Kathy Gilsinan | The Atlantic

What I Found When I Looked for the Helpers

2022-03-03T07:00:00-05:00

Pandemic coverage has continually described America’s rancor and division, political ineptitude and buck passing, fury at leaders and fellow citizens for restricting too much or not enough, for insisting on masks or refusing to wear them. Almost as soon as shortages, whether of masks or toilet paper, occurred, counterfeits and price gouging followed. Almost as soon as officials imposed mandates, people threatened, or in some cases committed, violence. Many have written about the ways we have failed one another, about the bungled government response, about how the arc of American public life has bent from the fleeting we’re-all-in-this-together goodwill of March 2020 toward relentless dysfunction.

But there’s a parallel and no-less-true story of the pandemic in the United States: Most people have behaved honorably, and that they have done so in spite of harrowing circumstances and bad leadership makes their efforts even more worthy of celebration. They have made millions of boring, daily, unheralded decisions to keep others safe, share resources, and ease the loneliness of the most isolated. Neighbors sewed masks for neighbors; students sent letters to nursing homes; mutual-aid groups delivered groceries to the homebound. These acts haven’t always been newsworthy. In fact, they have often been the norm.

This article is adapted from Gilsinan’s recent book.

Even in this context, some people have stood out for their selflessness. In early 2020, being myself deluged with grim headlines and aching for hope, I set out to find some of them and tell their stories. I wanted to remind myself and others about the goodness and heroism human beings are capable of. I looked all over the country for people trying to fix different pieces of American life the pandemic broke—people in the medical profession aiding the sick, people feeding the hungry as jobs disappeared, people trying to educate kids as schools shut down, and people trying to stop COVID’s transmission altogether in the historic race for vaccines.

I found many ordinary people who stepped up to meet an extraordinary moment even as the temptation of hopelessness lurked, even at the risk of their own life. They didn’t have much in common; they came from different states and professions and races and levels of wealth. But they all embodied the best of America while the worst raged around them.

[Annie Lowrey: The Americans who knitted their own safety net]

Paul Cary, for instance, was well known within the medical system in Aurora, Colorado, where he served as a paramedic—not only for his walrus mustache or the near-obsessive hours he put in, but also for his warmth. Harried and cynical ER nurses would light up when Cary arrived and asked after their families, cracking jokes about living the dream even as he was spending the evening ferrying gunshot victims or septic patients to the hospital. He wanted to be there for people on their worst days; that was the job. And in late March 2020, with COVID deaths mounting into the hundreds in New York City but still in the low double digits in his own state, Cary, a retired firefighter, decided to race toward the fire: He drove his ambulance 28 hours across the country to help relieve overwhelmed paramedics in New York. He did this knowing that, at 66, with a blood-clot disorder, a bad back, and other health issues, he was squarely in the demographic COVID preferred to kill.

Along with Cary, hundreds of first responders from around the country descended on New York in an extraordinary effort under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The city’s hotels, emptied of tourists, became de facto dormitories for emergency workers. The Bronx Zoo parking lot became a village of trucks ready to shoot out and rescue the sick. Cary spent weeks doing “hospital decompression”—moving patients from too-full facilities to less-full ones. “You could tell he was tired,” Alissa Perry, a Colorado paramedic who deployed to New York with Cary, told me. But “he was never gonna go home until they told him to.” He was planning to extend his deployment when he got sick with COVID himself. He died in April, roughly a month after he first arrived in New York. Fire and EMS trucks lined the streets of two cities, New York and Aurora, with flashing lights and saluting people, to pay him tribute on his way home. Friends and neighbors held up signs: ALL GAVE SOME. SOME GAVE ALL.

By then, Michelle Gonzalez, a 30-year-old ICU nurse in the Bronx with a brown ponytail and a heavy New York accent, had already been through her own bout of COVID. She’d endured some of the worst shifts of her career as her hospital ran low on space, protective equipment, and ventilators. She’d scrounged for masks for herself and fellow nurses and queasily reused N95s stored in paper bags; she’d stripped in the hallway of her apartment building and scampered to the shower, fearing she’d infect her parents in their 60s. She’d also coaxed some patients back to health. But the virus hit her own home, and her family. Gonzalez told me that she spent weeks praying that her parents wouldn’t die while she battled her own fever and difficulty breathing. After she and her family recovered, she was right back in the ICU, tending to the very sickest, holding the hands of the dying, backing up less-experienced nurses thrust into the hardest jobs because of demand. She said she always resented the “health-care hero” praise. She didn’t need thanks. She, and other nurses, needed help. When the worst of New York’s first wave subsided that summer, Gonzalez threw herself into union work to negotiate better wages and working conditions for other nurses. “People who don’t have voices, I’m gonna have a voice for you,” she told me. “Because I got a big mouth.”

Hamilton Bennett was working on a vaccine before many Americans had even heard of the coronavirus. Bennett is a sweet-speaking young scientist who grew up in part on a Kentucky hay farm. She describes herself as a bleeding-heart public-health enthusiast drawn to working on emerging infectious diseases—some of the least profitable, least glamorous work in the pharmaceutical industry, as if she was pointing her career directly away from money and glory. In 2016, she’d joined a Boston biotech firm entirely focused on a technology that many scientists had given up studying, that had never brought a workable product to market, and that was losing $100 million a quarter by early 2020. But even after four years, Bennett, a vaccine-program lead at Moderna, was a true believer in the company and in the promise of mRNA vaccines.

[Read: What happens when Americans can finally exhale]

Days after Chinese scientists published the genetic sequence of the coronavirus, Moderna’s research scientists, at Bennett’s urging, had found a draft sequence for a vaccine. She had it by January 13, 2020—eight days before the first official report of the virus in the United States. After convincing skeptical bosses to bet the company’s future on an all-out gallop for the vaccine, Bennett spent the remainder of the year overseeing a record-breaking vaccine program. (The previous record was the four-year development of the mumps vaccine; when Bennett first joined Moderna, she spent 18 months trying to develop a Zika vaccine with no success.) By Christmas 2020—within less than a year—Bennett’s team had secured emergency use authorization. Among her best presents that year was a photo from a colleague: a group of warehouse workers, standing around a box of Moderna vaccine vials, blessing them.

These are extraordinary stories, but they capture something that’s not at all unusual in times of crisis: People step up. After 9/11, volunteers ran toward the rubble and blood banks were overwhelmed with donations. After Hurricane Katrina, as Rebecca Solnit writes in her book A Paradise Built in Hell, “thousands of people survived … because grandsons or aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need.” Solnit, and many others, have documented this altruistic instinct during earthquakes, bombings, and, yes, pandemics. Albert Camus’ plague was a fictional one, but his conclusion about “times of pestilence” was completely right: “that there is more to admire in men than to despise.”

So when I see the inevitable headlines about Americans’ divisions over masking and vaccination, I remind myself that the percentage of Americans who report wearing masks outside the home has never dipped below half since April 2020, according to Gallup, and was at 70 percent as of the latest data in December 2021, even with vaccines widely available. I remember that the same poll shows the number of respondents willing to get vaccinated as higher than ever, at 81 percent; 73 percent reported themselves fully vaccinated. I know that, despite well-publicized denialism, overwhelming numbers of Americans know the pandemic isn’t over and are taking steps to prevent sickening others.

People, of course, fail, and so do institutions. Individual goodwill and altruism cannot by themselves compensate for systemic weaknesses, and no kind volunteer alone will fix decades of underinvestment in public health or vulnerable supply chains for protective equipment. No feel-good story can compensate for the loss of more than 900,000 Americans or repair the heartbreak of millions of grieving loved ones. Still, there are those—many more than perhaps we expect—who look impossible odds in the eyes and fight anyway.

This post is adapted from Gilsinan’s recent book, The Helpers: Profiles From the Front Lines of the Pandemic.

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Missouri Is the Next Front in the COVID Culture War

2021-09-15T06:30:00-04:00

There’s a particular spot in Jefferson City, Missouri, the state capital, where you can walk a few yards and pass through three different sets of masking rules. Struggling against the heavy wooden doors of the state-supreme-court building and stepping through, you leave the zone of the city and county recommendations—mask when you can’t keep distance—and enter a space where masks are required by order of the court. From there, you can peer through a glass door into a government office, a parallel pandemic universe where no one can tell you what to put on your face—and where trying to do so is a form of government overreach and social control.

This is the fiefdom of Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general and Republican U.S. Senate candidate. Schmitt has routinely snagged national headlines throughout the pandemic for his habit of suing people, most recently over masks. He is certainly not the only or best-known state official with bigger political ambitions battling public-health mandates in the name of personal freedom. Florida has Ron DeSantis, Texas has Greg Abbott—both governors wielding executive orders and fueling presidential speculation. Missouri does not have such a governor. Instead it has Schmitt, an ambitious attorney general wielding lawsuits.

[Read: My community refuses to get vaccinated. Now Delta is here.]

He started by suing the People’s Republic of China for unleashing the pandemic through “an appalling campaign of deceit, concealment, misfeasance, and inaction.” Then it was a Missouri business that he accused of wildly overcharging for masks. Lately, Schmitt has turned his powers of litigation against attempted COVID-19 mitigation that he deems unnecessary and harmful. His latest salvo, filed in late August, is a lawsuit targeting mask mandates in Missouri public-school districts; this month he promised still more lawsuits over the Biden administration’s new vaccine mandates.

Meanwhile, within the very office that generates these lawsuits, young staffers politely don masks to step into public areas where signs have proliferated to warn Schmitt people that they’re entering court territory. Here, a bitter statewide fight over masks plays out as a passive-aggressive workplace drama. Here, too, the contradictions offer a fitting backdrop for Schmitt’s evolution from a personable, aisle-crossing state legislator who once voted for a vaccine mandate to a firebrand partisan primary candidate who now says that public-health mandates show only that “the Left is obsessed with power & control.”

Schmitt has placed himself at the center of the COVID wars in a state where vaccinations fall stubbornly below the national average and where, earlier in the summer, the Delta variant ignited its first major outbreak in the United States. In Missouri as elsewhere, the mask-mandate fight is overshadowing the promotion of vaccines—which, as Schmitt himself has noted in lawsuits, remain the best way to combat the pandemic. He rarely advertises this. And although some of his Republican primary rivals encourage vaccination while emphasizing personal choice, Schmitt has appeared hostile even to admitting being vaccinated himself. (He is.) His story, along with the ways in which his ambition has drawn him into partisan combat in a public-health culture war, is a vivid demonstration of how national politics has poisoned local debates, pitting people against one another instead of against COVID-19, even as state and local governments remain the front line of pandemic response.

Nine years ago, Schmitt was looming over a lectern in full academic regalia, barely believing his luck. He was wrapping up his first term in the Missouri Senate, as a legislator from a suburban St. Louis County district, and his alma mater had asked him to give the commencement address. He was honored to be back at Truman State, in Kirksville, Missouri, where he’d not only earned his degree but also met his wife. (“In your wildest dreams,” he said he asked her, “did you ever imagine we’d be back here and I’d be giving this speech? And she said, ‘You know, Eric, I got news for ya: You’ve never been in my wildest dreams.’”) He told the graduates about the importance of service; he urged them to not be cynical, and to maybe even run for office—“just don’t run against me.” And he reflected that working for a purpose larger than oneself was “not tied to being a Republican or being a Democrat, or being conservative or being liberal, or being rich or being poor, or anywhere in between.” Everyone had something to give, he said: That was what bound us all together.

Back then he seemed to mean it. He teamed up with Democrats on protecting the elderly from financial fraud and mandating insurance coverage for autism therapy—something he took personally as the father of a child with autism and many other health problems. Also for the sake of his son and others with similar challenges, he pushed for access to CBD. In 2014, Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported recently, Schmitt even voted—along with the rest of the Republican state-Senate caucus—to require vaccines for resident students at state colleges when meningitis was breaking out on Missouri campuses. At that time, Schmitt wasn’t tweeting “Fight Tyranny. Crush Marxism. Love America”—as he has, verbatim, six times since July. Instead, he was tweeting a lot about Cardinals baseball, and he liked to mark Festivus around Christmastime.

“This guy totally changed,” says Jamilah Nasheed, who served alongside Schmitt in the legislature as a Democratic state senator from St. Louis. She recalls spending free time in his office, talking politics and listening to Biggie Smalls—“on his playlist, by the way; it wasn’t my playlist.” They differed on fundamental principles: Schmitt was anti-abortion and anti–gun restrictions; Nasheed was neither. But they could work together, and they could hang. “Eric was a guy that, you know, we would literally go to his house, Democrats and Republicans, once a year” for an event he hosted there, she told me. “He was able to do that because he didn’t drive the nail too hard in the backs of Democrats with that conservatism.” She saw him as someone who tried to find common cause and common purpose.

[Read: Democracy is already dying in the states]

“I always found him to be of the highest moral character and integrity,” says Robert Schaaf, a former Republican state senator who also served with Schmitt. “There’s no such thing as truly bipartisan; everyone has their own system of beliefs,” he told me. But in Schaaf’s view, Schmitt was an expert at listening to the other side and finding compromise—“as bipartisan as anyone can be.”

Schmitt was so malleable on certain issues, in fact, that he angered at least one fellow Republican. Jane Cunningham, who had campaigned for Schmitt and served in the state Senate with him, soon came to view him as a RINO more interested in being liked than in taking stands, and more interested in himself than in any particular principle. She told me that the autism-therapy bill, for instance, had nothing to do with being conservative. “Republicans don’t put insurance mandates on things—that’s Obamacare,” Cunninghan said. “He worked on issues to benefit himself.” Also to benefit Communist China. Years before he sued the country’s government over COVID, Cunningham noted, he pushed (ultimately unsuccessful) plans to bring a Chinese and global cargo hub to the St. Louis airport, and supported (ultimately successful) legislation to let a Chinese-owned company buy up Missouri farmland.

He would soon get more comfortable with being disliked, and alienate other former allies in the process. “I knew Eric—where did he go?” says Gerry Welch, the mayor of Webster Groves, Missouri, who saw him all the time at church and would occasionally grab coffee with him. She found him easy to get along and talk with. “And then,” she told me. “And then …”

Welch said Schmitt started avoiding her on Sundays at Mary Queen of Peace. She’s pretty sure the trouble started after the Ferguson protests, in 2014—during the same summer when Schmitt launched his first statewide campaign, for state treasurer. This was when he was still endearing himself to some Democrats, including Nasheed, who co-sponsored a bill with him to help fix some of the problems that the police shooting of Michael Brown had laid bare. Their bill fought a local practice that had become nationally notorious: municipalities “using their police forces to write as many citations as possible to increase their revenue,” which, Schmitt wrote at the time, “disproportionately hurt the poor and disadvantaged who are often unable to pay the fine or court costs.” He decried “debtors’ prisons” full of people who simply couldn’t pay. “He did do something to try to help African Americans,” Nasheed told me.

Welch is a Democrat; she said that trying to stop this practice was “obviously a good idea.” Yet when Schmitt was promoting the bill, she said, it was almost like a switch went off. Suddenly he was combative, attacking municipal officials in general as “treating their citizens as nothing more than ATMs,” and painting local officials like her as bureaucrats standing in the way of progress at the expense of the poor. (He was always careful to support law enforcement, saying that police wanted to serve the public, not write citations.) Welch objected to some specific provisions of the bill—she conceded that some municipalities abused fines, but said that, used properly, they could be an important tool to stop violations, such as abandoned properties that could attract crime or pose a fire hazard. But as for Schmitt himself, she was so sure that the nice guy she knew from church wouldn’t be so bellicose that she called his office to make sure there wasn’t some mistake. “I said to his administrative assistant, ‘Someone is misquoting Eric,’” she recalled. They weren’t.

Seven years later, the issues have changed, but the tone has become part of Schmitt’s political brand. You can draw a curvy but continuous line from that 2014 fight to the COVID wars of today, and it helps explain the seeming paradox that his critics zero in on now: What happened to the Republican Party of local control? Why would conservative statewide officials meddle in localities’ decisions? Mike Parson, Missouri’s GOP governor, has displayed a more passive form of conservatism, shunning statewide mandates but generally leaving local ones alone. Schmitt, though, presents himself as standing athwart overzealous liberal bureaucrats, yelling “biomedical security state”—a phrase he seems to have picked up from DeSantis, who used it in Florida a little more than a week before Schmitt debuted it in Missouri. Schmitt’s position on masks and vaccines is that local government isn’t local enough to make the decision: That belongs with what he calls the ultimate local institution, the family.

Schmitt explained this to Missourinet, not to me. His spokesperson declined repeated requests for an interview but did offer this statement: “These mask mandates and proposed vaccine passports are another way for government to acquire, aggregate, and maintain power ... If you’re vaccinated and you want to wear six masks while jogging around Forest Park for hours, this is America, you’re certainly free to do that. But the actions I’ve taken in court are to prevent government from attempting to impose their will on the people of Missouri.”

Thus: lawsuits—a blitz against local mask mandates beginning in late July, hitting St. Louis, Kansas City, and their surrounding counties, and then this latest one aimed at school districts. They’ve gotten Schmitt national media attention, including Fox News airtime, scolding from the White House podium, and many opportunities to get his name in front of Republican primary voters in a Senate race where, so far, he’s about neck and neck at the head of the pack. (His chief rival is former Governor Eric Greitens, who resigned in a sex, blackmail, and dark-money scandal in 2018 but has the virtue of name recognition.)

What they haven’t gotten him—yet—is the reversal of any mandates. St. Louis County’s fell apart on its own, in an intra-Democrat power struggle on the county council, which then backed a symbolic resolution to encourage but not enforce mask wearing. The other mandates remain in place as Schmitt’s lawsuits work their way through the system. Michael Wolff, the former chief justice of Missouri, doesn’t see a high chance of success: “Lawsuits,” he emailed me, “are not effective unless the legislature has passed a bill, signed by the governor, which is law. The courts normally will not enforce some general idea of ‘freedom’—courts need law from the legislature. Courts will not make it up.”

That hasn’t stopped Schmitt from claiming credit in grandiose terms, telling a fundraising dinner recently that with the demise of the St. Louis County mandate, “a million people have been freed from tyranny,” as if he’d just personally pried Estonia out of the Soviet Union.

Chad Hagen

Putting aside both hyperbole and the merits of the debate over masking in schools or anywhere else, Schmitt’s stark evolution tracks with both his changing constituency and his growing ambition. He no longer represents moderate St. Louis suburbanites, but all the voters of a state Trump won by 15 points in 2020. He undoubtedly has his eye on the further-right subset destined to turn out for the GOP Senate primary next August.

His opponents in that race have all, to varying degrees, advertised their ties to Trump. Greitens, who led the latest St. Louis University poll of the field, has the former Trump-campaign official Kimberly Guilfoyle on his staff. Vicky Hartzler, a U.S. representative from a rural district in West Central Missouri, isn’t personally close to Trump but touts having voted with him more than 95 percent of the time. Mark McCloskey, the personal-injury attorney best known for brandishing his AR-15 at protesters outside his house, saw Trump praise his pardon for fourth-degree assault. (Governor Parson, not Trump, issued the pardon.) And Billy Long, another U.S. representative, formerly known as the best auctioneer in the Ozarks, is campaigning around the state in a vehicle that he calls the “Billy Bus,” advising voters: “If you were on the ‘Trump Train’ you need to get on the ‘Billy Bus’ now.”

[Gregory H. Shill: How vehicular intimidation became the norm]

As a St. Louisan, Schmitt can’t out-rural Long or Hartzler; as a professional politician, he can’t out-outsider McCloskey. His closest analogue in the race is Greitens, who has the dual handicap of being a former Democrat and also having been charged with two felonies, stemming from an allegedly semi-coercive sexual encounter and from allegedly misusing his veterans charity’s donor list for political fundraising. (Both charges were later dropped; another ambitious Missouri attorney general, who investigated some of these allegations, did wind up in the U.S. Senate: Josh Hawley.) Schmitt, from his perch at the AG’s office, is doing his darndest to neutralize Greitens’s name-recognition advantage as lawsuit after lawsuit gets headline after headline. He might just pull it off: A poll from earlier this month has him leading the entire field, beating Greitens by one point. Meanwhile, other polling—not specific to Missouri—suggests that he’s exactly where his target voters are: Republicans overwhelmingly oppose mask mandates and overwhelmingly view the issue as one of personal freedom.

Nasheed understands Schmitt’s political incentives, but his new public persona makes her sad. In her case, partisan politics changed her relationship with Schmitt: She never really fell out with him, so much as she stopped dealing with him as he drifted further right in the Trump era. “I really know him deep down inside,” she said. She still likes the guy; she wants him to, in her words, come back toward the center. “But, you know, politics makes you do strange things when you’re trying to climb the ladder.”

Others who have served with Schmitt don’t think he’s really changed. Tom Dempsey, a Republican from St. Charles County, who also served with Schmitt in the state Senate, told me that he found Schmitt’s voting record to be generally conservative, including a vote to bar employers from requiring union membership. He said Schmitt’s Senate career doesn’t justify painting him as a moderate, although “in his tone and in his demeanor he definitely wants to work with people on both sides of the aisle. … He doesn’t write anybody off.” Pragmatist, yes. Moderate, no. Dempsey did not wish to comment on the tone of the lawsuits or the tweets but said, “I think he’s the same person he’s always been.” Cunningham, his fellow Republican, had a less charitable view: “I think he’s a chameleon, always has been, and he’s just changing his colors to match what he needs right now.”

In the meantime, the COVID situation in Missouri is as confusing as its mask politics, with the state roughly in the middle of the country in COVID case and death rates, and doing worse on vaccinations than most states but better than every other state but four on pulling down its hospitalization rate. More Missouri school districts have issued mask mandates since Schmitt filed his latest lawsuit; a fight broke out after one school board outside Kansas City approved such a mandate unanimously. Schmitt has further confused matters by offering “legal direction” to students in the Kansas City area, saying that they actually don’t have to follow any mask mandates. But it wasn’t so long ago, at the beginning of all this, that Schmitt himself offered up a moment of clarity: “It’s right there,” he tweeted in March 2020, “on the center of Missouri’s flag—United We Stand (although 6 feet apart for a while). Divided We Fall.”

How China Is Planning to Win Back the World

2020-05-28T08:00:00-04:00

It was posed as an innocent question, not an accusation. If the U.S. was so concerned about transparency, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying wondered aloud to nearly half a million followers on Twitter earlier this month, why not open its own biodefense lab in Maryland’s Fort Detrick to international inspectors?

Hua’s tweet was also an invitation to a conspiracy theory, and a message that, if President Donald Trump was determined to speculate about the virus first appearing in a Chinese lab—a notion that scientists have dismissed and that allied intelligence agencies find “highly unlikely”—then China was going to give as good as it got. Beijing does not accept that the virus originated in China at all, insisting that just because the country first reported the virus, and traced many of the first cases to an outdoor market in Wuhan, doesn’t mean it came from there. What if, Hua intimated without quite saying, it came from a U.S. lab instead?

After that May 8 tweet, Chinese state media outlets picked up the question and started pushing it in multiple languages: Spanish and Arabic as well as English. On May 12, the state-run China Global Television Network offered a story on the Fort Detrick lab’s “purely freakish history,” including the very real CIA experiments on humans that began there in the 1950s. The hawkish Communist Party newspaper Global Times ran a piece on May 14 declaring, “The US can't just claim all reasonable inquiries to its bio-labs as ‘conspiracy theories.’” This followed the paper’s earlier speculation, citing a mysterious anonymous petition on the White House website, that the base may have been the source of a virus leak.

This was a bizarre salvo in China’s propaganda war with the United States over the coronavirus, and it showcased Beijing’s latest information weaponry. Misleading spin, obfuscation, concealment, and hyperbole have been hallmarks of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda campaign, before and during the coronavirus era. But the pandemic appears to have given rise to more forceful attacks on foreign governments, as well as a new level of flirtation with outright disinformation.

