Uri Friedman | The Atlantic

Five Ways Iran May Respond

2025-06-23T09:52:10-04:00

“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social right after the United States launched a bombing campaign against three sites crucial to the Iranian nuclear program.

But Iran gets a vote on whether that time has indeed come, and its leaders are instead vowing “everlasting consequences.” What happens next in this rapidly expanding war largely depends on what exactly Iran means by that.

That’s not easy to predict, because the next stage of the conflict now hinges on an Iran facing unprecedented circumstances. The Iranian regime is arguably more enfeebled and imperiled than it has been since the 1979 revolution ushered the Islamic Republic into existence. Even before Israel launched its sweeping military campaign against Iranian nuclear and military targets just over a week ago, it had dramatically degraded two of the three pillars of Iran’s defenses: Tehran’s regional network of proxy groups (such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon) and its conventional military arsenal (assets like missiles, drones, and air defenses). Now Israel and the United States may have reduced the third pillar—the country’s nuclear program and its position at the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons—to smoldering ruins as well.

[Read: ‘Everybody knows Khamenei’s days are numbered’]

Given these conditions, past behavior by the Iranian regime may not be a reliable indicator of its future actions. Iran’s leaders, for example, have developed a reputation for biding their time for months or even years before retaliating against foes, but the speed and scale at which their nuclear program and the regime itself are coming under threat may force their hand.

For Iran experts, the north-star assumption tends to be that the regime’s overriding priority is ensuring its survival. Viewed through that prism, the Iranian government currently lives in the land of bad options. If Iran responds forcefully to the United States, it could enter an escalatory cycle with the world’s leading military power and an archenemy already pummeling it, which in turn could endanger the regime. If Tehran responds in a limited manner or not at all, it could look weak in ways that could also endanger the regime from within (enraged hard-liners) or without (emboldened enemies).

“There are no good options, but Iran still has options,” Sanam Vakil, an expert on Iran and the broader region at the think tank Chatham House, told me. She ticked off the goals of any Iranian retaliation: “Inflict pain. Transfer the costs of the war outside of Iran. Showcase resilience, survivability.”

In my conversations with experts, five potential Iranian moves kept surfacing.

1. Close the Strait of Hormuz

Iran could take a big step and use its military to disrupt shipping or even seek to shut down commerce in the Strait of Hormuz, a crowded international waterway near southern Iran through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.

Indeed, in the hours after the U.S. strikes, the Iranian Parliament reportedly granted its support for such a measure, though Iran’s leadership hasn’t yet followed through with action along these lines.

Such a move would affect the global economy, driving down financial markets, driving up the price of oil, and inflicting steep costs on economies around the world. It would likely get the attention of the economic-minded American president.

But in addition to the fact that the U.S. military might contest such a move, the dispersed pain of this measure could ultimately make it an unattractive option for Iran. The economic shock would boomerang back to Iran, in addition to harming Iran’s patron, oil-importing China, as well as oil-exporting Gulf Arab states. In recent years, Iran has been improving its relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—the Saudis even restored diplomatic ties with the Iranians in 2023. The Iranian regime will likely be wary of alienating partners at a time when it is so isolated and diminished.

2. Attack U.S. personnel or interests in the Middle East

Iran could also choose, either directly or through what remains of its regional proxy groups, to attack U.S. forces, bases, or other interests in the region.

That could include attacks on U.S. personnel or energy-related infrastructure based in Gulf countries allied with the United States, with the latter option serving as another way to induce economic shock. But Tehran’s assessment here may be similar to its calculations regarding the Strait of Hormuz. If the Iranians hit targets in the Gulf, that could “bite the hand that feeds” Iran, Vakil told me. “They need the Gulf to play a de-escalation role and perhaps a broader regional stabilization role. I think they will try to protect their relationship with the Gulf at all costs.”

Vakil deemed it more probable that Iran would strike U.S. targets in nearby countries that don’t have close relations with Tehran, such as Iraq, Syria, and Bahrain, which hosts the headquarters of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT).

If Iran were to take this approach, much would depend on whether its strikes are relatively restrained—essentially designed to claim that it has avenged the U.S. attack without provoking a major response from Washington—or whether it decides to go bigger, perhaps galvanized by the devastation wrought by the U.S. attacks and the U.S. government’s sharp public messaging.

[Read: Trump changed. The intelligence didn’t.]

“If the Iranians really strike all of the NAVCENT base in Bahrain,” Jonathan Panikoff, a former U.S. deputy national-intelligence officer for the Near East who is now my colleague at the Atlantic Council, told me, they may “open up a world of hurt.” Such an attack might embarrass Trump and spur him to make good on his threat in his address to the nation on Saturday evening to respond to Iran with even greater force. The United States could, for example, hit Iranian oil and gas facilities or other energy sites, army and navy targets, or even political and military leaders. The war in Iran could quickly metastasize into a regional conflict.

Consider, as one case study, what transpired after the United States killed the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani during the first Trump administration in 2020. Analysts predicted all sorts of potential Iranian retaliatory measures of various sizes and scales, but Iran ultimately opted for an intense but circumscribed missile attack on the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq, resulting in no fatalities but more than 100 U.S. personnel with traumatic brain injuries. The Trump administration downplayed the attack and limited its response to imposing more economic sanctions on Iran, and the two countries even swapped messages via the Swiss embassy in Tehran to defuse tensions.

3. Attack U.S. personnel or interests beyond the Middle East

An even more escalatory approach would be for Iran to directly attack U.S. targets beyond the region, Panikoff noted, referencing countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Central Asian nations.

But he thinks such a move is “very unlikely” because the Iranians would be taking a “hugely retaliatory” step and inviting conflict with those countries. “Having an actual missile attack—say, into Pakistan against the U.S. embassy—would be devastating and shocking,” Panikoff told me, adding that he could envision Iranian leaders doing this only if they believed that the end of their regime was near and they had “nothing to lose.”

Alternatively, the Iranians could revert to more rudimentary, older-school practices of theirs such as directly executing terrorist attacks or sponsoring proxy-group terrorist attacks against U.S., Israeli, or Jewish targets around the world. That “would be a lower bar” for the Iranians, Panikoff said, and “is something to be worried about.”

4. Dash toward a nuclear weapon

The Iranian regime could draw the lesson from its escalating war with Israel and the United States that only possession of a nuclear weapon can save it. Even before Israel’s military operation, Iran seemed to be tentatively moving in the direction of trading its position on the brink of nuclear-weapons power for actual nuclear weapons, which appears to have contributed to the timing of Israel’s campaign.

But although prior to the war Iran may have been capable of enriching uranium to 90 percent, or weapons-grade, within days or weeks, it was further away—perhaps months or more—from the capability of turning that weapons-grade uranium into a usable nuclear weapon. And now its nuclear program has been seriously degraded, though the extent of the damage isn’t yet entirely clear: Iran may have retained its stockpile of enriched uranium. Any push for the bomb could also invite further economic sanctions and military operations against Iran. That makes a race for a nuclear bomb in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. strikes, with whatever resources it has left, unlikely, although Iran could take steps short of that such as seeking to develop and possibly use a crude nuclear device, scrambling to rebuild its nuclear program, or withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran will emerge from this war with dead nuclear scientists and destroyed physical nuclear infrastructure, but what will persist in some form is the technical expertise that enabled it to enrich uranium to 60 percent, and that probably can be applied to further enriching the material to weapons-grade, because that isn’t much of an additional leap. The longer-term threat of a nuclear Iran is unlikely to be wiped out as long as the current Iranian regime, or any like-minded or even harder-line one, remains in power.

5. Strike a nuclear deal with the United States

It may seem like the most improbable scenario, given the bellicosity of Iranian rhetoric, but another potential outcome is that Iran concludes that the regime will be existentially threatened by an escalatory spiral with a militarily superior Israel and the United States and that, beyond a muted response, its next move should be striking a new nuclear deal with the United States that results in the end of the war and the regime in Tehran still in place.

[Read: The only Iran hawk is Trump]

But this would require Iran to agree to U.S. conditions that it forswear any nuclear enrichment, to which Iran hasn’t given any indication of being amenable. So for the moment, this outcome appears unlikely as well.

Iran may want to carefully calibrate its response to the U.S. strikes, but calibration in volatile conflicts isn’t always possible.

The Iranian attack on U.S. forces in Iraq after Soleimani’s killing five years ago may have been smaller than some anticipated, but it has still been described as “the largest ballistic-missile attack against Americans ever.” Troops later recounted that one soldier in a shelter behind the base’s blast walls was nearly blown up by the barrage. Frank McKenzie, then the commander of U.S. Central Command, has estimated that had he not ordered a partial evacuation of the airbase, an additional 100 to 150 Americans might have been wounded or killed.

If that had happened, the Trump administration might have responded much more forcefully, which in turn could have sparked further escalation from Iran. The effort to achieve a calibrated response might have produced a full-blown war. All actors in this current war now contemplating their next moves should keep that lesson in mind.

How Israel Could Be Changing Iran’s Nuclear Calculus

2024-10-30T11:05:00-04:00

The latest salvo in the decades-long conflict between Iran and Israel lit up the predawn sky over Tehran on Saturday. Israeli aircraft encountered little resistance as they struck military targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack earlier this month. Although Iran appeared to downplay its impact, the strike was Israel’s largest ever against the Islamic Republic. It raised not only the specter of full-scale war but also a prospect that experts told me has become much more conceivable in recent weeks: the emergence of Iran as a nuclear-armed state.

Think of Iran’s defenses as a stool with three legs. Two of them have suddenly gone wobbly. The first is Iran’s regional proxy network. This includes, most notably, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which Israel has dismantled through air strikes, incursions, and high-profile assassinations. Israel has even gone after Iran’s top military commanders. The second is an arsenal of missiles and drones, which Iran used to directly attack Israel for the first time in April, and then again this month. Not only did the strikes prove ineffective—Israeli and U.S. defenses largely thwarted them—but they also failed to deter Israel from continuing to hack away at the first leg and strike back as it did over the weekend.

That leaves the third leg: the Iranian nuclear program. Now that Israel has demonstrated its superiority over Iran’s proxies and conventional weapons—and degraded both in the process—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may decide to pursue a bomb in a risky attempt to salvage some measure of national security. He won’t have far to go. The program has made major advances since 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from its multilateral nuclear agreement with the regime, which now has enough near-weapons-grade uranium to produce several bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This already gives the country considerable leverage, but “there is a risk Khamenei decides that in this environment, a nuclear threshold won’t cut it, and Iran needs nuclear weapons,” Eric Brewer, a nonproliferation expert at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me.

Although Brewer and other experts I spoke with did not predict that Iran will go nuclear in the near term, they agreed that it is likelier than ever before. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons during the metastasizing conflict in the Middle East, it could become the first country to do so while at war since the United States in 1945. But Iran also has many ways to wield its nuclear program that stop short of getting a weapon, injecting further peril into an already volatile new nuclear age.

In recent years, current and former Iranian officials have insisted that the country is either already able to build a nuclear bomb or very close to that point. In the past month, as Iran awaited the retaliation that came on Saturday, its pronouncements got more pointed. Although the regime still denies that it’s seeking a weapon, a senior adviser to Khamenei warned that any Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites—which were spared over the weekend—could alter the nation’s “nuclear strategic policies.” That same week, a group of 39 Iranian lawmakers urged the Supreme National Security Council to eliminate its formal ban on the production of nuclear weapons.

[Read: What if Iran already has the bomb?]

The latest rhetoric in official circles could be a response to Iran’s shifting public discourse. Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Iranian nuclear decision making at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month seems to have piqued Iranian public interest in their country’s nuclear program. She’s noticed a greater number of Iranian commentators on Telegram discussing Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Texas A&M professor who studies nuclear statecraft and Iranian politics, has also observed this shift in Iranian public and elite sentiment. But he traces it back further, to America’s exit from the Iran nuclear deal and then, two years later, its assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. When the deal took effect in 2015, Tabaar told me, the regime was responsive to public pressure to limit its nuclear program and improve relations with the United States. Discussing the nuclear-weapons option was, as he put it, “taboo.” But in recent weeks, he said, he’s seen “a lively debate” on social media about whether or not to pursue a bomb, even among critics of the regime outside the country.

“There is this realization that, yes, the regime and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] are repressive, but we live in this neighborhood and maybe we need to have” nuclear weapons, Tabaar told me before the latest strike.

That decision belongs to Khamenei, but the increased public interest that Tabaar has observed creates an opening for Iranian leaders to advance the country’s nuclear program. As Tabaar noted, such decisions are often informed by the views of elites and by the regime’s “fear of popular revolt.”

Still, neither Grajewski nor Tabaar anticipates that the regime will immediately seek a bomb. Iran could instead use its near-nuclear status to its advantage, including by escalating threats to go nuclear, announcing progress in uranium enrichment, rebuffing international oversight, or exiting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition, Iran could try to reinforce the other legs of its security—by working with partners such as Russia and North Korea to upgrade its conventional military capabilities, and by bolstering proxy groups such as the Houthis in Yemen while seeking to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah.

But strengthening these other legs could take years, and Israel appears poised to press its military advantage. That leaves a crucial question for Iran’s leaders: Is the country’s nuclear-threshold capability enough of a deterrent?

If they decide to cross the threshold and go nuclear, Iranian leaders know that their adversaries will likely detect their efforts and try to intervene, potentially undermining the very security Tehran may be seeking. The latest U.S. estimates indicate that Iran might require only a week or two to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. But concealing such a move from IAEA inspectors without kicking them out of the country would be challenging. And Iran could need more than a year—or at least several months, by some estimates—to convert its uranium into a usable weapon.

Those months constitute “a pretty big window of vulnerability” in which “Israel or the United States could disrupt Iran’s work to build a nuclear weapon, including through military action,” Brewer explained. So he thinks it’s “unlikely” that the supreme leader will wake up one morning and declare, “Damn the torpedoes. All hands on deck. We’re going to weapons-grade today.”

A more plausible outcome, Brewer and Grajewski believe, is that Iran covertly resumes the research on weaponizing fissile material that it halted in 2003. The goal would be to “shorten the window of vulnerability” between amassing weapons-grade uranium, putting it into a nuclear device, and fashioning a deliverable weapon, Brewer told me. This weaponization work is more difficult (though not impossible) to spot than uranium enrichment, at least at declared facilities still monitored by the IAEA. International inspectors retain access to facilities containing fissile material, but Iran has reduced the frequency of inspections since 2018, when the U.S. exited the nuclear deal. The regime has also ended IAEA monitoring of other sites related to its nuclear program, raising the possibility that it has moved some centrifuges to undeclared facilities. Nevertheless, U.S. officials said this month that they could probably detect any decision to build nuclear weapons soon after Iranian leaders make it.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]

American officials often speak about whether Iran’s leaders have “made the decision” to attain nuclear weapons, but Tabaar argued that Tehran’s calculations don’t work that way. Think of a dimmer, not a light switch: Iran is “making sure all components are there to preserve its option to develop nuclear weapons, gradually more and more.” Tabaar added, however, that there are “two very extreme scenarios” in which he could imagine Iranian leaders suddenly making the call to flip the nuclear switch. The first is a “window of opportunity” in which Iran’s enemies are distracted by, say, a major conflict elsewhere in the world. The second is “a window of threat” in which Iranian leaders fear that their adversaries are about to unleash a massive bombing campaign that could destroy the country or regime.

Brewer posited one other wild-card scenario: The supreme leader might proceed with weapons-grade enrichment at declared facilities if he assumes that he can achieve it before Israel or the U.S. has a chance to destroy those facilities, thereby establishing some measure of deterrence. “That would be a very, very risky gamble,” Brewer said—particularly if Israel learns of Tehran’s decision in time to unleash preemptive strikes. Additional enrichment might not ward off an Israeli or American attack anyway. Although 90 percent enrichment is typically considered the level required for weaponization, experts believe that Iran might already be able to use its current stock of 60-percent-enriched uranium to make a bomb. Anything higher wouldn’t necessarily establish greater deterrence.

But, as Brewer has noted, history offers several examples of regional crises prompting states to “break out,” or race for a bomb. Shortly before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel reportedly rushed to assemble nuclear devices out of concerns about possible Egyptian strikes on its nuclear facilities. Amid tensions with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan is believed to have begun building nuclear weapons by 1990. That same year, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein ordered an impractical (and unsuccessful) effort to quickly build a nuclear weapon. “I can give you lots of really good reasons why breaking out would be a terrible decision by the supreme leader,” Brewer told me. “I can also give you lots of reasons why the crash nuclear-weapons program in Iraq was a terrible decision. But [the Iraqis] still made it.”

I asked my Atlantic Council colleague Danny Citrinowicz, who from 2013 to 2016 led the Israeli military’s analysis of Iranian strategy, whether Iran is more likely to become a nuclear-weapons state today than it was at any point in the many years that he’s monitored its nuclear program. He didn’t hesitate: “Definitely.”

Citrinowicz broke down that answer into relative probabilities. He pegged the chances of Iran “storming” to a bomb—by, for example, detonating a nuclear device for demonstration purposes—at 10 percent, the highest he’s ever assessed it. Before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel, he would have said “close to zero.” He assigned a 30 percent probability to the scenario of Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade, though perhaps only a minimal amount to show off its capabilities.

To my surprise, the scenario he deemed most likely—at 60 percent—was Iran pursuing negotiations on a new nuclear deal with the United States and other world powers. Citrinowicz could envision Kamala Harris and even Donald Trump—perhaps reprising the openness to nuclear diplomacy that he displayed with North Korea, despite his typically hard-line stance on Iran—being amenable to such talks after the U.S. presidential election. A diplomatic agreement would probably inhibit Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it could also provide the country with economic relief. As an added benefit, a deal with Washington might serve as a wedge between the United States and Israel, the latter of which would likely oppose the agreement. Israel would be less inclined to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if it couldn’t count on U.S. support, or at least it would be less capable of penetrating their heavy fortifications without help from America’s arsenal.

[Read: The unraveling of Trump’s North Korea policy]

Still, there are many reasons to be skeptical about the possibility of a new nuclear deal with Iran. Russia and China, both parties to the 2o15 pact, are far more hostile to the United States today than they were then. Khamenei has expressed a general willingness to reengage in negotiations, but he has also instructed his government that the U.S. can’t be trusted. And Iran will be much less likely to enter into a comprehensive agreement again now that Washington has already pulled out of one and reimposed sanctions, delivering a shock to Iran’s economy. Getting the regime to agree to anything beyond limited concessions on its nuclear program appears implausible.

One way or another, though, Citrinowicz expects 2025 to be “decisive.” Without a new agreement, Iranian leaders could start procuring a bomb. Or Israel and the U.S. could take military action to stave them off. And either of those scenarios could trigger the other.

If Iran heads for the bomb, or leverages its threshold status for geopolitical gain, that could encourage other countries, including U.S. partners, to develop their own nuclear programs. “I absolutely do worry that we could live in a world in the future of not necessarily more nuclear-weapons states but more countries that have this capability to build nuclear weapons,” Brewer said.

In some ways, Iran has already passed the point of no return. By enriching uranium to 60 percent, Tehran has demonstrated that it probably possesses the technical expertise to further enrich that material to weapons-grade, which requires minimal additional effort. Destroying Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure would be exceedingly difficult. Wiping out Iran’s nuclear knowledge base is not possible. Even if Israel or the U.S. takes military action, the threat of a nuclear Iran will almost certainly persist, at least as long as the current regime remains in power.

Should Iran get nuclear weapons, that would likely embolden its regime at home and abroad, elevate the risk of nuclear terrorism, upend deterrence dynamics between Iran and Israel along with the United States, and spur either an extension of the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Arab partners in the Middle East or a nuclear-arms race in the region—among a host of other potential consequences.

But such outcomes are hard to forecast, because so much of what we know about the interplay between nuclear weapons and international affairs is based on the Cold War and post–Cold War periods. We are now in a third nuclear age, in which nuclear and near-nuclear states come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes. Arms-control agreements have unraveled, diplomatic channels between adversaries have vanished, and establishing nuclear deterrence has never been more complicated.