[Thomas Wright: How should Biden handle China?]

The party has never waged a global struggle quite like this one—and its battle with the U.S. over where the virus came from and whose failures made the pandemic worse have marked a serious deterioration in the two countries’ ties. Just months ago, Trump was praising Xi Jinping for how he handled the outbreak; now Trump is toying with cutting off relations with the Chinese government altogether.

Seven decades ago, Mao Zedong publicly embraced a benevolent view of propaganda, as if he were a latter-day prophet spreading the communist gospel: “We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory,” he mused in 1945. Just a few months ago, Xi Jinping urged state journalists to spread “positive propaganda” for the “correct guidance of public opinion.” Indeed, Beijing’s global propaganda efforts in recent years have been more about promoting China’s virtues than about spreading acrimony and confusion, à la Russian information ops and election meddling. Moscow wants a weakened and divided West, one that leaves Russia free to dominate its self-appointed sphere of influence—but Russia in 2016 was also an economically sluggish, oil-dependent nation with an economy a tenth the size of America’s, and lacked the resources to remake the world in its image.

Beijing has a much bigger prize in mind and a much longer-term plan to get it: The contest isn’t about who gets to run the U.S. It’s about who deserves to run the world. And China, with its economy poised to overtake that of the United States, has already plowed billions into crafting an image as a responsible global leader, and billions more into cultivating global dependence on Chinese investments and Chinese markets.

“While the [Chinese Communist Party] has long sought to be a global influencer, their efforts today are aggressive and sophisticated,” Bill Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, wrote in an email. “In short, they’re looking to reshape the history of coronavirus and protect their reputation at home and around the world.”

[Read: The end of Hong Kong]

Before the coronavirus hit, the party was becoming bolder in its propaganda efforts overseas as China grew richer and more powerful, trying to promote around the world the orthodoxy it enforced at home, about the beneficence and goodness of the CCP. This involved publicizing Chinese investments in the developing world, arm-twisting diplomats to toe a pro-China line, ruthlessly trying to stifle even other countries’ freedom to dissent—to the point of sanctioning Norway in 2010 when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its peace prize to the imprisoned democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, who died in 2017. Xi has elevated the role of propaganda even further as he has vowed to build China’s power and prosperity, declaring, “The superiority of our system will be fully demonstrated through a brighter future.”

The coronavirus outbreak and the global outcry against China’s failures of transparency and containment were not part of the plan. They sparked an international backlash that, by Beijing’s reported reckoning, was worse than anything it had faced since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. So Beijing leaped to seize, or at least confuse, the global story of the virus and its cast of heroes and villains.

This has involved unleashing techniques Russia perfected during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. “We’ve seen China adopt Russian-style social media manipulation tactics like using bots and trolls to amplify disinformation on COVID-19,” Lea Gabrielle, the special envoy and coordinator for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, wrote to me in an email. “Both countries repress information within their countries while taking advantage of the open and free information environments in democracies to push conspiracy theories that seek to undermine those environments.”

As the world realized the virus was spreading out of control, Chinese diplomats, official media, and Twitter influencers launched an aggressive frenzy of defense, scrambling to preserve the Chinese Communist Party’s cratering reputation at home and overseas. And then they went on offense, with an assist from perhaps thousands of fake or hacked Twitter accounts, according to the investigative site ProPublica. The result was a coordinated campaign of attacks on the United States, and the spread of disinformation and confusion about where the virus really came from and whose screwup it was, really, that led to so much death.

[Read: America’s patchwork pandemic is fraying even further]

Other countries’ faltering responses to the virus have only bolstered this narrative, and the CCP has gleefully trumpeted America’s failures in particular. “Loose political system in the US allows more than 4000 people to die of pandemic every day,” Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Global Times newspaper, tweeted in April. “Americans are so good tempered.” Beyond the immediate crisis, this kind of narrative also serves the longer-term goal. In the words of Matt Schrader, a former China analyst with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund: “Ultimately it’s about the [Chinese Communist Party] being the most powerful political entity on the planet.”

The CCP has evolved in its themes and tactics over the course of the coronavirus information war so far, as it battles to bolster its own reputation and degrade that of the United States. The campaign has been widespread and highly focused at the same time. And the party has grown even more emboldened in the belief that it’s too big to fail, and that the reeling world may condemn it but still depends on it.

Suppression and celebration

Even more important than what the Chinese Communist Party says is what it doesn’t say. The party is such an aggressive suppressor of negative news that at one point government censors tried to block social-media references to Winnie the Pooh—because whimsical Chinese netizens had seized on the pudgy cartoon bear’s purported resemblance to Xi. The Central Propaganda Department distributes guidelines to media organizations and scrubs microblogging platforms for references to the widespread abuses of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang and to hopes for autonomy in Tibet.

So “relatively open” online discussions of the virus in late January, according to a report by the Freedom House China analyst Sarah Cook, seemed almost out of character. “Professional journalists took advantage of the government’s slow response to publish reports on the early days of the outbreak and life under the dramatic lockdown of numerous cities in China.” The party’s flagship paper, the People’s Daily, however, had largely ignored the gathering virus up until that point, Cook notes; back then it was covering the U.S. House and Senate impeachment votes on Trump and the U.S. strike against the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. And China had already waged perhaps the most dangerous information-suppression campaign of the entire crisis—reprimanding doctors who tried to warn one another about the disease, blocking reports about sickened health-care workers, and ordering labs to destroy samples.

The coronavirus killed one of those doctors, Li Wenliang, in early February, prompting an outpouring of grief and outrage on Chinese social media. What openness there had been was over. “Less than 90 minutes after his death on Friday morning, the hashtag ‘I want freedom of speech’ was trending on Weibo, a popular Chinese blogging site, with nearly 2 million posts,” wrote NPR’s Emily Feng and Amy Cheng. “The posts were gone by sunrise.”

At the same time that Chinese authorities were pulling down criticism, they were pushing out praise for first responders. State media published stories about robots delivering food, factory employees giving up their holidays to make masks, a nurse shaving her head to speed up the process of putting on protective gear. The People’s Daily ran a love letter to the city of Wuhan, titled “Heroic City, Heroic People”: “Our hospitals have become the battlefield!,” reads a partial translation by the China Media Project. Of the medical workers who had rushed to Wuhan from around the country, it noted: ”In order to not impact the flow of their work, some doctors and nurses wore adult diapers … Their white outfits are war fatigues, and they are the most beautiful resisters, the most adorable people of the New Era!”

Cook traces how the narrative began to shift into February, accruing credit to the Communist Party’s own actions and then, ultimately, turning attention to the rest of the world as the coronavirus slammed into other countries. Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, told me that the party’s line about other countries’ response was essentially: “They couldn’t handle it either.” The government version of events became that China had handled the outbreak well by comparison, and had a lot to teach the world about it. In March, the government dispatched aid to virus-ravaged Italy at a time when the European Union would not step in, and state-run papers published pictures of the team arriving along with quotes of gratitude from Italian officials.

Before the month was out, Chinese state media was suggesting that the virus may have originated in Italy instead—an early effort to flood the world with confusion about where the virus came from.

The counterpunch

As the message was shifting, one tactic remained consistent: Pump up the seeming good news about the party and suppress the bad. In March came the expulsion of American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, which China’s Foreign Ministry characterized as a response to U.S. restrictions on Chinese media acting on behalf of a foreign government. (One senior State Department official told reporters, while announcing the new restrictions in February: “We think it’s altogether appropriate that we basically call these entities what they are, which are organs of the Chinese one-party state propaganda apparatus.”)

By mid-April, diplomats and state media were focused on rising infection rates in the United States and the United Kingdom. Hua, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, pointed out on April 12 that the U.S. then led the world in infections and deaths, despite having been warned in early January about the situation in Wuhan. State broadcasters highlighted praise for China’s early response from the World Health Organization, right as Trump was swiping at the agency for its criticism of the U.S. and complaining that the organization seemed “to always err on the side of China.”

[Read: How China ]deceived the WHO

The most aggressive trolling came in video form. The state-run news agency Xinhua’s “Once Upon a Virus” featured animated Legos—a set of responsible, masked Chinese ones trying to warn a recalcitrant Lego Statue of Liberty that people needed to take the virus seriously and wear masks. After dismissing the warnings, the Lego Liberty turns red with rage and ends up on an intravenous drip, whining, “Why didn’t you warn us?” The Chinese embassy in France tweeted the video, which racked up more than 15,000 retweets. Graham Brookie, the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, wrote to me in an email that it was fair to say the tweet was "targeted towards the Western world,” and specifically Europe. Brookie noted that a small portion of the video’s Twitter spread was aided by accounts with Western-sounding names, such as “Emily Clark,” and “bot-like indicators”—ones that were recently created, or had handles involving a first name and a scramble of numbers, or lacked profile pictures, or whose sole tweet was the Lego video. “All retweeted the China Xinhua News' tweet with the same copy-and-pasted text,” he wrote.

Another video put the narrative in even more explicit terms, presenting America as not merely hapless but in outright decline. The United States has now seen 100,000 deaths attributable to the virus, while China has claimed only about 5,000, though U.S. intelligence officials believe China is far underreporting its numbers. The state-owned China Global Television network pronounced the virus “Waterloo for America’s leadership,” as a British-accented announcer intoned, over shots of the Capitol building and homeless people gathered in a parking lot: “An increasing number of observers are beginning to see that the health emergency is signaling the end of the American century … There is growing evidence that Washington is tumbling to rock bottom over its coronavirus response.”

The conspiracy

Perhaps the most surprising new feature of China’s coronavirus propaganda effort has been the dabbling in Russian-style disinformation. Nowhere has this been clearer than in prominent government officials’ efforts to obscure the origins of the virus, floating the baseless theories that the U.S. Army might have brought the disease to Wuhan, or that maybe it started in Italy. Sometimes these weren’t so much pure “fake news” plants as they were the “people are saying” variety of misdirection that has become a hallmark of how Trump’s White House deals with criticism.

Some of these types of attacks appeared to be experiments and have since faded. Gabrielle, the State Department special envoy, said at a press conference in March that Chinese officials in Africa briefly pushed a U.S.-origin theory of the virus, but then “abandoned that disinformation campaign” after receiving mostly negative online reactions. Elsewhere, Gabrielle wrote to me, Beijing backed off from directly attributing the virus to the U.S. “But we continue to see CCP propaganda like CGTN push content that suggests the U.S. is the origin of the virus. The [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] is still citing conspiracy websites in its messaging.”

Hence the Fort Detrick tweets from the foreign ministry, which never directly say the U.S. bio lab cooked up the virus, but darkly hint that there may be something there to investigate.

Economic coercion and diplomatic arm-twisting

When all else fails—when hints on Twitter just don’t seem to cut it—Beijing can rely on its economic power to try to coerce kindness from foreign officials or stifle their criticism. This has two benefits relative to China’s domestic audience: Praise can be trumpeted as evidence that China is respected around the world, while criticism can be used to stoke nationalist defensiveness in the face of politicians seen as unfairly targeting China.

When Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, China’s ambassador to Australia lashed out, pronouncing the Chinese public to be “frustrated, dismayed, and disappointed” and launching into some hypotheticals in the vein of nice trading relationship—would be a shame if anything happened to it. “The tourists,” said Ambassador Cheng Jingye in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, “may have second thoughts.” (More than 1 million people visit Australia from China every year, more tourists than visit from any other country.) “Maybe the parents of the students would also think whether this place, which they find is not so friendly, even hostile, is the best place to send their kids to … And also, maybe the ordinary people will think why they should drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef.” The implications for a country that relies on trade with China were hard to miss. Australia has continued to push for the inquiry.

China then started restricting some Australian meat imports, imposed tariffs on barley, and, according to Bloomberg, is considering targeting wine and dairy.

Beijing has even reportedly pressured foreign officials not to criticize its own use of disinformation. The Financial Times reported that Chinese officials complained to the European Union three times right before the bloc released a report on disinformation in the pandemic—and the published report removed a sentence in an earlier draft saying that China was running a “global disinformation campaign to deflect blame.” The EU’s top diplomat denied having bowed to any pressure, but one EU disinformation analyst aware of the changes accused EU diplomats of “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party.” It’s unclear what specific threats, if any, Chinese officials made, though China and the European Union are among each other’s largest trading partners.

[Read: China’s bargain on global influence is paying off]

But the biggest battle is between the United States and China, particularly as the U.S. struggles to stabilize its death toll and has appeared disinterested in leading a global response—for example sitting out an EU-led fundraising conference for a vaccine to which China sent a low-level representative. China has made ostentatious pledges of cash to the WHO as the U.S. has paused its funding, and Beijing has vowed to offer any vaccine discoveries from Chinese scientists as a global public good.

In Washington, officials and lawmakers are demanding some unspecified form of accountability from China and concocting ways to pull some manufacturing back to the United States, while demanding investigations into the virus’s origins. Chinese state media outlets characterize Trump’s blaming China as a deflection of responsibility for his own government’s failures—but just because it’s propaganda doesn’t mean it’s false. “What I see is a race to the bottom with China,” Susan Shirk, the chair of the 21st-Century China Center at UC San Diego, told me. “The cost of this is more people are going to die. More people are going to die because the two biggest economies in the world are not going to put their disputes aside to get the world to work together to confront this pandemic.”

The longer-term implications stretch far beyond the immediate crisis, however. When it’s all over, China will have gained experience pushing its propaganda overseas at a volume and intensity it never had before. The CCP has succeeded at home, through rigorous information management, in controlling what Schrader, the former German Marshall Fund scholar, calls the “means of perception.” And the party is having some success extending those tools beyond its borders. “Controlling the means of perception is fundamental to power,” Schrader said. And the better China’s propaganda works, the more power it will have to shape the rest of the world.

China’s Bargain on Global Influence Is Paying Off

2020-05-06T11:39:00-04:00

This spring, President Donald Trump declared that he would halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, previously more than $400 million annually—and he announced this right in the midst of a global pandemic. A week later, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged another $30 million—which would nowhere near make up for the shortfall (not to mention that China still owes the organization $60 million in membership dues, an amount the WHO expects to get later this year). But the moment was a clear case in point for China’s success at checkbook diplomacy, in which the amount matters less than the message: You can’t count on the U.S., but you can count on us.

America was, until Trump ordered a review of the contributions, the single largest state funder of the WHO—China was contributing just over a 10th of what the U.S. was. Yet for years now, even before Trump accused the WHO of being too “China-centric,” American officials worried that China kept somehow buying more influence, with less money, around the world.

“The Chinese give as little money as they can get away with,” Rear Admiral Kenneth Bernard, who previously served as a political adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization, and as a special assistant for biodefense to President George W. Bush, told me. “They give as little money as will buy influence.”

“This isn’t about being fair,” he added. “This is about winning.”

[Read: How China deceived the WHO]

The WHO isn’t the only example. Last year, the United States gave more than $670 million to the United Nations’ operating budget, while China gave almost $370 million—yet Chinese nationals currently head four of the body’s 15 specialized agencies. “No other nation leads more than one,” Melanie Hart, a senior fellow and the director of China policy at the Center for American Progress, told me. “Making contributions is one thing, but [Chinese personnel] show up big, and they push.”

China’s muscle-flexing is also occurring at a time in which the U.S. president has expressed disinterest in, or outright contempt for, international organizations, canceling or suspending funding for some, and calling it into question for others. The most powerful country in the world is perhaps entitled to take this posture—after all, U.S. presidents have ignored or sidestepped international organizations for decades, not least in launching bombing campaigns over Kosovo in the 1990s and Iraq in the 2000s. But China clearly sees such organizations not as irrelevant hindrances but as convenient vehicles for expanding its global influence. The Trump administration, meanwhile—though the U.S. appointed a special envoy to counter “malign influences” of China and others at the UN toward the beginning of the year, and finally announced a nomination for America’s years-vacant seat on the WHO’s executive board—has largely ceded the field.

Besides Beijing’s splashy but meager contribution to the WHO, in the past week China sent a representative to an EU-led pledging conference to find a vaccine. The United States declined to participate. In a phone call with reporters, a senior administration official repeatedly sidestepped questions about why, and insisted that “our cooperation with European partners continues to be extremely robust.”

The pattern repeats itself all over the planet. The U.S. still gives billions in foreign aid every year, and the funding touches all facets of life in other countries including public health, military training, sanitation, and women’s rights. But China is a shiny relative newcomer in many developing countries that have come to take U.S. assistance for granted. In the past 15 years China has been plowing money into megaprojects like airports and dams—strategic and flashy investments, unavoidable monuments to China’s ambitions and staying power. And the funding doesn’t tend to come with the same kinds of pro-transparency and human-rights-protection strings attached to American aid, which makes it more attractive to corrupt or authoritarian governments. So even if China doesn’t give more, it advertises better.

[H. R. McMaster: How China sees the world]

Chinese leaders also present their own country as a voice for the developing world against the dominant Western global powers. “They were the big players” in trying to get the World Health Organization to focus on developing countries’ issues, David Hohman, who formerly served as Deputy Director of the Office of Global Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, told me. “Fortunately in WHO you don’t vote on things, but if you ever did, [China has] the votes … It was a big advantage to them.”

Through its seat on the United Nations Security Council, China’s Communist government has had the ability to thwart other members’ ambitions for decades. But only recently has it begun to flex this muscle. In the past 15 years, China has vetoed 11 Security Council resolutions, more than five times as many as in the preceding 15 years. (It still has not caught up to the United States, which vetoed 18 resolutions over the same 30-year period.)

Meanwhile, Beijing is working to rewrite the rules of the liberal system America once prided itself on having built. China has gotten two resolutions through the UN’s Human Rights Council, Hart explained in written testimony to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission this spring, one “suggesting that human rights must be balanced with economic development needs,” and another asking that cultural contexts be taken into account when considering human rights standards. Hart told me that “the U.S. currently doesn’t care about the UN Human Rights Council. China does.” (The U.S. withdrew from that body in 2018 when then–UN Ambassador Nikki Haley accused it of being biased against Israel.) And the watering-down of international standards, Hart says, creates “maneuvering room” for authoritarians around the world.

“It is not a good idea to let dictators run UN agencies,” said Bernard, who retired from the U.S. Public Health Service. “Not because it’s particularly China or not China. It’s because the constituencies for those issues get hurt.” China is currently holding up to 1 million Uighur Muslims in what it calls “re-education” camps in conditions that rights groups and other governments have condemned.

“If any government other than China was holding a million Muslims arbitrarily, I think we can reasonably assume we would already be well under way in a discussion, not just about investigation, but about accountability,” Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, told me. But the UN hasn’t even launched an investigation. At one point in April 2017, according to a Human Rights Watch report, UN security escorted a Uighur activist out of UN headquarters, where he was participating in a forum. A Chinese diplomat later bragged about it on state media, Hart noted in her testimony.

In another instance that Human Rights Watch highlighted, the Chinese government detained an activist who tried to go to Geneva for a session at the Human Rights Council. After the activist, Cao Shunli, died following a six-month detention, Chinese diplomats in Geneva blocked efforts to hold a moment of silence in her memory. China’s “human-rights agenda is not about human rights,” Bernard said. “It’s about Chinese politics.”

[David A. Graham: The public is astonishingly united]

The same is true of any other mechanism China uses to build its influence around the world. If China has pushed to install its diplomats at the helm of the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization, it’s not necessarily because the Chinese Communist Party cares a great deal about the issues at the core of those agencies. It’s about gaining political and economic influence over member states. Case in point: Cameroon put forward a candidate to lead the Food and Agriculture Organization, who withdrew after Beijing forgave Cameroonian debt. China also reportedly threatened to cut off important exports to other countries if they refused to back Beijing’s candidate. The Chinese candidate won.

The clearest example of how China uses this influence involves Taiwan, the democratically governed island that the Chinese Communist Party claims as part of its own territory. Hart noted that after Taiwan, in 2016, elected President Tsai-Ing Wen, who ran as an advocate for Taiwanese sovereignty from Beijing, the WHO stopped inviting Taiwan to its global summit—though Taiwan’s attendance hadn’t been cause for concern the prior year, when a pro-Beijing president was in charge of the island. “As soon as the people of Taiwan elected a candidate that Beijing didn’t like, ‘Oops,’” Hart said. “You cannot convince me that it no longer made sense for the WHO to have those people represented there because the presidency changed.” More recently, a senior WHO official dodged questions about Taiwan’s success in responding to the pandemic, saying instead: “When you look across different areas of China, they’ve actually done quite a good job.”

[Read: The pandemic has revealed the weakness of strongmen]

Still, all this maneuvering might have its limits. A Pew Research Center survey from December, before the coronavirus crisis engulfed the entire world, found negative views of China in much of the United States, Western Europe, and Asia. China has economic clout and is savvy about using it, but this hasn’t necessarily bought it enduring influence in the world’s other economic power centers.

Now U.S public opinion toward China is at an all-time low, according to Pew, and though data do not yet exist on how world public opinion has changed since the crisis, Chinese leaders are already clearly worried. They are pumping out propaganda disparaging the U.S. response and touting their help to stricken countries. Reuters reported on an internal Chinese document fretting about the possibility of a global backlash akin to what China saw after the Tiananmen Square massacre. China is a great deal richer and militarily stronger than it was in 1989, but with the world awash in a pandemic and the U.S. trumpeting China’s culpability, Beijing may soon find that there are some things money can’t fix.

Leah Feiger contributed reporting.

The End of the Imperial Presidency

2020-05-02T05:00:00-04:00

Democrats have long feared that in a national crisis, President Donald Trump would seize the chance to stretch his powers and sweep aside constitutional restraints. Yet as the pandemic rages, Trump may be creating an unanticipated legacy: By ceding some control to the states, he’s allowing the nation’s governors to reacquire executive muscle that has withered in the age of the imperial presidency.

However inadvertent, Trump may have set in motion a durable shift that positions states as more of a counterweight to the chief executive. Trump blustered at one point that Democratic governors who opposed him were committing “mutiny.” If so, the mutineers faced no reprisal—an incentive to act on their own again.

Trump’s posture has forced governors to confront a worldwide crisis they wouldn’t have imagined would be theirs to solve. They’ve had to venture into a chaotic global marketplace to hunt for masks and ventilators. They’ve forged alliances to figure out the smartest ways to reopen their economy and curb the virus’s spread. And they’re building systems to help them cope with future pandemics.

“If [Trump] feels more comfortable as a backup quarterback, then the governors will step up and be the front line,” Ned Lamont, the Democratic governor from Connecticut, told us. “I can’t tell a mayor, You be the front line and get your own personal protective equipment from China, and I’ll be the backup. If the buck stops here, it stops here.”

Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan described how she felt when taking part in an early conference call with fellow governors, during which the White House “signaled” that state leaders would need to find safety and medical equipment on their own. “I realized we’d have to set up, in our state emergency-operations center, a procurement office that was going to compete with the world,” Whitmer told us. “That was a sobering moment.”

[Read: Trump’s plan to save his presidency]

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said yesterday that Trump’s approach shows his commitment to federalism. But he may just want to redirect blame for a rolling catastrophe that could cost him reelection. “He’d rather have the governors impose quarantines than him, because he feels they’re then responsible for any economic problems that arise,” Saikrishna Prakash, a University of Virginia law professor and the author of the book The Living Presidency, told us.

Save for a brief post-Watergate pause, presidents in the modern era have steadily amassed power within the executive branch. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Dwight Eisenhower’s federal highway system, Ronald Reagan’s push for education standards that would later morph into the Common Core—all of these chipped away at states’ authority. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act extended the federal government’s reach by helping states fund the expansion of Medicaid programs. Amid the pandemic, Trump has sounded as if he’s prepared to push a president’s prerogatives even further, claiming at one point last month that his authority as president “is total.”

But in terms of actions, he “has basically stuck to things that are clearly within the federal jurisdiction,” said Christopher DeMuth, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute who worked in both the Richard Nixon and Reagan administrations. “He’s used some emergency authorities, and he’s let governors and mayors take the lead. This is a sharp departure from the record in recent national emergencies.” After the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis, presidential power expanded. New executive agencies grew out of the wreckage, buttressing a model in which “the executive was king,” he told us.

Trump’s approach is “the worst of both worlds,” Bobby Chesney, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told us. “He’s using the rhetoric of an authoritarian without any of the China-style payout in terms of taking charge of the actual problem. Rhetorically, at least, he’s asserting almost preposterous levels of authority. Fortunately, he’s not following through. He’s all hat and no cattle.”

A natural role for the president would be to lead the worldwide hunt for medical supplies, leveraging the government’s vast purchasing power. Trump’s reluctance to serve as what he calls a “shipping clerk” has left some governors incredulous. “It’s absolutely maddening,” Governor Jay Inslee, a Washington Democrat, told us. “It’s like being in World War II and not getting the federal government to manufacture boots … It’s very difficult to understand. I liken it to Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying, Okay, Connecticut, you build the battleship and I’ll be there at the launch and break the bottle.”

At times, the Trump administration has seemed less like a partner than a competitor, commandeering supplies that governors had thought were coming their way. Shipments of gloves, masks, and ventilators bound for states have been rerouted to the federal government. Larry Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor, said this week that thousands of coronavirus tests he obtained from South Korea are now under guard at “an undisclosed location,” in part because he doesn’t want them seized by the Trump administration.

The federal government “needs to be in or out,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, told us. “If they’re out, that’s great; they’re not buying stuff out from under the states. If they’re in, they need to have a transparent process on how they’re making decisions on what states like Colorado will be getting.” (One senior White House official told us the administration has on occasion jumped to the front of the line when it comes to buying supplies, but only to ensure that states with more infections get material they need.)

Even Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican who told us he’s generally satisfied with the White House’s coordination on the crisis, has struggled to secure enough protective equipment for medical workers. “It’s the Wild West out there, trying to get PPE,” he said. At one point, the state received a shipment—from China by way of Los Angeles—of what DeWine thought would be 5 million N95 masks, only to have inspectors find that beneath a top layer of genuine masks the rest was, in DeWine’s words, “junk.” “There’s people who are just scam artists everywhere,” he told us.

In Trump’s absence, many governors have been eager to collaborate with one another instead. Earlier this week, for example, Colorado and Nevada joined California, Oregon, and Washington in a pact that aims to responsibly ease stay-at-home orders and reopen their states. Governors on the East Coast have established a similar alliance. “You have broader coalitions,” Raymond Scheppach, a former longtime executive director of the National Governors Association, told us. The governors “are getting into groupings so they won’t get pushed around by [Trump].”

[Read: What will happen when red states need help?]

And they’re gaining new capabilities that could render them less reliant on a president who demands they show personal gratitude. “Our state has had to learn to navigate international supply chains,” Polis said. “We’ve pulled in people from the private sector, we’ve established strong relationships in China and South Korea, and we’ve been doing what we can to have supplies we need for Colorado.”

For Trump, elevating the governors may have already backfired. He can try to blame them for things going sour. But he’s also invited comparisons that have left his public profile diminished. A new poll shows that 64 percent of Americans think their governor is doing a better job handling the pandemic than Trump. Another poll showed approval for DeWine’s coronavirus-crisis management at 85 percent, versus 50 percent for Trump.

“People look at the states now as better able to get things done than the federal government,” DeWine said.

To Chesney, governors’ reassertion of their authority is simply “federalism in action.”

“This is a living illustration of what the Founders intended: preserving a substantial part of the true independence of the states,” he said.

Still, for many people living through the crisis, the political landscape seems pretty confused. Ordinary citizens don’t always know whose direction they should heed to keep themselves safe and their businesses afloat.

Uri Wurtzel co-owns an Atlanta bowling alley called Comet Pub and Lanes. He pronounced himself “taken aback” to see bowling alleys among the first businesses allowed to reopen in Georgia. He had shut his own place down in mid-March, “before there was any word from anybody in authority [in Georgia] about needing to close,” and he has no intention of reopening now. The risk of infection is too high, because bowlers exchange shoes and touch the same bowling balls.

Wurtzel told us he’ll think about reopening once he hears medical experts confirm that his state is out of the woods. He’s decided not to take his cues from politicians at all—not from mayors, or governors, or the president.

Can the West Actually Ditch China?

2020-04-24T11:12:37-04:00

“Hold China accountable,” urges a fundraising appeal from U.S. President Donald Trump. U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab vowed to ask “hard questions” and threatened the end of “business as usual” with Beijing. German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged China to be more transparent about how it tackled the outbreak. French President Emmanuel Macron said that it would be “naive” to compare China’s handling of the crisis with that of Western democracies, adding, “There are clearly things that happened that we don’t know about”—an apparent reference to the growing international skepticism over Beijing’s claims that it has contained the virus.

Denouncing China was a bipartisan sport in Washington well before the coronavirus pandemic, but now leaders in Europe, where the pandemic has also hit hard, are clamoring for accountability from China because of its early missteps and obfuscation, which abetted the spread of coronavirus around the world. But how severely can they really punish a government when many of them need Beijing for the most crucial of things—medical supplies?

China was already producing half the world’s medical masks even before the pandemic spread; it’s also a major source of pharmaceuticals and protective equipment at a time when countries around the globe are experiencing shortages.

[Read: How China deceived the WHO]

“The world is dependent on China for manufacturing,” Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School who has written on U.S.-China supply-chain issues, told us. This isn’t just about medical supplies—it’s also about electronics, textiles, furniture, toys, and a lot more, adding up to about half a trillion dollars in imports. “So I’m in the school that talk is cheap. And if you really want to go down that path, then you have to be prepared for the consequences,” Shih said.

And it isn’t just a matter of simply relocating to hubs other than China, given that Beijing has cemented itself as the heart of global manufacturing, with more advanced internal supply chains than other possible substitutes.

If Western displeasure with China’s coronavirus performance is currently more rhetoric than substance, it may still presage some long-term changes, though there’s some evidence that countries are worried about even just antagonizing Beijing too publicly with their words.

France, like the U.S., is deeply reliant on Chinese supply chains, not only for medical equipment needed to cope with the coronavirus, but for its pharmaceutical and auto industries too. Macron recently announced that France would strive for “full independence” by ramping up its own production of face masks and ventilators, but it’s unlikely to be a quick solution (he said it would happen by the end of the year), or a cheap one. As a result of this crisis, “French companies will be under enormous pressure to repatriate some of their productions from other countries, and the obvious choice will be China,” Philippe Le Corre, a nonresident senior fellow in the Europe and Asia Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. Some already appear to be responding to Macron’s announcement. The French pharmaceutical company Sanofi said last month that it would launch a new Europe-based company to reduce its reliance on drug manufacturing in China and India, where the majority of the world's active pharmaceutical ingredients are made.

Le Corre cautioned that efforts to reduce French dependency on China could result in Beijing doing the same, which could have an adverse effect on some of France’s most profitable sectors, such as wine and tourism. “For many of these industries, the China market does matter,” he said.

In Britain, Raab’s suggestion of a shift from “business as usual” is similarly dubious. Like other countries, Britain has looked to China to obtain lifesaving materials such as testing kits and ventilators. Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, about their two countries fighting “shoulder to shoulder” to contain the outbreak in late February, only a month before Johnson fell ill with the virus himself.

Though Beijing doesn’t rank among Britain’s largest trading partners, in areas where the two countries do engage, such as the technology and financial sectors, the U.K. is unlikely to seek to upend those ties, Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat in Beijing, told us. “As [Britain’s] economy takes this massive hit, these are areas presumably where it wants to do what it can to maintain decent growth or any growth at all,” said Brown, who serves as the director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London.

[Read: China hawks are calling the coronavirus a ‘wake-up call’]

Growing dependence on China has been a source of discontent in Britain since even before the coronavirus emerged. Earlier this year, Johnson gave the Chinese telecom giant Huawei permission to build part of Britain’s 5G network despite concerns that it could pose an intelligence risk and make Britain technologically dependent on China. The pandemic has reignited this debate, with some senior lawmakers urging the government to reconsider its position.

Though Beijing isn’t among Britain’s top-four trading partners, it is nonetheless a key economic ally—one that Simon McDonald, the head of Britain’s Diplomatic Service, this week told lawmakers “has become more important in the last few years.”

Then there’s the matter of Brexit, which is scheduled to go into full effect by the end of the year. “The U.K. will be seeking great new economic opportunities outside its traditional partnerships in Europe,” Brown said. “It would be weird if the world’s second-biggest economy didn’t figure in that.”

Some countries have already found ways to move away from China by tightening the rules around foreign investment. In doing so, governments in India, Germany, and Australia have argued, they can shore up their domestic capacity to produce essential materials without fear that they might be bought out by foreign investors. Though the new restrictions didn’t name China explicitly, “the impact of the policy on Chinese investors is clear,” a spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in New Delhi said in a statement.

The U.S., though, is a case study in just how difficult these kinds of efforts might prove to be.

Trump came into office determined to sever some of America’s deep trade entanglements with China, blaming the country for the loss of American manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor overseas. But even with the U.S. and China almost two years into a trade war featuring billions of dollars in tariffs on one another’s goods, the coronavirus has made clear just how intertwined their economies remain and how difficult it will be to separate them. The same White House vowing to seek accountability has airlifted tons of medical supplies from China. Even Trump is finding that it’s not so easy to turn away from China.

At one point last year he even, via tweet, ordered U.S. companies to find alternatives to operating in China, which he can’t compel but which some companies were already trying to do anyway.

On Capitol Hill, furthermore, Republican China hawks have spotted an urgent opportunity to press the case that Beijing can’t be trusted, and the U.S. needs to be able to produce far more of its own medical supplies as a matter of national security. Democrats, too, were openly fretting about medical-supply-chain dependence on China last fall. Lawmakers from both parties are pushing proposals now to encourage U.S. companies to make more medical supplies, but even with all this activity, any kind of real shift could take years, and the pandemic is moving much faster than the time it would take to rebuild entire industries. As Senator Tom Cotton pointed out in an op-ed with Republican Representative Mike Gallagher: “Just years after the United States granted China special trade privileges in 2000, the last penicillin plant in America closed down. American factories that made aspirin, vitamin C and other essential medicine closed after that, put out of business by China’s predatory pricing.”

This left the U.S. especially vulnerable when the Chinese government, in an effort to control its own country’s outbreak, directed its medical manufacturers in February to aim production for domestic use. “Now apparently past the peak of its COVID-19 outbreak,” notes the Congressional Research Service, “the Chinese government may selectively release some medical supplies for overseas delivery, with designated countries selected, according to political calculations.”

[Read: Indians aren’t buying China’s narrative]

An even bigger risk could be that China will weaponize medicines that other countries might need. For instance, “medicines can be made with lethal contaminants or sold without any real medicine in them, rendering them ineffective. These products can be distributed to specific targets,” Rosemary Gibson, who wrote a book on U.S. medical dependency on China, testified to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission this past summer.

Some countries have already witnessed pitfalls: Reports of faulty medical equipment from China have prompted governments in Spain, Turkey, and the Netherlands to reject Chinese-made gear. Britain sourced millions of coronavirus testing kits from two Chinese firms, spending $20 million, only to find that they didn’t even work.

The problem, however, does not reside solely in China—it’s more that China has managed to capitalize on America’s own appetites and the structure of its industry. A sudden spike in demand for medical supplies, like what we’re seeing now, would result in shortages no matter where they’re produced. “The focus on just China is the wrong focus,” David Simchi-Levi, an MIT professor who researches supply chains, told us. The bigger problem is that industries’ focus on cutting costs leaves no room to invest in building enough slack in the system to respond to crises like this. Investment in supply-chain resiliency costs money for no immediate benefit, and most of the time crises don’t happen. Either way, you end up with more expensive goods in the short term. Ultimately it’s the consumers who have to decide whether they’re willing to pay for that.

Shih recalled going to Home Depot last summer to pick up some N95 masks to protect him from dust during yard work. He set up a scenario: Suppose there were two identical sets of masks, one Chinese-made and one American-made. The American-made costs twice as much. Which would you buy?

The Race to Build New Hospitals

2020-04-18T08:00:00-04:00

Todd Semonite was sent to Iraq 17 years ago to work on getting the power back on across the country. Three years ago, after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, he had to figure out how to get thousands of power poles onto the island and across mountains to get the grid lit up again. Now, after 41 years in the Army, the past four spent in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers, his focus is all over the United States. As COVID-19 cases have mounted, states have been running out of hospital beds, and Semonite’s Corps has stepped in with a solution. At sites across the country, the Corps is converting hotels, dorm rooms, and massive convention centers into makeshift hospitals. The first was in New York’s Javits Center—where Hillary Clinton expected to have her presidential victory party a lifetime ago. It’s now a 2,000-bed hospital. The Corps is building or has built close to 30 similar projects around the country, in Illinois and New Mexico, Colorado and California, with more on the way.

Semonite spoke to me recently in between trips to scope out new sites and consult with governors, mayors, and the president. We discussed how his career took him from power plants in Baghdad to hospital beds in New York, and planning for possible pandemic peaks in the future. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Kathy Gilsinan: You’re watching the COVID-19 crisis gather in China and then in the U.S. At what point do you start to realize that this is going to become your problem too?

Todd Semonite: It was about five weeks ago, when New York Governor [Andrew] Cuomo went to the president of the United States and said, “I am short [of hospital] beds.” So we got our guys together and got the secretary of the Army’s plane, and we flew into Albany, New York, the day after [Cuomo asked], and we were sitting with the governor—me and my engineering team, I’m talking about mechanical, electrical, my guys who design hospitals. Cuomo said, “I want you to come in and build these out in a big field.” And we said, “You can’t build a hospital in three weeks in a field.”

But [we can] go into a place that already has electricity, it has fire [safety], it has clean water, it has sewage, it has all of the places to be able to bring in supplies—a hotel, a college dorm, or a convention center. They all were empty. They all had their staff that weren’t being put to work. So then we’d come into that existing facility, and we’d build an ICU-like facility inside.

We said, “Here’s our concept of what we can do for you.” It really went back to this idea of trying to have a standard design. What we wanted to do was design [facilities for] COVID and non-COVID [patients]—to be able to convert a two- or three-story hotel into an alternative care facility. Or a large space, [like] a convention center, a great big indoor auditorium.

And then when Cuomo looks me in the eye and he goes, “Okay, General Semonite, what do you need from me?,” I said, “I need a building by tonight. I need three buildings by tomorrow night. I need a list of all the places you want to build by the weekend.” And he immediately turned around and said, “Go hot on [the Javits Center].”

[Read: Vermont’s great experiment]

Gilsinan: What happened when you realized the problem was going to be much bigger than New York?

Semonite: When I was flying back [from New York], and I knew that New York had thousands of beds that were short, I said to my guys in the plane, “We’re going to have this problem in Chicago. We’re going to have this problem in Miami.” This whole idea that this virus is a little bit harder on older people, I said, think about Miami [and] the retired community down there. Think about these urban centers where you just don’t have enough hospitals.

So that’s where we really started thinking, We can’t let every one of these cities call us. We need to have this planned. It is a universal plan. And then we adapt it to what the requirement is by the local mayor. We had the standard design, but it’s not like the mayor of Detroit called us up and said, “We need help.” I have 43 colonels who command what’s called Corps of Engineer districts. I told our colonels, “You go find the mayors and the governors, and you walk in and say, ‘Here is a capability we can do for you. Do you need this or not?’”

We have no agenda here. We don’t care whether we build these or not. But I tell mayors when they don’t know which way to go—you don’t want the ambulance to pull in the back of the city hospital and the guy on the loading dock says, “We’re full.” And now the ambulance has nowhere to go.

USACE Commanding General Lieutenant General Todd Semonite meets with Jacksonville District engineers and contractors at the Miami Beach Convention Center. (Brigida Sanchez / DVIDS)

Gilsinan: How’d you get into this line of work?

Semonite: I’ve been in the Army 41 years next month, and most of our engineers are what we call combat engineers. They’re the guys that go fight in wars. So I was a battalion commander, [and later] a brigade commander, mainly where you worry about commanding soldiers on the battlefield.

But we have another side of the Army called the Army Corps of Engineers. It is [more than 32,000] employees, and it’s 99.5 percent civilian. I was assigned to the Corps of Engineers, and they needed a No. 2 guy to take about 100 people and $1 billion, and to stand up the electricity in Iraq right after our forces attacked Baghdad.

I went into Afghanistan in 2014. We had a two-star [general] assassinated [Harold J. Greene, killed by an Afghan soldier at a training academy in Kabul], and I volunteered to go over and backfill, and I was the commander in charge of building the Afghan police and the Afghan army. So there, the challenge is, how do you figure out where the Afghan army needs to go? What do they need for uniforms? What do they do for weapons? How do you train them? How do you feed them?

When Puerto Rico got hit by [Hurricane] Maria [in 2017], we were asked to go in and get the grid up and running. And then you’ve got to figure out, How do we rebuild Puerto Rico? We needed to bring in 66,000 power poles.

Today, the problem is, I don’t know what the enemy’s going to do. If you go back to smallpox, that particular pandemic actually had three peaks. So right now I’m preparing for peak one.

And you’ve seen the curves. We’d [stay] home, we’d flatten the curve, and God willing, there’s going to be some time when that peak goes away. And I don’t know whether it’s going to be May, April, June, July—we’re going to stay aggressive until we get over peak one. Then what happens if this thing comes back when fall comes—October, November—what do we want these facilities [that we built] to look like?

Do we keep them up, and how do we do all that? And then God knows what’s going to happen next summer, the summer after that.

We don’t have a problem that’s cleanly defined, and every single day, I’ve got to continue to be able to reassess. I’ve got a whole modeling team right now that is looking not just statewide, but we’re looking citywide, to try to be able to figure out, when do we think the peak’s coming in?

Gilsinan: It strikes me that what a lot of these things have in common is you’re running into a situation where you have this enormous problem, and I’m curious about how you even begin to conceptualize it. What is the first step there? Or what is the first step when you’re in Puerto Rico trying to deliver electrical poles, but the ports aren’t even functioning?

Semonite: Today, right now—and these numbers change every day—we’re building 27 different facilities and we are creating 15,500 beds. In the next week, we expect to put in about another 14 facilities and potentially up to another 4,600 beds.

We have designed a bunch of facilities, and then given those designs to states and cities. I flew into Miami last week, and I met with the mayor of Miami and the governor of Florida. And my guys said, “We probably need to build out the Miami convention center, and this is about 450 beds.” We needed about ’til the 27th of April to get that one done. There was probably about 21 days we needed.

The governor looked at his medical guys and said, “When’s the peak day?” And their medical guys said April 21. And then I told my guys, “Well, then we’re going to be done by the 20th. You don’t have 21 days. Now you have 14 days to get it done. So now go back and come up with a plan.”

The whole point here is that we don’t have time for the perfect solution.

Gilsinan: Are the projects going fast enough to handle the need?

Semonite: It is on all the ones we’re building. But let’s assume that the peak for [a] particular city is the 24th of April, and the 24th was the day all along [when] we thought that a lot of these might peak. Today I’m checking, it’s the 16th, so if we need 10 days to build, and [a] mayor hasn’t made a decision, then when we go in, we say we don’t have the ability anymore to do it in six days.

I don’t want to get anybody nervous or threatened; I just want to be able to be honest. There’s some things you can do really, really fast. You can fly in a thousand people to a city if they’re really short on doctors and nurses and have them there in probably 48 hours. Well, you can’t go into a convention center and build 3,000 beds overnight.

[Read: An unhealthy military is struggling to fight COVID-19]

Gilsinan: You were in Iraq; you were responding to hurricanes. Have you ever seen anything like this?

Semonite: Yes, I have. This is not something simple, where you have only one or two variables. A good example is Puerto Rico. All the electricity, all of the generating plants and power plants were in the south of Puerto Rico. All the people live in the north, San Juan. Puerto Rico is an island. So the only way to get the electricity from the south to the north is to go over a mountain range [with] all of those power poles, 66,000.

It’s all complicated—same thing in Iraq. As much as we tried to get the electricity on, all the power plants ran off of oil. All the refineries were blown up, or they were taken out. Although you might have the power plant up and running, it’s kind of like having a gas station go with no gas.

So we had to get the refineries up and running to be able to get the rest of it going. [Seventeen years after the U.S. invasion, much of Iraq suffers from frequent power outages, particularly in the summer months.]

Gilsinan: What’s your best story from the ground so far?

Semonite: The best one’s in Detroit. We went into a convention center. Now, you have 970 beds built in a great big, gigantic thing the size of a football field. Every one of those bed spaces had an oxygen feed, just like water pipes in your house. The nurse could just plug in the oxygen mask right into a wall, just like in a hospital room, and you had piped oxygen in there.

Everyone had a nurse call station, a little string like by your bed; you pull it and right outside the light goes on. You had a light in there for someone to read by. You had wireless so they can check their phone. You had everything else they needed: showers, bathrooms, all the rest. And what makes my heart feel good is that when my guys got done, about four hours later, a patient arrived.

It doesn’t have to have a patient to say it’s a success. If we built a facility and no one ever uses it, that’s great, because that means that all the other parts of the system—the social distancing, the flattening of the curve—work.

But when we know that there’s somebody that’s alive today because the Corps of Engineers was able to get a facility done, it’s a big deal.

Vermont’s Great Experiment

2020-04-15T14:36:28-04:00

The call from his commanding officer came on a Sunday at the end of March, when Matthew Tatro was on his couch in front of the television. His life in small-town Vermont was already being reshaped by the coronavirus; for his usual job as a high-school music teacher, he’d been puzzling through how he could teach band remotely if and when the schools closed.

But now the governor was activating the National Guard, and Tatro, as a longtime guardsman, the bandmaster of the 40th Army Band, with 28 people under his leadership, had to mobilize himself and his fellow musicians to help get medical equipment to places in need around the state. Within days, the order came down from Brigadier General David Manfredi at the Vermont National Guard’s Joint Operations Command: Tatro and dozens of other guardsmen with day jobs, including teachers, master’s students, and at least one dental hygienist, would have to help build a 400-bed hospital to prepare for a possible wave of new patients. State and military planners wanted it ready to provide care within four days after construction started—when the state’s modeling suggested that Vermont, with its limited intensive-care capacity, might start running out of room for the very sick. It was like a Habitat for Humanity blitzkrieg for the coronavirus era.

Tatro enlisted in the Guard 27 years ago. In normal times, his unit plays at concerts, parades, and welcome ceremonies for visiting dignitaries, including the presidents of North Macedonia and Senegal. But the National Guard in each state is also a force that the governor can activate to help in a disaster—and in Vermont, the 40th Army Band provides much of the quick-reaction capability. In the past, this has involved filling sandbags for floods and chainsawing the occasional tree branch to remove it from the road after a hurricane. But this was something else altogether.

The story of how about 70 National Guardsmen managed to transform a convention center into an alternate health-care facility in mere days shows a state community coming together to get ahead of the pandemic at a time when the federal response is faltering. The military as a whole has struggled to adapt to the virus in its ranks—notably with the outbreak of cases on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and inconsistent guidelines to protect members across the services.

[Read: An unhealthy military is struggling to fight COVID-19]

But around the country, teams like the Vermont guardsmen and members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are practically defying physics to relieve stressed local hospitals in record time. The Vermont experiment stands out among similar projects across the country for its speed—and shows that at least one piece of the U.S. crisis response, specifically at the local level, is working.