After the advent of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, at least one new country acquired the world’s most destructive arms every decade until the 2010s, when the streak ended. Nearly halfway through the 2020s, it seems like we may revert to the historical pattern before this decade is done.

What Would a Second Trump Administration Mean for the Middle East?

2024-10-21T07:00:00-04:00

International affairs rarely determine how Americans vote in presidential elections, but this year could be different. The Biden administration’s policies toward the war raging in the Middle East have divided Democrats and drawn criticism from Republicans. Whether the administration has supported Israel’s military response to last October’s Hamas attack too much or too little, how it has responded to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and whether it has done enough to broker an end to the fighting all may influence the decisions of some voters in swing states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Kamala Harris spoke out about the situation in the Middle East quickly upon becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and has been scrutinized continually since for daylight between her stance and Joe Biden’s. But what about Donald Trump? If he wins the presidency in November, how will he approach Israel, the war in Gaza, and the conflict now spreading to southern Lebanon and Iran?

[Read: Does Kamala Harris have a vision for the Middle East?]

Over the past several months, I have combed through the public record and spoken with former Trump-administration officials in search of the answer. What I learned is that, compared with the Biden administration, a second Trump administration would probably be more permissive toward the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and less inclined to bring U.S. leverage to bear in shaping Israeli conduct (as the U.S. government recently did by warning Israel that it could lose military assistance if it doesn’t provide more humanitarian aid to Gaza). In fact, a second Trump administration’s Middle East policies would likely focus more on confronting Iran and broadening Israeli-Arab diplomatic normalization than on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This approach would be in keeping with Trump’s policies as president and the views of many of his Middle East advisers.

The wild card in all of this, however, is Trump himself. On some issues, the former president has views that can be documented back to the 1980s—that the United States is getting a raw deal in free-trade agreements and alliances, for example—but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not one of them. And just how he will choose his policies, based on what concerns, is not entirely predictable.

“Trump does not think in policy terms,” even though “the people around him may,” John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, told me this past May. “I don’t think he has any philosophy at all.” Bolton, who has emerged as a critic of the former president, described Trump as “ad hoc and transactional,” drawn above all to the “idea of making the bigger deal.” And if these are the terms in which he sees his Middle East policies, rather than filtered through a particular outlook on geopolitics or national security, the old investment adage may apply: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

When I reached out to the Trump campaign with direct questions about the candidate’s likely approach to the war in Gaza and the Middle East more broadly, I didn’t receive a response. And the Republican Party’s more than 5,000-word 2024 platform doesn’t offer many clues. It contains just one line on the conflict—“We will stand with Israel, and seek peace in the Middle East”—and makes no mention of Gaza or the Palestinians. So a look at Trump’s recent public statements seemed in order.

On the stump, Trump has boasted that he is “the best friend that Israel has ever had,” based on a record as president that includes imposing a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and negotiating the Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab countries normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. With regard to Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, and the expanding regional conflagration, however, Trump’s most consistent remark is that none of it would have happened on his watch, because Iran was “broke” on account of sanctions he imposed and therefore couldn’t have funded terrorist groups.

[David Frum: The defeat-Harris, get-Trump politics of protest]

What that line of argument has going for it is that it’s impossible to prove wrong. But it’s also impossible to prove right. The attack and the ensuing conflicts have happened. So what might Trump do about it? Here he has sent mixed messages, initially saying that the best course was to let this war “play out,” then pivoting to his now-frequent call for Israel to quickly finish it up. “I will give Israel the support that it needs to win, but I do want them to win fast,” Trump declared in August, criticizing what he described as the Biden administration’s demands for “an immediate cease-fire” that would “tie Israel’s hand behind its back” and “give Hamas time to regroup and launch a new October 7–style attack.”

Trump doesn’t want a cease-fire, he’s made clear, but he does want the fire to cease: “You have to have that ended, one way or the other,” he stated last month when asked about the war spreading from Gaza to Lebanon. “The whole thing over there is unacceptable.” In an April interview, he declined to say whether he’d consider withholding or conditioning military aid to Israel. Even regarding his personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has demonstrated dueling impulses—airing grievances that could complicate their future relations, asserting that Netanyahu “rightfully has been criticized” for being unprepared for the October 7 attack, welcoming him to Mar-a-Lago in July while lauding their “great relationship,” and declaring that “Bibi has been very strong.”

As Bolton sees it, if a singular ideological purpose is hard to discern from this welter of signals, that may be because Trump’s posture toward Israel is driven more by self-interest than anything else. Trump has said “that he wished the Israelis would get it over with, which could be interpreted two ways: one, finish off Hamas, or two, withdraw from Gaza,” Bolton noted when we spoke earlier this year. “And I don’t think he really cares which one. He just knows that the Israelis are under criticism. He has defended Israel, and he’s worried he’s going to be under criticism for defending Israel. And he doesn’t want to be under criticism.”

Robert Greenway, who served on Trump’s National Security Council as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs, told me this past spring that he believes a second Trump administration would have a strategy for the region—just not one that revolves around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Which is not to say that Trump would back away from supporting Israel’s war in Gaza or its defense against Iranian-sponsored groups; quite the contrary, Greenway made clear. But Greenway, who was one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, outlined U.S. national-security interests in the Middle East as follows: “Stability of global markets—that’s energy and trade—counterproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and counterterrorism, in that order. What I did not state in there as a vital national-security interest is the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Because it’s not.”

I asked Greenway whether a second Trump administration would have a plan to address the aftermath of the war in a devastated Gaza. He gestured toward a “collective, regional response to both security and reconstruction.” But to his mind, the effects of the war on energy and trade markets will be the more urgent American concerns.

Given these priorities, Trump and his advisers don’t necessarily believe that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cornerstone of regional security, nor are they likely to press an unwilling Israel to embrace such an outcome. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner did characterize the Middle East peace plan that he rolled out during Trump’s presidency as an effort “to save the two-state solution,” but the proposal was widely viewed as favorable to Israel’s positions. When asked during the first presidential debate whether he would support establishing a Palestinian state, Trump equivocated. “I’d have to see,” he said.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness]

In the Middle East, the focus of a second Trump administration, according to Greenway, would be on confronting threats from Iran and its proxies while improving relations between Israel and Arab states. Bolton predicted that Kuwait or Qatar could be among the next states to normalize relations with Israel. And then there’s Saudi Arabia. Biden-administration officials have so far unsuccessfully sought a grand bargain that would fold a Gaza cease-fire into an Israeli-Saudi normalization arrangement. The Biden proposals have included U.S.-Saudi security and nuclear pacts and an Israeli commitment to a pathway for a Palestinian state. But Bolton said he could envision a second Trump administration unbundling these items, particularly once the war in Gaza ends and there is less pressure on the Saudis to demand a commitment to a Palestinian state as part of a diplomatic deal with Israel. The Israelis and Saudis might pursue normalization without progress on a two-state solution, for instance, while the United States brokers a separate, bilateral defense deal with Saudi Arabia.

When Trump was president, his administration approached the Middle East in exactly this fashion. As Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s former Middle East envoy, reflected in a 2023 podcast regarding the genesis of the Abraham Accords, the administration deliberately “broke” apart the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts to see if it could “solve” one or both of them that way. “I think we proved that separating the conflicts allows reality to set in and improves the lives of many people without holding them back by the Palestinian conflict,” he contended.

Bolton maintains that for Trump himself, a far more significant factor than any past policy position is the lure of the big deal. That might even extend to striking an agreement with Iran. Trump made his hard-line stance on Iran the signature element of his administration’s Middle East record. But during a podcast appearance in June, Trump mused, “I would have made a fair deal with Iran,” and “I was going to get along with Iran,” so long as Iran agreed to not develop a nuclear-weapons capability (by many assessments, Iran is now a threshold nuclear-weapons state). He added, remarkably, that “eventually Iran would have been in the Abraham Accords.”

Trump made these comments before reports emerged of Iranian efforts to assassinate him and hack his campaign. Yet even after all of that, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September, Trump expressed openness to striking a new nuclear agreement with Tehran. Just days later, after Iranian leaders walked right up to the brink of war with Israel with their second direct attack on the country, Trump criticized Biden for opposing Israeli retaliation against Iranian nuclear sites, underscoring just how wide Trump’s Overton window is when it comes to policy toward Iran and the Middle East more broadly.

“The idea that [Trump] will be ‘death to Iran’ when he takes office in the second term is not accurate,” Bolton told me in May. Trump is attracted to the notion of “being the guy who went to Tehran or Pyongyang,” he argued. “I’ll bet you a dollar right now, if he’s elected, he’ll end up in one or both of those places in his first year in office.”

Could the appeal of the deal overcome a Trump administration’s calculations about the importance of peace between Israelis and Palestinians relative to other U.S. interests in the region? During Trump’s first term, Kushner’s effort to broker a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians failed. Kushner has said that he does not expect to join a second Trump administration, but Bolton told me that he can imagine Trump dusting off those plans if Kushner has second thoughts: “Now, whether he would really get into it when he realizes what trying to make a deal in the Middle East is like is a different question.”

Trump casts himself as the consummate dealmaker no matter how daunting the deal, but even he seems to suspect that a solution between Israelis and Palestinians is beyond him. “There was a time when I thought two states could work,” he has noted, but “now I think two states is going to be very, very tough.” Given that assessment, the backdrop of a devastating and still-unfolding war, and the low priority that Greenway suggests a second Trump administration would place on the pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace, the agreement that Trump once described as the “ultimate deal” would likely prove elusive, yet again.

Vladimir Putin and the Parable of the ‘Cornered Rat’

2023-08-02T12:00:00-04:00

Rarely have so few, seemingly inconsequential words generated so many consequential ones.

In a mere 109-word paragraph tucked away in an autobiographical collection of interviews published in 2000, just as he ascended to power in Russia, Vladimir Putin tells a nightmarish tale: Once, when he and his friends were chasing rats with sticks in the dilapidated apartment building in St. Petersburg where he grew up, a “huge rat” he’d cornered suddenly “lashed around and threw itself at” him, chasing the “surprised and frightened” Putin to his door before he slammed it shut in the rodent’s face. For Putin, it’s a parable: “I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered.”

More than two decades later, that anecdotal seed has sprouted into a ubiquitous narrative that has helped shape the West’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. A cornered Putin, commentators and policy makers in the United States and Europe have frequently insisted, could behave like the rat, lashing out even with weapons of mass destruction if provoked. The assumption has informed policies on arms provisions to Ukraine and nuclear deterrence against Russia.

Yet the Russian leader’s response to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in June has called the cornered-rat concept into question. Some experts argue that Russian propaganda amplified the metaphor, and that Putin’s reaction to the rebellion exposed it as a lie. Others paint a more complicated picture, suggesting that the story does reveal deep truths about Putin, but not the ones we imagined.

To better understand the Russian leader’s psychology—and make sounder policy decisions as a result—it’s worth tracing how an obscure vignette from Putin’s childhood took on such a prominent life of its own.

Putin has retold the rat story, and the lesson he learned about the perils of cornering others, several times in the 23 years since he first dropped the biographical breadcrumb, including in a 2005 60 Minutes interview. I’ve come across at least one instance of a former Kremlin official explicitly comparing Putin and Russia to the cornered rat. And Putin, along with other Russian officials and their allies, has occasionally implicitly echoed the anecdote’s themes via warnings to the West to not back Russia into a corner.

But the story was barely mentioned in the Western media (with some exceptions, including a fleeting reference in this magazine) until Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, when references gradually ticked up. As Putin suffered setbacks in Ukraine, Russia experts and journalists writing about the conflict and searching for insight into the Russian leader’s mindset started citing the anecdote from the 2000 interview collection. And they did something curious: They identified Putin not with his younger self but with the cornered rat, suggesting that his precarious position made him liable to lash out against his adversaries.

Only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, however, did the notion of Putin as a “rat in a corner” achieve escape velocity, to the point that it now seems to be invoked much more frequently in Western countries than in Russia.

The rat story served as the framing device for a flurry of articles in the early days and months of the war, both serious-minded (with headlines such as “A Cornered Vladimir Putin Is More Dangerous Than Ever”) and more sensationalist (“A rat with nuclear weapons ... That’s why we mustn’t drive Vladimir Putin so far into a corner he will do anything to save his own skin”). A May 2022 CNN documentary promising to take viewers “inside the mind” of the Russian leader seized on the rat story as a leitmotif of his biography, noting that Putin grew up in the “darkest corners” of St. Petersburg and that being “trapped in a corner only to fight his way out” has been “a theme throughout Vladimir Putin’s life,” building to the big question: “Erratic, obsessed, enraged. Is Putin now that cornered rat he once encountered?”

References to the tale tend to crop up when Putin is either issuing nuclear threats or under intense economic or military pressure, and they have become so common that experts often describe Putin as a “cornered rat” or even “a snarling rat backed into a corner,” with nary a mention of the childhood story that spawned the metaphor. Perhaps most consequentially, the language has made its way into the vernacular of U.S. and European governments—popping up in NATO research and remarks by British lawmakers. In his new biography of Putin, the journalist Philip Short refers to a conclusion by CIA analysts that Putin’s rat story should be “read as a warning that, if Putin were ever cornered, he would turn and fight.”

In the jittery days following Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine, as the United States slapped sweeping sanctions on Moscow, one anonymous official quoted by The New York Times gave a name to the ambient concern in the White House, voiced repeatedly in Situation Room meetings, about a trapped Russian leader lashing out: the “Cornered Putin Problem.” Last fall, when the Biden administration was resisting Ukrainian requests for more sophisticated weapons amid advances against Russian forces, Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, expressed concern that “Ukraine’s success on the battlefield could cause Russia to feel backed into a corner, and that is something we must remain mindful of.” Cornered-rat logic arguably has also informed calls to negotiate a face-saving way for Putin to get out of his quagmire.

[Read: Putin is caught in his own trap]

Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, told me she’s seen the concern about pushing Putin and Russia into a corner most “profoundly” among U.S. and Western European officials, whereas officials in Eastern European countries and in Ukraine itself, given their experience with Soviet occupation, tend to believe the best way to deter Russia is through “force and strength.”

“I don’t know if senior policy makers, as they look at this situation, call to mind that [cornered rat] metaphor, but anyone who says, ‘We can’t take certain steps in Ukraine, because Putin might go nuclear’ is manifesting the logic of that paradigm, which is precisely the policy impact that Putin has been seeking,” John Herbst, the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work), told me.

Some leading experts on Putin and Russia have argued compellingly that the cornered-rat metaphor has real merit in illuminating how the Russian leader might act. Shortly after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for example, the journalist Masha Gessen wrote that the rat story “keeps coming up in my conversations in Moscow” and that “no one who has ever heard it doubts that the adult Putin identifies with the rat.”

Around the same time, the Cold War historian Vladislav Zubok told me he was alarmed by those in the West who “keep shouting, ‘Press this guy Putin against the wall. Squash him like a rat! Kill him!’ And this guy has a nuclear button. Come on! Don’t make him nervous.” Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian politics at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote to me that, in his opinion, the cornered-rat image “is very accurate.” He noted that Putin “responds to every challenge (e.g. damage to the Crimean bridge) with a brutal attack (e.g. missile strikes).”

But other experts—such as Polyakova, who studies disinformation, and Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine—argue that Putin and the Kremlin have intentionally spread the image of Putin as a cornered rat as a form of propaganda, a verminous spin on Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory.” They hypothesize that Putin, as a former KGB agent during the Cold War, would have been well versed in psychological operations and thus likely had a calculated reason to repeatedly relay the rat story and the lesson he drew from it.

Whether or not Putin had an ulterior motive in sharing the rat story, Herbst told me, the Russian leader and “his henchmen” have emphasized the trope over the years “to instill fear in Western policy makers and also in policy makers in smaller, closer-by countries” that if they oppose Putin getting what he wants, he will strike back in devastating ways. Putin doesn’t have to repeat the story often, Herbst said, because the West has done the work for him by amplifying its theme.

[Read: The accidental autocrat]

As striking as the story’s repetition is the frequency with which it has failed to predict Putin’s behavior. Faced with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s June rebellion—as mercenaries marched toward Moscow—Putin’s reaction was not to lunge forward but rather to back away, negotiate with the Wagner Group leader, and make concessions to the mutineers to defuse the crisis.

Polyakova considers Putin’s behavior during the episode consistent with a broader pattern that even predates the current conflict: “In every instance where we [in the West] have pushed back against either Russian aggression or Russia’s economic interests, there hasn’t been this ‘all hell breaks loose’ response.”

Herbst agrees. He points out that Western countries have repeatedly crossed ostensible Russian red lines—by providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, for example, or admitting Finland and Sweden into NATO—without Putin resorting to nuclear use or other major escalations. And yet, the notion persists, perhaps usefully to Putin, that he must not be forced on the ropes or he will unleash World War III.

Natalia Gevorkyan was one of three Russian journalists who spoke with Putin for the 2000 autobiographical interviews. She told me she doubts that the Russian leader deliberately planted the rat story as propaganda—at least in its initial telling. Putin didn’t know in advance the questions the journalists would be asking, and he volunteered the anecdote only when they pressed him on whether the conditions at the communal apartment where he grew up were as horrible as a former teacher of his had suggested.

The Kremlin had encouraged Putin to “talk openly” about himself so that the interviews would introduce him to Russians who “didn’t know anything about him” at the time, Gevorkyan said. Stories like the one about the rats seemed intended to fulfill that directive.

“Nobody was cornering him” back in 2000, Gevorkyan reasoned. “I don’t believe that he was that smart to say, ‘Look, guys, listen to this story and never push me into the corner.’” She conceded that it’s “quite possible” he has sent a political message by repeating the story and its lesson in the ensuing years.

But Gevorkyan, who is now based in Paris, did challenge the conventional interpretation of the story. She wonders why so many people (herself included, until she looked at the tale in a new light after Russia’s assault against Ukraine last year) gravitate toward a convoluted reading of it that associates Putin with the dangerous rodent. The more straightforward moral of the story is that a frightened young Vladimir backed off when threatened, and that the elder Vladimir might do the same under similar circumstances. Something about the tale, she mused, tempts people to concentrate on the pouncing rat rather than the fleeing boy.

[Read: Why Putin let Prigozhin go]

Putin had a stick that he could have used to protect himself against the much smaller animal. Instead, Gevorkyan said, “he runs away and he hides in his own apartment and he feels safe. For me, this is much more a story about Putin than about the rat.”

No one but Putin himself will ever know for sure if, when push comes to shove, he is the cornered rat, the frightened boy, or something else entirely. But policy makers and the public can pay particularly close attention to what Putin does rather than what he says or what others say about him, and build their understanding of the Russian leader on a foundation of empirical evidence. They can avoid the siren song of popular frameworks that offer simplistic explanatory models for a complicated geopolitical actor. They can design policies and strategies to defend their interests that factor in their best assessments of Putin, while not accepting as gospel any single measure of the man and how he might behave.

Aleksandar Matovski, an assistant professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has studied the connection between Putin’s military adventurism abroad and his political standing at home. He told me that he sees some limited but significant truth in the cornered-rat paradigm: “There is a genuine threshold at which cornered Putin (in the sense of losing his grip domestically) would lash out aggressively, as a fall from power for a personalized dictator like him would be catastrophic,” he wrote to me, noting that his comments constitute his own assessment and not the position of the U.S. Department of Defense. But he also underscored the evidence that has piled up against the paradigm. Putin has “exploited the fear of the ‘cornered rat’ as a sort of bluff, particularly through nuclear blackmail in recent years,” he observed.

To avoid a situation in which a weakened Putin in dire circumstances blunders into nuclear use, Matovski argued, Western officials will need “to appeal to the survivalist outlook of Putin and his elite by signaling determination to retaliate in ways that will deny the Kremlin the benefits of a nuclear strike” and exert painful pressure on the Putin regime.

In other words, to manage the risk of nuclear escalation with Russia, they shouldn’t dismiss offhand the man who once saw in a cornered rat a warning about the dangers of desperation. But they should nevertheless appeal to the survival instincts of the boy with the stick who, when faced with those dangers, decided to run for it.