Donald Trump’s freewheeling daily briefings are the icon of the federal response, and stimulus money and corporate bailouts are making their way around the country. But much of the real work of containing the pandemic is being done at the state level, with governors managing stay-at-home orders and teaming up to coordinate regional plans. It often falls to state actors to take care of their communities.

The pop-up hospitals aren’t the famous Chinese mega-constructions such as the one in Wuhan that 7,000 workers built from the ground up in about 10 days in February. Rather, members of the U.S. military are converting existing sites around the country—schools, convention centers, other vacant buildings—into spaces for patients displaced by the influx of coronavirus cases, or even for COVID-19 patients themselves. Vermont isn’t even at a point where its hospitals are overflowing. But state planners were observing the worrying trends elsewhere in the country, and they wanted to get ahead of what might be coming. “It was absolutely essential to look at that worst-case scenario and have capacity to meet it,” says Kerry Sleeper, the interim deputy secretary for Vermont’s Agency of Human Services, who manages surge capacity in the state. “We would have been negligent had we not done that.”

The new hospital started life as the Champlain Valley Exposition Center, three buildings amounting to 74,000 square feet, not too far from I-89 and accessible from a number of other hospitals off the highway. This had been a place for kids’ soccer and lacrosse games, antique expos and quilt shows and Tuesday bingo with a full snack bar. When Tatro went to visit the space with the lead civil engineer, Major Jason Villemaire, earlier this month, he had a hard time seeing the potential in all the emptiness. “I’m walking through these rooms … they’re like big empty spaces,” Tatro told me. “Major Villemaire is telling me what needs to happen, and I’m like, ‘It can’t happen. It can’t happen at all.’”

(Julie shea / DVIDS)

Villemaire put together the blueprints himself on Wednesday, April 1, working late into the night over pizza with a team of about seven other people. You can’t just put 400 beds in an expo center. Medical planners were asking Villemaire’s team to transform it into a space with eight 50-bed pods including an isolation ward, in case it had to take coronavirus patients. Each pod was to include a nursing station and supply closet as well as a sink, each bed to get its own electrical outlets and lamp nearby. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Gookin, the deputy state surgeon in the Vermont National Guard, recalls walking through the expo center before construction started and worrying about how everything would fit. “We’re having that moment of doubt where we’re like, ‘It’s not going to be big enough,’” he told me. He was imagining filling it up with two-by-fours, nursing units, sinks, beds, emergency exits, and corridors.

Villemaire wasn’t as worried. As a full-time engineer at the Burlington Air National Guard Base, he manages the infrastructure for a facility that hosts 15 F-35 fighter jets. He’d enlisted as an air mechanic in the late 1980s, and had experience building things quickly with few resources on deployments. But the scale of this project was altogether new to him..

“I’ve never done anything of this scope all at the same time,” he told me. And normally, for a project this big, it would take more than a week just to get all the personnel in place. “We were able to do it in a matter of hours.”

The advantage of the expo center was that it already had its own power, plumbing, heating, and ventilation. Still, Villemaire’s team needed to put up dozens of walls to separate each pod from the others and to divide each into two sections, for men and women; run new electrical wiring within the walls to get power next to each bed; and run plumbing to the sinks in the nurse’s stations. This would mean erecting close to a mile’s worth of walls eight feet high, a similar length of new electrical wiring to connect to 432 different power outlets, and about 1,200 feet of plumbing.

Villemaire showed up with a few dozen people on Thursday, April 2; they knew they needed walls and where they should go, so they began hammering plywood to two-by-fours and putting them up. But it was clear by the end of the day that they’d need a lot more people to get the project done in time.

[Read: Our pandemic summer]

Reinforcements came on Friday, when Tatro showed up with his team. By now, the entire construction crew had grown to about 55 members. Emily Eckel, who plays the bassoon in the Guard and is a master’s student in music therapy, was one of few with a carpentry background—from a work-study job in college building sets for Godspell and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She felt, she told me, “like the stars have aligned … I knew enough to put up walls, and I could use power tools.”

(Julie Shea / DVIDS)

The construction settled into an assembly-line rhythm over 14-hour days stretching into the weekend, by which point the team had grown close to 70 people. People would nail together walls and stack them up, then move them into position; electrical came next, alongside plumbing. One big room, then another, then another.

By Sunday, when Tatro walked back through the event space, the empty halls had been transformed, and workers were covering the new walls in plastic sheeting that could be easily cleaned and sterilized. The facility was ready to receive patients.

But none actually came for another several days. Ordered to sprint to be ready on Sunday, April 5, the guardsmen didn’t see any patients until the following Friday. By that point, the Guard’s medical personnel were training the others to serve as orderlies in the new hospital, and band members were walking around trying to encourage the staff. “I’ve already had one guy with a guitar walk around and play some music for the medics,” Tatro said.

And then, last Friday, the center got its first patient, sent straight to the isolation ward. They were infected with the coronavirus.

How China Deceived the WHO

2020-04-12T08:00:00-04:00

Back in January, when the pandemic now consuming the world was still gathering force, a Berkeley research scientist named Xiao Qiang was monitoring China’s official statements about a new coronavirus then spreading through Wuhan and noticed something disturbing. Statements made by the World Health Organization, the international body that advises the world on handling health crises, often echoed China’s messages. “Particularly at the beginning, it was shocking when I again and again saw WHO’s [director-general], when he spoke to the press … almost directly quoting what I read on the Chinese government’s statements,” he told me.

The most notorious example came in the form of a single tweet from the WHO account on January 14: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.” That same day, the Wuhan Health Commission’s public bulletin declared, “We have not found proof for human-to-human transmission.” But by that point even the Chinese government was offering caveats not included in the WHO tweet. “The possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be excluded,” the bulletin said, “but the risk of sustained transmission is low.”

This, we now know, was catastrophically untrue, and in the months since, the global pandemic has put much of the world under an unprecedented lockdown and killed more than 100,000 people.

[Read: The pandemic will cleave America in two]

The U.S. was also slow to recognize the seriousness of this new coronavirus, which caught the entire country unprepared. President Donald Trump has blamed the catastrophe on any number of different actors, most recently, singling out the WHO. “They missed the call,” Trump said about the body at a briefing this week. “They could have called it months earlier.”

Trump may well be looking to deflect blame for his own missed calls, but inherent structural problems at the WHO do make the organization vulnerable to misinformation and political influence, especially at a moment when China has invested considerable resources cultivating influence in international organizations whose value the Trump administration has questioned. (Trump just in March announced he would nominate someone to fill the U.S. seat on the WHO’s Executive Board, which has been vacant since 2018.)

Even in January, when Chinese authorities were downplaying the extent of the virus, doctors at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan reportedly observed human-to-human transmission, not least by contracting the disease themselves. In the most famous example, Dr. Li Wenliang was censured for “spreading rumors” after trying to alert other doctors of the new respiratory ailment; he later died of the virus himself at age 33. China now claims him as a martyr. Asked about Li’s case at a press conference, the executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, Michael Ryan, said, “We all mourn the loss of a fellow physician and colleague” but stopped short of condemning China for accusing him. “There is an understandable confusion that occurs at the beginning of an epidemic,” Ryan added. “So we need to be careful to label misunderstanding versus misinformation; there's a difference. People can misunderstand and they can overreact.”

Those lost early weeks also coincided with the Chinese New Year, for which millions of people travel to visit family and friends. “That’s when millions of Wuhan people were misinformed,” Xiao said. “Then they traveled all over China, all over the world.”

[Read: China hawks are calling the coronavirus a ‘wake-up call’]

The WHO, meanwhile, was getting its information from the same Chinese authorities who were misinforming their own public, and then offering it to the world with its own imprimatur. On January 20, a Chinese official confirmed publicly for the first time that the virus could indeed spread among humans, and within days locked down Wuhan. But by then it was too late.

It took another week for the WHO to declare the spread of the virus a global health emergency—during which time Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, visited China and praised the country’s leadership for “setting a new standard for outbreak response.” Another month and a half went by before the WHO called COVID-19 a pandemic, at which point the virus had killed more than 4,000 people, and had infected 118,000 people across nearly every continent.

The organization’s detractors are now seizing on these missteps and delays to condemn the WHO (for which the U.S. is the largest donor), call for cutting the organization’s funding, or demand Tedros’s resignation. At the White House, Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro has been a sharp critic.

“Even as the WHO under Tedros refused to brand the outbreak as a pandemic for precious weeks and WHO officials repeatedly praised the [Chinese Communist Party] for what we now know was China’s coordinated effort to hide the dangers of the Wuhan virus from the world, the virus spread like wildfire, in no small part because thousands of Chinese citizens continued to travel around the world,” Navarro wrote to me in an email. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the administration was “reevaluating our funding with respect to the World Health Organization;” Trump has said an announcement on the matter will come next week. On the Hill, Republican Senators Martha McSally of Arizona and Rick Scott of Florida are both seeking an investigation of the WHO’s performance in the crisis and whether China somehow manipulated the organization. “Anybody who’s clear-eyed about it understands that Communist China has been covering up the realities of the coronavirus from Day 1,” McSally, who has called for Tedros to resign, told me. “We don’t expect the WHO to parrot that kind of propaganda.” Scott told me he wants to know whether the WHO followed their own procedures for handling a pandemic and why the organization hasn’t been forceful in condemning China’s missteps.

Asked for comment, a representative from the WHO pointed to a press conference Tedros gave this week. “Please quarantine politicizing COVID,” Tedros said then. “We will have many body bags in front of us if we don’t behave … The United States and China should come together and fight this dangerous enemy.” Even in early January, when it was still describing the disease as a mysterious new pneumonia, the WHO was publishing regular guidance for countries and health-care workers on how to mitigate its spread. And the organization says it has now shipped millions of pieces of protective gear to 75 countries, sent tests to more than 126, and offered training materials for health-care workers.

In any case, it’s not the WHO’s fault if China obscured the problem early on, says Charles Clift, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Center for Universal Health who worked at the WHO from 2004 to 2006. “We’d like more transparency, that’s true, but if countries find reasons to not be transparent, it’s difficult to know what we can do about it.” The organization’s major structural weakness is that it relies on information from its member countries—and the WHO team that visited China in February to evaluate the response did so jointly with China’s representatives. The resulting report did not mention delays in information-sharing, but did say that “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.” The mission came back telling reporters they were largely satisfied with the information China was giving them.

[Read: The problem with China’s victory lap]

If this is something short of complicity in a Chinese cover-up—which is what former National Security Adviser John Bolton has alleged of the WHO—it does point to a big vulnerability: The group’s membership includes transparent democracies and authoritarian states and systems in between, which means the information the WHO puts out is only as good as what it’s getting from the likes of Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. North Korea, for instance, has reported absolutely no coronavirus cases, and the WHO isn’t really in a position to say otherwise.

The structure also gives WHO leaders like Tedros an incentive not to anger member states, and this is as true of China as it is of countries with significantly less financial clout. During the Ebola epidemic in 2014, Clift said, WHO took months to declare a public-health emergency. “That’s three very small West African countries, and WHO didn’t want to upset them,” Clift said. “WHO didn’t cover itself in glory in that one.” The response this time has been much faster and better, in Clift’s observation. “It doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be examined afterwards to see what they could have done better,” he said. “And one should really investigate the origins of what happened in China.”

The WHO has also shown, however, that it can walk the line between the need for cooperation and information-sharing from member states and the need to hold them accountable for mistakes. During the SARS outbreak in 2003, a WHO spokesman criticized China for its lack of transparency and preparation, which had allowed the virus to spread unchecked. China even later admitted to mistakes in handling the outbreak.

No such critique has been forthcoming this time. One study found that China could have limited its own infections by up to 95 percent had the government acted in that early period when doctors were first raising the alarm and the Chinese Communist Party was still denying the extent of the problem. “The WHO at that time didn’t do their job,” Xiao said. “The opposite: They actually compounded Chinese authorities’ misinformation for a few weeks. That is, to me, unforgivable.”

An Unhealthy Military Is Struggling to Fight COVID-19

2020-04-03T11:45:37-04:00

An outbreak on an aircraft carrier. Infections in basic training. Office-bound contractors unable to work from home. The coronavirus has hit the military-industrial complex, and this is not an enemy it knows how to fight.

The U.S. armed forces and their supporting industries, with people wedged into shared barracks or in 96-person ship berths sleeping inches away from one another, are especially vulnerable to the spread of the virus. The military is also the world’s largest employer, with more than 3 million on the Defense Department payroll alone—not even counting legions of contractors that assist the entire enterprise.

The virus now threatens to be deadlier to U.S. citizens than any of America’s recent armed conflicts, and take many multiples the number of lives lost in the 9/11 attacks. And the institution that seeks to protect the United States from threats cannot stop the single biggest one the U.S. has faced in a generation. Meanwhile, even as the military is called upon to help with the domestic response, the nature of the virus strikes right at the core of its culture and ethos. The whole point of a military is to mass together to destroy an enemy. That’s exactly the wrong thing to do when confronting a transmissible virus.

[Read: How the pandemic will end]

Nevertheless, the U.S. government is relying on the military for a significant part of its effort to contain the pandemic. The Army Corps of Engineers is retrofitting convention centers and hotels into medical facilities in New York and Seattle, the Navy has sent hospital ships to New York and California, and the National Guard is unloading trucks at grocery stores in Arizona. The Defense Department is offering millions of masks and other equipment for the fight; the Army is asking its retired medical service members to consider coming back. But how can the military protect America when it can’t protect itself?

“We are not at war,” wrote Captain Brett Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt in a letter asking superiors for help following an outbreak on the ship while it had 4,800 people aboard. Certain risks the crew would necessarily take in wartime were unacceptable in peacetime, he wrote. But the Navy “cannot allow a single sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily.”

“The environment most conducive to the spread of the disease is the environment the crew of the TR is in right now,” Crozier wrote in the letter, which the San Francisco Chronicle published. Thousands of sailors in a confined space. Shared restrooms. Close contact in narrow passageways. Ladders, hatch levers, doorknobs all being touched by numerous other people. Within days of the letter becoming public, the Navy relieved him of command of the ship.

Similar obstacles to social distancing apply to the military as a whole, not just on ships—which is why the Defense Department has largely delegated decisions about health protections to commanders. The lack of unified instruction from the Pentagon’s leadership about necessary precautions and social-distancing enforcements has created a haphazard approach to containment, with more than 1,500 infections and five deaths so far across the military and Defense Department civilians, dependents, and contractors. “I can’t put out a blanket policy, if you will, that we would then apply to everybody, because every situation’s different,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters in March, when the virus had recently taken the life of one defense contractor. “Tell me, how do I do six-feet distancing in an attack submarine? Or how do I do that in a bomber with two pilots sitting side by side?”

Navy leadership has defended its actions not evacuating everyone from the Teddy Roosevelt, now docked in Guam with thousands of sailors still aboard after about 100 people tested positive for the coronavirus—all of whom, per Navy officials, have been moved off the ship and isolated. The true number of infections could be higher—as of Wednesday, most of the crew hadn’t even been tested yet, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly told reporters. Still, “we cannot and will not remove all the sailors from the ship,” Modly said. “This ship has weapons on it, it has munitions on it, it has expensive aircraft, and it has a nuclear power plant. It requires a certain number of people on that ship to maintain the safety and security of the ship.”

Close quarters have historically contributed to the spread of disease in the military, whether on ships or in boot camps or at overseas bases. For instance, the 1918 Spanish-flu epidemic first appeared in the U.S. at the Army’s Fort Riley, in Kansas, and spread rapidly from there, eventually killing nearly 700,000 Americans within a year.

“All of this was entirely predictable. How could it have not been predictable?” Andrew Milburn, a Marine colonel who retired last year, told me. The original sin, in his view, was Esper’s decision to delegate safety standards to commanders. The result has been a patchwork of different restrictions and regulations across different services and units. The Army halted basic training in March and then reversed itself. The Navy is delaying new boot-camp arrivals by a week after a recruit tested positive. The Marines kept training going until its own outbreak of more than 20 recruits at the Parris Island recruit depot forced it to stop accepting new arrivals until mid-April. The Marine-barracks gym in Washington, D.C., was still open last week as the rest of the city shut down. The Marines haven’t relaxed grooming standards across the service, again delegating the decision down the chain; at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina barbershops remain open on the base, albeit with restrictions, even as the governor has ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to shut down across the state.

“This was one time when hierarchical decision making was really, really needed,” Milburn said. “And it just didn’t happen.”

Esper has defended the decision to delegate and even announced enhanced counternarcotics operations, deploying more cramped ships, helicopters, and planes to the Southern Hemisphere and putting yet more service members in risky close quarters. “There seems to be this narrative out there that we should just shut down the entire United States military and address the problem that way,” Esper said at a press conference on Wednesday. “That’s not feasible.” This kind of delegation also isn’t Pentagon-specific; the country as a whole lacks a unified response to the virus, with individual governors deciding when and how severely to restrict residents’ movements.

[Read: The case against waging ‘war’ on the coronavirus]

The military is a highly bureaucratic organization that values toughness, sacrifice, and, maybe above all, standard operating procedures. That culture applies to all kinds of illnesses. “In the Marine Corps, the typical solution [is to] have Motrin and drink water,” said a Marine lieutenant colonel who spoke with me on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to talk to the press. “And there are times when that’s not the appropriate answer.”

Tom Crabtree, who spent 24 years as an Army surgeon, told me that this approach to treatment was common enough that people referred to Motrin as “Ranger candy.” While he doesn’t see the “Carry on” ethos as unique to the military—“I see the same things at Walmart”—the implications for America’s safety in the world are entirely different. “It’s a very simple fact: A healthy military is a capable military. For all the things that it needs to do and can do,” he said. “An unhealthy military is not.”

And as commanders try to balance protecting the United States from external enemies while battling its own internal pandemic, the question is, when exactly does risking people’s health end up damaging all those other protection missions?

Milburn thinks the military can afford further restrictions. And the Teddy Roosevelt carrier was a case in point. If some ships have to be mothballed for a few weeks to get cleaned and protect the sailors for an actual war when there is one, to him, it’s worth the cost. “Are we really going to cede control of the seas in this short period of time?” he asked.

The Problem With China’s Victory Lap

2020-03-28T09:00:00-04:00

On January 24, a few days after the United States confirmed its first coronavirus case, President Donald Trump expressed his gratitude for China’s “efforts and transparency” in combatting a virus that the country’s leadership tried for weeks to cover up. On behalf of the American people, Trump wrote, “I want to thank President Xi!”

By then, the pandemic was on its way to wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and its citizens’ way of life—not least because of the actions of Xi Jinping’s own government. Yet in February, Trump again praised for Xi on Twitter, writing that “he is strong, sharp and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus … Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.”

Since then, cases have skyrocketed across the United States, which now has the highest number of confirmed cases anywhere in the world, with more than 100,000 people infected. Yet Trump’s comments reflect a propaganda victory for Xi. And as the U.S. approaches the height of its outbreak, scrambling to spend trillions of dollars to save its economy, asking other countries to make up for its device shortages, soliciting doctors from overseas, and still struggling to bring stranded citizens home, it has no credible claim to be the responsible superpower leading everyone out of the crisis. Xi, the ascendant authoritarian with a massive surveillance state and a ruthless security apparatus at his disposal, wants to pick up the mantle.

[Read: Why America is uniquely unsuited to dealing with the coronavirus]

With combatting the virus the most immediate concern, the U.S. has not figured out how to compel China to own up to its shortcomings in managing this crisis—ham-handed attempts to brand the disease the “Chinese virus” notwithstanding. Xi is now maneuvering for a propaganda and diplomatic victory, offering aid and advice around the world.

The U.S., meanwhile, is entering what’s perhaps the darkest phase of its own crisis—its domestic problems hobbling it from providing significant international aid or coordinating a comprehensive response. (The U.S. announced on Thursday that it had made available $274 million in emergency aid to 64 countries.)

“On the global stage, [China is] hoping to fill the void of U.S. leadership,” Rush Doshi, the director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told me. “They have a long way to go, but they’re trying."

Never mind that China put the world in this predicament in the first place. Two months into a massive societal lockdown in China, with new cases of the disease slowing down—at least by official statistics—Xi is ready to declare victory at home.

He made a valedictory visit to Wuhan, the epicenter of the country’s outbreak, in mid-March. The lockdown on the surrounding province has lifted; public transit is running in Wuhan again. Xi has also sent millions of masks and thousands of ventilators to Europe, getting praise from the Italian foreign minister for helping “save lives in the first stages of the emergency.” As recently as yesterday, Xi offered Chinese support to the U.S. in a phone call with Trump.

“This is happening all around the world now,” says David Shullman, a China expert at the International Republican Institute. “[There] is a really long list of places where China is offering this equipment and assistance … It also comes with a message that, ‘Look what’s happening in the established democracies.’” Chinese-backed accounts have flooded Twitter with praise for the country’s response; a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson has pushed the false claim that the U.S. Army brought the disease to China; and Xi has encouraged Chinese media to push positive stories about China’s response.

But both China’s purported success against the virus, and its help to others in similar circumstances, may prove less than meets the eye. For one thing, the Chinese model of mass roundups of citizens and extensive surveillance with no real public-health purpose is not, or shouldn’t be, exportable to democracies—and democracies like South Korea and Taiwan have, through their own successes against the virus, proved that authoritarianism is not the required ingredient. The crackdown may not even have succeeded as well as China wants to advertise. Nurses in Wuhan have told the Financial Times of “hidden infections” going unreported in China’s official statistics. “If China prematurely declares victory and they’re wrong, that could lead to a second wave of infections,” Doshi said. “It’s quite sobering to think what that would mean for the world’s pandemic response and the global economy.”

[Read: China is avoiding blame by trolling the world]

Most immediately, it could mean that the coronavirus ground zero continues to generate and export more cases.

Desperate countries were happy to accept Chinese help. But it hasn’t always provided the lifesaving equipment expected. In Ukraine, for example, Andrey Stavnitser, who is helping coordinate the coronavirus response in the Odessa region, told the Atlantic Council that one center there ordered thousands of coronavirus tests from China at great expense—only to receive “ordinary flu tests” that had “nothing to do with coronavirus.”

The real short-term risk of China’s leadership exercise is that, should the country make the calculation to prize its economic health over public-safety concerns, other countries contending with the pandemic’s economic devastation may find themselves tempted to follow suit. Trump has already said he’d like to get the United States back to work by Easter, about three weeks from now—though China’s lockdown lasted months. As the crisis drags on, more and more leaders will find themselves facing gruesome calculations about the severe economic toll of keeping a low death toll. At that point, the China model may look even more tempting.

A Marine General’s Next Battle: Grocery-Store Logistics

2020-03-25T08:00:00-04:00

Two years ago, Lieutenant General Larry Nicholson was leading a roughly 30,000-strong Marine Expeditionary Force in Japan that forms part of America’s post–World War II presence in Asia. At one point, he commanded about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, the most violent in the country at the time, to fight the Taliban. So when he retired in 2018 after almost four decades of service and moved to Tennessee to manage supply-chain logistics in Knoxville, he thought he’d left behind the battlefield forever.

And for a while, that was true. He spent his time visiting warehouses talking to teams of employees about getting food and medicine to various convenience stores around the country. But with the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the country, Nicholson is once again at war—trying to keep food and medicine stocked to keep America fed, without endangering the health of drivers, packagers, and managers.

[Read: Grocery Stores Are the Coronavirus Tipping Point]

Nicholson is a vice president at the wholesaler H. T. Hackney, which has 4,000 employees and serves 20,000 stores from Miami to Detroit. He and I spoke recently about how he applies his battlefield experience to his job, how the coronavirus crisis has many parallels with Afghanistan (including toilet-paper shortages), and what Napoleon might have to do with grocery logistics. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Kathy Gilsinan: Were you expecting in retirement that your life wouldn’t be as stressful as it was in the Marines?