How and When the War in Ukraine Will End

2023-02-23T11:00:00-05:00

Sometimes the best way to understand what’s possible is to ask impossible questions.

One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies. How and when will the conflict end? For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want.

The main takeaways from the responses I received? Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecasts a decisive Russian win against Ukraine.

Let’s examine each of these insights in turn.

Beware the fog of war … termination.

First, a meta-point: This exercise is really hard. “No one, including me, has any strong confidence about how or when the war will end,” Dan Reiter, a political scientist at Emory University who wrote an entire book about how wars end, told me.

[Anne Applebaum: It’s time to prepare for a Ukrainian victory]

Wars “proceed in phases,” with “offensives and operational pauses, cycles of increased or decreased intensity in fighting,” and so on; it is perilous to “extrapolate from whatever period you’re currently in and imagine that this will represent the future trajectory” of the conflict, cautioned Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses.

There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances. To put a twist on an old Yiddish expression, people predict, and war laughs.

Prepare for a protracted, protean conflict.

Amid an apparent Russian offensive and anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensives in eastern Ukraine this spring, U.S. officials are reportedly conveying an urgent message to their Ukrainian counterparts: The next several months are crucial to tipping the war in Ukraine’s favor, given that ramped-up Western military assistance can’t necessarily be sustained. Ukrainian leaders and a number of prominent experts argue that Ukraine could actually win the war as early as this year if the United States and its allies speedily provide the types of additional advanced weaponry, such as fighter jets and long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, that Kyiv is requesting.

If the Ukrainian military were to use such weapons to cut off the land bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula, which the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, Moscow would have a harder time supplying troops and civilians in Crimea and keeping control of it, argued John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and the head of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council (where I work). That, in turn, could pressure Putin to strike a peace deal or even bring about new Russian leadership, Herbst told me.

Many experts I consulted, however, advised girding for a struggle that could last a lot longer, even if the war in its more acute form resolves sooner.

The conflict is “already a long war when compared to other interstate conflicts, and wars of this kind tend to cluster as either being relatively short—lasting no more than weeks or a few months—or averaging several years in duration,” Kofman told me. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars like the one in Ukraine have ended in less than a year, and that when such wars persist for more than a year, they last more than a decade on average.

Any apparent conclusion of the conflict might give way to a reopening of the war in the future, Kofman noted—particularly if the current wave of fighting subsides because of “a premature cease-fire with none of the fundamental issues resolved, and both parties simply use the time to rearm in the hope of returning to the battlefield.”

The forecasting firm Good Judgment’s superforecasters, a global network of about 180 experts in various fields with a strong track record, tend to “see a long slog coming” in Ukraine, CEO Warren Hatch told me. Some of the superforecasters, however, point to key differences between this war and past conflicts that they believe could produce a faster resolution—including the degree to which the West is arming Ukraine and punishing Russia economically.

As of this writing, the superforecasters had assigned a roughly 70 percent probability to the scenario of Russia and Ukraine not agreeing to end the conflict before October 1, 2024, the furthest-out date among the multiple-choice options presented. Good Judgment also posed my questions to its network. When the superforecasters were asked to name the year in which they expected Russia’s war against Ukraine to end, the median answer was 2025, with a minimum of 2024 and a maximum of 2037.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]

The Russian journalist Maria Lipman, now a visiting scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, observed that at the moment, “neither side seems to have a clear advantage on the battlefield,” and “neither Ukrainian nor Russian leadership is willing to start peace talks.” This leads Lipman to an endgame scenario that some other experts recently have invoked: an armistice akin to that between North and South Korea, with the United States and its allies supporting Kyiv as they do Seoul.

“One may imagine something like the outcome of the Korean War,” with “the warring sides remaining not reconciled and irreconcilable, always on alert, but more or less securely divided,” Lipman told me. Still, she said, whatever border is drawn between Russia and Ukraine is likely to be far longer and harder to secure than the one dividing the Korean peninsula. And Russia, as a much larger country, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a significant economic player, “is no North Korea” and “can’t and will not be isolated,” she noted.

Michael Kimmage, a historian of U.S.-Russian relations at the Catholic University of America who served on the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff from 2014 to 2016, told me, “The one thing I feel comfortable predicting” is that what’s now playing out on the battlefield in Ukraine will prove “a generational conflict” featuring tensions and hostilities over the next two to three decades, even if the current hot war wanes. It will be a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, “but nested within another conflict between the United States and Russia that’s really over Europe at large.”

The closest analogue is the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union took nearly 20 years—until the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis—to establish “rules of the road” for how to contain and manage the entrenched, multifaceted conflict between the two superpowers, Kimmage argued. In the United States, he noted, everything from industrial policy to diplomatic and military strategy to domestic politics similarly will need to be refashioned for this new conflict. Even as they steel themselves for a long-term contest with China, Americans could find the conflict with Russia becoming more present in their life than it is now—in the form of, say, more Kremlin cyberattacks or election interference, or even direct military confrontation with Russia in a war zone like Ukraine.

Still, Herbst, of the Atlantic Council, noted that the United States is spending only a bit more than 6 percent of its defense budget ($50 billion a year) to support Ukraine militarily and economically, relative to the trillions of dollars that the United States spent over the course of the Cold War. “If leaders explain the stakes and the costs, this is a manageable burden,” he told me.

Keep an eye on whether other countries accept Russia’s claims to empire.

Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian army who now studies the future of warfare, put it plainly: The war is most likely to end “when Putin realizes his imperial fantasies are not possible, and that his army cannot deliver him the victories [on] the ground he needs.”

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

The Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, also pointed to the Kremlin’s imperial aspirations as a key indicator to watch, but added that these could be thwarted by developments off the battlefield. She doesn’t foresee a durable end to the war in Ukraine until “the world” (here she especially has in mind countries other than the United States and its European allies) “is no longer of the view that Russia deserves a sphere of influence and has a right to empire.” Only in such a scenario, Hill explained, will the Kremlin be prevented from overcoming Western isolation by deepening its diplomatic, economic, and military ties with other countries, and feel international pressure to engage in serious negotiations to end the war through some international framework.

Persuading countries in regions such as Africa and the Middle East to deny Russia its imperial schemes will require a major shift in how the United States and its allies describe the stakes of the war and even in how they articulate their broader worldview, Hill argued. Rather than framing the war as a struggle between democracies and autocracies or East versus West, U.S. and European leaders should make the case that the Kremlin, in its thirst for empire, has “violated the UN Charter [and] international laws” that keep other countries safe as well.

U.S. officials also might need to move away from the strategic paradigm they’ve embraced in recent years of “great-power competition.” This framework, Hill maintained, risks implying that the fates of nations around the world are subject to face-offs among the United States, China, and Russia—and it can shape geopolitical realities rather than merely describing them as they are. The United States might have to push to reform outdated elements of the world’s security architecture, such as the UN Security Council, so that they no longer reflect a bygone era in which a small group of big powers got to determine the course of international affairs.

Anticipate a messy, provisional peace advanced by a group of global actors.

Many experts I consulted were pessimistic about the prospect of a negotiated settlement to end the war in the foreseeable future. But a couple offered scenarios for what such a settlement could look like, portraying them as more guesswork than predictions. Both scenarios involved the mediation of other world powers. Neither featured a tidy, satisfying resolution.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Cut the baloney realism]

Mathew Burrows of the Stimson Center, a former top U.S. intelligence official focused on strategic foresight and global trend analysis, sketched one potential path in which a stalemate leads to a brittle, occasionally violated cease-fire mediated by actors like the United Nations, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Eventually, perhaps if U.S. commitment to Ukraine fades or Putin is weakened by significant opposition during Russia’s 2024 presidential elections, there could be a difficult, lengthy push for a sturdier peace deal involving bigger concessions, with Ukraine encouraged to negotiate by Western and Southern European countries and Russia pressed to do the same by the other “BRICS” nations (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa). That effort would require extensive U.S. involvement as well, and could serve as a springboard for China to assert itself as a diplomatic power, as the United States did during peace talks after World War I.

Reiter, the scholar of how wars end, provided another rough outline: If Russian and Ukrainian offensives this spring fail to result in a clear military victory for either side, a neutral country such as Brazil or India could broker secret peace negotiations. Ukraine and Russia might be more receptive to these diplomatic efforts than before—Putin on account of an exhausted Russian military, Ukrainian leaders out of concern about the war’s mounting economic and humanitarian toll and the slackening of Western military assistance. The talks could yield a shaky cease-fire in which Russia consented to remove its forces from Ukrainian territory (a commitment that all parties think the Kremlin will probably renege on by maintaining a military presence in the country’s east) and Ukraine vowed to reestablish a water supply to Crimea without recognizing Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. The agreement also could include a tacit understanding that Ukraine would not formally join NATO. Such a deal could provide Putin with a “fig leaf” to “declare victory for domestic political audiences” and enable Ukraine to begin postwar reconstruction, Reiter reasoned. But it would leave the core issues of sovereignty that triggered the war unresolved.

Don’t expect the war to end in a mushroom cloud.

Over the past year, there has been an ebbing and flowing fear of the war in Ukraine ending apocalyptically, with Russia resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, stirred most recently by Putin suspending cooperation in the nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States known as New START. But many experts I turned to were not seriously concerned about such an outcome.

[Eric Schlosser: The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory]

In explaining why, Reiter pointed to “the heavy diplomatic costs of [Russia] using nuclear weapons, the lack of military utility of using nuclear weapons,” and the risk that such use would “increase NATO military involvement” in the war. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe at Yale, told me he stands by an assessment he made in October in which he similarly argued that a Russian nuclear detonation was highly unlikely. “We are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending,” he wrote at the time. More likely, Snyder argues, Putin is trying to instill fear in order to buy his military time and undermine international support for Ukraine.

And don’t assume that the war will conclude with regime change in Moscow.

When my colleagues at the Atlantic Council and I recently surveyed more than 150 global strategists and foresight experts about what the world could look like in 10 years, nearly half of the respondents expected Russia to either become a failed state or break up internally by 2033, presumably driven at least in part by Putin’s disastrous war against Ukraine. But even if this occurs, that doesn’t mean the war itself will end with Putin’s downfall.

In his October assessment, Snyder floated one scenario in which Ukrainian military victories prompt a power struggle in Moscow that leads Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, as Putin and his rivals judge that the armed forces loyal to them are most useful on the homefront. But what Snyder envisions is Putin prioritizing his political survival in Russia over his personal and ideological designs on Ukraine, not necessarily Putin’s removal from power.

Kofman, at CNA, considers “leadership or regime change in Russia” to be “unlikely in the near term,” and pointed out that “a change in leadership will not necessarily lead Moscow to end the war.” Kimmage, at Catholic University, estimated that the odds are “one in a thousand or one in a million” that a new Russian leader will emerge who is willing to withdraw Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, subject Russian perpetrators to war-crimes tribunals, and pay reparations to Ukraine—all objectives Kyiv has articulated.

Lipman, the journalist and scholar, expects “a long period of decline or decay in all spheres of life” for Russia, but she currently doesn’t foresee political upheaval. Putin’s “grip on power has grown even tighter and his authority even more unlimited” over the past year, with broad “public acquiescence” to the war and Russian elites still relying on Putin for “security and stability,” she noted. “Will the situation change to a point when taking the risks to oppose Putin may appear justified? That’s something very hard to imagine, looking from today. Right now, pledging full allegiance certainly appears to be a safer strategy.”

Kimmage, for his part, worries that the United States and its allies might expect a “Hollywood version” of the war’s ending, featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “the David who’s going to beat Goliath.” The danger, he said, is that “if there’s too much of an expectation of quick-fix, instant-gratification heroism … we’ll end up getting frustrated with Zelensky and the Ukrainians” and then could wind down support for their struggle. Zelensky “deserves all the praise he gets, but the script is not written. And the script is not destined to have a happy ending. And it’s not destined to have a happy ending soon if there is a happy ending,” Kimmage explained. “We have to build a narrative of the war that’s durable enough that it doesn’t depend on that happy ending.”

Will Putin Use Nuclear Weapons? Watch These Indicators.

2022-10-15T06:00:00-04:00

If Vladimir Putin were to decide to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, would we know ahead of launch? If so, how exactly would we know?

Not since the early days of the war in Ukraine have these questions felt so urgent. As Putin has suffered battlefield setbacks and illegally annexed Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine, he has repeatedly threatened to make use of his country’s nuclear weapons—appearing to implicitly extend the protection of Russia’s nuclear arsenal over lands that Ukrainian forces could soon seek to retake. U.S. officials have underscored the gravity of the situation as well; President Joe Biden recently traced a direct line from what he deemed the serious risk of Putin going nuclear to “Armageddon.”

In these circumstances, feeling on edge is only natural. But in reporting on nuclear threats over the years, I have learned the pitfalls of assigning undue weight to rhetorical shiny objects. In 2017, for example, when Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were calling each other “Little Rocket Man” and a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and warning of all manner of nuclear apocalypse, experts advised me to peer past the bombast and look for clues of impending war, such as the evacuation of American noncombatants from South Korea. Those clues never materialized. Nor did the apocalypse.

[Eliot A. Cohen: What to do about Russia’s nuclear threats]

In a similar spirit, I asked several experts to share the indicators they’re watching most closely to determine whether Russian nuclear use in Ukraine is imminent—and to help us all separate the signal from the noise.

“I do believe that we are at least several steps away from” Russian nuclear use in Ukraine, Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces, told me.

Below is a breakdown of what those remaining steps could look like.

A shift to more explicit, specific nuclear threats by Putin and other Russian officials

Despite Putin hinting recently that threats to Russian “territorial integrity” could spur the Kremlin to use nuclear weapons, Podvig maintained that the Russian president and other top officials have nevertheless largely been consistent in articulating a defensive doctrine, in which the Russian government would consider using nuclear weapons only if it were to sustain an attack that threatened the existence of the Russian state.

Podvig is looking out for a shift away from that doctrine, which could involve Russian leaders more explicitly threatening to use nuclear weapons to halt Ukrainian advances on the battlefield. Matthew Kroenig, a nuclear strategist and my colleague at the Atlantic Council, served up a scenario: Imagine that Putin, seeing the lands he recently annexed about to slip from his grasp, declares, “‘I warned the world that these four regions are Russian territory. I warned Ukraine not to attack Russian territory. They’ve not heeded these warnings. They need to evacuate these areas immediately, or else I’ll consider nuclear weapons. This isn’t a bluff.’” That’s the kind of more specific statement that would put Kroenig on higher alert.

“We will know it when we see that,” Podvig said of a possible rhetorical shift. “My take is that, so far, we haven’t seen it.”

A definitive rout of Russian forces in Ukraine and corresponding threats to Putin’s power at home

As a dictator who controls the media, Putin could spin any partial Russian win in Ukraine as a victory, Kroenig reasoned. But if Ukrainians are on the verge of taking back all of their territory, Putin could conceivably turn to nuclear weapons to reverse his military misfortunes and avoid a humiliating defeat.

Kroenig, who served in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, is relatedly tracking “Putin’s strength at home,” because “if we saw more Russian elites turning against him or publicly criticizing him,” Putin “could seek nuclear use as a way to gamble for resurrection, change the conversation, [and] show that he’s a strong leader.”

This is one of the core conundrums in this confounding war: The United States and its partners are rightly supporting Ukraine’s campaign to regain all the territory it has lost to Russia’s illegal and abhorrent aggression. But investing in Ukraine’s unequivocal success, and thus Putin’s utter defeat, may come with the greater risk of a desperate Putin unleashing nuclear war.

Movements of Russian tactical nuclear weapons from storage to the field

The general consensus among experts is that if Putin were to reach for his nuclear weapons in the course of his war in Ukraine, he wouldn’t select the kind of long-range, city-destroying, “strategic” nuclear weapons that were so prominent during the Cold War. Instead, he’d likely opt for one or several of the country’s roughly 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons—less explosive, shorter-range arms intended for use on a battlefield.

These tactical nuclear weapons are not deployed and ready for immediate use the way that Russia’s ground- and sea-based strategic nuclear weapons are. Experts believe they are held in an estimated 47 national and base-level storage facilities across Russia. The country’s systems for launching these weapons are stashed away in separate locations.

Podvig has sketched out how a move to tap into this arsenal could play out. In the event of an order to raise Russia’s state of readiness, the defense ministry’s 12th Main Directorate, the custodian of the country’s nuclear arsenal, would remove the selected weapons from storage and put them on specialized trucks, which would bring them to a designated point where they would be taken out of their storage containers and paired with their delivery systems (loading a nuclear bomb onto an aircraft at an air base, for instance, or installing a nuclear warhead on a missile).

Through its satellites, other surveillance capabilities, and various forms of on-the-ground intelligence, the U.S. government would probably (not certainly) be able to spot signs of Russian efforts to move tactical nuclear weapons out of storage facilities.

Private researchers poring over open-source intelligence would, conversely, be less likely to catch this activity. But the broader public might quickly find out about it anyway. Just as it did in novel ways in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration might disclose classified intelligence—through either leaks to the media or public statements—to expose Putin’s plans and marshal international pressure, including from more Russia-friendly nuclear-armed states, such as China and India, as a means of deterrence.

In such circumstances, “I think President Biden and other officials would”—publicly and privately—“signal very aggressively to the Russians to dissuade them from escalating the conflict with nuclear weapons,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear-nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told me.

The experts I consulted also agreed that Putin himself would probably want to telegraph to the world in subtle or blatant ways that he’s making these moves—in part because he could never be fully confident of taking these steps without his adversaries detecting them, but also because, as Lewis put it, he would want “to see if he could get what he wants for free.”

If Putin can “frighten” Ukraine’s allies into standing down without actually using nuclear weapons, “that’s the best outcome for him,” Kroenig said. Kroenig could even envision the Kremlin “ostentatiously” recording video of Russian troops removing tactical nuclear weapons from storage facilities and Putin deliberately leaking it, with a message to the world like “‘We’re moving them to the front lines. We’re getting ready to use them. I’m serious. Back off now, or else this is coming.’”

[From the July/August 2022 issue: We have no nuclear strategy]

Intercepted communications suggesting forthcoming nuclear use and corresponding movements of Russian forces or military assets

If Russia were preparing to use nuclear weapons, Podvig said, it would likely “raise the level of readiness of a portion of forces,” which “generates a certain footprint,” such as orders and additional communication through both Russia’s nuclear command-and-control system and other military channels. Russia has practiced these processes during past military exercises, so the U.S. government has a sense of the patterns to watch for. One recent assessment estimated that “tens of thousands” of Russian soldiers would ultimately need to be involved in the complex logistical operation of transferring tactical nuclear weapons from storage to the battlefield.

“I would expect to see alert levels rise throughout Russia’s nuclear forces before any nuclear use, no matter how small,” Lewis said, particularly because the country’s generals will need to gird those forces for escalation that could result from any U.S. or NATO retaliation following Russian nuclear use. Moving Russian nuclear forces to a higher state of readiness could involve not just activity at storage sites for nuclear warheads, but also “submarines going out to sea” or “mobile missiles leaving their bases.”

Although open-source researchers such as Lewis don’t yet have the capabilities to monitor Russian communications, here, too, the U.S. government could choose to publicly release any intelligence it gathers on Russian military orders that signal nuclear use is in the offing.

A particular challenge with reading the Kremlin’s tea leaves is that Russia has nearly two dozen “dual use” delivery systems, some already being used in the war in Ukraine, which can carry conventional or nuclear warheads. U.S. intelligence could “assume they have conventional warheads on them, but actually they don’t,” because Putin has “switched them out somewhere and we didn’t detect that,” Kroenig noted. “So it is possible, I guess, that we just start seeing mushroom clouds in Ukraine, but I think that’s less likely than that we’d get some kind of warning.”

In recent weeks, U.S. and allied officials have repeatedly stated that they have not detected signs of imminent Russian nuclear use. And the experts I consulted mostly concurred, although Kroenig noted that because Putin is beginning to lose the war and sharpen his threats, “we are already in the danger zone.”

“There is always some background level of activity with [Russia’s] nuclear forces,” as there is in any nuclear-armed country, Lewis noted. But so far, he has “not seen anything in Russia” that he “would characterize as unusual.”