Larry Nicholson: I did not expect this. I thought I’d come into the private sector and learn a lot about supply chains and hopefully be able to contribute in some areas. I never expected to be in a crisis like this. There are a lot of parallels to my previous life.

Gilsinan: What are you seeing now? What is your day-to-day like?

Nicholson: It’s very much like being in the military. We are at a high alert. There’s things you take for granted, that the stores are going to be full, that the shelves are going to be full, and I think we’re working through the crisis here. There’s a heightened sense of service in the sense that our drivers, our warehouse guys, everybody feels like, “Hey, you know, we are an essential service.” We deliver to 20,000 stores. Our customers and the communities that they serve have never been more dependent upon us, so there’s just this sense of obligation. We’re a critically important part of the supply chain as a wholesaler distributing to these companies.

During this period, for a lot of people, the local [convenience store], especially in the rural areas, that’s where they’re buying their food. That’s where they’re buying the milk, eggs, or their paper products if you can find them. Based on our role in the supply chain, we are considered to be an essential company that’s got to be out there. So our employees are hard at work. A lot of them have to carry passes; in certain states, they’ve got to be able to show that.

Gilsinan: How do you think your experience in the military helps you now?

Nicholson: Tremendously. I mean, just beyond the leadership thing, the understanding of logistics. You know the old quote [sometimes attributed to Napoleon]: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.” Whether you’re in Afghanistan or Iraq or here at home, you’re not going to be successful unless that supply chain is working for you.

Gilsinan: What are the parallels between you being in Marjah, Afghanistan, trying to get ammunition to the troops, versus making sure there’s toilet paper at convenience stores in Detroit?

Nicholson: I think about how lucky we were, even in the remote areas of Iraq and Afghanistan, [to have a functioning] supply chain. The ammunition is one thing, but [there’s also] the food, the sanitation, and the basic lifesaving support—things that you need to keep combat troops healthy and in the fight. I think we feel very much the same way here. We have things we need to get out to the community. But we all understood in Iraq and Afghanistan that without a supply chain that actually was responsive and functioning, we would not be successful. And we feel the same way here.

Gilsinan: Did you ever experience a toilet-paper shortage in Afghanistan?

Nicholson: Um, Kathy, I’ll tell you that we went to alternate ways. Sometimes it went toilet paper. Sometimes there were other things. Without getting too graphic, some were better than others. But I think for the most part, if we didn’t have nice, squishy rolls of toilet paper, we had something that, uh, that took care of the job.

Gilsinan: So did you find the supply chains actually more reliable when you were in Afghanistan versus now? What are the challenges you see now that you didn’t see then?

Nicholson: No, I think the supply chain is reliable, and my sense is that we don’t have a shortage of toilet paper—people are not using more toilet paper than they did a month ago. They’re just hoarding it somewhere. I know that paper-product manufacturers are cranking out more. And our job is to just keep pushing product out there.

[Read: Why the coronavirus has been so successful]

Gilsinan: How are you keeping your employees safe because they have to be out there?

Nicholson: The two biggest things for us are accomplish the mission and take care of your people. In the Marine Corps, I used to talk about [how those are the only two] reasons we have leaders and officers.

We’re going to great lengths to keep our folks healthy. So far we’ve been incredibly fortunate; at this point, we’re zero COVID-19 positive. We are getting people tested, and anybody that doesn’t feel great doesn’t even think about coming to work.

But from 32 different locations, every day there’s issues you’re trying to solve, and you make the best decisions that you can. In a lot of ways, the combat analogies are [apt]. You never have perfect intel on the battlefield. You think you’ve got a pretty good idea of what the enemy’s doing, but you don’t have perfect intel. And it’s the same thing here; we never have perfect intel, and our team is out there walking into stores every day delivering. Success is entirely based on our people and their ability to do their job and [keeping] them healthy. So we’re doing everything we can.

Gilsinan: How have the protocols for your drivers changed day-to-day?

Nicholson: The trucks are rolling; they’ve got plenty of hand sanitizer; they’ve got wipes. After each delivery, [the drivers] go through a sanitation process where everything they touch, they clean. So even in the store, they’re wiping down the areas they’re in.

Gilsinan: What else reminds you of the Afghanistan experience?

Nicholson: Our guys intuitively understand their critical role in the crisis here. The other thing is, for teammates that are potentially exposed, are we providing the best care? You know, how are we rapidly responding to situations where somebody may have come in contact? The same way we focused on immediate medical attention, the “golden hour,” trying to take care of our marines. The “golden hour” in Iraq and Afghanistan was the sense that if you could get a wounded marine into resuscitative care surgery within an hour, his chance of surviving increased exponentially. If it took more than an hour, then his chances of survival diminished significantly.

Gilsinan: So how are you applying that concept now when you think about employees who may have been exposed?

Nicholson: We have our own protocols that ensure that they get immediate medical attention.

We’re doing everything we can to make sure that our folks that need to be tested are tested, and that folks that we need to quarantine, we quarantine. The terrible scenario is if you have people out there working that would be infected. So we’re incredibly cautious and always on watch for anybody that needs medical care to make sure they get it. You know, marines knew that Hey, if I get hit, man, I know I’m going to get world-class medical care right away. I think our employees have to know that the same holds true here.

Gilsinan: You mentioned imperfect intel, like you at one point were motivating people to go outside the wire and they didn’t necessarily know if they were going to come back. And now you have 4,000 people that are going to work and not necessarily sure if they’re going to get sick. How do you handle that problem?

Nicholson: These delivery drivers are stopping at 14, 15, 20 stores a day, and they’re going into these stores multiple times with hand trucks full of food, and then [they get] back in a truck and [move] on to the next spot. For any of those folks, obviously there is risk. They are kind of the unsung heroes of this fight; we should tip our cap to them because they’re out there. They are keeping those stores as full as we can. I certainly understand that the workers at greatest peril during this period are the medical professionals. So I was always incredibly proud of our marines and their ability to continue to get out there and get after the enemy. And I’m equally proud today of our folks here that understand this risk. And yet still every day they’re on the road, and they’re hitting those stores.

Kathy: The intensity of the Afghanistan experience, I’m sure, is still something that you carry with you. I’m wondering what would be the nightmare scenario now for you and your job?

Nicholson: The concern is always, we just don’t know where this thing’s going. None of us know how long this will last.

Gilsinan: Do you see a scenario in which your guys would have to scale back on deliveries?

Nicholson: I just can’t imagine [they] would. That would be a nightmare scenario because that means things have gone terribly wrong, as critical as we are right now to keeping people healthy. You want strong immune systems. Well, you better be sure that they’re well nourished.

[Yascha Mounk: This is just the beginning]

Gilsinan: This is a very anxious time for a lot of people. It’s an anxiety that most Americans, I think, have never experienced. But you yourself have been in extremely intense situations and dealt with stress like this. As a leader, do you have any words of wisdom for coping with massive uncertainty like this?

Nicholson: The thing we encourage our leaders to do is be out there, be steady, be strong, encourage people. Keep your sense of humor. Everyone takes cues from their leaders. And if your leader’s confident, he can get across the critical importance of this mission and why everybody’s doing their job here to help our nation through this.

For a lot of these people, hopefully there will never be a bigger crisis in their lives. They won’t have been to combat. And this will be the greatest test a lot of these guys face.

Gilsinan: Afghanistan is such a complicated conflict, and I don’t know that it was always clear to U.S. troops on the ground why exactly they were there. Is the mission here clearer?

Nicholson: For the guys on the ground [in Afghanistan] that were actually doing the daily missions, I think there was an incredible sense of gratification. [Going after] the Taliban, but also helping the people, I think they could see some of these towns come back to life. They could see schools opening. They could see markets opening. There’s always time later to debate about whether we should or shouldn’t have [been there]. There will be no debate in the future about whether we should continue to feed our nation. That’s kind of a slam dunk.

The Coronavirus Comes to a ‘Handshake Town’

2020-03-21T10:00:00-04:00

A few weeks after September 11, 2001, Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain were chatting in the green room of Meet the Press. A partisan fight was brewing over how to investigate the attacks, so they hatched a plan right there to push for an independent commission. The result of that personal encounter was the 9/11 Commission Report, the definitive account of that day, and the blueprint for a wholesale overhaul of America’s intelligence infrastructure.

“McCain and I happened to be just sitting together, talking,” Lieberman told me. “And something came out of it that when I look back on it was maybe the most important thing I did.”

D.C. in many ways runs on in-person encounters like this. Those iconic pictures of officials carrying out tough negotiations or making hard decisions about the country’s national security, simply show … people in a room. Think Barack Obama ringed by Cabinet officials watching the Osama bin Laden raid, or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up from a crowded conference table to admonish Donald Trump.

But the coronavirus pandemic is a new kind of crisis for Washington—one that requires the kind of emergency decision making facilitated by people huddled together in an office even as physical proximity itself risks exacerbating the crisis. Just in the past few days, two members of Congress tested positive for the virus—right after passing urgent legislation to deal with that very virus while sharing a room with more than 400 of their colleagues.

D.C. has now reported one coronavirus death, adding to the more than 200 across the country so far and nearly 12,000 worldwide. One particular conference illustrated the dangers of the kinds of networking gatherings D.C. is accustomed to, when a single infected person at the Conservative Political Action Conference met with numerous lawmakers, sending some into self-quarantine. The president himself, who had brief contact with at least one member of a Brazilian delegation who tested positive for the coronavirus, later tested negative.

[Read: Democracies must learn to work from home]

The business of Washington, including the federal government, which shapes lives around the entire country, depends to a unique degree on human interaction. It’s not just that Congress currently has no way to pass laws, including coronavirus relief, without physically meeting and casting votes, social distancing be damned. The people working in and around politics—the lobbyists, PR folks, journalists, think tankers, lawyers, and nonprofit employees whose work depends on proximity to government—also find that it’s very hard to do their jobs without meeting people.

D.C. is a “handshake-and-a-lunch town,” according to CR Wooters, a former Hill staffer and lobbyist who co-founded the public-affairs firm Fio360.

Just a week ago, work-related socializing was still in full swing, even as Capitol Hill, executive-branch offices, and companies around the city were sending staffers home. The coronavirus was already starting to rip through states across the U.S. by last Friday, but in Washington, the power diners were still power dining at Cafe Milano; the lawmakers, many of them over 65, were still hobnobbing at the Capitol. Philippe Reines, a former Hillary Clinton adviser and now consultant, was invited to a private dinner discussion about the virus—that would feature a bunch of people ringing a dining table with place settings presumably fewer than six feet apart—and he was even tempted to go, he told me.

But now the crisis is forcing a change in behavior that just a few weeks ago would have looked impossible in D.C. The government is allowing mass teleworking for federal agencies; the White House and Pentagon are enforcing social distancing at press briefings. Think-tank events and book readings are moving online. Even the leaders of some of the richest countries on Earth are meeting via teleconference in June now that the Camp David G7 summit has been scrapped. It turns out, to the extent that it requires people moving information around, politics is indeed a function many internet applications can handle—you just need to see the pixels, not necessarily the people.

Still, actual face time is surviving in the city. It’s evident, for instance, on Capitol Hill—the engine of D.C.’s in-person culture to begin with—and at the White House, where senior administration officials and health experts are holding emergency meetings and delivering urgent information to the nation via daily briefings.

Pete Marovich / The New York Times / Redux

Ordinarily, Congress and its accompanying office buildings are teeming with politicians, staffers, journalists, and lobbyists. Aides gather behind members in hearings, passing notes; lobbyists and journalists plant themselves in the corridor off the Senate floor to snag impromptu meetings they’d never otherwise get. Members who might rarely interact otherwise size colleagues up during votes or scurry over to their desk to trade criticisms or ideas. In other words, Capitol Hill is a “petri dish” for the spread of the virus.

While some Hill staffers have been working from home for weeks now, lawmakers have to be physically present to cast votes; for instance, on the massive coronavirus relief package passed last weekend. Some are calling for rule changes to allow remote voting, which leaders in both chambers have dismissed. “Come in and vote and depart the chamber so we don’t have gaggles of conversations here on the floor," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested, according to the Associated Press.

[Read: We were warned]

In other parts of the D.C., there is less insistence on being there in person. Steven A. Cook, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, told me the enforced social distancing could actually be an opportunity to step away from the posturing and allow for other kinds of work to get done. If D.C. social life slows down, he said, “maybe people can take a deep breath; they can actually do some book research or do some reading.”

Gloria Story Dittus, who is in crisis public relations, has resorted to doing her job by making multiple phone calls (18 on one particular Tuesday) and scheduling a few “walking meetings” with people who live in her neighborhood while maintaining social distance. Now is not the time to develop relationships. “In a crisis, you get to know somebody because you’re in the foxhole and you’re fighting together,” she told me. “But it’s not like, Oh, I need to get to know so-and-so, so I’ll invite him over to a salon dinner.”

When I spoke with Reines earlier this week, he hadn’t left his apartment in days. Cafe Milano has closed until further notice. The coronavirus dinner event got canceled. . Reines doubts he’s missing anything now that he would need to see. But he doesn’t think it will last forever.

“There is a good part of Washington that relies on face time,” Reines said. “It’s unclear whether a job that requires actual face time can be shifted to virtual Apple FaceTime. And I don’t think anyone is going to believe the answer to that is yes.”

Friendships in the Age of Quarantine

2020-03-15T08:00:00-04:00

The hotel is a pleasant California bland—a yellowish four-story stucco number with a red roof and a fringe of palm trees. It’s about a half-hour drive from Napa Valley; it has four stars on Yelp even though one guest complained last year about bugs in his room. And for the past month, hundreds of Americans evacuated from cruise ships and Chinese cities have called it home.

For Yanjun Wei, the Westwind Inn on the 6,000-acre Travis Air Force Base looked like heaven last month after 30 hours in transit from Wuhan, China, the center of the coronavirus outbreak. She’d just been through hell trying to get back home to the United States. She had battled with the State Department for seats on an evacuation flight with her two toddlers. When her son, age 3, started “going crazy,” harassing his 1-year-old sister after the plane landed at Travis, she started crying and yelling at him; “I had a meltdown,” she told me. A friend sitting nearby came over to hold and soothe her from behind a face mask; another person in her row took charge of her daughter so she could deal with her son. Finally Wei’s family made the short trip from the tarmac to the hotel that would serve as their temporary home. For Wei, the worst was already over, even though she wouldn’t see her husband, Ken, who was waiting for her in San Diego, for the next two weeks.

[Read: What you need to know about the coronavirus]

Staff members and evacuees who spent time at Travis described a period of friendly confinement, with intervals of normalcy, extreme boredom, and surreal reminders of the invisible danger. What those conversations also revealed was a sense of solidarity and affection among people thrust into the same bizarre situation, who struck up friendships and found ways to help and entertain one another even under enforced social distancing. There are not many good news stories in the relentless coronavirus updates, but here is one: In circumstances of extreme stress and uncertainty, people forged lasting bonds and took care of one another.

“It was a great group of people. Both staff and evacuees,” said Frank Hannum, who spent two weeks in quarantine at Travis. His wife, Hope, who was also quarantined, put on ball gowns she’d brought with her to entertain the kids. Frank, an engineer, borrowed a laptop charger every morning from a stranger who left it outside his hotel-room door. They never met in person. “We were all kind of in the same situation, and we were just, you know, biding our time, making sure that we weren’t sick, our families weren’t sick, that we didn’t, of course, expose anybody else,” he said.

Base hotels such as Westwind are generally reserved for military members, veterans, civilian defense officials, and their guests, whether they’re moving among bases or on vacation, looking for a discount rate to see the sights. In many ways, the Westwind looks like any normal hotel, as you can see in videos from the Defense Department and evacuees—the rooms with their TVs and coffee makers and mini-fridges, the dim hallways with patterned carpet. It’s just that the guests are wearing masks or keeping six feet apart, fenced in on the grounds and guarded by U.S. marshals, and getting their temperature checked twice a day. The Java City café in the lobby is closed; the hotel staff are now Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health and Human Services personnel. It’s much the same at the other three military hotels turned quarantine centers in Georgia, Texas, and elsewhere in California, which are taking in nearly 1,000 evacuees from a cruise ship this week.

Hope Hannum in her ball gown (Courtesy of Frank Hannum)

Given the restrictions on social contact, forming a community required being inventive. Many of the evacuees used WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, to offer comfort, encouragement, and news to fellow guests they hadn’t even met, since many kept to their room for fear of infection. That’s also how Frank Hannum coordinated with his mystery laptop-charger benefactor. Some guests shared their notes from the daily CDC town hall to allow others to skip it, or alerted fellow evacuees when snack supplies were restored (since, as one of them told me, “those went by fast!”). Some staff members arranged a religious service by teleconference; participants, a CDC spokesman told me, could push pound-six to request a prayer.

For exhausted mothers like Wei, some of the kindness came in the form of child care. Several families with children wound up at Travis after evacuating from China. Wei and her kids, for instance, had been visiting relatives in Wuhan during the Chinese New Year when the government locked down the city and much of the surrounding province.

The staff organized outdoor activities for the children—catch and soccer games—in part to allow mothers a moment to take a nap or shower. “Think about it, the children are jet-lagged too,” Hannum said. “So for the first week, nobody’s getting any sleep.”

Both history and current events make it clear that fear of “the other” can permeate communities during an outbreak. As Jonathan Quick, a doctor and an adjunct professor at the Duke Global Health Institute, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, during the Spanish-flu outbreak of 1918, “Chileans blamed the poor, Senegalese blamed Brazilians, Brazilians blamed the Germans, Iranians blamed the British, and so on.” Racist incidents have been reported in Europe during the current pandemic; both the New Jersey governor’s office and the human-rights organization Amnesty International have recently felt compelled to remind people on Twitter not to be racist.

[Read: Trump’s European travel ban doesn’t make sense]

Despite the close relationship between disease and xenophobia, Quick told me that “the reflex to help one another is actually more common than one might expect.” In his article for the Journal, Quick cited the book Pale Rider, by Laura Spinney, which explains how the Spanish flu brought out good Samaritans: “In Alaska, 70-year-old Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy came out of retirement to fight the flu; in Tokyo, doctors went out at night to give free vaccinations to the poor; in Germany, the Catholic Church helped to train young women as nurses.” He told me that in his own medical work in crisis-hit areas, whether in Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “I was always struck by these people who had been through awful things. When they had a chance … they really maintained a positive attitude and worked together, despite the tough times that they’ve had.”

Chalk art at Travis Air Force Base (Courtesy of Frank Hannum)

At Travis, this meant that Hope Hannum and another woman broke their boredom by drawing SpongeBob SquarePants and Pokémon characters on the walkways for the quarantined kids. Frank Hannum recalled one staffer who teared up after walking by a drawing of a virus with the caption “THANK YOU FOR SAVING US FROM CORONA.” Another evacuee, pining for red wine, got a gift from a staffer, according to a Wall Street Journal reporter who was herself quarantined at Travis: “four miniature bottles of vodka hidden in latex gloves.” Kristin Key, the comedian on the coronavirus-stricken Grand Princess cruise ship, who is currently in quarantine at Travis, told me that she heard there’s a ukulele circle, which she plans to join with her guitar.

At another quarantine site, Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Matthew Price entered a haiku contest set up by the staff. His poem includes an affectionate nod to the staff’s personal protective equipment (PPE), which included masks, gloves, and medical gowns for when they got close to patients:

Please don’t spit on me
I’m wearing PPE
Love the CDC

This is not technically a haiku, and Price did not win the prize: Thai takeout, a respite from the monotony of the catered meals otherwise served three times a day. But the rules weren’t strict, and it was still a staff favorite.

The Hannums are now back in their small hometown outside Portland, Oregon, and oddly, Frank Hannum admits to feeling a touch of nostalgia for being in quarantine. Sure, it was boring, the food was so-so, and he and his wife were stuck together in close quarters for an average of 20 hours a day. But, he said, “we didn’t kill each other, which is great.” (He noted that they didn’t really have much choice but to work out whatever frictions arose over, say, clutter, because neither of them could actually go anywhere.) He hopes to put together a reunion for the evacuees, maybe a picnic next year. As he learned when he left quarantine, those people were special—not everyone is so welcoming during times of crisis. One night back in Oregon, when Hope Hannum was too tired to cook, the couple went out to a local Chinese restaurant. The proprietors knew where they’d come from. They asked the Hannums to leave.

Confessions of an Ex–Never Trumper

2020-03-10T07:00:00-04:00

She had to sleep on it. The letter was in her inbox; friends and colleagues, throughout the Republican national-security circles where Rebeccah Heinrichs had made her career, were signing on. It called then-candidate Donald Trump “fundamentally dishonest” and claimed that if elected president, he would use his power “in ways that make America less safe.” She wasn’t crazy about the tone in some spots, but she also didn’t think he was a credible candidate. Only a few other Republicans were left in the primary back then in March 2016—and she thought a letter like this, with its roll call of GOP luminaries, could help nudge voters to pick someone more responsible.

“I made the decision based on the information I had,” she told me recently. She doesn’t regret signing the letter, but now thinks that many of the worries she and her colleagues were expressing then—in warning about Trump’s isolationism, the potential economic effects of his trade policies, and his embrace of the “expansive use of torture,” among other things—were unfounded. And she is thrilled about that.

Heinrichs is an exception in the old GOP national-security world—which for the most part has stuck to its Never Trump positions—but she’s the norm in the party as a whole, which gives Trump a 94 percent approval rating. The 150-odd names on letters such as the one she signed represent the last major bastion of Republican resistance to Trump; prominent members continue to slam the president for his insulting tweets and his volatile temperament, even questioning his very ability to behave like an adult. But outside of this club—whether for reasons of ambition, genuine approval, or a combination of both—elected officials and operatives have largely fallen in line behind the president. And Heinrichs, unlike many of her peers, decided she could accept the character flaws because the foreign-policy results looked good.

[Read: What Democrats aren’t admitting about Trump’s record]

“His personal flaws are so transparent that they can distract truly well-meaning people or turn people off altogether,” she told me. But fundamentally, she feels Trump is fighting for a powerful America. “I have long argued for American primacy and President Trump is, even if sometimes clumsily, defending it and fighting for it. I'm not going to yell at the clouds over his tweets or obsess over this or that expression of bad manners.”

Trump has done plenty of things the old Republican foreign-policy establishment would cheer for, if someone else were doing them. He has labeled China as a threat, condemning its trade practices and calling for investments to counter the country’s military rise. He ditched a nuclear deal with Iran that many Republicans hated, and has financially devastated the regime instead. His administration has added more troops in Eastern Europe to confront Russia, and ended an arms-control treaty that Moscow was violating—even while Trump himself has confused matters by praising Vladimir Putin’s leadership and questioning whether Russia has really interfered in U.S. elections. Whatever Trump’s own doubts, though, at the insistence of Congress, he has imposed sanctions against Russia for 2016 election interference. Sure, he has said mean things about NATO, but Republicans and Democrats alike have long wanted other members to pay more for their own defense, and now they are.

On the flip side, the Trump presidency hasn’t manifested in the precise kind of nightmare the Never Trump letter writers envisioned in 2016. In the first of two alarmed open missives—one that appeared in March 2016 in War on the Rocks and another in The New York Times that August—GOP foreign-policy power brokers warned about specific consequences of a Trump presidency: His wish for trade wars was “a recipe for economic disaster”; his “hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric” would alienate allies in the Muslim world; he could bring back torture. In 2020, the economic effects of the trade war have been mild, cushioned by a multibillion-dollar bailout to farmers; Muslim allies in the Gulf in particular have overlooked his rhetoric and embraced Trump over his harshness toward their archenemy Iran; the use of torture in war remains illegal, even though Trump has granted clemency to three soldiers accused of war crimes.