When I asked Podvig whether he’d seen any of his top indicators for looming Russian nuclear use, he hesitated and then replied, “Not yet.” A message of great reassurance this was not. But I’ll take it over the latest runaway speculation on Twitter.

A Third Nuclear Age Is Upon Us

2022-08-02T05:00:00-04:00

On the brink. That’s how we tend to think of humanity’s predicament during the most dangerous moments of the nuclear era. But as Thomas Schelling, the godfather of nuclear strategy, once pointed out, the phrase is misleading. The nuclear frontier is not “the sharp edge of a cliff where one can stand firmly, look down, and decide whether or not to plunge,” he wrote, but rather “a curved slope that one can stand on with some risk of slipping”—the slope getting steeper and riskier “as one moves toward the chasm.” Now the slope is getting steeper before our eyes.

That’s not just because of the potential for Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in a desperate effort to avert defeat in Ukraine. It’s also the result of a threat that isn’t making many headlines but that experts are currently concerned about: North Korea’s development of tactical nuclear weapons—less explosive, shorter-range arms designed for use on a battlefield.

North Korea has been pursuing tactical nuclear weapons for many years, but the latest chapter in this story begins in January 2021, when the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, explicitly pledged to build such weapons. Then came Pyongyang’s April 2022 test of a short-range missile expressly intended to be wielded as a tactical nuke, followed by cryptic June military announcements that some analysts interpreted as an indication that Kim is planning to deploy the weapons to his frontline artillery units. North Korea watchers expect the country to conduct its seventh nuclear test any day now, which would most likely be aimed at further honing small warheads that could be mated with shorter-range missiles.

If those predictions bear out, North Korea’s next nuclear test would herald what some scholars have dubbed a “third nuclear age.” The first age was dominated by the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, the second by post–Cold War dynamics among various emerging and aspiring nuclear-weapons powers.

[From the July/August 2022 issue: We have no nuclear strategy]

In a prescient 2019 essay, the scholars Nicholas L. Miller and Vipin Narang identified three main components of this new, third nuclear age: “renewed nuclear competition among several great powers” as arms-control agreements fall apart and these countries modernize their arsenals, the “emergence of new nuclear powers” (potentially including both U.S. allies and adversaries), and “a greater tolerance for escalation among existing nuclear powers.” North Korea’s work on tactical nuclear weapons testifies to the second and third dimensions.

This dangerous moment combines the challenges of great powers competing with and seeking to deter one another in the nuclear realm (the hallmark of the first nuclear age) with the challenges of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons (the focus of the second)—plus destabilizing new weapons systems and vanishing international cooperation to keep any of it in check.

The third nuclear age ushers the world into “truly uncharted waters,” the scholar David Cooper has observed. “Everything we think we know about nuclear weapons—deterrence, coercion, etc. … is based on a very short, finite history from two of the world’s most stable periods: the frozen, bipolar stalemate of the Cold War and then the subsequent … ‘unipolar moment’ of the post–Cold War world where the United States essentially was unrivaled in power.”

Tactical nuclear weapons are often described as “small” nuclear weapons, but that’s something of a contradiction in terms—like saying not to worry about the small asteroid barreling toward your town. The smallness holds only when compared with the kinds of “strategic” nuclear weapons that the U.S. and the Soviet Union threatened to obliterate each other with during the Cold War. Many tactical nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals pack more potential explosive power than the U.S. atomic bomb that killed roughly 70,000 people in Hiroshima, although these explosive yields can be adjusted to lower levels.

After the Cold War, the U.S. scaled back its tactical nuclear weapons amid the triumphalism and diminished security threats of that period. But Russia largely maintained its stockpile, which is currently about nine times the size of America’s.

And as Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued, if North Korea adopts tactical nuclear weapons, it would “manipulate [Schelling’s] slope” and “invite the United States and South Korea to stand on it.” North Korea is already predisposed to use its nuclear weapons early in a conflict with more powerful adversaries. The addition of tactical nukes, given their less destructive nature relative to strategic nukes, would further lower the bar for North Korean use of nuclear weapons. Deploying tactical nukes could involve Kim delegating some authority for command and control of those weapons to lower-ranking military commanders, particularly in wartime, and storing the weapons at more military bases throughout the country—which could significantly increase the risks of nuclear use as a result of accidents or miscalculations.

In, say, a non-nuclear conflict sparked by an act of North Korean aggression, Kim or one of his commanders, operating in the information-distortion field that is North Korea, could mistake a U.S. or South Korean retaliatory attack (or even something mundane, such as a civilian plane nearing North Korean airspace) for a more existential military offensive to wipe out the regime or its nuclear-weapons arsenal. They could respond by firing tactical nuclear weapons at U.S. or South Korean targets, leaving Washington and Seoul unsure about how to respond—particularly given U.S. qualms about again crossing the nuclear threshold and North Korea’s suspected capability to target the U.S. mainland with longer-range nuclear weapons.

North Korea could also deliberately turn to tactical nuclear weapons during an intensifying or stalemated conflict in an effort to spook its enemies and compel them to back down—an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that the Russian military is thought to embrace.

[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

The suddenly more real (if still very low-probability) prospect of Russian nuclear use in Ukraine is forcing policy makers, unpracticed in nuclear strategy and planning, to think hard about response options to such a brazen but bounded crossing of the nuclear threshold. In a similar vein, U.S. and allied officials need to proactively craft new policies and strategies for how to deter North Korea from using tactical nuclear weapons—and how to respond should deterrence fail. That could involve, for example, the U.S. and South Korean militaries making their bases less attractive targets for Pyongyang. It could also entail Washington and Seoul shifting their focus from the long-standing but now-quixotic goal of “denuclearizing” North Korea to engaging it in talks aimed at reaching arms-control agreements, reducing the threat that each side perceives from the other, managing crises before they spiral out of control, and mitigating the chances of a nuclear conflict erupting.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev famously declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That reassuring sentiment was affirmed as recently as earlier this year by the five internationally recognized nuclear-weapons states. But in this third nuclear age, the line needs a corollary that recognizes the harsh realities of the times: Some nuclear-weapons states may indeed believe that a nuclear war can be won—and thus that one could be fought.

We often talk about the potential use of nuclear weapons in apocalyptic terms—as an act that would destroy the whole world. But that description of nuclear war as unthinkably horrific is a legacy of the Cold War. Limited use of nuclear weapons—use that could inflict tremendous destruction and shatter international norms but not destroy the world—is unfortunately thinkable. At the very least, it is incumbent upon policy makers to act as if it is thinkable; the very concept of tactical nuclear weapons is, in fact, premised on the idea that limited nuclear war is thinkable. We need to plan for such scenarios—even as we expend every effort to prevent them from materializing.

How the UN Security Council Can Reinvent Itself

2022-07-07T06:00:00-04:00

Seventy-seven years into its troubled existence, the United Nations Security Council confronts a consequential decision: Transform or die.

The choice was vividly illustrated in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, when Russia’s United Nations ambassador served as the president of the Security Council even as his country committed a flagrant violation of the UN’s founding principles. That spectacle was soon followed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggesting that entities such as the Security Council are defunct and proposing a new “union of responsible countries” (dubbed “U-24”) to provide assistance within 24 hours of a country suffering an attack, natural disaster, or health crisis. Sure, he was short on details. But it was still a stunning suggestion to make in the throes of war—like proposing a rewrite of fire regulations while your house is burning down. Being failed by international institutions brings a certain clarity about their deficiencies and the urgent need to address them.

Even before Russia’s invasion, a deeply divided Security Council was struggling to act on many of today’s defining challenges, including mass human-rights violations and nontraditional security threats such as climate change and public-health crises. The most powerful body of the most global organization has been largely bypassing the world’s most pressing problems.

[Photos: More than 100 days of war in Ukraine]

If the Security Council doesn’t make major changes to overcome its paralysis, it risks fading into obsolescence. But the body isn’t dead yet. Experts are debating intriguing proposals for how to overhaul it. And though all seem unlikely to be implemented, reformers can take heart from the fact that the Security Council itself is an unlikely invention.

When the Security Council was founded as part of the United Nations in 1945, it was built as “an extension of the powers that defeated Hitler and Japan,” and a way to “lock in place the Soviets, the British, and the U.S., along with France and China, as the world’s policemen,” Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group, told me.

The locking mechanism was to make these wartime allies permanent members and grant them the power to veto measures brought before the body, which enjoys unrivaled clout within the UN system as the only entity with the authority to initiate military action, institute peacekeeping operations, impose international sanctions, and issue binding resolutions.

But the policemen quickly turned on one another as the Cold War took hold. The veto, which once seemed like a reasonable price to pay for securing the buy-in of the great powers, started looking more like a poisoned chalice.

[Read: The Cold War never really ended]

The Security Council was arguably even more dysfunctional and deadlocked during certain low points of the Cold War than it is today, not meeting for months at a time and passing just one resolution in 1959, then drifting for much of the 1970s and ’80s. After a brief, successful period following the Cold War, the council again foundered. It failed to effectively respond to international crises such as the genocide in Rwanda, the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, the second Iraq War, the Syrian civil war, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and mass atrocities in the Sudanese region of Darfur and Myanmar’s Rakhine State, among others.

Nor has the council distinguished itself on contemporary challenges that pose serious threats to human security, broadly defined. It has been a bit player in the global response to COVID-19, taking months to pass a resolution urging warring parties around the world to abide by a humanitarian cease-fire during the pandemic—only for the measure to then go unheeded. The institution has also done little on climate change: Last year, Russia vetoed a rather anodyne resolution nudging the council toward tackling climate change as a threat to peace and security, despite 113 countries co-sponsoring the resolution—the second-highest tally for a draft resolution in the organization’s history.

The Security Council also suffers from a crisis of legitimacy stemming from the fact that its permanent members are a snapshot of the prevailing world powers circa 1945. It has, for example, no permanent representation from Africa or Latin America. Influential countries such as India and Japan are missing as well. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres told me in 2018, “the Security Council doesn’t correspond anymore” to contemporary geopolitical dynamics.

Now Russia’s assault on Ukraine has underscored just how ineffectual the Security Council can be when a permanent member assumes the role of attacker, using the body as a shield. In the early days of the conflict, even though by some interpretations it should have abstained as a party to the dispute, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that the Kremlin halt its illegal aggression and withdraw its forces from Ukraine. The measure’s backers therefore had to transmute the text into a nonbinding resolution that the UN General Assembly, to its credit, passed resoundingly. Moscow’s veto is also a big obstacle in the way of the Security Council referring Russian acts of aggression in Ukraine to the International Criminal Court. Ditto for economic sanctions, which have been levied against Moscow not by the Security Council but by an ad hoc coalition of countries.

The UN has not been entirely listless during the Ukraine crisis. The General Assembly has voted to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council; UN officials are investigating potential war crimes in Ukraine; and UN agencies are providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainians and assisting refugees.

And for all its flaws, the Security Council itself isn’t yet a lost cause. The institution has managed (for now) to continue conducting non-Ukraine business by, for example, reauthorizing an African Union mission in Somalia and extending a UN mission in Afghanistan. “We understand that behind the scenes the Chinese in particular are leaning on the Russians [and] saying: ‘Don’t let this spread. We have an interest in the UN remaining effective in places like Afghanistan and we don’t want you to blow this all up,’” Gowan told me. He thinks the council retains value as “a place where the big powers can hash out a certain range of security issues,” such as sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear-weapons program or the now-languishing international agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program.

[Read: It’s time for a new United Nations]

There are, moreover, plenty of ideas of varying practicality and ambition for reforming the Security Council, including the permanent members voluntarily relinquishing their veto in cases of mass atrocities or being deprived of their veto power on matters involving the existential threats of climate change, infectious disease, and nuclear weapons; making the Security Council more globally representative; and changing the way the secretary-general is selected so the UN leader is less beholden to permanent members. Russia’s war against Ukraine has already spurred one significant but modest change: A veto of a Security Council resolution now automatically triggers a debate on the subject in the General Assembly within 10 days.

Perhaps the most compelling idea I’ve encountered is for a change to the UN’s founding charter that would allow a supermajority of countries in the General Assembly (possibly with the concurrence of most permanent members in the Security Council) to override the veto of a permanent member.

Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, who knows the UN system inside out as a former high commissioner for human rights, a Jordanian ambassador to the organization, and a peacekeeper in the former Yugoslavia, recently suggested such a solution. He argued that a three-quarters or seven-eighths vote in the General Assembly should be sufficient to override a permanent member’s veto. Former Turkish Economy Minister Kemal Derviş and former Colombian Finance Minister José Antonio Ocampo, both also former UN officials, have proposed something similar: adding a provision to the charter enabling “a large double majority—representing, for example, at least two-thirds of member countries and two-thirds of the world’s population—to override a veto.” The international-relations scholar Anthony Pahnke has floated yet another variant: a veto override if two-thirds of countries in the General Assembly and/or four out of five Security Council members are in favor of doing so. We’re talking roughly the levels of exceptional international solidarity on display in the March General Assembly resolution calling for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The giant roadblock is that any change to the charter would need to be approved by two-thirds of UN members through their respective constitutional processes for ratifying treaty amendments, including all Security Council permanent members. Russia and China would likely reject such a reform, as would maybe even France and the United Kingdom, which haven’t cast a veto since 1989—as well as the United States, which often uses its veto power to defend Israel against resolutions related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

An additional challenge is that seeking a specific modification of the charter could unlock a Pandora’s box on a global scale. Countries “have a long wish list of what they want in council reform,” Gowan explained. “The North Koreans occasionally pop up and say that the council should spend more time discussing Japanese war crimes in the 1940s. Everyone has a demand. So if you start opening up for reform, you’re not going to be able to keep it focused on a few narrow goals.” That’s the reason the charter has been amended only five times in its history, and not once since 1973.

We tend to forget how revolutionary it was for countries to voluntarily restrict some of their sovereignty by agreeing to be bound by Security Council decisions, including in matters of armed conflict. They did this in response to the extraordinary horrors of World War II and the preceding failure of the League of Nations. Karin Landgren, the executive director of Security Council Report, a nonprofit organization focused on making the Security Council more effective, and a former UN undersecretary-general, has observed, “If that was radical in 1945, I think it’s the stuff of fantasy today” amid fierce competition among the world’s big powers.

Gowan has noted that transformations in international institutions tend to stem from wars involving world powers, whereas more incremental tweaks to these institutions typically result from less severe crises. The war in Ukraine occupies an ever-shifting place somewhere in between these poles. “If the situation in Ukraine escalates to the type of major-power war that opens up the space for fundamental, multilateral reform, that’s great but we’ll all be dead” from nuclear war, he said.

But perhaps the long odds are fitting for an improbable creation like the United Nations, and today’s confluence of challenges presents an urgent impetus for change short of world war. If the United States and its allies want to preserve the international architecture they helped build, these desperate times call for drastic measures such as leading a bold initiative to reform the sclerotic Security Council and pressuring Russia and China to consent to it.

We live in an age of global intervulnerability to existential threats—and thus a period when it may be warranted to transfer some power (in the form, say, of a veto-override option at the United Nations) from the five top powers circa 1945 to the consensus of the majority of countries affected by the challenges associated with climate change, pandemics, and nuclear conflict.

In supporting an effort like this, the U.S. government could contend that it isn’t afraid of (and is in fact supportive of) the global consensus on the world’s defining challenges. And it could ask a related question: If Russia and China are opposed to such a change, what does that say about their disregard for the rest of the world? This could open a new front in the battle of ideas between Moscow and Beijing on one side, and Washington and its allies on the other.

As Derviş and Ocampo have argued in support of their proposal, “This is an ideal time for the world’s democracies, including the U.S., to propose such a change. By backing it, President Joe Biden’s administration could seize the moment and show its determination to create a more equitable and inclusive multilateral system. This would send a powerful—and widely welcomed—message that the U.S. is confident that its enlightened national self-interest will be in accord with the interests of a large majority of the world’s countries and people.”

If the Security Council fails to go big on reform, the future will likely involve countries forming flexible, pop-up security coalitions of the willing—with prime examples being the Ukrainian “U-24” proposal, or the countries that have rallied to support Kyiv with military, economic, and humanitarian assistance and sanctions against Russia.

[Annie Lowrey: Can sanctions stop Russia?]

Gowan has sketched a similar concept: an “emergency platform” that operates in parallel with the Security Council and includes a network of leaders from UN members, UN groups, and international financial institutions and aid agencies to mitigate the fallout from shocks to the global economy and international system. He envisions the platform functioning something like how global actors are currently joining forces to contend with the energy challenges and food crises resulting from the war in Ukraine.

“The future of multilateral cooperation,” Gowan noted, “is likely to be the quite informal, quite context-specific groups that get together on a case-by-case basis.” Unfortunately, he added, they will typically band together “because there’s a crisis and the existing structures cannot manage it.”

What’s the Likelihood of Nuclear War?

2022-03-23T05:42:59-04:00

World War III, this time with multiple nuclear-armed states.

That’s the nightmare scenario haunting many people as Russia’s horrific war on Ukraine metastasizes, moving toward NATO’s borders, stoking further Western involvement, sucking in other powers, and spurring nuclear threats from President Vladimir Putin. Discussion of the conflict is rife with comparisons to the Cold War’s darkest days.

We are undoubtedly living through dangerous times, and the risk to Ukrainians is obviously grave. But to better understand the nature of the peril we face, it helps to dig deeper into history. The lesson: For the wider world, in terms of the chances of direct conventional or even nuclear war pitting Russia against the United States and its NATO allies, this is not the most precarious moment since the lowest points of the Cold War—at least not yet.

That was the consensus of several Cold War historians I corresponded with. On balance, they gave me some reason to temper my alarm about the war on Ukraine spiraling into a broader conflagration between nuclear-armed powers. Of the six historians I consulted, four said the present moment was less dangerous than the Cold War’s most hazardous moments; one said it was equally dangerous, just in different ways; and one said it was more dangerous.

The scholars emphasized how close the Soviet Union and United States came to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, as a result of several factors that so far aren’t at play today. Most noted the reassuring ways in which the Biden administration is aiming to avoid an escalatory confrontation with Russia. But they also stressed that escalation stemming from mistakes or miscalculation, which was the most salient source of danger during the Cuban missile crisis, poses a significant risk now as well.

And several cited troubling reasons—including how prolonged the current crisis is likely to be, and modern-day Russia’s weakness compared with the Soviet Union in every domain but nuclear-weapons power—for why the eruption of hostilities in Ukraine may have ushered the world into uncharted territory, limiting the utility of historical analogies and rendering the present moment potentially more precarious.

Certain dynamics that made the Cuban missile crisis so treacherous are, at this point, absent in the conflict over Ukraine. Whereas the 1962 incident was sparked by the U.S. discovery of Soviet efforts to deploy nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to Cuba, today Russia has not taken a comparable step to directly threaten vital American interests, such as relocating “nuclear missiles closer to the U.S. or West,” Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me.

The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, who co-wrote a book, Essence of Decision, on the Cuban missile crisis, also drew a distinction between the brinkmanship 60 years ago and President Joe Biden’s determination to keep his confrontation with Putin from sliding “into hot war between U.S. and Russian forces that could escalate to World War III.”

To illustrate his point, Allison asked me to imagine some alternative history: It’s the last Saturday of the Cuban missile crisis, with tensions thick after an American spy plane was shot down. Instead of accepting the U.S. government’s proposed deal for the Soviets to swiftly remove their nuclear missiles from Cuba in tacit return for a U.S. pullout of similar missiles from Turkey, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev rejects the offer.

In the event that Khrushchev rebuffed his ultimatum, President John F. Kennedy had approved strikes against the Soviet missiles and then an invasion of Cuba. What he didn’t know at the time: The 40,000 Soviet forces deployed to the island possessed more than 100 tactical nuclear weapons, relatively low-yield, short-range arms that can be used on a battlefield. Catastrophe could have ensued.

Near the end of the crisis, Kennedy put the odds that it would result in nuclear war at “‘between one in three and even,’” Allison said, adding that “nothing historians have discovered since has done anything to lengthen those odds.” By contrast, Allison estimates the probability that the Ukraine crisis will devolve into nuclear war between Russia and the United States as “less than one in 100—and in my best estimate, closer to one in 1,000.” Despite “Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling,” Allison judged it “extremely hard” to “sketch a scenario from the current tragedy to Russian nukes exploding on American soil.”

Sergey Radchenko, also at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pinpointed the decision by the United States and NATO to explicitly rule out engaging in a direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine as the main reason the current war is less perilous than both the Cuban missile crisis and the lower-profile 1983 Able Archer incident, when the Soviets had twitchy fingers on the nuclear trigger during a U.S.-NATO military exercise that they feared could be cover for a preemptive U.S. nuclear strike. (To get a sense of the high-stakes jitters around the time of Able Archer, consider that a month earlier, a Soviet duty officer named Stanislav Petrov had, in the span of five frantic minutes, correctly determined that a satellite warning of incoming American intercontinental ballistic missiles was a false alarm, narrowly averting a nuclear calamity.)

The historian Melvyn Leffler similarly felt that the Western policy to not directly use force against Russia in Ukraine has reduced the chances of escalation with Moscow today relative to the worst crises of the Cold War, when each side was highly uncertain about what the other might do militarily. (He referenced not just the Cuban missile crisis but also the Soviet blockade and U.S.-British airlift, in 1948; the follow-on standoff over the status of Berlin, in 1961; and the U.S.-Soviet confrontation that accompanied the Yom Kippur War.)

A couple of the historians, however, expressed greater worry. Michael Dobbs, the author of One Minute to Midnight, an account of the Cuban missile crisis, told me that the debate about whether Putin is a “rational actor” misses the central lesson from the 1962 incident. Kennedy and Khrushchev were “rational actors,” he noted, “but they still brought the world to the edge of the nuclear abyss” because of mistakes and miscalculations.

Echoing concerns from Radchenko and Leffler about inadvertent escalation, Dobbs listed various forms that these missteps could take today: a warplane straying over NATO or Russian borders, a confrontation between naval forces, a cyberattack gone awry. And whereas the Cuban missile crisis transpired over just 13 days, Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine has already lasted longer than that with no clear end in sight, and numerous signs point to further escalation, increasing the likelihood of blunders.

Vladislav Zubok, at the London School of Economics, told me he views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as more dangerous than episodes such as Able Archer and the Cuban missile crisis. Not only is Putin less politically constrained than his Soviet predecessors, who had the politburo to reckon with, but he is also presiding over a country that is far weaker than the Soviet Union was in its heyday, producing a uniquely destabilizing dynamic.

The weakness of Russia’s conventional military and economy, now on vivid display, has likely produced “cognitive dissonance” among Russian leaders, who consider their country a great power but are confronting a reality that suggests otherwise, Zubok noted. Recent weeks have revealed “that they don’t have very many cards to play” in terms of “conventional forms of power,” but there is one domain in which Russia remains a superpower: nuclear weapons. Zubok’s fear is that a cornered, existentially threatened Putin will use nuclear weapons as the “ultimate joker [card] that can change the game.” Perhaps in the future we will discover records showing that Putin was bluffing with his nuclear taunts, he mused, “but something tells me this is not the story.”

Zubok’s comment reminded me that although applying historical lessons to contemporary circumstances has value, an asymmetry of analysis is at play. Historians can access a wealth of information about the periods they study—declassified documents, oral histories—that we simply don’t have in our foggier present.

And the fog of this war is heavy with possible hazards.

For four decades during the Cold War, with a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over their struggle, the Soviet Union and the United States and its NATO allies sought to avoid direct military conflict with one another, instead waging war through proxies. Yet developments such as the recent Russian strike on a Ukrainian military facility near the border with Poland, a NATO member, and the Kremlin’s threat to target Western weapons shipments passing through that area raise the specter of a head-on conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries. The very definition of a direct clash, and even whether we’re already engaged in one, is up in the air as the United States and Europe effectively prosecute a financial war against Russia in reaction to Putin’s assault on Ukraine.

Nuclear weapons were never used during the Cold War in substantial part because of the belief in both Washington and Moscow, as Ronald Reagan put it when describing the logic of mutual assured destruction, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But the world’s fragile system of nuclear deterrence could crumble, as the writer David French warned, if Putin decides that the only way he can win against Ukraine and the West is by making use in some form of his advantage in tactical nuclear weapons. This might not generate the sort of nuclear conflict envisioned by some of the historians I turned to—with nukes raining down on U.S. or NATO territory and Western retaliation in kind—but it would still be a nuclear conflict.

Although several historians favorably cited the move by the United States and NATO to exclude the possibility of a fight with Russia over Ukraine, that approach too could have hidden costs. It means Putin can conduct his war without worrying about a response from Western conventional or nuclear forces; the terrible trade-off for less concern about a direct conflict between Russia and the West may be a higher probability of the Kremlin escalating its aggression against Ukraine.

And whereas the Cold War materialized relatively gradually in the years after World War II, a new iron curtain—sweeping in its economic, diplomatic, political, informational, and digital dimensions—is now descending with unprecedented speed. As Sarotte, at Johns Hopkins, fears, that could potentially leave two nuclear-armed powers largely operating in isolation from each other.

In comparing Ukraine today with the Cuban missile crisis, Dobbs arrived at a grim calculation. “The risks of a direct confrontation between U.S. and Russian forces may be fairly low at present,” he conceded. “But if you multiply that by X months or X years and the number of things that could go wrong, they turn out to be similar mathematically.”

Putin’s Nuclear Threats Are a Wake-Up Call for the World

2022-03-15T05:00:00-04:00

He threatened any country that interfered in his invasion of Ukraine with “consequences greater than any you have faced in history.” He placed his nuclear forces on high alert and held exercises with them. And then he proclaimed that Western sanctions amounted to a “declaration of war” against Russia.

The fate of humanity suddenly seems to be in the unsteady hands of an isolated, frustrated, and potentially unhinged Vladimir Putin. And people are understandably panicked about that prospect. “The fact that there’s a very short path from, say, Putin feeling humiliated to the end of life as we know it,” the sociologist Kieran Healy wrote, “is literally insane.”

At this point of the conflict over Ukraine, the odds are that the Russian president’s threats amount to a bluff intended to intimidate and coerce his opponents in the West. But regardless of whether the risk of nuclear war has actually increased, Putin’s actions have opened our eyes to how dependent we all are on the whims of one man and his nuclear arsenal—or even the missteps or miscalculations that fallible, emotional, semi-rational human beings make when moving quickly in crisis.

Our current predicament should, in fact, open our eyes wider still to the more profound problem of a similar susceptibility in the United States and other nuclear-armed countries—and to how few checks there truly are on leaders who decide to use the world’s most destructive weapons.

The reactions to Putin’s threats remind me of 2017, when Donald Trump started unleashing nuclear threats against North Korea, and many Americans began to understand the U.S. president’s expansive power to use nuclear weapons. Be it with Putin now, Trump then, or a Watergate-addled Richard Nixon in the 1970s, the delicate nature of the world’s framework for deterring nuclear war typically dawns on people only when leaders of nuclear states start acting in extraordinary and seemingly reckless ways, even though the underlying condition of vulnerability is always present.

“The entire system of nuclear deterrence is and always has been incredibly dangerous and fragile,” Eryn MacDonald, a global-security analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. “We tend not to notice this—or, perhaps, are more able to push this knowledge far enough into the background to ignore how disturbing it is—until there is a crisis that brings the absurdity of the whole system into focus.”

We don’t know a lot about how exactly the authority to launch nuclear weapons works in Russia. This opacity is deliberate. All nuclear command-and-control systems, including America’s, have a “first rule of Fight Club”-like aspect to them: You don’t talk much about them, to keep your enemies guessing. But Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces (who, even armed with all his knowledge, speaks about some of his assessments in terms of guesswork), has concluded that the Russian president can probably order the use of nuclear weapons on his own, even if the country’s policies aren’t necessarily designed that way.

The Russian system, which dates back to the 1970s and was crafted with Soviet-era collective, centralized decision making in mind, calls for the defense minister and the chief of the military’s general staff to be looped in on any orders by the country’s leader to use nuclear weapons, giving them an opportunity to influence the decision. (Experts think each of these figures possesses a Cheget, Russia’s rough equivalent of the American “nuclear football,” though whether all three briefcases are needed to transmit a nuclear-launch order is unclear.) If, as some speculate he might in the course of the conflict in Ukraine, Putin were to reach for his tactical nuclear weapons—a lower-yield, shorter-range variety that can be deployed on the battlefield—he would need to remove them from storage and prepare them for use in a relatively protracted process that would ostensibly involve more consultations.

But given the degree to which Putin has recently concentrated power, it appears that no actor in the Russian system would actually be able to veto a presidential decision to use nuclear weapons. Podvig told me that any Russian plan to employ nuclear weapons would likely have to first be developed by military officials, who would thus “have a chance to offer their opinion [and] raise objections.” Nevertheless, he added, “ultimately they are there to carry out orders, not to dispute them.”

Were Russia to come under attack, its system calls for solid confirmation of such an offensive to initiate retaliatory nuclear strikes, he explained, “but when it comes to a deliberate [Russian] first strike [with nuclear weapons], most safeguards could be circumvented.”

The U.S. nuclear-launch system has its own ambiguities, but one element is clearer than in Russia’s system: The American president has sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, without any need to consult with or obtain the assent of top military or civilian advisers.

It’s a reality rarely dwelled upon, even by those whose job is to dwell on it. In 2017, in the throes of Trump’s vows to rain down “fire and fury” on Kim Jong Un, I tuned in as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the first congressional hearing on the subject in 41 years. I was shocked by how many members of Congress’s premier foreign-affairs committee seemed to be just getting up to speed on the commander in chief’s exclusive power in matters of nuclear war.

This concentrated executive authority—which contrasts with more collective decision making in nuclear states such as India and Pakistan, where nuclear-use powers are vested in councils—is in large part a legacy of the Cold War. During that period, the U.S. government chose to categorize nuclear weapons differently than other weapons and put them under the circumscribed civilian control of the country’s democratically elected political leader. The approach was informed by a prolonged nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union that placed a premium on enabling quick decisions, because an American leader might have only minutes to retaliate against a surprise nuclear assault.

Still, in both Russia and the United States, despite what Trump might have led us to believe, the proverbial “nuclear button” is a myth; even with the immense executive authority to launch nuclear weapons in each country, any such presidential order would necessarily need to pass through other individuals with varying degrees of agency. But based on what we know of the Russian and American systems, does Joe Biden actually have fewer checks on his power to wage nuclear war than Putin does?

The response when I posed that question to MacDonald and Podvig: It’s complicated.

In theory, they explained, the Russian system for launching nuclear weapons has more checks, because it seems to technically require the consent of others beyond just the president. But in practice, given Putin’s firm grip on power, the president’s underlings are unlikely to object to his order and liable to be easily replaced if they have the audacity to do so.

In the United States, by contrast, the obstacles to a president firing these weapons are theoretically fewer but practically perhaps greater than in Russia. Nuclear-strike options require legal review before they're presented to the U.S. president, for example, and those executing an order at least have the option of resisting a command they deem unlawful.

Whatever “the actual arrangements and safeguards” in both countries, Podvig noted, “ultimately, a determined commander in chief would be able to execute a first [nuclear] strike.”

MacDonald argued that certain policy reforms could reduce the risks associated with the world’s system of nuclear deterrence. She pointed to two proposals among the many that have been floated. One option would be to mandate that more people be involved in decisions to use nuclear weapons. (In recent years, the trend in nuclear states appears to be going in the opposite direction—toward greater centralization of launch authority in the chief executive.) Another would be to take the hotly debated step of declaring that the United States will never be the first actor to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. (Other nuclear experts such as my Atlantic Council colleague Matthew Kroenig have argued that adopting this policy would undermine deterrence and introduce different dangers, such as emboldening U.S. adversaries to use conventional force against the United States and its allies without concern about nuclear retaliation from Washington.)

Although Russia is highly unlikely to adopt a “no first use” policy at the moment, MacDonald acknowledged that “even a unilateral U.S. declaration would still reduce the risk of a misunderstanding or miscommunication causing a conventional conflict to escalate to a nuclear exchange.”

In my reporting on nuclear-weapons issues over the years, I have often found myself racing down rabbit holes of research and reckoning with the immense spectrum of possibilities only to emerge stupefied, wondering how anyone can be talking or writing about anything else. This might be why most people don’t talk about it much. And then, every so often, dramatic developments in the world have a way of awakening us from our collective slumber.

As Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told me during the “fire and fury” era, “If you’re uncomfortable with nuclear weapons under Donald Trump, you’re probably uncomfortable with nuclear weapons, because it means you recognize that [deterrence] won’t always hold up and things can go wrong.”

“Once you start thinking ‘this person is appropriate for this weapon but not that person,’” she said, “then maybe it’s the weapon that’s the problem.”

The Seven Habits of COVID-Resilient Nations

2022-02-15T07:00:00-05:00

The tweet has stuck with me for months now: a chart of cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. The U.S. and U.K. lines rise up like mountains relative to the valley of South Korea below. Even as Omicron-related deaths have increased in South Korea more recently, the picture hasn’t changed much.

South Korea “kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated,” the physician Vincent Rajkumar marveled on Twitter in response to the chart. “This is success.”

A more apt word than success might be resilience. As I have previously argued, the COVID crisis has underscored that clout in the 21st century—an era rife with systemic threats including climate change, cyberattacks, and economic crises—will depend on a country’s ability to anticipate and absorb large-scale shocks, adapt to their disruptions, and rapidly bounce back (or even forward) from them. It will depend on “resilient power.” And through its response to the coronavirus so far, South Korea has emerged as a paragon of resilience governance.

South Korea hasn’t proved to be the only resilient power in this period; other standouts include New Zealand and the Nordic countries. Yet South Korea is unusual in that it has not only repeatedly suppressed the spread of the virus and kept deaths to relatively low levels, but also never instituted a full lockdown. As a result, it has experienced much less economic fallout from the crisis than most other major economies. In contrast to other countries that excelled at one stage of the pandemic but struggled at others, South Korea has somehow respectably navigated every stage. After a sluggish start to its vaccine campaign, it now has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates. South Korea has also amassed soft power and diplomatic influence by providing pandemic-related assistance to other countries and establishing itself as a widely perceived model for how democracies should contend with COVID-19.

[Uri Friedman: The pandemic is revealing a new form of national power]

“How did South Korea escape the pandemic relatively unaffected economically, with deaths at such low levels, while now vaccinating at such a high level that it has protected itself from future waves of illness and harsh lockdowns?” the public-health expert Devi Sridhar recently inquired. “That’s the question we should all be asking.”

Below is my answer to that question—in the form of the broad lessons that other countries should learn from South Korea’s achievements. These are the seven habits of highly resilient nations.

1. Learn from past shocks to prepare for the next crisis.

In 2015, an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), also caused by a coronavirus, tore through South Korea’s hospitals and caught the government off guard. After initially failing to provide sufficient testing and transparent information about the crisis, however, officials eventually got the outbreak under control.

This “history of lived resilience,” as Michele Grossman, a resilience expert at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, once described it to me, gave the South Korean government and public confidence from the start of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, when others were either panicking or complacent, that they could prevent the virus from spiraling out of control. This might seem like an encouraging lesson: If resilience is born of the sort of trauma every country has experienced during this pandemic, then every country should now theoretically be primed to be more resilient in the future.

Adversity is not a sufficient condition for resilience, however. As The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has written, what has set the South Korean government and people apart is their willingness to learn from that adversity and adapt their practices, policies, and institutions accordingly. South Korea’s playbook for containing COVID-19—rapid and widely accessible testing, sophisticated contact-tracing technology, and treatment measures such as compulsory isolation of serious cases—sprang from new legislation and government infrastructure developed as a direct result of MERS and other prior epidemics, such as a 2009 outbreak of H1N1 influenza.

As part of its dozens of post-MERS reforms, the government enhanced its data-collection methods and medical and laboratory facilities. It empowered the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KCDA). It identified high-priority infectious diseases, stockpiled personal protective equipment and other medical essentials, crafted a plan to disseminate supplies across the country, and conducted drills. MERS also prompted the government to develop closer relationships with biotechnology companies, which paid dividends when the novel coronavirus hit, enabling the country to quickly acquire reagents for diagnostic tests.

2. Channel scientific and other expert advice into policy and strategy.

A December study by Bertelsmann Stiftung, which examined 29 countries in the European Union and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, found that from the earliest days of the coronavirus outbreak, South Korea based its public-health interventions on scientific and socioeconomic expertise from a range of government entities. More broadly, according to the German foundation, countries that can speedily and successfully integrate expert advice into new policies, or adjust existing policies, tend to respond better to crises.

[Uri Friedman: The dueling ideas that will define the 21st century]

South Korea’s overall COVID strategy was shaped by deference to such expertise. As Sridhar, the public-health expert, has argued, the country’s short-term focus on “maximum suppression helped buy time for scientists” to “find a sustainable exit from the crisis” through the development and approval of vaccines in 2020 and therapeutics in 2021.

3. Follow the data in real time.

Resilience depends on governments responding early and decisively to fluid realities. That, in turn, requires a commitment to “‘Follow the data’ as a beacon for policy and decision making,” Grossman, of Deakin University, told me.

South Korea has advanced data infrastructure—including a cutting-edge (if also problematic, from a privacy perspective) contact-tracing system—that enabled authorities to swiftly collect and analyze various sorts of pandemic-related data as a means of detecting early warning signs and assessing the effects of government policies. Employing its sensitive, multilevel alert system for infectious-disease risks, the government shifted its focus to economic recovery when new COVID cases dropped and shifted back to virus mitigation when cases surged again.

South Korea was one of only several countries in the Bertelsmann Stiftung study that “succeeded in regularly reviewing the effectiveness of their policies, and in adapting them on an ongoing basis to rapidly changing circumstances or new knowledge,” the report notes.

That achievement should not be underestimated. “Real-time learning [during a crisis] is very, very difficult in the majority of countries,” including nearly all of the study’s front-runners, Christof Schiller, a governance expert at Bertelsmann Stiftung and a co-author of its report, told me. “Korea could be an exception there.”

4. Communicate clearly and transparently with the public.

New Zealand has been the world’s brightest star for crisis communications during the pandemic (its prime minister actually has a degree in communications), but South Korea has distinguished itself in this domain as well, consistently conveying a coherent containment strategy to its people.

As early as January 30, 2020, when the country had only five confirmed COVID cases, the government initiated twice-daily press briefings with public-health officials. It quickly issued press releases and web resources packed with data on the state of the outbreak and steps to counteract it, deployed a mobile-friendly emergency-alert system, established a 24-hour COVID hotline, and disseminated infographics on measures to avoid infection.

Here, too, the South Korean government’s adherence to learning was key. The country’s Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act, shaped by lessons from the H1N1 and MERS outbreaks, afforded the public “a right to be informed about disease outbreaks” and about government responses to them, note Thomas Kalinowski and Sang-young Rhyu, Bertelsmann Stiftung’s South Korea experts. They explain that “as a result, the government largely disclosed its actions and plans, and was transparent even about difficulties that threatened to increase public levels of frustration, such as the mask shortages in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak.” In leveling with the public about these challenges, the government “restored civic trust and encouraged the population to engage in a communal effort to prevent the spread of the virus.”

That transparency also helped mobilize the private sector to boost South Korea’s resilience by, for instance, developing mobile apps and websites that draw on government data to track mask inventories in stores or paths of viral transmission.

5. Cultivate public trust in government and fellow citizens.

Writing for The Atlantic in 2020, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the most significant factor in national performance against the pandemic was “whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state.” Other scholars have since similarly discovered correlations between countries’ resilience to COVID-19 and their levels of trust in government and within society.

[Read: What’s really behind global vaccine hesitancy]

The authors of one such study of 177 countries and territories recently estimated that if the citizens of every country trusted one another at the level evident in South Korea, which ranked in the 75th percentile for this metric in their survey, the first 21 months of the global coronavirus outbreak might have produced 40 percent fewer infections.