None of this consoles the many signatories who still find Trump unacceptable. Policies can change, but character does not. If your main concern in 2016 was that Trump was “fundamentally dishonest” and “wildly inconsistent,” or that he “lacks the temperament to be President,” as the letters claimed, Trump likely hasn’t convinced you otherwise. And even if the worst predictions haven’t come to pass, you still won’t feel reassured while someone you fundamentally distrust is making life-and-death decisions on behalf of the country every day; there’s no World War III now, but in the words of the prominent Never Trumper and Atlantic contributor Eliot Cohen, “that’s a pretty low bar.” Cohen, a former senior Bush-administration official who helped coordinate the War on the Rocks letter, described the specific kind of unease he felt in Politico in late 2017. “This is about putting lives on the line. These are enormously consequential kinds of decisions that a president makes. And character really trumps, so to speak, everything else.”

[Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic]

Or maybe power does. Far from being inhibited by the foreign-policy establishment that shunned him, Trump has destroyed it. The list of names on the letters now reads like a memorial wall for the party’s old power brokers. Trump has barred them almost entirely from jobs in his administration, and built a new pro-Trump establishment on the wreckage of the old GOP elite.

Heinrichs is the rare young intellectual to have lived in both worlds. By 2016, she had worked on missile-defense issues on the Hill and held research posts at a number of conservative think tanks, headlining panels on issues such as “the future of missile defense” and co-authoring a paper on “deterrence and nuclear targeting in the 21st century.” Now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, she has been described as “one of the leaders of the next generation of experts on nuclear strategy and arms control” and is a regular TV commentator on U.S. foreign policy. She, along with a few other members of the GOP’s most resistant segment—which includes people who have spent their careers devoted to alliances, worrying about presidential character, and banging on about norms and values—have now come around to Trump’s foreign policy.

Even in primary season, Heinrichs saw hints of Trump’s appeal. People she knew back home in small-town Ohio found the candidates she was informally advising, including Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, too wooden. “I have some lifelong Democrat friends and family members who, for the first time in their life, supported the Republican candidate and voted for Donald Trump,” she said. “He’s like, ‘I’m tired of Americans dying in Afghanistan.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, so are we.’”

Trump, of course, made it through the primaries despite the Republican opposition, and Heinrichs knew she couldn’t support Clinton, whom she saw as dangerously accommodating to foes such as China and Iran. She had also noticed patterns in what Trump was saying. Just because he wanted to avoid overseas “nation-building” didn’t make him an isolationist—he also wanted better trade deals, so clearly wanted to be engaged in the world. So, she said on a Federalist podcast then, “I was open to this idea of a different kind of commander in chief.”

There was something else, she told The Federalist. “I didn’t like the direction that the Never Trump national-security establishment was going.” The suggestion that Trump would start a nuclear war, or a war with Muslims all over the world was “incredibly irresponsible coming from people who I think, and know, know better.”

This, after all, was the president that the election had delivered, and clearly many of the notions the old GOP foreign-policy establishment considered sacred were very much open to question. “Ordinary Americans … look at the establishment and say, ‘I don’t think you guys necessarily know what you’re doing,’” she told me. Many in the establishment were the same people who had advocated or helped mismanage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And anyway, was Trump being ignorant or spooking allies when he asked what the point of NATO was and why the U.S. had troops in South Korea? Or was he asking questions that average Americans wanted to know the answers to?

He could be doing both, but Heinrichs found it offensive that elites she knew considered it unreasonable for Trump—and by extension the millions of people who voted for him—to wonder where American resources were going and why. To her, this, and the broader discomfort with Trump’s populist appeal, reflected establishment contempt for public opinion. “I think it's wrong for the professional national-security class to write off common Americans as irrelevant or even nuisances,” Heinrichs said.

The matter of Trump himself, however, persists—and whatever good his administration may be doing in his supporters’ eyes, his own words frequently call into doubt where the United States really stands. His Russia comments were one example, and his sudden order to remove troops from northeastern Syria last fall left a vacuum for Russia to fill. He has praised leaders his government formally considers enemies, including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (“We fell in love,” Trump once said of the dictator), and even the Taliban’s chief (“The relationship is very good that I have with the mullah”). These gestures would be unthinkable for any president from the GOP “establishment”—which excoriated the Obama administration for its Taliban talks and for dealing with Iran’s “mullahs.”

[Read: Qassem Soleimani haunted the Arab world]

Nevertheless, Trump’s lack of concern for foreign-policy orthodoxy has also unshackled him in ways Heinrichs has cheered, although she admitted to “white-knuckling” over some of the risks Trump embraced. For instance, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had opportunities to kill the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, but they decided against it. Yes, Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in Iraq, but Iran and the U.S. were not formally at war, and such a hit could start one. A more typical administration would focus on those risks and hold lots of interagency meetings. “And it’s like, ok, but I would like to kill Soleimani,” said Heinrichs. “So is it just talking points and white papers that we’re trying to do? It’s almost like we were afraid of our own shadow in these policy areas where Donald Trump doesn’t care.”

If orthodoxy isn’t always right, though, neither is flouting it. She was uneasy about Trump’s performance at his meeting with Putin in Helsinki, where Trump undermined his intelligence agencies’ findings on election interference. “Across the board, I think for any American president, when you leave your own borders, you take your own side,” she said. She also admired appointees such as James Mattis, who resigned on principle, and a stream of other ex-officials who condemned Trump on their way out the door. While she chalks up the departures to Trump’s comfort with high turnover, she’s also not happy with some of his decisions to fire people.

The rift in the old “Never Trump” community has put former allies on opposing sides and destroyed friendships. Heinrichs is baffled by colleagues determined to bash a president who is doing many of the things they used to want, though she says she is cordial with them. Cohen has been harsher, comparing Trump’s sympathizers to those who served the Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France. The former diplomat Robert Blackwill signed both letters, later reservedly praised Trump’s foreign policies, and still said he would support any of the Democratic candidates over Trump in 2020. Once again, the policies didn’t matter so much as the man himself. “One can correct mistakes in foreign policy, or at least often one can,” Blackwill said. But Trump is “weakening our democratic institutions, and he’s dividing the country. So in my judgment, that has much longer implications than any particular foreign policy that he pursues.”

But even if he loses in 2020, Trump is not going away. ”There are too many people inside D.C. who think Donald Trump is a fluke and that the only reason he won was because his opponent was so weak,” Heinrichs said. And their additional warnings about Trump’s alleged damage to American standing in the world, his treatment of the federal bureaucracy, and his violations of long-standing norms, have clearly failed to convince the 40-odd percent of the country that approves of him.

It’s still hard to say whether, in the event of a Trump reelection, more signatories will tire of being locked out of the new center of GOP power, and let go of their character concerns.

“If I had my way, I would love to have a president who can lift the country and unify it, and has great personal virtue, and [can] carry out all of these policies that I think are necessary to defend and strengthen our security,” Heinrichs said. But voting for the policies means voting for the character. “You don’t get pieces of a candidate; you get the whole candidate,” she said.

Leah Feiger contributed reporting.

The U.S. Once Wanted Peace in Afghanistan

2020-02-29T08:44:17-05:00

For George W. Bush, the goal was the destruction of al-Qaeda, the total defeat of the Taliban, and a “stable and free and peaceful” Afghanistan. For Barack Obama, it was a degraded Taliban that could be reasoned with but would have to renounce violence, respect women, and abide by the Afghan constitution. For Donald Trump, it was just a reduction in violence and a clear path to the door—the Afghans themselves would have to figure out the rest.

Over nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan, the United States government went from seeking to annihilate the Taliban, to meeting with them furtively, to negotiating with them openly, before, finally, signing a deal with them. And at each juncture, the expectations dropped.

The agreement the United States and the Taliban signed today is both truly momentous for happening at all and severely modest for what it contains. In essence, it extends a seven-day truce in which U.S. and Taliban forces refrained from attacking each other, calls for Afghans to talk among themselves, and lays out a plan for a U.S. withdrawal over 14 months. The U.S. isn’t going anywhere immediately, and neither is the Taliban; there’s not even a full cease-fire. Implicit in all of it is the larger recognition that, for the U.S., getting out of Afghanistan will mean lowering the bar.

[David A. Graham: Everyone knew we were losing in Afghanistan]

Administration officials themselves seem determined to hold down expectations. “We’re not getting to a peace deal,” a senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in a briefing days before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went to Doha for the signing ceremony. “We’re getting to the start of a discussion about a political settlement, or a peace deal … But we are at the very, very beginning of this process.”

The deal specifies that the U.S. will pull all its forces from the country in little over a year, provided the Taliban lives up to its end of the agreement. Yet the Taliban has managed to fudge even two key U.S. goals that remain: The group does not formally renounce al-Qaeda or formally recognize the Afghan government, instead saying that al-Qaeda can’t use Taliban territory to threaten the U.S. or its allies and that it will participate in intra-Afghan peace talks. Women will take part in those talks, but Pompeo said this month that it’s up to Afghans to decide how their rights would be protected—effectively dropping Obama-era demands from the agenda. (The Taliban, which has consistently demanded that the United States must leave immediately, has also fallen short of that goal: The deal says the U.S. will draw down to 8,600 troops within 135 days—bringing troop numbers back around to the level they were when Trump took office.)

This agreement may enshrine the more limited ambitions of the U.S. in Afghanistan, but, in fact, the bar lowering started not long after the war did, as three successive presidents searched for victory and instead found more violence. Indeed, American ambitions actually looked deceptively modest in 2001, because the war was supposed to be easy—an overthrow of the Taliban government then running Afghanistan, a bit of humanitarian help, and the election of a new friendly government to ensure that terrorists couldn’t use the country to attack the United States. But by 2006, the Taliban had launched an insurgency, and Bush wound down his presidency in 2008 by sending thousands more U.S. troops to the fight. By then, the most immediate goal was to “restore basic security”—a far cry from his earlier hopes for “a free and stable democracy.”

Obama simultaneously raised resources—troop numbers went up from 31,000 at the end of the Bush administration to around 100,000 in 2010—and lowered expectations for what could be achieved. He spoke of the need simply to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda” and prevent its return to Afghanistan. Around the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that the administration was pursuing contacts with the Taliban, but insisted that any negotiations required the following outcomes: “Insurgents must renounce violence, abandon al-Qaeda, and abide by the constitution of Afghanistan, including its protections for women and minorities. If insurgents cannot meet those red lines, they will face continued and unrelenting assault.”

“Look, this is Afghanistan,” one anonymous American official told The New York Times in 2012. “Is it going to be Switzerland? No.” The paper noted at the time that the mantra around Washington was “Afghan good enough,” and that expectations for the central government in Kabul even to simply control all of Afghanistan’s territory had evaporated. Then National Security Adviser Tom Donilon just wanted “a degree of stability” to keep al-Qaeda from launching attacks, the Times reported, but even that was elusive. Lawrence Nicholson, the now-retired Marine lieutenant general who led a troop surge into the southern province of Helmand in 2009-2010, told me, “A lot of the areas that we had stabilized and cleared of Taliban went right back [to Taliban control] after we left … It was like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water.”

So Trump, when he came into office, was not unique in his desire to leave—and then became the third president in a row to decide to send more troops. “My original instinct was to pull out,” he said in 2017, “and historically, I like following my instincts.” But: “The consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable.” He offered no affirmative reason for staying, mentioning only the risks of leaving. Ensuring women’s rights was no longer part of the goal.

It still took Trump’s envoy Zalmay Khalilzad more than a year of negotiations to get a deal. Last fall, the U.S. and the Taliban were on the verge of signing an agreement when Trump pulled out, citing an American soldier’s death in Kabul. He revealed in a tweet that he had scrapped an extraordinary plan to host Taliban representatives at Camp David, along with the Afghan president, within a few days of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

This time it’s just Pompeo in Doha and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in Kabul, though Trump said last week he would have been perfectly willing to sign the agreement himself. The deaths of two U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan this month didn’t derail the talks; they died not in a Taliban attack, but at the hands of an Afghan in army uniform. Those men brought to six the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year—now 2,348 over the course of the conflict. Some 43,000 Afghan civilians have died, by one estimate; Afghan security forces were dying at a rate of about 9,000 a year for four years until 2018; then the U.S. military said casualties were higher in 2019 but classified the statistics.

The senior administration official who held the briefing on the deal ahead of time acknowledged “a healthy skepticism in many quarters” about it and even highlighted risks. “Nobody sees an increasing return on violence in Afghanistan,” the official said. “It may be that circumstances don’t play out the way we want [them] to. But we do believe this is the very best chance.”

[Read: ‘We shouldn’t be buying the Taliban’s excuse’]

That chance relies on the trustworthiness of the Taliban. Even in the group’s recent appeals to a U.S. public that may be just as eager for its troops to leave Afghanistan as the Taliban is to drive them out, Taliban representatives have refused to acknowledge al-Qaeda’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks. Last September, a Taliban spokesman told CBS that “still it is not known” who was behind those attacks. Just this month, the Taliban’s deputy head declared in a Times op-ed, “Reports about foreign groups in Afghanistan are politically motivated exaggerations by the warmongering players on all sides of the war.”

Robert Grenier was the CIA station chief in Islamabad when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan—almost 20 years ago, he tried to prevent the war by the same means Trump is now trying to end it: negotiating with the Taliban. Grenier tried to persuade a Taliban official to give up Osama bin Laden and possibly stop the invasion altogether. But even with the threat of a U.S. invasion bearing down, his interlocutor could not get the movement to sever ties with al-Qaeda or hand over bin Laden. “What’s unusual about my perspective is I’ve been willing to deal with these people,” Grenier told me recently. He said he feared that the president was seeking a face-saving way out of the conflict, and was relying too much on the word of the Taliban—a fundamentalist group—to protect the world from radicals they’ve shown no inclination to renounce, let alone control. He said, “I have no reason to believe that this is a decent agreement.”

The Russian Trolls’ Next Favorite Candidate

2020-02-20T13:36:39-05:00

Updated at 6:06 p.m. ET on Friday, February 21.

“Please move.” The white woman doesn’t raise her voice; she’s got her shirt on inside out and she’s aiming a cellphone at the taco-truck vendors parked on her street. She wants them gone, and they’re telling her to go back inside. “Okay, baby girl,” she says. “Vamonos. I’ll call ICE.” “Stupida bitcha,” comes a reply.

A video of the confrontation, filmed outside a house in Dallas last spring, soon went viral, with the title “racist woman talking about shes gonna call ICE ON US FOR SELLING FOOD IN DALLAS WHEN WE HAVE PERMIT.” Within weeks, it had more than 170,000 views.

This is the new face of Russian propaganda. In 2016, the Kremlin invested heavily in creating memes and Facebook ads designed to stoke Americans’ distrust of the electoral system and one another. Now, after nearly four years under a president whose divisive rhetoric and policies have inflamed voter anger on issues such as race, inequality, and his own conduct, the Russian government is still interfering, but it doesn’t need to do much creative work anymore. The taco-truck video wasn’t fabricated in some St. Petersburg workshop. It was a real video of a real incident, made in America—and all Russia had to do was help it spread with its Twitter trolls.

Luckily for the Russians, then, the two current front-runners for the presidency, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are both polarizing figures—and they’re both candidates Russian trolls sought to promote in 2016, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller found. This time, the Democratic field is crowded and squabbling, but it includes no hawkish, long-established Hillary Clinton to tear down. If the election does end up being a Trump-Sanders face-off, one of the Kremlin’s favored candidates from 2016 is guaranteed a win. They are far apart ideologically but nearly equally suited to the Kremlin’s interests, both in being divisive at home and in encouraging U.S. restraint abroad. Both Sanders and Trump profess to want to refocus the U.S. inward—a message that clearly appeals to many Americans. But that doesn’t mean the Russian propaganda machine is slowing down; it’s just aimed at a new target.

[Read: The Sanders doctrine]

Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who has studied Russian information operations, told me, “Systems like this don’t tend to stop simply because their reason for being no longer exists. They find new reasons for being.” In this case, building on their 2016 successes and worsening divisions in the United States.

Linvill offered me a list of reasons the Kremlin still wants to interfere in U.S. politics, despite the fact that we’re already doing such a great job of dividing ourselves. Russia’s goals include depressing voter turnout and making it more difficult for the eventual winner to govern by sowing doubts about the electoral process.

The Kremlin might also still have a preference for Trump, if only because Russian leaders now know what to expect from him, Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me. The New York Times reported after we spoke that intelligence officials told lawmakers, in a briefing last week, that Russia is indeed interfering to help Trump again. The report did not specify exactly how. Then came reports that U.S. officials had briefed Sanders that Russia was interfering on behalf of his campaign—Sanders said that Putin should “stay out of American elections,” in keeping with his position since 2016.

No matter what, Polyakova said, “a U.S. that’s mired in its own domestic problems and not engaged in the world benefits Moscow.” That’s where the videos come in.

Americans are now the chief suppliers of the material that suspected Russia-linked accounts use to stoke anger ahead of U.S. elections, leaving Russia free to focus on pushing it as far as possible. Linvill has seen Russian trolls shift tactics to become “curators more than creators,” with the same goal of driving Americans apart. “The Russians love those videos,” he said, “because they function to make us more disgusted with one another.” He and a colleague have traced viral tweets about the Dallas incident to Russia-linked accounts that Twitter has since suspended.

[Read: The billion-dollar disinformation campaign to reelect the president]

America’s largely self-inflicted political condition has provided a stunning return on investment for the Russian government, which began orchestrating—as far back as 2014—what Mueller later called a conspiracy of “fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes,” including the 2016 presidential election. Mueller laid bare the extent of the conspiracy led by a St. Petersburg–based organization called the Internet Research Agency. The IRA was the nerve center of the interference operation; it had hundreds of employees and a budget of millions of dollars dedicated to what it internally referred to as “information warfare” against America, with Facebook ads, fake Twitter personas, and even efforts to organize real-world protests.

Meanwhile, the irony is that the specter of Russian interference itself has become a tool to discredit political enemies online. “The biggest effect that I think foreign disinformation has had on our conversations is the perception that if someone disagrees with you, they’re a Russian troll,” Linvill said. “When, in fact, they probably just are somebody that disagrees with you.” Twitter, for instance, at one point suspended an account supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement as a suspected Russian troll. Wired later identified the user: an American living in Florida.

The IRA was already setting up fake social-media accounts and sending operatives to the United States two years before the 2016 election. It operated English-language Twitter accounts that circulated made-up news stories—about a salmonella outbreak in New York, for instance, and a chemical explosion in Louisiana, neither of which had happened, Linvill said. These days, Russian internet operatives barely deal in outright fabricated news stories, he said, and those early efforts failed because they were easily debunked. When the campaign started, the IRA wasn’t focused on supporting any particular candidate so much as targeting Clinton. This meant boosting not only Trump (by establishing Facebook accounts such as “Clinton FRAUDation” and “Trumpsters United”) but also, incongruously, Sanders. (A BuzzFeed investigation found one Russian Tumblr account, 4mysquad, that posed as a black activist and celebrated Sanders as “not some old White man who just decided that #BlackLivesMatter yesterday. He’s BEEN fighting.”) Mueller later found that the clear preference for Trump developed over time.

[Read: The Russian conspiracy that won’t die]

Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of some IRA operatives—which meant little, since they were in Russia, beyond the reach of American law, and turning their attention to the 2018 midterm elections. The organization was still creating memes, and it got an even bigger budget, according to Graham Brookie, the director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank. But it also began using more of what Americans themselves were putting on the internet, seizing on divisive debates about immigration, gun control, and police shootings of unarmed black men, using real news stories to highlight genuine anger and dysfunction in American politics.

Now, in 2020, the president and his political rivals have spent years locked in battle over things such as the Mueller investigation, impeachment, and America’s very institutions and role in the world. Russian trolls can largely just watch Americans fight among themselves, and use fictitious Twitter personas to offer vigorous encouragement, as they did with the taco-truck video. They will keep prodding the same bruises in American society, or encouraging cries of electoral fraud if there’s a contested Democratic primary or a tight general election.

The U.S. doesn’t need Russians to erode faith in its elections—one buggy app at the Iowa caucus did that just fine, prompting the president’s campaign manager to wonder on Twitter whether the caucus had been “rigged.” Trump is both a cause and an effect of existing American lack of faith in institutions, which he encourages with frequent reference to the “deep state.” And Sanders gets authentic support for his criticism of political and economic elites, which the Russia-linked accounts also promote.

Even as the U.S. by virtue of its political divisions has made Russia’s job easier in some ways, it has made Russian operations more difficult in others. The Mueller investigation and congressional scrutiny have made people more aware of Russia’s activities since 2016, Brookie said. Social-media companies such as Twitter and Facebook have grown more active at suspending suspicious accounts—even to the point of accidentally suspending real people spreading polarizing messages.

Still, although Brookie didn’t want to understate the threat of Russian interference, he maintained that American domestic disinformation is worse than anything the IRA could do. Of the Russians at this point, he said: “They could spike the football and say, ‘Mission accomplished.’”

The Inconvenient Truth About ISIS

2020-02-14T07:00:00-05:00

The Islamic State has lost all of its territory; tens of thousands of its fighters have been killed or are imprisoned; and its former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is dead. But a Kurdish leader who witnessed the militant group’s rise and fall is warning that ISIS is putting itself back together and stressing an uncomfortable fact: that ISIS is bigger now than it was nearly six years ago, when it founded its self-styled caliphate.

Eager to move on, President Donald Trump has declared victory over ISIS. Nevertheless, the conflict is ongoing, and to the extent that the Democratic presidential candidates mention the fight, it’s to express their desire to withdraw troops. The reality, though, suggests that a definitive end to the conflict remains out of reach. Even after America spent billions of dollars during two presidencies to defeat ISIS, deployed troops across Iraq and Syria, and dropped thousands of bombs, ISIS persists. If anything, it stands ready to exploit Trump’s impatience to end America’s “forever wars” and shift the country’s focus to countering Iran.

“ISIS is still very much intact,” Masrour Barzani, the prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, told us in an interview. “Yes, they have lost much of their leadership. They have lost many of their capable men. But they’ve also managed to gain more experience and to recruit more people around them. So they should not be taken lightly.”

[Graeme Wood: ISIS is gloating]

Barzani is in a position to know, because he’s had a front-row seat to the war against ISIS from the start. Before he became prime minister in June, Barzani was an influential U.S. partner in the war against ISIS as the top security official in the Iraq’s Kurdish region, which is semiautonomous from Iraq’s central government in Baghdad. Kurdish fighters, called peshmerga, defended their territory from the ISIS onslaught in 2014 even as entire divisions of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces melted away. They not only proved to be some of America’s most effective military allies in the country, but their spies fed intelligence to the Americans, their officials helped coordinate U.S. air strikes, and their counterterrorism units worked alongside U.S. special operators. Thousands of peshmerga have been killed and wounded in the anti-ISIS campaign.

Barzani has watched with concern as Trump zigzagged on the presence of American troops who were supporting Syrian Kurds in their own anti-ISIS fight, then ramped up a confrontation with Iran that has thrown the U.S. mission in Iraq into uncertainty. After Trump ordered the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in January, Iraqi politicians vowed to eject the the 5,000 U.S. troops stationed in the country for the ISIS campaign. Their status remains in limbo. Barzani, whose government relies heavily on U.S. support, did not directly criticize Trump for the Soleimani killing, saying he was “surprised” by it and wanted to de-escalate regional tensions.