South Korea is not a paragon of public trust in government. Nevertheless, the South Korean public has generally been willing to follow the government’s pandemic guidelines, perhaps because the country’s COVID-19 response has been largely expert-led and depoliticized. In the global survey on trust that it released last month, the public-relations firm Edelman found that South Koreans’ trust in scientists (70 percent) and national-health authorities (56 percent) remained high relative to trust in government leaders (35 percent). Koreans also tend to be more trusting of their civil service, which has a strong culture of performance and accountability assessments, than they are of appointed or elected officials.

6. Design centralized systems sensitive to local concerns.

The Bertelsmann Stiftung study notes that South Korea was one of several “more centralized countries” that topped their rankings in part because “national coordination efforts proved sensitive to local concerns and were thus carried out with the least friction,” by through local authorities empowered to “find solutions that work at the local level.”

By leveraging a centralized but flexible system, the government was able to establish regional centers for disease control and prevention and rush resources, health-care workers, and public-health officials to areas reeling from surges in cases. The government’s Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters—led by the prime minister and established in February 2020—held daily high-level meetings during acute periods of the pandemic to coordinate disaster response across central-government ministries and 17 provinces and major cities.

Notably, many of the countries that have proved most resilient against COVID-19 have been small nations such as New Zealand and the Nordic countries or midsize ones such as South Korea. Maybe this elaborate interplay between national and local systems is easier to pull off in such countries than in larger, more complex, and more diverse ones like the United States. A study of 116 national responses to the pandemic by the Lowy Institute in Australia last year found that countries with populations of fewer than 10 million people “proved more agile than the majority of their larger counterparts.” It’s just one example of how traditional measures of national power—military spending, population size, gross domestic product—don’t necessarily translate into resilience.

7. Recognize that no country can cope with shock entirely on its own.

South Korea’s commitment to continuous learning, scientific expertise, and following the data extended not just to assessments of its own performance during the pandemic but also to assimilating insights from other countries grappling with the same challenges.

Resilient countries don’t “go it alone,” Grossman explained; instead, they “navigate toward and share resources”; understand that their “own well-being is interdependent with, and contingent upon, the well-being of the rest of the world”; and act to “reinforce the reciprocal relations that underwrite this recognition.”

South Korea has not been perfect on this score. Kalinowski and Rhyu write that the government has remained “inward-looking” during the pandemic, showing a willingness to promote South Korea’s successes against COVID-19 to the world but “less interest in coordinating actions with international partners.”

Nevertheless, the government has established travel bubbles with nearby countries and shared its COVID-19 knowledge, testing kits, and anonymized patient data with other countries and international organizations, while launching the Group of Friends of Solidarity for Global Health Security at the United Nations as a platform for countries to exchange lessons from their responses to the virus and other public-health challenges.

[Derek Thompson: How Denmark decided COVID isn’t a critical threat to society]

The specific factors that have enabled South Korea to be resilient to COVID-19—its post-MERS crisis-management system, for instance—may not help it respond resiliently to other systemic threats; South Korea performed less well on Bertelsmann Stiftung’s assessments of economic, welfare-state, and democratic resilience during the coronavirus crisis.

Now that the Omicron variant is generating a substantial wave of new COVID cases in South Korea, this might also seem like an odd time to be singling out the country as a model. But the government is once again adapting, for example by ditching its celebrated pandemic playbook for a new one that focuses resources on the most at-risk COVID patients.

And, crucially, resilience is not the absence of failure. It is, instead, failure with grace, followed by robust recovery. For two years we’ve sought out neat success stories in the struggle with COVID. The real trick is managing vulnerabilities to avoid surrendering to shock.

The Dueling Ideas That Will Define the 21st Century

2021-11-10T06:00:00-05:00

It was catnip for policy analysts: Henceforth, the Biden administration signaled recently, the U.S. government would refer to its approach to China and other adversaries by a new name. Out was the Trump-era term, great-power competition. In was strategic competition. The assessments of what it all meant poured forth.

But lost in the debate was the fact that the U.S. government appeared to be tweaking the semantics of the organizing principle of its foreign policy and grand strategy—competition with China, whatever adjective one appends to it—without wrestling with the more fundamental question of whether it had landed on the right paradigm for understanding the 21st-century world, and America’s role in it.

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal this summer punctuated the end of the post-9/11 era, if any doubt of its obsolescence remained. The developments left unresolved a separate but related matter, though: What’s coming next?

Before great-power competition captivated Washington’s imagination, Barack Obama and others had flirted with a different framework for the future: one defined by shared, often-existential challenges to humanity such as climate change, pandemic disease, economic and financial crises, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and cyberweapons, which could be dealt with only through international cooperation, particularly among the world’s most powerful countries. It’s an alternative vision of what Jairus Grove, the director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, calls “intervulnerability.”

Great-power competition. Strategic competition. Intervulnerability. All this terminology might seem theoretical. But a lot is riding on how U.S. officials answer the question of what’s next. As I’ve written, in the mid-1940s American officials actually proposed several plans geared toward more collaboration with the Soviet Union—plans that were eclipsed by the strategy of containment, which was predicated on a darker reading of Soviet intentions and capabilities. Although the Cold War was likely unavoidable, the historian Melvyn Leffler told me, “its dimensions and its magnitude could have been very different” had American leaders seriously considered alternative assessments of the Soviet Union and accordingly made different choices.

Our paradigms mold our assumptions and expectations, and thus our policies and behavior. As the international-relations scholar Van Jackson has noted, “The way we think about the future is going to end up shaping it.”

So which is it: an era of geopolitical competition featuring a sprawling struggle between the United States and its democratic allies on the one hand and China and other authoritarian powers on the other? Or an age of intervulnerability in which all countries, despite their rivalries and clashing worldviews, band together to combat collective challenges?

It’s not that one of these paradigms is clearly right and the other wrong—or that the paradigms are mutually exclusive. The 21st century may prove to be both an era of geopolitical competition and an age of intervulnerability, however paradoxical that may seem, in which the two dynamics feed off each other in positive and negative ways. In this highly complex world of ours, a single framework for making sense of its affairs is elusive.

But this is a liminal moment—a time for choosing, even if the answer is that both paradigms need to be embraced and reconciled. And in the United States we’re not really acting like it. We’re debating, for example, whether or not to brand the competition with China a “cold war” rather than interrogating our fixation on competition in the first place. The U.S. government, of course, can only do so much to influence how Chinese leaders view the world and act as a result—and Washington must tailor its policies and strategies to the world as it is, and China as it is, rather than as it would want them to be. But that doesn’t change the fact that enshrining competition with China as the primary animating logic of American statecraft is a choice, not an inevitability.

That choice is mainly a question of relative emphasis. A logic of intervulnerability, for example, would propel the United States along a different path from its current course—toward fortifying international institutions and governance, clarifying the contours of its competition with China, and more proactively seeking cooperation with Beijing in areas where they have overlapping interests, such as climate change or nuclear nonproliferation.

The Biden administration has taken some significant steps toward fashioning U.S. foreign policy for an age of intervulnerability—and certainly given the idea rhetorical play. The coronavirus pandemic has ushered the “world into a new era” that demands “a modern defense,” Vice President Kamala Harris declared in June. “We know now our world is interconnected, our world is interdependent, and our world is fragile. Just think, a deadly pandemic can spread throughout the globe in just a matter of months. A gang of hackers can disrupt the fuel supply of a whole seaboard. One country’s carbon emissions can threaten the sustainability of the whole Earth.”

President Joe Biden struck similar notes in his United Nations General Assembly address in September, proclaiming that “global challenges” underscore “a fundamental truth of the 21st century”: that “our security, our prosperity, and our very freedoms are interconnected” and therefore “we must work together as never before.”

But these points were in tension with key passages in Biden’s speech that alluded to another theme of his presidency: that the United States must join with democratic allies to tackle contemporary challenges and the countervailing forces of resurgent autocracies—the ideological dimension of strategic competition, which conjures a world cleaved into camps. This latter theme appears, according to Mathew Burrows of the Atlantic Council (where I work), to be the dominant one in the White House. Given how the United States has let international institutions “drift,” Burrows, a former top U.S. intelligence official who was the lead author of the American intelligence community’s forecast for the world in 2030, told me, “I don’t see anybody thinking about global cooperation seriously.”

We are living through a period of ascendant nationalism and fluid, ad hoc international coalitions, not robust global architecture. Leaders of international organizations have largely become modern-day Jeremiahs, issuing prophecies of doom that typically go unheeded by a fractious world even as the problems they call out metastasize.

When I interviewed UN Secretary-General António Guterres in 2018, he lamented that the world was “in pieces” and lacked effective international governance to put the fragments back together. And that was before COVID-19 hit, the climate crisis worsened, and mounting strife among world powers further weakened global institutions and the international system they undergird. “Our world has never been more threatened. Or more divided. We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes,” Guterres stated during his address at this year’s UN General Assembly, pleading with the world leaders arrayed before him to adopt “interdependence” as “the logic of the 21st century.”

Biden has recommitted the United States to international institutions and pacts that Donald Trump exited, such as the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement, while endorsing new ones, such as a Global Health Threats Council to prevent future pandemics. Yet so far, the Biden administration has done more to highlight the need for reform of the dysfunctional international system—in organizations such as the World Trade Organization—than to actually undertake those reforms. And Biden has tended to focus on competition with China and especially the broader struggle between democracies and autocracies.

One would have thought that COVID-19—a truly global shock that has arguably upended Americans’ way of life more than the rise of China has thus far, albeit perhaps temporarily—would have jolted Biden into weighing the country’s present path in foreign affairs against one more inflected by the imperatives of intervulnerability. The pandemic is, in many ways, the definition of a paradigm shift.

Not so, it seems. In a grim sense, it was ultimately “too easy” for the world’s leading powers “to deal with [the pandemic] on their own,” Burrows said. They “could produce vaccines [and] close borders” while leaving less powerful countries in the developing world behind. The pandemic “could have involved cooperation—it would have been better to have more cooperation—but it wasn’t necessary,” he noted.

Over the past two years, national and international leaders have largely failed the alien-invasion test—the notion that countries would coalesce and global institutions would realize their full potential if humanity were to confront a common threat, such as an extraterrestrial assault. It turns out that even problems that afflict the whole planet don’t do so equally, hindering cooperation. In the dismal words of Jackson, the international-relations scholar, the pandemic has taught us that “we can’t do collective action … literally to save our lives.”

A U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy informed by intervulnerability wouldn’t entail some fantasy of kumbaya cooperation with an often-recalcitrant China whose interests and values in many instances diverge sharply from those of the United States and its allies. It would instead involve fully recognizing the competitive, conflictual trajectory of U.S.-China relations while seeking to circumscribe that dynamic wherever possible to give Washington and Beijing space to cooperate—even if just tacitly rather than through formal agreements.

“You could compete without getting tensions so high that cooperation is impossible. And at this point I think we’re close to that,” Burrows warned.

Implementing such a paradigm would also mean strengthening and reimagining global organizations and governance with the same fierce urgency and unbound creativity that the architects of the post–World War II international system marshaled during a no less pivotal period. This time, such a task will be more difficult, given the current contentiousness among the world’s great powers and the fact that, unlike after the Second World War, no victors are swooping in to provide desperately needed order to a shell-shocked world.

If there is any global actor that can provide a guide to what a paradigm of intervulnerability could look like in practice, it’s the European Union—a leading advocate for multilateralism with a generally dim view of commencing a new cold war with China. A 2019 EU forecast for the year 2030 predicts that “it is doubtful that the world will be structured around ‘poles’” and that the international system will instead be marked by “connectivity, interdependence and pluralis[m].” The EU is also an entity constructed on the conviction, born of the horror of two world wars, that nations are stronger in today’s world by fusing their sovereignty in certain respects, a notion that has far less traction in the United States.

Where EU-style multilateralism runs into trouble, Anthony Dworkin writes in a recent policy brief for the European Council on Foreign Relations, “is that the domains of health, finance, climate, technology, and trade—where the world’s societies are deeply interconnected—are increasingly sites of geopolitical competition,” which in turn has undermined the international institutions that oversee those domains. “In an era of systemic competition, the links between countries have become instruments of power, creating dependencies that could represent strategic risks,” he explains. (Scholars refer to this phenomenon as “weaponized interdependence.”)

So what’s the solution? Dworkin recommends adopting a “twin-track strategy” that is keenly aware of the limits of multilateralism in a geopolitically competitive world. The EU could aim for “coordination on global public goods with as wide a circle of countries as possible” through existing global institutions and new international agreements, such as efforts to boost global vaccine manufacturing and reform the WTO. And it could simultaneously seek “deeper and narrower cooperation with smaller groups of like-minded partners who share common principles on openness, accountability, and individual rights,” as in initiatives to regulate digital technology and fight corruption.

On climate change, for example, Dworkin suggests that the United States, the European Union, and China align their classification systems for sustainable economic activities and form a “climate club” with other willing countries to orchestrate measures such as the rollout of carbon border taxes, even as the EU works with a smaller group of democratic partners “to establish secure supply chains for essential raw materials and green technology.”

Disabusing ourselves of the notion that “there’s a strict opposition between interdependence and great-power politics is the work at hand—and we’re not doing it,” Grove told me. Part of that work would be better delineating the rough bounds of U.S. competition with China. The United States could, for instance, choose to engage in an ideological struggle with China—in hopes of vindicating America’s democratic political model over China’s authoritarian alternative—but not strive to achieve military “escalation dominance” over Beijing. Is the competition with China “really about China invading the United States or vital U.S. interests? No. It’s about a different model for the international order. It’s about freedom of navigation in the Pacific,” Grove argued.

Despite its focus on the rivalry with China, the White House should, in theory, know this. As Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan, who now hold top national-security posts in the Biden administration, warned in Foreign Affairs in 2019, U.S. leaders should beware of foreign-policy frameworks that reflect “uncertainty about what that competition is over and what it means to win.”

The term they were critiquing at the time? Strategic competition.

Germany Found a Way to Reduce Polarization. Could It Work in the U.S.?

2021-07-30T06:30:00-04:00

When Edmund Schechter, a Viennese Jew who fled the Nazis, arrived in postwar Germany in 1945, he encountered a “wasteland”—not just physically, he said, but “psychologically.”

All newspapers had ceased publication. Radio stations were destroyed and devoid of their Nazi staff. The “silent” media landscape provided “virgin territory” to “do all sorts of things really from scratch,” recalled Schechter, who had escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp to the United States only to head to Germany after World War II to help vanquish the dark forces that had just threatened to devour him.

Inspired by media in their own countries, American, British, and French authorities created public-service broadcasting structures in the areas of West Germany under their control as part of a wider effort to build democracy there. The systems were deliberately designed to prevent the likes of the Nazis’ propaganda apparatus from reemerging—to ensure, as Schechter explained at the time, that stations did not become a “mouthpiece” of government and that they represented “every level of society.”

[Read: What America taught the Nazis]

Schechter would oversee radio activities in the American zone of West Germany, and with others would help build the foundations of a German public-media system that is now one of the finest on the planet. Today, as the U.S., plagued by accelerating political polarization, struggles to achieve democratic renewal of a different sort, it’s time for lessons to flow in the other direction.

Over the past several decades, polarization has increased more in the U.S. than in other comparably wealthy democracies. But perhaps more striking, according to research by the economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse Shapiro, the most significant declines in polarization among such democracies have occurred in Germany, a divided country as of three decades ago.

The economists’ paper is not the only study to record decreasing polarization in Germany in recent decades. The authors, however, noticed an intriguing pattern in their data. “Countries with falling polarization,” Boxell, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, told me, “spend a lot more on public broadcasting per capita.”

Germany is an overlooked paragon of public broadcasting. Its system, established as an antidote to the exploitation of mass media by Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, is one of the world’s most effective models for how to coalesce much of a country around a shared reality and common set of facts. It’s a hybrid of U.S.-style federalism, British-style public-broadcasting freedom, and welfare-state-style media regulation, designed to keep the public close and the government at a distance. German public broadcasters enjoy remarkably large audiences and widespread trust across the political spectrum—along with investment levels that dwarf those in the U.S.

“Strong public media is definitely part of the equation” in reducing political polarization in Germany, Rodney Benson, a media scholar at NYU and a co-author of two surveys of public media in leading democracies, told me. The fact that most Germans get “at least some portion of their news from this same high-quality, trusted source” is “bound to dampen the creation and circulation” of dueling perceptions of truth, he said.

Political signals back up the social science. There’s a logic to why populists around the world, including those in Germany, consistently attack public broadcasters: Robust public broadcasting mitigates polarization, the lifeblood of populism.

All this presents policy insights for the U.S. Other factors likely tamping down polarization in Germany, such as an electoral system based on proportional representation, are unlikely to be adopted in the U.S. anytime soon, but ramped-up investment in public media is a feasible reform—one the Biden administration could embrace if the president is serious about being the healer of national maladies that he cast himself as in his inaugural address.

Germany’s public-media success story began seven decades ago, when Schechter and his colleagues launched new papers and stations, recruited prodemocracy German staffers, and helped shape local laws to maintain media’s independence from the state, all of which eventually provided a legal and institutional framework when television emerged.

[Read: Teaching the Holocaust in Germany as a resurgent far right questions it]

In 1950, regional radio stations moved under the umbrella of a new national public broadcaster: ARD. Public media developed a unique federal structure, involving a network of regional broadcasters plus broadcasting laws and programming responsibilities devolved to the West German states. A postwar constitution enshrined principles such as freedom of broadcasting and noninterference by the state in media.

German public broadcasting “started off as a means of democratic reeducation and rerooting political pluralism in Germany, and then morphed into a means of preventing new forms of disinformation or propaganda, particularly from the East” during the Cold War, Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Germany at the Brookings Institution and a former journalist for the German weekly Die Zeit, told me. (Today, she added, public broadcasting has a new assignment: helping make German society more resilient against Russian and Chinese propaganda and disinformation efforts.)

Even now, when social media and online streaming have shattered the concept of appointment viewing, millions of Germans tune in to ARD’s 15-minute national bulletin, Tagesschau, each night at 8 o’clock. The program, which first aired in 1952 and which the journalist Marie-Sophie Schwarzer has described as “the most successful news show in the western world,” still attracts about 10 million viewers each day, or 12 percent of all Germans—compared with the roughly 3 percent of Americans who watch the most popular network evening-news show in the U.S.

Every night, “a heterogeneous audience … sits around the common campfire to listen to the day’s stories” on Tagesschau, the former American public-television broadcaster William F. Baker once marveled. “The show is done in a slick, clean, professional manner, similar in look to BBC newscasts but with a bit more technology. It’s delivered by news readers, not news personalities. The feeling is open and straightforward. The content is clear and feels complete, what you need to know free from editorial statements.”

In 2020, an edition of Tagesschau that aired after the German government announced its first COVID-related shutdown was the fifth-most-watched TV program of the year. (It was right up there with the UEFA Champions League final and two episodes of Tatort, a long-running crime show airing—where else?—on ARD, right after the evening news on Sunday.) At a moment of acute national crisis, Germans turned en masse to their trusted Tagesschau.

ARD’s nonpartisan political talk shows are also popular. And each day, 53 percent of Germans listen to one of ARD’s more than 60 radio stations. Nearly 40 percent of Germans (including similar percentages on the political left and right) cite ARD or a second national public broadcaster, ZDF, as their main news source. An astounding 82 percent of those on the left and 72 percent of those on the right say they trust ARD. In fact, public broadcasters are the most-trusted news sources in Germany.

Not all of the trend lines are so rosy. Germans with populist views are more distrustful of public media than other Germans. And Hartmut Wessler, a German media scholar at the University of Mannheim, told me that younger Germans, who tend to get their news online and on social media, “have a somewhat looser connection” to Tagesschau.

The hold that public broadcasting has on the nation, Stelzenmüller said, is “not the same” as it was during her grandparents’ time. “My grandfather expected dinner on a tray on Sunday nights at eight to watch the news, and then we would all watch Tatort together,” she recalled of her visits with him in the early 1980s. But German public broadcasting’s influence on the population is still far greater than that of PBS or NPR in the U.S., she added.

One obvious factor bolstering German public broadcasting is its high level of funding. German public media receive $135 per capita in public funding and $157 per capita in total funding (including additional revenue sources such as advertising and sponsorships). In the United States, public broadcasters get only $3 per capita in government funding and just $9 per capita when factoring in individual donations and corporate and foundation underwriting.

But just as key is the funding model. Germany’s public broadcasters are multibillion-euro enterprises largely financed by a flat broadcasting fee of about $20 a month paid by each household. Broadcasters don’t receive direct state subsidies and are thus less subject to government whims than, say, the U.S. Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives an annual appropriation from Congress. Funding in Germany is also designated for multiyear periods, which inhibits the government from making resources dependent on its views of programming.

[Read: Is it time for the Jews to leave Europe?]

The German fee is determined by an independent commission with representatives from each state who consider “only the technical and public-service needs” of the outlets, Benson, the NYU media scholar, said. (State legislative bodies still must approve the funding.) Wessler noted that “societal oversight” of public broadcasters occurs through broadcasting councils that supervise matters such as budgets, leadership, standards, and programming and aim to represent a range of groups such as trade unions, employers’ associations, religious organizations, and political parties.

ARD’s federal structure—with one national channel and numerous regional broadcasters that cater to the country’s 16 states—matters as well. The setup “has helped immensely to make [the system] more genuinely representative,” Stelzenmüller said. “Public broadcasting really does need to pick up what the consumer wants, and that may be regionally and politically different.”

Competition has helped too. Stelzenmüller noted that as a result of a push to privatize German television in the 1980s, “public broadcasters realized that they had become a little bit fuddy-duddy and needed to adapt.” (Tagesschau is now on TikTok, and ARD and ZDF support a web-TV operation called “Funk.”)

Germany’s public broadcasters don’t operate in some politics-free paradise, though. Critics argue that broadcasting councils operate with too much political influence, and last year a tussle among parties, ostensibly over a vote to raise the household license fee by 86 euro cents, threatened to bring down the governing coalition in one German state.

And although German politics remains relatively stable and centrist when compared with European peers, the reintegration of eastern and western Germany is still very much a rough work in progress. Germany certainly has its share of polarization challenges, with the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party and divisive debates over issues such as immigration.

Whatever the precise effect that public broadcasting has had on reducing polarization in Germany, the causality is complex. In contrast to the U.S., where commercial broadcasting came first and public broadcasting was tacked on later, public broadcasting was the early entrant in Germany; commercial television didn’t arrive until the 1980s. “The dominant media sets the tone for the entire media system,” Benson noted, providing “a model for other media to follow” and making “media that diverge from that standard appear less legitimate and appealing.”

There are limits, of course, to what the United States can learn from Germany’s success. Increased investment in public broadcasting will not counteract structural drivers of American polarization, such as gerrymandering, economic inequality, and the country’s majoritarian political institutions. But to get anywhere, Americans need to start somewhere. And media reforms are where some concrete progress could be made.

When I mentioned the idea of a major push by the Biden administration to boost public broadcasting, Thomas Carothers, a democracy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was skeptical, arguing that it was perhaps too late for such an effort to take root. “Once you’re really polarized, creating more public broadcasting or more public spaces is really hard, because people have already left the public space or they’ve already made their minds up,” Carothers, a co-editor of the book Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization, told me.

[Read: What’s the answer to political polarization in the U.S.?]

And yet when telling “the story of why the U.S. is so much more polarized than most established democracies,” he added, “certainly one element of it is the fact that in the United States, television went private and then went extreme much more extensively and quickly than in other countries.” Indeed, in their study, Boxell and his co-authors found that polarization accelerated in the U.S. after the mid-1990s, when Fox News and MSNBC launched.

That’s where the window (however narrow) for going big on public broadcasting opens. The right and the left, after all, are united in complaints about the current partisan-media landscape. And while no media outlet is in great shape in the eyes of most Americans, public media are less bruised and battered than the others—in keeping with trends in many democracies where public-service media are the most-trusted news outlets. In a 2020 Pew survey of Americans, PBS, the BBC, and The Wall Street Journal were the only three outlets that were more trusted than distrusted by both Republicans and Democrats. Two of those three are public broadcasters (and one isn’t even American).

One way to attract bipartisan backing for a surge of funds for public media, Benson proposed, would be for investments to take the form of “support for local journalism, which tends to be more popular and trusted than national media” (and has been shown to act as a bulwark against political polarization)—drawing inspiration from ARD’s regional structure in Germany and the BBC’s recently launched Local Democracy Reporting Service. “New public funding for PBS and NPR could be part of a larger package to ensure provision of nonpartisan regional and local media,” he suggested.

Such an approach could align with U.S. public broadcasters’ existing networks of local stations and build on bipartisan legislative proposals to support local journalism. States could enter into coalitions to undertake the effort if federal action isn’t possible.

Implementing an initiative like this at the national level would be difficult, Benson conceded. But he argued that it could come through policy reforms that are focused on combatting the partisanship and polarizing effects of commercial media, such as a “Fairness Doctrine for the social-media age.”

Policy makers could also make the case that an injection of public funds would yield a more inclusive American media ecosystem. U.S. public broadcasters “produce primarily for elite audiences,” whereas “the Western [and] Northern European ideal of public media is all about providing quality media for everyone,” Benson noted. “If PBS and NPR relied more on public rather than elite philanthropic funding, they would have more of an incentive to serve a broad public, and this might eventually help broaden their audience and crowd out some other media.”

Wessler, from the University of Mannheim, floated another idea that’s been bubbling up in Germany and might appeal more to American free marketeers: establishing “cooperative media platforms” that “bundle quality offerings from both market-driven and public-service news-media outlets,” partly funded through the country’s broadcast-license fee.

Efforts like these would surely face political opposition. “But once established, universal government services are very popular and rarely dismantled,” Benson pointed out. “Public media in the U.S. is so vulnerable because it’s not universal.”

The Lost Month That Haunts the World

2021-05-12T06:00:00-04:00

By early February 2020, China had effectively locked down tens of millions of its citizens. Entire hospitals were sprouting from scratch to cope with an onslaught of coronavirus cases there. The World Health Organization had just declared that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus was a “public health emergency of international concern.” And on February 7, I went on a radio show and spent much of the segment discussing the economic implications of the ordeal for East Asia.

I often think about that segment now and wonder how I could have been so unimaginative. I was so focused on the desperate scenes in China that I failed to consider that similar scenes could soon transpire around the world. Why didn’t I grab the mic, dispense with the usual commentary, and issue an urgent plea for the world to wake up?

I was not the only one—far from it. And that was, in large measure, the problem. In a report released today, the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response—a body established last year by the WHO’s director-general to identify lessons from the present pandemic and apply them to avert future ones—arrives at a stark conclusion. Drawing on a detailed chronological reconstruction of the pandemic, it finds that February 2020 stands out as “a lost month, when steps could and should have been taken to curtail the epidemic and forestall the pandemic.”

Had that month not been squandered, by a world “lulled into complacency” by the lack of a catastrophic pandemic in more than a century, “we believe we wouldn’t be looking at an accelerating pandemic,” former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, one of the panel’s co-chairs, told me and other journalists in a briefing on the report.

The report contains all sorts of ambitious recommendations for pandemic-proofing the world, including establishing a council on global health threats and launching an international pandemic-financing facility. But perhaps its most significant contribution is retrospective, showing in detail how unprepared the world was to contend with a pandemic “that has spread wider and faster than any in human history.”

The Cold War and 9/11 accustomed policy makers to thinking about threats, such as those posed by nuclear weapons and terrorist groups, that require us to react near-instantaneously when alerted to imminent danger. Many officials are struggling to process others, such as climate change, that play out over much longer time horizons.

But what COVID-19 has demonstrated is that the international system is not constructed to respond to the in-between speed of a pandemic—slower than a ballistic missile and faster than the cumulative effects of carbon emissions, yet just as much of a danger to humanity.

The threat of new pathogens, especially zoonotic diseases, is growing because of population booms and corresponding environmental pressures, while increasing air travel allows, as the report notes, “a virus to reach any place in the world in a matter of hours.” But global frameworks for countering such threats haven’t adapted to these contemporary realities. As Preeti Sudan, another panelist and India’s health secretary during the first months of the pandemic, told me, we need to better position ourselves to run “the race with the virus so that humanity wins.”

In February, the world stood at the starting block, waiting for the WHO to fire the gun, while the virus raced ahead.

In general, the panel does not apportion blame to particular parties, though there’s clearly plenty of that to mete out right now. But it has trained its reformist zeal on the 2005 International Health Regulations, which delineate legally binding rights and responsibilities for the WHO and its member states in assessing and responding to potential public-health emergencies.

The report calls out the International Health Regulations for being overly conservative and cumbersome relative to a highly contagious respiratory pathogen and the various means in the digital age of swiftly spotting and sharing signals that one might be coming. The current system for alerting the world about potential pandemics is biased toward inaction, the report notes, so that “steps may only be taken if the weight of evidence requires them.”

But that bias should be reversed in the case of respiratory infections, the panelists argue, where it is reasonable to apply “the precautionary principle” and assume that there will be sustained transmission between people unless the evidence specifically contradicts this assumption.

The panel concluded, for example, that the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China probably fulfilled the conditions to be declared a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, at least as early as the first meeting of the WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on COVID-19, on January 22, 2020. But the divided committee didn’t make the declaration until a week later—a crucial delay in the early stages of a potential pandemic—when there were already 98 cases in 18 countries outside China.

Clark noted that “if travel restrictions had been imposed more quickly, more widely … that would have been a serious inhibition on the rapid transmission” of COVID-19. But when the emergency committee declared the PHEIC on January 30, it did not recommend travel or trade restrictions. The WHO’s approach was guided by the International Health Regulations, which aim to “avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.”

And the declaration of the PHEIC itself was ineffective. The WHO was essentially ringing its “loudest alarm” under the International Health Regulations, as the report puts it, yet the sound registered only faintly around the globe; many people didn’t even realize that it was the WHO’s loudest alarm. (The WHO later declared a pandemic on March 11, when roughly 118,000 cases had been reported in 114 countries, but that term has no legal significance for the institution.)

The report notes that the PHEIC announcement in late January did not produce “forceful and immediate emergency responses in most countries,” which only occurred in March after the pandemic designation and once governments were already receiving reports of major COVID-19 outbreaks in other nations or rampant transmission and hospital overcrowding in their own countries—by which point, of course, the world was already battling against the viral tide.

There were exceptions; a small minority of countries, including several Asian nations that mined their experiences with previous disease outbreaks, reacted to the PHEIC declaration and other alerts by rapidly rolling out whole-of-government responses to the outbreak, some before they’d even registered their first COVID-19 case.

But the majority did not, and the panel identified two main reasons why: first, because “they did not sufficiently appreciate the threat and know how to respond,” and second, because “in the absence of certainty about how serious the consequences of this new pathogen would be, ‘wait and see’ seemed a less costly and less consequential choice than concerted public health action.” Trillions of dollars in pandemic-related expenses and myriad global convulsions later, we know that this was a tragically misguided calculation.

In its report, the panel sketches out a new international alert system. It proposes, for instance, that the WHO be granted new powers by the World Health Assembly, the institution’s decision-making body, to immediately “publish information about outbreaks with pandemic potential” without needing preapproval by national governments and to “investigate pathogens with pandemic potential in all countries” on short notice, using epidemic experts with standing visas. It urges the WHO to reward countries that respond early to outbreaks and to establish performance standards for issuing alerts about and responding to different types of outbreaks.

In the future, the panelists assert, the declaration of a PHEIC should be based on clear criteria and, in cases such as respiratory infections, on the precautionary principle. They maintain that the declaration should include explicit guidance on how countries should respond to the public-health threat, and thus “serve as a clarion call for emergency pandemic response across the world.”

“The disease surveillance and alert system needs to be overhauled,” Clark said. “Sensitivities about sovereignty should surely not delay alerting the world to the threat of a new pathogen with pandemic potential.”

Human nature, of course, often resists the precautionary principle; when confronted with problems that seem distant (say, a disease outbreak halfway around the world), we tend to put off urgent action—rather than recognizing that if we wait until we see the problem right in front of us, it may be impossible to avert. But if we manage to bake the principle into our international systems, it could have an impact on longer-term challenges such as climate change as well.

As Elizabeth Sawin, a co-director of the think tank Climate Interactive, recently told the journalist Beth Gardiner, “If we can tell [the] story of what we just went through [with the pandemic] and help people understand that this is an accelerated version of another story we’re going through that has the same plot structure but a different timeline, that could be transformative,”

I asked Clark whether there was a risk of overlearning the lessons from this pandemic (as ludicrous as that might sound at the moment) and engineering a system that, for instance, shuts down international trade and travel at the slightest sign of a potential pandemic.

A novel pathogen that can result in respiratory infections warrants “a particularly precautionary approach,” she said. “So it’s not that we’re saying ‘jump at every ghost.’ But this kind of ghost needs to be jumped at.”

COVID-19 Lays Bare the Price of Populism

2021-05-09T09:00:43-04:00

As populism has experienced a resurgence in recent years, many have focused on the hazards the ideology poses to democratic systems. But today’s complex and highly technical global threats—pandemics, climate change, cyberattacks, financial crises—that demand technocratic solutions have driven home a grim reality: Populism can place us all at risk.

In 2018, a burst of anger over government corruption propelled a populist politician named Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency. Brazil, which is currently suffering from one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks, is a prime example of how populist governance in one country can threaten the whole world. If the way out of the pandemic is through science, in the form of mass vaccination and other containment measures, the corollary is also true: The way we remain mired in it is, in large part, through the kind of anti-science worldview that populists frequently champion.

The shift to the pandemic’s vaccination phase has prompted many people to dwell at the micro level: When will I be fully vaccinated? When will my family and friends get their shots? When can we all revert to something resembling normal life? But that has lent a false sense of security to the vaccinated and obscured the perils lurking at the macro level, as devastating new waves of COVID-19 crash over countries such as India and Brazil and spread more transmissible variants of the virus beyond their shores.

“The United States may be advancing remarkably [with] the pace of vaccination, but so long as you have uncontrolled pandemics throughout the world, every contagion increases the likelihood of an ‘escape variant’ that eventually, with the level of interconnectedness we have, will find its way even [to] populations that have been vaccinated,” Julio Frenk, a former Mexican health minister and World Health Organization official, told me. “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”

Brazil has now suffered the second-most deaths from COVID-19—more than 400,000—of any country in the world, after the United States, and the third-most cases. In recent weeks, in fact, Brazil has accounted for about a fifth of all COVID-19 deaths worldwide—more than any other country except, of late, India. Home to 2.7 percent of the world’s population, Brazil has suffered 12.8 percent of the world’s deaths. At the present rate, more than a dozen Brazilians will die from COVID-19 in the time it takes to read this article.

In January, the Lowy Institute ranked Brazil last in its survey of 98 countries’ management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg’s Resilience Ranking, which aims to measure how 53 governments are handling the crisis, currently ranks Brazil 53rd.

The country’s outbreak has been driven in recent months by the P.1 variant, which emerged in the Amazon region of Manaus last fall. Studies in Brazil indicate that the variant, which particularly afflicts young people in new and alarming ways, may be up to twice as contagious as earlier forms of the virus, and 61 percent more likely to reinfect people, though there is no indication yet that it is deadlier or capable of evading immunity from current vaccines. Brazil’s health-care systems have come under severe strain, reeling from a continuous crush of COVID-19 patients that has produced acute shortages of intensive-care-unit beds and crucial supplies such as oxygen, anesthetics, and intubation drugs.

“The more contagion you have, the higher the likelihood that you will have a mutation and that that mutation will lead to a more contagious variant. And that’s exactly what’s happened,” said Frenk, now the president of the University of Miami.

The huge wave in Brazil has begun to ebb, but it appears to be washing over other South American countries, all but two of which share a land border with Brazil. The P.1 variant is now present in at least 44 countries, including the United States.

Pedro Hallal, the lead investigator for EPICOVID-19, the largest epidemiological study of COVID-19 in Brazil, told me that he’s concerned about new variants popping up in Brazil that could, for example, be more dangerous for children or undermine the effectiveness of existing vaccines. Brazil, he said, has become a “variants factory.”

Brazil’s predicament is particularly striking because it had an earlier warning about COVID-19 than its neighbors; the first case of the virus in Latin America and the Caribbean was reported in Brazil on February 26, 2020. And yet Bolsonaro and his allies in government chose to squander their precious lead time.

Even ahead of the pandemic, the president cut funding for Brazilian universities and the government’s education and science ministries. Those funding cuts now haunt Brazil, depriving its scientists of resources they need to study coronavirus variants.

As the virus spread around the world, Bolsonaro emerged as a leader of, as I put it in March 2020, the global “coronavirus-denial movement.” He trivialized the virus as a “little flu” and ridiculed those expressing concerns about it. He made a point of not wearing a mask and appearing in crowds of supporters, shaking hands and taking selfies. Worried about the damage that efforts to contain the virus would inflict on the Brazilian economy, he actively sought to thwart federal, state, and local officials’ efforts to impose lockdowns and other social-distancing measures early on in the pandemic—presenting Brazilians with a false choice between their physical and economic well-being. He cycled through a series of health ministers, clashing with those who disagreed with him and leaving the post vacant for a spell last year. The country also has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the world’s biggest cauldron of misinformation about COVID-19, often stoked by Bolsonaro and his supporters.

Hallal, whose COVID-19 study lost government funding in July, described rampant “anti-science messages” that surge through WhatsApp and Twitter and are also manifest in the “declarations from the president himself.” He told me, “I get daily messages [on] my phone about ineffective medicines, anti-lockdown messages, anti-vaccine messages, and even anti-mask messages.”

Even as he launched the country’s vaccination campaign, Bolsonaro himself said he had no plans to get vaccinated—quipping that vaccine makers were shielding themselves from responsibility should the vaccines turn people into crocodiles or give women beards and men high voices.

The Brazilian government also failed to stockpile vaccines in a timely manner. It rejected an early offer to buy Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and acquired only enough doses through the international COVAX Facility to cover a small percentage of its population. Brazil is now scrambling to catch up but grappling with a lengthy lag in obtaining and administering the necessary doses. At its current sluggish pace, Brazil will take another 12 months to vaccinate 75 percent of its population. This despite the fact that Brazil boasts a public-health infrastructure with a demonstrated capacity to conduct rapid vaccination campaigns at scale.

Maria Laura Canineu, the Brazil director for Human Rights Watch, told me that Bolsonaro’s “sabotage [of] efforts by others to slow the spread of the virus” extends beyond the country’s borders: “Brazil is the only developing country openly opposing a proposal by India and South Africa to waive some patent rules to allow wider production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines,” she noted.

Populist leaders were not necessarily doomed to botch their pandemic response. In an August 2020 assessment of 17 populist leaders, Brett Meyer of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change found that 12 took the coronavirus crisis seriously—including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, though more recent evidence indicates that Modi’s government dismissed scientific advisers’ warnings about new variants and the risks of permitting large political and religious gatherings in the lead-up to the country’s current surge of infections. But Meyer also concluded that several populist leaders—including Bolsonaro in Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, and Donald Trump in the United States—downplayed the crisis. Those same leaders have presided over some of the world’s worst outbreaks.

“There is an overrepresentation of governments led by populist leaders among the worst performers” against COVID-19, Frenk told me, also citing the examples of Bolsonaro, López Obrador, and Trump. “I’m not saying it’s a cause-and-effect relationship,” he added, “but it’s hard to [find] any example of a country with a populist leader that has done well.”

Frenk listed four common attributes of various populist leaders who have mishandled the pandemic: First, “the tendency to underestimate or dismiss expertise,” because “experts are considered part of the corrupt elites that the populist leader is going to defend people from”; second, “the distrust of science” and of the sort of “independent, critical thinking” that populist leaders with authoritarian inclinations dislike; third, the impulse to divide citizens between the “good people embodied by the populist leader” and “the corrupt elites,” even going so far as to politicize public-health measures such as mask wearing, rather than instilling in the public “a sense of shared destiny”; and fourth, the instinct to “trap themselves in a narrative” and then “refuse to acknowledge that they were wrong” and correct course, blaming others instead. The governments that have performed best against COVID-19, by contrast, have implemented policies “informed by science and by expertise and by political leaders who unify the country.”