Meanwhile, more than five years into the U.S.-led war—and after many statements by Trump heralding the Islamic State’s defeat—the group still has some 20,000 fighters across Iraq and Syria, Barzani told us. (A Pentagon report last summer put the number of ISIS fighters between 14,000 and 18,000. Estimates by analysts and U.S. officials put the number around 10,000 when it announced its caliphate in the summer of 2014.) ISIS is still managing to carry out 60 attacks a month in Iraq alone against security forces and local rivals, Barzani said, as it regroups around a core of hardened fighters.

U.S. military officials and Western and regional politicians have never stopped warning about the Islamic State's ability to recruit fighters and launch attacks. When Trump ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria in October, he faced bipartisan resistance from lawmakers who said the job was not yet done. But what is striking about Barzani’s portrayal of the group is the idea that it is not just surviving but thriving. This cuts against the official line from the White House. It jibes, however, with recent warnings: from the Pentagon’s inspector general, who said in a report last week that Baghdadi’s death has not disrupted ISIS’s command structure or operations; and from the United Nations, which said in a report last month that ISIS still has at least $100 million in its reserves and has begun to reassert itself in Iraq and Syria.

[Read: Iraq is the one war zone Trump doesn’t want to leave]

The administration’s focus on punishing the Iranian regime isn’t helping. The Soleimani strike capped months of U.S.-Iran tensions that included Iran-linked attacks on shipping and oil interests in the Persian Gulf and rocket attacks by Iran-backed militias against U.S. troops in Iraq; after Soleimani’s death, Iran sent missiles flying at bases housing U.S. troops in the country. “This confrontation definitely will have a negative effect on the fight against terrorism and ISIS, which should be the priority for all of us,” Barzani said.

But the main reason for the ISIS resurgence, Barzani said, is the persistence of the same conditions that allowed it to rise up in the first place. Syria remains in chaos. In Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi leaders alike have, for almost two decades, failed to solve problems such as corruption, poor governance, sectarianism, and economic malaise. Much of the Sunni-majority areas that were ISIS strongholds still lie in destruction, largely from U.S. air strikes, and some are now under the control of Iran-backed Shiite militias, which have antagonized much of the population with their sectarian tactics.

The U.S. has pushed other countries to contribute funds to help rebuild ravaged areas, but it has not prioritized these efforts, which have been halting and plagued by local mismanagement. Leaders in Baghdad have made little effort at political reconciliation. Many residents remain in displaced-persons camps. “If people are jobless, if people are hopeless, if people have no security, if people have no opportunity, if there is no political stability, it's always easy for terrorist organizations to manipulate local populations,” Barzani told us. “ISIS is a by-product. So as long as these factors are still valid, there will always be either ISIS or something similar to ISIS.”

Iraq Is the One War Zone Trump Doesn’t Want to Leave

2020-02-03T07:00:00-05:00

Donald Trump has harangued generals at the Pentagon over what he’s called the “loser war” in Afghanistan and their failure to end it. He has dismissed Syria as “sand and death,” and complained that the United States was supposed to be there for only a “short-term hit.” He has sought and failed to get rapid pullouts from both places. But he hasn’t made any such promise for Iraq. In fact, he has recently made the opposite case: that the roughly 5,000 U.S. troops there must stay.

When the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel U.S. troops last month—out of anger at the brazen strike that killed an Iranian general in Iraq without its government’s approval—Trump vowed not to leave at all, and threatened sanctions if forced to do so.

Why is Iraq the one country where Trump seems to want to stick around, especially since he campaigned on having opposed the 2003 war there? Why, given Trump’s statements that he’s defeated ISIS, has he not used the supposed victory to get out of Iraq as well as Syria? To the extent that Trump cares about Iraq at all, the answer that emerges from conversations with current and former officials and advisers boils down to three of Trump’s main enemies: ISIS, Barack Obama, and Iran.

[Read: In Iraq, the U.S. gets hit where it hurts]

"I’m convinced that he hasn’t made any pronouncements about getting out of Iraq because he knows full well that ISIS can reemerge. They have a presence there,” Jack Keane, a retired general and informal adviser to the president on national-security matters, told me. “And he understands that if we unilaterally pulled out and this thing caught on fire again, he would own it in a way that Obama owned it after he withdrew.” Trump, he said, is sensitive to what happened when his predecessor left Iraq and ISIS rose from the remnants of the war many Americans had thought was over.

Trump himself made this clear on the campaign trail in 2016, despite also lamenting the U.S. going into Iraq at all. Obama withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011, unable to secure a new agreement with the Iraqi government to keep them there longer. Iraq was forced to invite the U.S. military back to fight ISIS, which in the summer of 2014 was threatening genocide against the Yazidis and beheading hostages, including Americans.

By 2016, Trump was convinced of two things: ISIS was Obama’s fault, and the U.S. had to stay in Iraq to fight it. Iraq was now the “Harvard for terrorism,” he said. That left no choice but to “take care of it.”

And so once Trump took office, he sped up the military campaign against ISIS and notched a major victory with the fall of the Islamic State’s Iraqi capital in 2017. In the spring of 2019, he declared the territorial defeat of ISIS, and later that year, ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, killed himself during a U.S. Special Operations raid.

But Trump, despite his private and public complaints about the expense, did not promise to withdraw from Iraq, the central staging ground for the U.S. counter-ISIS fight. Instead, he has focused on getting troops out of Syria, where a complex battlefield currently includes some 500 U.S. troops butting up against the competing interests of Turkey, a NATO ally; U.S. adversaries such as Russia, the Syrian government, and Iran; and ISIS remnants.

Furthermore, Keane said, “it’s the U.S. military leaders in Iraq that actually run the U.S. coalition war against ISIS in Syria, so we're managing Syria and Iraq from Iraq.” Put another way, the U.S. could still fight ISIS without Syria; it could not fight ISIS without Iraq.

So the first time he was ready to declare victory against ISIS, back in December 2018, when the group was still clinging to its last scraps of territory, Trump may have spotted a double political benefit: He could announce what looked like a big troop withdrawal and claim to end the war in one country, while also vowing to keep ISIS down. Thus, when he took a hastily organized trip to Iraq that month, he started talking about bringing troops home—from Syria. He toured the massive al-Asad Air Base, in western Iraq—a “fantastic edifice,” he later called it—and marveled at the size of its runways. Then he told the troops there that they would stay put “to prevent an ISIS resurgence and to protect U.S. interests.”

The base itself also spoke to Trump’s real-estate interests: He evidently thought the U.S. had built it, though it has stood in Iraq’s Anbar province since Yugoslavian contractors helped put it there in the 1980s. He told CBS: “We spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it.” And then he added a new reason to stay in Iraq. “One of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran, because Iran is a real problem.”

Indeed, this remark hinted at a new phase in Trump’s involvement in the Middle East. His priorities have shifted from the defeat of ISIS to the pressure campaign against Iran. When ISIS was at full strength, both U.S. and Iran-backed forces in Iraq considered the group their enemy, turning their guns against the insurgents rather than each other, as they had previously in the Iraq War. But with ISIS gone and Trump undertaking an ever-intensifying campaign of sanctions against the Iranian regime, Tehran’s and Washington’s common interests in Iraq began to evaporate.

Recently, “Iran policy has simply taken over Iraq policy,” says Douglas Silliman, the former ambassador to Iraq, who was present at Trump’s al-Asad visit.

Trump’s Iran problem has only gotten worse in recent months. Iran-backed militias in Iraq that had left U.S. forces largely alone during the counter-ISIS fight have begun targeting them again, including in rocket attacks that culminated with the death of an American contractor after Christmas. Soon after that death, Trump killed the top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani. With the strike, Trump proved just how effectively the U.S. could watch the Iranians from Iraqi soil.

[Read: The world paid attention to the wrong Iraqi protests]

The irony is that the killing may end up driving Trump from the one war zone he doesn’t appear to want to leave. Iraq asked the U.S. to discuss a timeline for withdrawal, and the State Department reacted with an outright refusal before softening its stance. The House of Representatives is also putting pressure on the administration to restrict what the military can do in Iraq. Meanwhile, U.S. diplomats are pushing NATO countries to take on a bigger role there, in line with Trump’s urging, while Trump has insisted on being paid back for the air base the U.S. didn’t build if the Americans are forced to leave.

What followed Trump’s initial lashing out, though, was intense diplomacy and multiple rounds of calls among senior leaders in Iraq and the United States to try to smooth the rift. Iraq’s own domestic political problems—the just-appointed prime minister has yet to form a government, two months after his predecessor resigned—may delay any decision on the status of U.S. forces. In the meantime, U.S.-Iraqi cooperation in the fight against ISIS briefly paused after the Soleimani killing, and military officials are struggling to secure Iraqi permission to host U.S. defense systems against Iranian missile attacks. Even if Iraq doesn’t ultimately force U.S. troops out, these developments show how political disputes are having military effects.

The possibility that Iraq does insist on an American exit remains real, if somewhat remote. “It’s way too soon to say what is going to happen,” Silliman says. And while Iraqis decide the shape of their next government, the parties may have some space to negotiate while giving the immediate political furor from the Soleimani killing a chance to fade. “Procrastination,” Silliman says, “works wonders.”

Trump’s stance on Iraq embodies many of the tensions in his worldview. He hates wars, but he loves killing terrorists. He claims that he never wanted to get into Iraq, but he condemns the way Obama got out. And he dislikes the expense of staying in Iraq, but more than that, he hates being told what to do. If he can’t leave Iraq on his own terms, he doesn’t want to go at all.

C-SPAN Is So Hot Right Now

2020-01-27T13:15:00-05:00

People across America turn to it regularly. It’s getting lovingly roasted on late-night television. It’s going viral on YouTube with sizzling footage of Jerry Nadler talking two decades ago.

C-SPAN is so hot right now. And that’s a symptom of something gone deeply wrong.

The fact that so many people want to watch Congress’s activity points to just how disturbing and dysfunctional the current political era is. A perhaps surprising number of politicians are totally charisma-free, on-screen and off. Even though it’s their job to check the rest of the government and spend taxpayer money, no one necessarily wants to watch them do it hour after stultifying hour.

But C-SPAN has been watching for more than 40 years now—and judging by the growing share of its videos with 1 million or more views, its expanding subscription base on YouTube, and the hundreds of thousands who have tuned into its impeachment live-stream, a still-modest but ever larger number of Americans want in too. The United States under Donald Trump has seen an unusually high number of buzzy hearings, with James Comey versus Senate Intel becoming required viewing at bars in Washington, D.C; Michael Cohen versus House Intel streaming from countless cubicle laptops; and Robert Mueller versus House Judiciary getting obsessively analyzed for entertainment value—as if a congressional witness is supposed to scintillate. This is salutary civic engagement, maybe, but it’s not a sign that the government is working well.

[Read: The solemn absurdity of Trump’s impeachment trial]

Because there’s nothing entertaining about public servants doing their job properly—and when that’s what’s on C-SPAN, for most people it isn’t hot. It’s just how things are supposed to work and what citizens have a right to expect. It’s the breakdowns, the partisan rancor, the malfeasance, and the mismanagement that make for must-see TV. In normal times, a qualified ambassador’s Latin-laced testimony about foreign-aid disbursement would be of interest mainly to nerds, professionals, and professional nerds. Instead, Americans devoured Gordon Sondland’s “explosive” account of a Ukraine-aid quid pro quo.

And a network that insists on airing entire hearings in full, without the talking-head chatter and screaming chyrons of cable news, is at the center of the action. When I visited C-SPAN last week, everyone I asked about the network’s reputation for dullness seemed used to the critique—and either resigned to or fully in on the joke. The day before I caught up with him at the network’s office, Jeremy Art, C-SPAN’s social-media senior specialist, had tweeted a bit from the talk-show host Stephen Colbert about late-night impeachment arguments. (The tagline: “Indulge your impeachment fantasies with C-SPAN3 After Dark.”) I later spotted the political editor Steve Scully hunched over a desk, watching a Conan O’Brien skit from the previous night on his phone. (In it, an argyle-sweatered control-room boss amps up the C-SPAN team: “Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump: This is our goddamn Super Bowl, okay?”)

In his office, C-SPAN’s communications director, Howard Mortman, dug up another O’Brien clip to show me, from the 1995 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, as Nadler’s face beamed from four different screens next to him, each showing the action on the Senate floor. It’s Mortman’s favorite C-SPAN joke: “I have an announcement for those of you watching tonight’s event live on C-SPAN. For God’s sake, it’s Saturday night! Go outside, meet a woman. Come on!”

The irony of this being C-SPAN’s moment is that its cameras aren’t actually in the Senate chamber right now, and neither are any other news-media cameras. C-SPAN can and does cover every grimace and rant of House and Senate hearings—complete with speaker shots, reaction shots, witness shots, milling-about shots in committee rooms—but debates and votes on the actual floors of the House and Senate are a different matter. With rare exceptions, such as the State of the Union address, the House and Senate operate their own cameras in the chamber, with C-SPAN and other news outlets picking up the footage.

To hear C-SPANners tell it, the cinematography is lacking—and they could do it so much better. “We would love to be able to show the reactions of senators as they are listening to arguments,” Ben O’Connell, C-SPAN’s managing editor, told me. “We would’ve loved to have been able to show as each senator stood up and took their oath.” The point is not just aesthetic, but philosophical too. “We believe that it’s very important that journalists are behind the camera and deciding what people see in the room and how they see it, rather than the government,” O’Connell said.

What the millions watching can’t see is just as revealing about the process as what they can. When Representative Adam Schiff launched into the second hour of his opening arguments in Trump’s impeachment trial one day last week, you could see him taking sips of water between reflections on abuse of office, George Washington crossing the Delaware, and the wise words of Benjamin Franklin. You couldn’t see what the New York Daily News reporter Michael McAuliff spotted and tweeted about from the press gallery: 21 empty seats on the GOP side and two on the Democratic side. The Senate cameras do offer Americans the benefit of hearing the arguments on impeachment, but they give no indication about how seriously lawmakers are taking them—or by extension, their responsibility to act as jury members.

C-SPAN pushed for floor access to the impeachment proceedings, but neither Democratic leadership in the House nor Republican leadership in the Senate welcomed its cameras—even though the value of the network is a rare patch of bipartisan agreement on the Hill. (As for the impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees last year, the network had seven cameras in place—including a tiny camera on a pole in the corner for a wide shot of each room.) C-SPAN’s appeal to the Senate, in the context of other press restrictions, prompted a New York Times headline declaring that “even C-SPAN” was “piqued.”

[Buckner F. Melton Jr.: No wonder the impeachment trial is such a mess]

O’Connell would neither confirm nor deny any such state of pique, but he did say that C-SPAN journalists have requested floor access multiple times since turning on their cameras in 1979. Those efforts have pretty much always failed, with the exception of a recent documentary. For that, the Senate let them film partly from the floor, though the lawmakers had to pass a resolution to allow the cameras in. Brian Lamb, who founded the network and retired from it last year, recalled fighting in vain for floor access during Bill Clinton’s impeachment too. “We were running down a blind alley into a dead end,” he told me.

Politicians “really don’t understand television,” Lamb added, lamenting their need to control how they’re seen. “They understand that it can damage them.”

And it has. When he was House speaker in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich also refused to let C-SPAN cameras onto the floor, though he did let House camera operators experiment with reaction shots, according to Chad Pergram, a Fox News congressional correspondent who previously worked at C-SPAN. “That experiment lasted about a week as the House feed showed lawmakers dozing, goofing off and reading,” Pergram wrote in a column for Fox News. “Callers then lit up the Capitol switchboard as they phoned to admonish their lawmakers for not showing respect to the speaker or accusing them of sloughing off on the taxpayer's dime.” (Gingrich then backed off to let them do so in private.)

One can almost sympathize with their anxiety. Politicians work for the public, and who wants their boss watching them all the time? But if you’re the boss, you presumably want to know that the person whose salary you pay is, say, following company policy and showing up to meetings. That’s especially important right now, when those very employees keep saying that the fate of the entire country is at stake in their deliberations.

A properly functioning government is one that the average citizen has the luxury to ignore rather than think about, much less spend hours watching tear itself apart. But the government isn’t functioning properly these days—in ways that long precede Trump and impeachment—and the extent of its failures should actually make C-SPAN even hotter than it is right now. Mortman said that well before The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers series exposed how officials kept expressing optimism about the war in public while panning it in private, C-SPAN had aired hundreds of hearings on the matter, dating back to 2001, in which much of the series’ revelations could have been gleaned. From fiscal mismanagement to bungled wars, politicians aren’t succeeding enough anymore to give Americans the luxury of boredom. And they’ve been failing in plain sight, in front of the cameras. Americans may be tuning in too late.

The War Machine Is Run on Contracts

2020-01-17T07:00:00-05:00

Mike Jabbar never met his replacement. But when Nawres Hamid died in a rocket attack on a military base in Iraq after Christmas, Jabbar saw photos of the wreckage and recognized the American flag he himself had helped paint on the door of a room now mangled. That was his old room, on his old base. It could have been him.

“Imagine something like that happens, knowing that you were supposed to be there and you weren’t there, and the person that replaced you is gone,” Jabbar, who like Hamid served as a translator for the U.S. military, told me in an interview. “It absolutely feels horrible.”

Jabbar was one of the lucky ones. He left his home country of Iraq last fall, at age 23, for the United States, where he’s now a permanent resident living with a friend in North Carolina.

The U.S. has relied on thousands of contractors like him and Hamid to help conduct its wars, in roles handling translation, logistics, security, and even laundry. America cannot go to war without its contractors, but presidents usually ignore the thousands who have died, including U.S. citizens. They are ubiquitous but largely unseen by the American public, obscuring the real size, and the real cost, of America’s wars. This also means that a president can selectively seize on one contractor’s death in the service of other goals.

Senior U.S. officials invoked Hamid, an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen, repeatedly to explain why they brought America to the brink of an all-out conflict with Iran—days before the public knew his name. Donald Trump, who has vowed to end wars in the Middle East, was willing to risk a new one to avenge an American contractor’s death—including by killing the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a step previous presidents worried could unleash a violent backlash. Yet when a terrorist attack killed two more American contractors and one U.S. soldier in Kenya about a week later, Trump barely reacted. “We lost a good person, just a great person,” he said of the soldier. He didn’t mention the contractors.

[Read: America’s self sabotage in the Middle East]

As America's interventions abroad have become more complex and open-ended, the country has relied on contractors more and more for essential jobs like guarding diplomats and feeding the troops. Even as the U.S. tries to end those wars and bring more troops home, contractors can stay behind in large numbers to manage the aftermath—especially since many of them are local hires in the first place.

The government has no data on exactly how many American contractors have died in the post-9/11 wars; in fact, it’s hard to get a full picture of how many contractors have been involved in those wars at all. The Defense Department publishes quarterly reports on how many it employs in the Middle East—close to 50,000 in the region as of last October, with about 30,000 spread through Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Americans make up less than half the total, in a region where U.S. troop numbers fluctuate between 60,000 and 80,000. The contractor numbers fluctuate too, and the military’s data don’t include contractors working for other agencies, such as the CIA or the State Department.

The death toll is murkier still, though Brown University’s Costs of War Project gives a figure close to 8,000, counting Americans and non-Americans. “They are,” in the words of Ori Swed and Thomas Crosbie, researchers who have studied contractor deaths, “the corporate war dead.”

Jabbar told me he was happy to take on that risk. Like Hamid, he was born in Iraq; from his middle-school years, he said, he wanted to become an American, and taught himself English in part by listening to Eminem and watching Prison Break. He dropped out of college at 19 to serve as a translator in the U.S. fight against the Islamic State, and wound up alongside U.S. troops as they pushed toward the group’s Iraqi capital of Mosul in 2016. Instead of studying English and earning an information-technology degree, he was in the middle of a fight to wrest back territory from insurgents, translating battlefield instructions for the Americans’ Iraqi partners.

He later ended up with a Navy SEAL unit in Kirkuk, near where he grew up, and became all but officially part of the team; he lived with them, ate with them, patrolled with them, went to the front lines with them. Jabbar even once got beaten up and arrested while getting groceries for them—a case, he said, of mistaken identity, resolved only after he’d spent the night in jail.

“It is hard for me [to] emphasize enough how critical these dedicated people were to our military mission,” Joseph Votel, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, who retired last March after three years helping direct the anti-ISIS fight, wrote to me in an email. Interpreters on contract with the U.S. military were more than just language translators. “They helped with our understanding; they provided cultural context to the events playing out on the ground; and, they came to us with networks of their own that [were] always very useful in navigating complex situations … They did all this at their own personal risk.”

[Read: The danger of abandoning our partners]

America’s reliance on private contractors in war didn’t start with 9/11, but it exploded in the wars that followed those attacks. The political imperative to keep troop numbers limited, and the need to rebuild amid conflict, meant that contractors filled gaps where there weren’t enough troops or the right skills in the military to do the job. They could often work more cheaply than U.S. troops. They might get limited compensation for death or injury, compared with a lifetime of Veterans Affairs benefits; they could deploy to places where the U.S. didn’t want to or couldn’t legally send the military, Steven Schooner, a professor of government procurement law at George Washington University, told me.

Even before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Leslie Wayne documented the rise of contractors in The New York Times, noting their roles in training U.S. troops in Kuwait and guarding Hamid Karzai, then Afghanistan’s president. “The Pentagon cannot go to war without them,” she wrote. “During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in 10.” In Afghanistan, according to the latest U.S. military figures from last fall, the ratio of American contractors to U.S. troops is almost 1 to 1; including local and third-country contractors, it’s about 2 to 1.

Iraq contributed further to the trend. “At the beginning of the Iraq War, expectations, foolish as they may have been in retrospect, were that this would be a pretty easy thing,” Deborah Avant, a professor at the University of Denver who has researched the industry, told me. But as the situation deteriorated, it would have been difficult to mobilize tens of thousands of additional troops to provide security. So contractors filled the gap—and not just for the Defense Department. “If ABC News was there, they needed to have security,” Avant said.

They weren’t just providing security, though, and they weren’t just American. They came from a range of countries in addition to the U.S. and did a range of jobs that in prior years the military had handled. “When I went into the Army … everybody was trained as a soldier, and then after you were qualified as a soldier, you might have trained to be a cook, or a laundry specialist, or a postal specialist, or a transportation specialist,” Schooner said. “Today, we train trigger-pullers, and we’ve outsourced all support services.” Because many U.S. missions overseas now involve reconstruction, contractors can also provide thousands of local jobs in struggling economies.

With contractor support, Schooner said, “We can send innumerable troops anywhere in the world, any distance, any weather, any geography, and we have them taken care of better than any army has ever cared for its people, for as long as you need.”

But the biggest benefit of all may be political. “Americans really don’t care what war costs,” Schooner said. “All they really care about is win or lose, and how many of our boys and girls come home in bags and boxes. So if you can, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly, artificially deflate the number of body bags or boxes, you’re winning.”

[Read: Trump might not want war, but the military is steering his Iran policy]

This doesn’t always work, however—and Iraq in particular has shown how contractor deaths or missteps can have severe political consequences, or even escalate conflict. Contractors have committed crimes that have hurt U.S. prestige and destroyed lives in Iraq—including the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, and the 2007 massacre of 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. In 2004, four armed contractors were ambushed in Fallujah, their burned and mutilated bodies hung from a bridge. An “angry and emotional” President George W. Bush then directed the Marines to seize the city, the historian Bing West told a BBC reporter. The result was a vicious urban battle that left 27 American troops dead, along with roughly 200 insurgents and 600 civilians.

In Hamid’s case, Jabbar thinks Trump got some justice in having Soleimani killed. “[Hamid’s] gone now,” Jabbar said, “but if he knows somehow that all this happened because of him, he would be so happy. And I’m so glad that at this point interpreters are being looked at as very valuable.” Jabbar himself left Kirkuk as soon as he could, because he said he was facing threats. He received a rare visa to come to the U.S. through a program for interpreters that the Trump administration had slashed. He believes that the visa saved his life, and he wants to serve again—this time in the Air Force.

As for Soleimani, Jabbar is glad he’s dead. “He’s the guy who orders others to go and kill ‘traitors’ and interpreters.”

America’s Self-Sabotage in the Middle East

2020-01-06T16:17:33-05:00

The Trump administration is still celebrating the death of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander the president called “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” But in a single hectic weekend after the killing, virtually all of America’s other goals in the Middle East took a significant hit.

The U.S. wants to stop Iran from going nuclear; Iran said it would ditch the last restrictions on its nuclear program. The U.S. wants to check Iran’s influence throughout the region; one of America’s closest allies, Iraq, incensed that the U.S. struck Soleimani on its own soil when he was there as a guest of the government, gave Iran a victory in a nonbinding parliamentary vote asking U.S. forces to leave the country—which a commander in the counter-ISIS mission in Iraq said in a letter he would honor, sparking confusion and forcing Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to deny any plans to leave Iraq. The U.S. wants to keep the Islamic State down through its Iraqi partner forces; the relationship is now damaged, and the U.S. coalition has paused its counter-ISIS operations in the country to focus on guarding against Iranian attacks.

Depending on what happens next, all of this could add up to big opportunities for two U.S. enemies—if ISIS can reconstitute and Iran can expand its influence.

The chaos extends beyond Iraq and Iran, and had been gathering for months before this weekend. It has hit worried allies in the Gulf, who in recent months have seen their shipping lanes and oil infrastructure targeted and have quietly tried to tamp down tensions with Iran. It has emboldened dictators like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erodğan, who is flexing his strength in Libya after intervening, counter to American wishes, against American allies in Syria. And it has damaged friendships with European allies, who keep scrambling to deal with Donald Trump’s impulsive decisions—and have just barely recovered from his surprise attempt to withdraw from Syria last fall.

[Read: What America’s allies really think about Trump’s Syria decision]

Regardless, this could lead to victory for Trump anyway, because he’s made clear his one overriding goal: to leave the Middle East.

Except that up until Monday he was mostly getting further in. The U.S. has sent thousands of additional troops to the region, as well as a contingent of marines to guard the U.S. embassy in Iraq after protesters tried to storm it last week. Thousands of additional troops have headed to the Middle East since last week; another 14,000 have deployed since May. Trump just this weekend vowed not to leave Iraq. But even if he does get out of one Middle Eastern country, he has also threatened to strike into another, threatening to hit targets within Iran if it “strikes any Americans, or American assets.”

Pentagon officials have consistently characterized their repeated deployments to the region as defensive measures. Even after the U.S. struck five sites in Iraq and Syria that the military says were linked to Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah group, which the U.S. blames for the death of an American contractor in a rocket attack right after Christmas, Esper said: “The United States military responded [and] took defensive actions ... striking a combination of the command and control or weapons caches with considerable effect.” Ditto the unprecedented hit on Soleimani, which Trump said was to stop an “imminent and sinister” attack.

[Read: The Soleimani assassination is America’s most consequential strike this century]

Absent more information on the specific plot the administration said it disrupted—Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told reporters that a failure to act would have been “culpably negligent”—it’s hard to say whether the benefits were worth the costs. If the U.S. did in fact stop an attack that could have taken “hundreds” of American lives, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed, it may have been worth it. The problem is that Trump lies routinely, and his officials just as routinely cover for him. The New York Times reported that even some Trump officials were skeptical of the intelligence, and said that one U.S. official described the intelligence as simply “another Monday in the Middle East.” As my colleague Peter Nicholas wrote last week: “Trump faces the gravest foreign-policy crisis of his tenure at a time when his credibility has been shredded.”

Another example occurred just this weekend. After Trump tweeted he had a 52-target list including sites “important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” Pompeo responded to criticism that targeting cultural sites would be a war crime. “President Trump didn’t say he’d go after a cultural site,” Pompeo said on Fox News. “Read what he said very closely.” Hours later, Trump, en route to Washington after a two-week vacation in Florida, told a journalist: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural [sites]? It doesn’t work that way.” At a press gaggle today, the president’s counselor Kellyanne Conway confused matters further: “Secretary Pompeo said yesterday that we will be within the law, and I think that Iran has many … strategic military sites that you may cite are also cultural sites … He didn’t say he’s targeting cultural sites.”

These are the same people insisting that the world is a safer place during the cascade of bad news that has followed Soleimani’s death—even as the State Department told all U.S. citizens in Iraq to leave immediately.

Yet the general’s killing only accelerated trends that were already under way. Iran had been blowing through its commitments under the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal for months by the time its leadership announced yesterday that it wouldn’t observe any more of the agreement’s limits on its nuclear program. The Trump administration left the nuclear deal in 2018 and vowed to get a better one—one that would check Iran’s proxy violence and missile development in addition to its nuclear program. None of those things have happened.

As for Iran’s growing influence in the region, Pompeo tends to trace it to the nuclear deal, which gave Iran sanctions relief he says has been used to fund terrorism. But Iran’s recent expansion started much earlier, with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which gave Iranian-backed militias a foothold in the country and a base from which to attack U.S. forces. The anti-ISIS fight only empowered them further as the Iraqi government relied in part on them to beat back the insurgents. Iraq has ever since been struggling to bring them under government control. And the U.S. has spent millions of dollars training Iraqi forces and trying to pull the country out of Iran’s orbit. Meanwhile, the Syrian conflict, in which Iranian forces and their proxies have backed Bashar al-Assad, has helped the country consolidate what officials call a “Shia crescent” of influence extending from Iran, through Iraq, and into Syria and Lebanon. The Iranian military has also conducted joint exercises with China and Russia.

And once again, part of the ISIS fight is on hold. Not only have the Americans paused their cooperation with Iraqi units since Soleimani’s killing; the rest of NATO has suspended its operations in Iraq too. This is the second time in three months that counter-ISIS operations have had to be stalled; the first was after Trump opted to move U.S. forces in northeastern Syria out of the way of a Turkish attack against America’s Kurdish allies there.

In the short term, Trump officials keep saying their goal with Iran is to “restore deterrence,” that each additional movement of troops to the region—or as of last week, each military strike—aims to stop the cycle of violence by making clear to Iran the consequences of its actions. The problem is that if the Iranians aren’t deterred, they may take violent steps of their own for much the same reason the U.S. has: to prove that there are consequences.

[Read: The blueprint Iran could follow after Soleimani’s death]

One advantage to having mutually contradictory policy goals is that when one fails, another might succeed. Yes, what the military calls the “enduring defeat of ISIS” achieved “by, with and through” local partners like the Iraqis may now be coming to an end—it’s hard to be “with” them if you’re leaving. But that’s just the goal of executive-branch institutions like the State Department and the Pentagon. As for the president himself—and even though he’s declared that the U.S. is not leaving unless the Iraqis pay for the air base the U.S. constructed in their country—his real preference has been clear since the 2016 election campaign. “We should have never been there in the first place,” he said in October 2017. “Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” he said two years later.

The contradictions are not just between Trump and the rest of his administration, but within Trump himself. He has twice now declared the defeat of ISIS and tried to leave Syria, only to get talked out of it. He professes to hate war, but he loves killing bad guys. What happens after they’re dead is someone else’s responsibility.

It Wasn’t the Law That Stopped Other Presidents From Killing Soleimani

2020-01-04T08:00:00-05:00

Just about nobody in Washington wants to defend Qassem Soleimani—even if they condemn his killing. He was a terrorist kingpin; he destroyed the lives of countless people across an entire region for more than a decade; he had Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Lebanese, and American blood on his hands. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy slammed what he called an assassination as he tweeted, “Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question.” Representative Eliot Engel, the Democratic chair of House Foreign Affairs Committee, decried the lack of consultation with Congress; he also called Soleimani “the mastermind of immense violence, suffering, and instability.” Much of the litany of Soleimani’s crimes through two presidential administrations prior to Donald Trump’s is well-known.

So why kill him now?

George W. Bush did not target him during the height of the Iraq War, when Iranian-supplied roadside bombs and Iran-backed militias were killing hundreds of American troops. By 2011, that toll had reached more than 600 and Barack Obama was the president; he too declined to hit the general. But at some point Trump, who came into office vowing to pull the United States out from Middle Eastern wars, decided to cross a line two war-president predecessors feared breaching.

This fear wasn’t because of America’s long-standing prohibition of “assassination,” forged during the Cold War to check the excesses of the CIA. Successive administrations since September 11 have interpreted this ban narrowly, arguing that singling out an individual for death on the battlefield doesn’t really count. The ban arose in response to covert CIA plots to, for example, kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar during peacetime—essentially, attempting to kill because of political differences, not in wartime self-defense, said Matthew Waxman, who directs the National Security Law Program at Columbia University and served in the Bush administration. The Obama administration used the term targeted killing for strikes on terrorist leaders in overseas battlefields—arguing that they fell under a right to self-defense in an ongoing war against al-Qaeda.

Not everyone is convinced. “These killings cannot be distinguished from unlawful assassination,” Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, told me.

[Andrew Exum: Iran loses its indispensable man]

The Soleimani killing would be no more or less legal in this context than that of a nonstate leader just because he worked as a top general, in uniform, for a state. If you subscribe to the idea that targeting an individual combatant in self-defense isn’t the same as an assassination, then Soleimani is fair game—provided you credit Trump’s claim that Soleimani was plotting “imminent and sinister” attacks against Americans. A State Department official on a phone call with reporters noted, “Assassinations are not allowed under law.” But the official argued that this wasn’t one. “The criteria is: Do you have overwhelming evidence that somebody is going to launch a military or terrorist attack against you? Check that box. The second one is: Do you have some legal means to, like, have this guy arrested by the Belgian authorities or something? Check that box, because there’s no way anybody was going to stop Qassem Soleimani in the places he was running around—Damascus, Beirut. And so you take lethal action against him.”

If you believe targeted killings is a sanitized term for assassinations, which have become normalized in the drone-war era but are no less illegal, then targeting Soleimani is a war crime, especially since there’s no formal state of war between the United States and Iran. “Preemptive self-defense is never a legal justification for assassination,” O’Connell said. “Nothing is. The relevant law is the United Nations Charter, which defines self-defense as a right to respond to an actual and significant armed attack.”

Two administrations sidestepped this debate when it came to Soleimani, not as much for legal or moral reasons as for strategic ones. The two sides of this conflict have opted for other forms of confrontation, from proxy fights to sabotage to cyberattacks to sanctions, but they didn’t kill each other’s generals. Now that barrier has been shattered, leaving the world to await Iran’s next move in a game with suddenly higher stakes. From the Iranian perspective, it doesn’t much matter whether the U.S. administration considers Soleimani’s death an assassination or not. He’s still a dead general.

Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic representative and former CIA analyst focused on Shia militias, said in a statement that she’d seen friends and colleagues killed or hurt by Iranian weapons under Soleimani’s guidance when she served in Iraq. She said she was involved in discussions during both the Bush and Obama administrations about how to respond to his violence. Neither opted for assassination.

“What always kept both Democratic and Republican presidents from targeting Soleimani himself was the simple question: Was the strike worth the likely retaliation, and the potential to pull us into protracted conflict?” she said. “The two administrations I worked for both determined that the ultimate ends didn’t justify the means. The Trump Administration has made a different calculation.”

[Read: The Soleimani assassination is America’s most consequential strike this century]

Trump-administration officials have so far declined to specify what exactly prompted that calculation, though Trump said Soleimani was planning to attack American diplomats and military personnel. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told some reporters that “the risk of inaction exceeded the risk of action,” according to The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe.

The risks of action in other cases have restrained the U.S. from targeting military leaders—for instance, to hold on to the possibility of negotiations, or out of the belief, in Murphy’s words, that “such action will get more, not less, Americans killed.” But action is not unprecedented. “We have [in the past] gone after very, very senior military leaders; usually that would be kind of in the course of an ongoing war,” Waxman told me. During the Iraq War, a congressionally authorized state-on-state conflict, U.S. troops had a “deck of cards” of top most-wanted figures, including senior leaders in Saddam Hussein’s armed forces. During World War II, the U.S. killed the Japanese admiral who plotted the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But in both of those cases, the United States was in a formal state of armed conflict. More recently, as the U.S. has focused on fighting nonstate terrorist organizations, it has also gone after the leadership of those groups. Though Iran has since May staged a series of violent attacks against U.S. allies and interests in the region—culminating, in the past two months, in rocket attacks against U.S. or allied bases in Iraq and the death of an American contractor—no formal war has been declared. And when Soleimani was killed, he died on the soil of a U.S.-allied country, whose government then condemned the attack.

The State Department official conceded the risks in the background call with reporters. “We cannot promise that we have broken the circle of violence,” the official said. But without Soleimani, the official said, “if we do see an increase in violence, it probably will not be as devilishly ingenious.”

The Soleimani Assassination Is America’s Most Consequential Strike This Century

2020-01-03T05:00:00-05:00

Of the most feared terrorist leaders the United States has hunted and killed this century—from Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—no death ever had the significance of the one America just dealt. The killing of Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, in a U.S. strike yesterday in Baghdad wasn’t just the targeted assassination of a state military leader. It marked a dangerous new chapter in a roiling region Soleimani has helped shape for more than a decade, and moved the U.S. and Iran’s cycle of proxy violence and sabotage closer to outright war.

President Donald Trump did not immediately claim victory as he did for the death of Baghdadi in October. The president instead tweeted out a single image of an American flag as early reports of Soleimani’s demise circulated. The Defense Department confirmed that the U.S. military had killed Soleimani on Trump’s orders.

Soleimani has been called “the most powerful general in the Middle East today,” and the mastermind behind a strategy of backing sympathetic proxies in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon to secure influence and attack Iran’s enemies. Through the summer and fall of 2019, as the Trump administration ramped up its financial pressure campaign on Iran after leaving the nuclear deal, Soleimani’s forces or their proxies were blamed for attacks on oil tankers near the Persian Gulf, rocket volleys against American interests in Iraq, the shoot-down of an American drone, and a strike on an oil facility in Saudi Arabia.

Unlike bin Laden or Baghdadi, Soleimani had the power and resources of an entire state at his back—and open support at high levels of the government in the state where he was killed. Both bin Laden and Baghdadi died in hiding and on the run; Soleimani traveled openly in the region where his forces operated. “It’s one thing to kill someone who is considered a terrorist by everyone, including the host country,” Abbas Kadhim, the director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told us. “It’s another thing to kill someone who is designated as a terrorist by the U.S. but not by the host country—Iraq, in this case.”

“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Defense Department statement said, declaring Soleimani responsible for a series of attacks on U.S.-led coalition bases over the past several months—including one in late December that killed an American contractor. “We know that the intent of this last attack was, in fact, to kill” Americans, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press conference yesterday morning, noting that about 100 U.S. military personnel were at the attacked compound in December, in addition to about 200 contractors. “Thirty-one rockets aren’t designed as a warning shot.”

That strike prompted U.S. strikes against five targets in Iraq and Syria where an Iranian-backed militia, Kataib Hezbollah, was operating. The leader of that militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who also served as an adviser to Soleimani, was reported killed alongside the Quds Force commander.

[Read: Iran loses its indispensable man]

Earlier yesterday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper had told reporters that he fully expected Iranian retaliation for the strikes on Kataib Hezbollah, but that the U.S. might act preemptively, and Iran wouldn’t like the results. Now further retaliation from the Iranian side seems all but inevitable, even if what form that will take is unclear. Further U.S. responses may be equally inevitable.

“They will strike back. Just a question of target,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which advocates for a hard-line policy toward Iran, told us. “This ends any possibility of nuclear negotiations.”

Phillip Smyth, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who studies Iran’s military forces and their proxies, called the attack on Soleimani the most important decapitation strike America has ever launched, because it’s against a state-backed entity “totally different than ISIS or al-Qaeda.”

“We are talking about the core leadership of a transnational Iranian-led network,” he told us. “They controlled tens of thousands of fighters throughout the region and were old hands—true believers. These were the people who were creating the future for Iran's imperial project.” (The Islamic State is believed to still have perhaps 14,000 to 15,000 fighters in Iraq and Syria, and had no territory left by the time Baghdadi was killed in October.)

[Read: Everyone is getting sucked into the Iran morass]

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, of which Soleimani’s Quds Force formed the expeditionary wing, has, however, been labeled a terrorist group by the Trump administration, Smyth noted, and the IRGC networks Soleimani controlled included “numerous groups that the U.S. had labeled as terrorist entities.” Despite being state-directed, these groups “use terrorism—and have used it more effectively.” They are far more powerful, Smyth added, than al-Qaeda or ISIS ever were.

This distinction will be especially important in the days to come—because it underlines how dangerous the response from Iran and its proxies could be. Ilan Goldenberg, who worked on Iran in the Defense Department under President Barack Obama, speculated on Twitter that the response might involve escalation in Iraq or missile attacks on U.S. regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

U.S. soldiers who fought in the Iraq War have bitter memories of Soleimani and the bloodshed he unleashed in the country. Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican who served in Iraq, said in a statement that Soleimani “got what he richly deserved, and all those American soldiers who died by his hand also got what they deserved: justice.” Seth Moulton, a Democrat in the House of Representatives and an Iraq War veteran who has been a vocal critic of Trump’s Iran policy, issued a statement late Thursday night calling Soleimani “an enemy of the United States with American blood on his hands.”

Yet, like others in his party, Moulton worried where Soleimani's assassination might lead: “The question we’ve grappled with for years in Iraq was how to kill more terrorists than we create. That’s an open question tonight as we await Iran’s reaction to Donald Trump’s escalation, which could ignite a regional war, with still no strategy from the Administration.”

It Was Never Just About Human Rights in Iran

2019-12-10T12:19:23-05:00

The horrifying numbers are still trickling in: Anywhere from 200 to more than 1,000 people dead. Seven thousand people in prison. The full human cost of Iran’s recent crackdown on protests that started last month is only now coming into focus, as the demonstrations taper off and more details come out of an opaque country where authorities shut down the internet during some of the worst violence. And suddenly, the Trump administration spoke out on human rights.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said today that the United States is “proud to be the world’s leading advocate on human rights,” shortly before his administration put financial penalties on a number of individual human-rights abusers, including officials in South Sudan, Slovakia, and Saudi Arabia. But when it comes to condemning entire governments, he has put particular emphasis on Iran. “This administration has taken a completely opposite view of the important political protests, the freedom-seeking, the freedom-loving people of Iran, than President Obama and his administration did,” Pompeo said in one interview, referring to Obama’s reluctance to speak out in support of Iran’s Green Movement protesters in 2009. “These people are simply asking for a basic set of freedoms, and the Iranian leadership—that regime should change in a way that reflects the desires of their own people,” he said in another one.

As part of a foreign policy that Pompeo has described as one of “realism and restraint”—which recognizes that the U.S. cannot remake other societies in its own image—this administration has been selective about where it seizes on the suffering of the masses. America always aims to support regimes it sees as friendly and weaken the unfriendly ones; Trump’s is by no means the only administration to criticize enemies more vigorously than allies when it comes to human rights. In Iran’s case, the administration has found that condemning violence and suffering and pushing for human rights can also serve a much bigger agenda.

“Allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries,” one top State Department official explained in a memo early in the Trump administration, noting that maintaining good relations with allies such as Saudi Arabia entailed “difficult tradeoffs” with regard to human rights. Trump would later veto a bill requiring him to cut off military support to Saudi Arabia’s disastrous air campaign in Yemen, which has contributed to the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world, in order to avoid antagonizing an ally.

But Iran is no ally. The administration has waged a campaign of “maximum pressure” against the Iranian regime that has helped devastate the country’s economy. The protesters’ revolt—over gas-subsidy cuts imposed by a financially desperate regime—has created another source of pressure, this one from within the country. “We should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” the official wrote, not just out of moral concern, but because “pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”

That official, Brian Hook, now oversees U.S. policy on Iran.

[Read: Trump goes after Iran’s supreme leader]

True to this philosophy, Hook spoke forcefully to reporters at the State Department recently about the plight of Iran’s protesters. He detailed a horrific shooting spree by regime forces against a group of protesters hiding in marshland. He said the death toll had risen to perhaps more than 1,000, though Amnesty International has put the figure at 208, counting only the names it can confirm. He claimed that the regime was charging families to receive the bodies of their slain loved ones and even asking to be reimbursed for the bullets that killed them. Hook said the department had received 32,000 videos, in response to a call from Pompeo on Twitter for Iranians to send evidence of the crackdown.

“This is the worst political crisis the regime has faced in its 40 years,” Hook said. “All of these protests are directed at a corrupt religious mafia that has been terrorizing its own people.”

Since the Trump administration took the drastic step of imposing a nearly complete oil embargo on Iran, officials have been quick to highlight examples of Iran’s resulting economic distress and its impact on Iran’s foreign policy—“off the charts” inflation; appeals for donations by Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. But the outbreak of protests in mid-November, which roughly coincided with major protests in Iraq and Lebanon (where Tehran wields considerable influence), marked a new moment in the “maximum pressure” campaign, one Pompeo hinted he was angling for back when he announced the administration’s Iran strategy in May 2018. “At the end of the day, the Iranian people will get to make a choice about their leadership,” he said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. “If they make the decision quickly, that would be wonderful. If they choose not to do so, we will stay hard at this until we achieve the outcomes that I set forward today.”

[Read: Two nuclear problems, one policy: maximum pressure]

Those objectives included a halt to uranium enrichment and a full withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria. Hook was himself pursuing another of those goals last week, the release of a U.S. prisoner from Iran. Trump, who has denounced the regime for its crackdown on the protesters, praised Iran as “very fair” after last weekend’s release of that prisoner, the Princeton student Xiyue Wang. “See,” Trump tweeted, “we can make a deal together!”

The Iranians may gamble that Trump, despite saying in another tweet that he supports the protesters and “always will,” meant it when he said he believed Iran wanted a deal, “and my deal is nuclear”—implying that his top issue was to keep Iran from getting the bomb, even if that meant ignoring all his administration’s other demands. If Trump does get a new agreement with Iran, will he really “always” support the opposition to the regime that gave it to him? There is precedent in the case of North Korea, where Trump has also sought a nuclear deal and where he has tweeted praise for Kim Jong Un, who leads perhaps the most abusive regime on the planet.

“I do appreciate the government’s support and statements,” Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, told me. “But the protests and the human-rights situation cannot become another football in the conflict between Iran and the U.S.”

Ghaemi’s organization, a New York–based advocacy group, has collected testimonials from people who have lost family members in the protests. One woman, Nahid Shirpisheh, went to a protest with her son west of Tehran; she told the center that she had seen people get shot there but did not know that the bullets were real. At one point, though, a group of people came toward her carrying a body. When she looked at the clothes and the shoes, she realized it was her son. “My innocent son was killed by this corrupt regime; this tyrannical, criminal, treacherous regime that deserves every bad name you can think of,” she told the center.

“What is shocking, really, is that they had prepared their troops to shoot to kill from the very beginning,” Ghaemi said. He surmised that the regime could have foreseen that raising gas prices would trigger protests, since such a move has in the past, and that the extreme violence was meant to send the message that the regime would tolerate no dissent. And for now, Ghaemi said, the protests have settled down.

[Read: Everyone is getting sucked into the Iran morass]

But he is confident this won’t be the last of it. “There is fire under the ashes,” he said, citing an Iranian proverb. “They did not put out the fire. And don’t be surprised if it gets inflamed.”

In the meantime, the U.S. will “stay hard at this,” in Pompeo’s words. But its commitment to a better future for Iranians may last only as long as that commitment is a useful cudgel to secure the regime’s demise or a better nuclear deal—whichever comes first.