“We used to say, when I worked at the World Health Organization, that there are communicable diseases and then there are communicated diseases,” Frenk told me. “If you fail to communicate clearly, based on science, that itself is a source of further contagion. Because in a pandemic, it’s not just the viruses that get spread, it’s the messages that get spread … And those messages then drive [public] behavior and adherence to public-health measures.”

Bolsonaro is finally, fitfully, changing his tone amid the undeniable gravity of Brazil’s latest COVID-19 outbreak and, perhaps more pertinent, pressure from a strengthening political opposition ahead of a presidential election next year. But his initial trivialization of the crisis set the country far back as the virus spread exponentially, which now makes matching and outpacing the threat with effective government policies all the more difficult.

A recent study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that “while no single narrative explains” the spread of COVID-19 in Brazil, it was driven by a “failure of implementing prompt, coordinated, and equitable responses” to the virus, and particularly by a federal government response that amounted to “a dangerous combination of inaction and wrongdoing,” in the context of the country’s preexisting health and socioeconomic inequities. The Brazilian Senate has just launched an investigation into the government’s handling of the pandemic; this week, one of Bolsonaro’s former health ministers testified that he had repeatedly tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the president “not to go down this extremely perilous path” of dismissing scientific recommendations.

“This is really a story about failed government leadership,” one of the authors of the Harvard study, Marcia Castro, recently told PRI’s The World. “And it’s failed leadership because it neglected science, it minimized the importance of the virus, it did not use the key advantage Brazil had—a universal health-care system and a large and organized network of primary care in Brazil. It’s also failed leadership because the government itself disseminated wrong information,” which “had an effect on compliance and trust in science from the population.”

The role played by anti-science movements around the world in fueling the pandemic has prompted Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, to propose building “new infrastructure” through institutions such as the United Nations, the WHO, and NATO to “combat antiscience, just as we have for ... other more widely recognized and established threats” to global security.

“The brightest side of this pandemic has been the level of collaboration among scientists from all over the world—from academia, industry, and government—working to deliver those vaccines,” Frenk said. “I am hoping that the pandemic has made the fruits of science so visible, and the dismal performance of populist leaders so obvious, that it will lead to a new era where we dismiss both the populist leaders and the anti-scientific” movement.

Then he paused. “But it could go the other way.”

Don’t Erase What Happened at the Capitol

2021-02-13T07:00:00-05:00

On the evening of February 5, as Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey retraced the steps he’d taken nearly one month earlier, hours after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, he saw little remaining evidence of destruction. The shattered glass where Ashli Babbitt was shot outside the Speaker’s Lobby? Repaired. The statues defaced by cigarette butts? Fixed. The broken windows? Boarded up. The benches reduced to shards? Removed.

But when he walked by the Columbus Doors at the main entrance to the Capitol, leading into the Rotunda—the same doors through which the caskets of American presidents pass to lie in state—he came across one lingering sign of the mob: A single pane of glass in one of the doors was still shattered, riddled with cracks that looked like a mess of stars and an upside-down six.

“I personally think that that panel, if security would allow for it to remain, I think it should,” Kim told me earlier this week. “These are the doors through which you see some of the most iconic images of the insurrectionists coming into the Capitol,” where “that hate and that division burst through into our temple of democracy.”

“I’m sure whenever I see it for the rest of my life, if that panel remains there or is preserved somewhere else, I will always feel that immediacy of the chaos and the tragedy,” he added.

[Robert A. Pape: The Capitol rioters aren’t like other extremists]

On Thursday, however, that last vivid reminder vanished as well, as staff came to remove the broken glass and fix the door. The damaged panes were nevertheless preserved, according to Erin Courtney, a spokesperson for the Architect of the Capitol.

“We are looking at options to display a collection after objects are no longer needed for prosecutorial purposes,” she told me, noting that the Architect of the Capitol has turned over “damaged items” and “debris” from the riot to the Department of Justice. She added that artwork taken down from the Capitol after January 6 needs special cleaning to remove damage from fire extinguishers, pepper spray, and other chemicals.

Whether it’s the smashed glass from the Columbus Doors or another evocative marker of the destruction, some damage from that day should be preserved in the Capitol before the rush to repair it all scrubs the memory from the edifice—as an enduring reminder to current and future generations of Americans of the fragility and resilience of American democracy, and the role we all play in upholding it. The broken glass could be permanently reinstalled in the Columbus Doors and safely reinforced if possible, for example. Or it could be prominently displayed nearby, as Kim and Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota proposed on Thursday in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Administration Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren.

Due consideration must be given to security, to ensuring that the building remains open for the work of the legislative branch, and to preventing any preserved evidence of the riot from becoming a shrine for the insurrectionists and their sympathizers. But what more powerful rebuke to those who sought to disrupt government business than getting on with that business in earnest while signaling that the attempted subversion will not be forgotten?

On the day of the insurrection, some suggested that such violence was alien to America. Senator Marco Rubio described the insurrection as “3rd world style anti-American anarchy,” while former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos characterized it as the stuff of “banana republics.” Americans passing through their legislature must be reminded that what transpired on January 6 was born of problems incubated in America, demanding solutions incubated in America. A sense of vulnerability reminds us of the need for vigilance. This is not the moment to shunt disturbing truths out of sight. An imperfect Capitol will be a greater source of inspiration for national renewal than a pristine one.

The notion of retaining damage in public buildings for such purposes might seem foreign to many Americans. As the journalist Andreas Kluth once observed in The Atlantic, the architecture of Washington, D.C., tends to tell “a fundamentally heroic narrative.” But that’s not the case everywhere in the world. Kluth contrasted this approach with the public architecture of modern Germany, which has been influenced by the philosophy that historical “scars must never be hidden” and “must instead be acknowledged, preserved, and displayed as an implicit reprimand to be moral and responsible in the here and now.” Many buildings built or rebuilt after German reunification surround “the disasters of the past” with “the achievements of the present” as “an exhortation for the future.”

As an example, Kluth cited the Reichstag, in Berlin, where the German Parliament meets. Renovating the building in the 1990s, construction workers discovered graffiti that had been scrawled on the walls by Russian soldiers when they seized control of the Reichstag from Nazi Germany in 1945. While some of the more offensive messages were removed, much of the graffiti was maintained in place for posterity as “a subtle warning against nationalism, hubris, and jingoism,” Kluth wrote.

[Nick Cullather: The architecture of fear has already made Congress worse]

Similar architectural decisions have been made elsewhere in Europe, from the National Museum in Prague to the General Post Office in Dublin. There’s also precedent in the United States itself. Scorch marks remain on the White House from when the British burned it in 1814, and a desk drawer in the Capitol retains a bullet hole from when Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the building in 1954.

Kim’s desire to maintain damage from the insurrection has been echoed by other lawmakers in both parties. Senator Mitt Romney recently suggested preserving “evidence of the destruction” so that people touring the building 150 years hence, when there will be no lived memory of the events of January 6, will say, “Ah, this is where that insurrection occurred.” Romney’s press secretary, Arielle Mueller, told me that “the senator has had informal conversations with [the] Senate curator’s office and the Architect of the Capitol about preserving parts of the damage.”

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents D.C. in Congress, told me that her office has reached out to Romney’s. Her staff is also investigating what insurrection-related damage remains at the Capitol and developing a bill directing Capitol authorities to preserve and display it somehow, as visible evidence of what occurred at a time when Americans’ shared sense of reality has been shattered.

“We don’t want the Capitol to be a wreck or anything of the kind,” she said, “but we do think it would be a disservice to erase this historic event.” This was “unprecedented,” she emphasized. Yes, the British burned the Capitol in 1814. But “that wasn’t from the inside.”

She envisions something to point to in the Capitol, maybe with a plaque under it so visitors can discover the damage on their own, blended in with the business of Congress. “I’d not want the tour guide to have to go out of his way. I want him to go past the very same places that he goes anyway,” she said. “And as he goes through, he should not simply [be] saying, ‘The Rotunda is where we meet and have these extraordinary services.’ He should also point to, if there is a marking there, what happened”—not just the tragedy of the insurrection but also the triumph of lawmakers returning to the Capitol immediately after the trauma to affirm the results of the 2020 election.

Norton’s vision reminded me of something Jane Campbell, the head of the United States Capitol Historical Society, had told me in the days right after the insurrection, as she walked the streets near the Capitol with sirens blaring in the background.

“The British came and burned [the Capitol] down. And we built it back,” she said. “Abraham Lincoln made a conscious decision that even with all the economic stress the country was going through, we were going to continue to build the dome as a symbol that the union would come back together.”

“The most important message from the whole drama [on January 6] is that the Congress came back and did the work of democracy,” she continued. “That even with broken windows, having been hunched under chairs with gas masks, unsure what was happening, sending text messages to their family that they love them, the Congress, Republicans and Democrats who didn’t get along [on] all kinds of things, said, ‘We’re going to come back.’”

One Country Has Jumped Ahead on Vaccinations

2021-01-23T06:00:00-05:00

One nation has already provided more than a quarter of its people with at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, outpacing every other country in the world and more than sextupling the percentage in the United States. During one recent three-day period, in fact, it administered a dose of the vaccine to a higher percentage of its population than the U.S. has altogether. Nearly three-fourths of those over age 60 have gotten their first shot. And most of the population could be vaccinated by the end of March, which would be earlier than any nation except, perhaps, tiny Palau and the Vatican. The government is now preparing “passports” for the twice-jabbed that will exempt them from quarantines.

It’s the kind of standout success one would expect from the now-familiar stars of the global response to COVID-19—Taiwan, South Korea, or New Zealand. But it’s actually been achieved by Israel, in several respects a surprising country to be the world’s front-runner on vaccine distribution. A 2019 Johns Hopkins study ranked Israel an unspectacular 54th among 195 countries in terms of preparedness for a pandemic. After initially appearing to vanquish the coronavirus, Israel has since suffered some of the world’s worst outbreaks—something that remains true as it celebrates its vaccine advances. And during a pandemic in which public trust in government has emerged as arguably the most consistent ingredient across countries for success in combatting the virus, public confidence in Israel’s political leaders is dismally low. The Israeli government currently has the distinction of being one of the most unstable in the democratic world.

[From the September 2020 issue: How the pandemic defeated America]

So how exactly has Israel pulled off this unlikely feat? The answer traces back decades to the embryonic health infrastructure created before the State of Israel even existed. That, in turn, should serve as a sobering reminder for Americans: Nations faring well against the virus are drawing on preexisting strengths, not flexing muscles suddenly conjured amid the crisis or, say, a change in administrations.

The countries that have performed best against COVID-19 have been those “that in general have good public-health infrastructures—and we [in the United States] just don’t,” Helene Gayle, the head of the Chicago Community Trust and a veteran of the CDC, told me.

“There’s a big lesson from this, which is: You’re not going to be ready for a pandemic if you don’t have your data systems in place, your surveillance systems, your state-level funding for the infrastructure, so that you can distribute [vaccines] effectively and fast,” argued Gayle, a co-chair of a recent study on how to equitably allocate COVID-19 vaccines.

And as the world shifts from focusing solely on containing the virus to rolling out vaccines as well, the key determinant of success is morphing from the credibility of the government to the credibility of the health-care system. As the scholars Jeremy A. Greene and Dora Vargha have observed, vaccines are at least in part “technologies of trust” that rely on people “maintaining confidence in national and international structures through which vaccines are delivered.”

The apparent paradox of Israel being both a “vaccine champ” and a “contagion chump,” as the Israeli journalist David Horovitz memorably put it, becomes less mystifying on closer inspection. Whereas some countries that did better in flattening the curve of coronavirus cases, such as Australia and South Korea, at first proceeded cautiously with plans to approve and procure vaccines, because they felt they had the virus under control, pandemic-battered Israel didn’t have that luxury. What the Israeli government felt instead was urgency.

Ahead of elections this March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast himself as the face of the country’s vaccination campaign (he got Israel’s first COVID-19 shot) and its dealmaker in chief, negotiating directly with Pfizer’s CEO and reportedly paying Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna top dollar to receive doses quickly and at scale when global supplies are tight.

Netanyahu recently announced an agreement with Pfizer that will send hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses to Israel per week. Israel, in turn, will serve as something of a national clinical trial—or, in the prime minister’s words, a “global model state for the rapid vaccination of an entire country.” It will send Pfizer anonymized medical information about the effects of the vaccine on the population and on curbing the epidemic. The statistical data could yield lessons not only for Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies as they continue to develop COVID-19 vaccines, but also for other countries and international organizations working on their own vaccination campaigns.

But the story of Israel’s success is arguably more about distribution than procurement. As Dany Bahar, an Israeli economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., recently observed, focusing on what the Israeli government has managed to negotiate overlooks why it was in a strong negotiating position in the first place. It could present itself to pharmaceutical companies as an attractive “pilot country” for an effective mass-vaccination program for its 9 million–plus people because of its small size and the “vast public health infrastructure” that the state has invested heavily in over the past seven decades, building on a tradition of socialist-minded worker health-care cooperatives that preceded the state’s founding.

[Read: Where year two of the pandemic will take us]

As Bahar noted, the modern manifestations of these cooperatives are Israel’s four nonprofit health-maintenance organizations, or HMOs, which offer health care to all citizens through an individual mandate and social-security payroll contributions, share a single electronic medical-record system, and benefit from a “centralized chain of command” that allows them to implement plans across the nation’s range of medical facilities. These HMOs don’t just help cover medical expenses; they also operate clinics and provide doctors.

“When it comes to understanding the early success and—perhaps as importantly—the reason why pharma companies trusted Israel in its ability to implement this massive endeavor, it comes down to its public-health system, inherited by those in power today,” Bahar argued.

The semiprivate, publicly funded HMOs, which don’t respond to the same profit incentives that private insurance companies in the United States do, are present not just in big cities but also in more remote and disadvantaged locations such as “poor, smaller Arab towns or Bedouin villages in the Negev” desert, Bahar wrote to me in an email. “The contrast in my mind here was rural America, which will be hard to vaccinate if people there have to drive one and a half hours each way to the closest CVS or clinic.” (In this regard, Israel benefits immensely from being a much smaller country than the United States.)

The HMOs have helped make Israel’s health-care system one of the most efficient in the world. And crucially—and in contrast to public sentiment regarding the government and other aspects of the health-care system such as surgery or queues for services—confidence in these health funds is widespread; roughly three-quarters of Israelis say they trust their HMO physician, and 90 percent say they are satisfied with their plan. This trust matters, because the HMOs are at the forefront of the vaccination campaign.

To execute that campaign, the Israeli Ministry of Health has acted as a hub for receiving the vaccines from drugmakers and distributing them to the HMOs. The HMOs tapped into the country’s digital medical records to determine the order in which population segments needed to be vaccinated, and speedily set up hundreds of vaccination centers across the country.

While Israelis must be members of an HMO, they can choose which one and have the option each year of switching to another if they are unhappy with the services they’ve received. “The competition between these HMOs facilitated a much more efficient vaccination rollout,” as did additional competition with independent hospitals, Cyrille Cohen, a professor at Bar-Ilan University and member of a coronavirus vaccine advisory committee to the Health Ministry, wrote to me by email. It helped foster what he called “‘vaccinal capitalism.’”

Cohen told me he got his shots by tuning into regular updates on the news about which demographic group was eligible to be vaccinated next. He logged into his account on his HMO site when he learned it was his turn, chose a vaccination center based on his location, and scheduled an appointment. “Thirty seconds after confirming, I got a text on my cell with all the info, including date, time, place and already a second appointment for [the] next shot, exactly three weeks apart,” he told me. It all took “less than two minutes.” There are alternative options if you don’t use the internet or prefer to get your vaccination at a hospital rather than through your HMO.

As Bahar sees it, Israel’s HMO infrastructure and medical-record system have enabled it to achieve two of the three requisite goals for a staged national vaccination program when supplies are short: targeting shots to the people who most need them and ensuring that those who are eligible can access the vaccine for free. But he told me that what he sees as the third requirement—a public understanding that the vaccine is safe and that the whole population must be vaccinated to end the COVID-19 crisis—still depends on the confidence in government that was so essential for countries to beat back the virus during the pandemic’s first phase.

Israel has also performed well on this third front. “Only 9 percent of the population has declared that they won’t get the vaccine,” which is low compared with many Western countries (including the United States) and in keeping with the practical, “start-up nation” mentality of Israelis, Cohen observed.

But he added that Israel’s success looks more uneven when you zoom in on the specifics, noting that vaccination rates in the Arab population and Ultra-Orthodox populations are only half those of the general population. Misinformation and a lack of trust in Israeli authorities, among other challenges, are tamping down rates among both groups.

Israel’s vaccination drive also doesn’t include Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as Israeli and Palestinian authorities each accuse the other of shirking their responsibility for these populations. Even when you zoom back out, Israel’s successful procurement of vaccines raises broader questions about the inequitable global distribution of vaccines between rich and poor countries that may only grow more pronounced in the coming months.

While the Biden administration has ambitious plans to invest $20 billion in a new campaign to vaccinate the nation through federally supported vaccination sites, the reality is that there are limits to what a country can do if it neglected to invest in the prerequisites for an effective response until the crisis was already upon it.

"We would never think, Let’s wait until we’re in the middle of a war to fund our military. But we do that all the time with our public-health infrastructure” in the U.S., said Gayle. “That’s the backdrop against which we are now trying to do what is the most complex public-health implementation that we’ve ever had, which is getting this vaccine rolled out and effectively given to diverse populations.”

[Read: The] long haul of vaccine results is just beginning

To make progress, the United States would do well to play to its unique strengths, just as Israel did with its HMOs. To cite an example that’s especially relevant now, as new coronavirus variants emerge around the world that could undermine the effectiveness of vaccines: The United States has so far sequenced only 0.3 percent of its COVID-19 genomes—a process that would help it track the virus’s genetic changes—even though the U.S. has more genomic-sequencing capacity than any other country, according to Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine. It currently ranks a middling 43rd in the world on percentage of COVID-19 cases sequenced. When it comes to combatting the coronavirus, America has the science in spades. But that scientific knowledge has repeatedly been detached from its public-health response.

The United States has failed at every stage in the fight against COVID-19, from its inadequate diagnostic testing and genomic sequencing to what now appears to be its botched vaccine rollout, Hotez told me. “There was never a plan to vaccinate the American people,” he argued, noting that the military-led logistics for the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed seem to have been “all about loading boxes off UPS and FedEx trucks and keeping them cold,” rather than focused on fashioning efficient, effective, and equitable systems for getting the vaccine doses in those boxes into Americans’ arms.

“The states put in place an adult-vaccination infrastructure that was basically just the pharmacy chains and the hospitals, maybe a few community clinics,” Hotez said. “It was not nearly adequate for the task at hand: to vaccinate three-quarters of the American people. And we’re backed into a corner now because, since we failed to even attempt to do COVID-19 control, we’ve put all of our eggs in the vaccine basket.”

The way out might be leaning more on the few institutions that still retain high levels of trust among Americans—the equivalents of Israel’s HMOs. In a new survey, the communications firm Edelman identified a striking dynamic in the United States (and many other countries): Although public trust in government is low, trust in business and particularly people’s employers is higher, even across the country’s political divide. That argues for the U.S. government to work more closely with the private sector on vaccinations, as Washington State’s health department just announced it will do by establishing a “Vaccine Command and Coordination Center" in partnership with companies such as Starbucks and Microsoft.

But the fact that this public-private innovation is happening at the state level is revealing. The federal government’s decision to send vaccines to states but then delegate the administration of the vaccines to under-resourced local authorities has produced a bewildering, disorganized patchwork—what often amounts to public health by happenstance. In contrast to Israel, far more doses have been distributed across the United States than shots given. Americans are scrambling to track down doses however they can—whether a tip from their mail carrier, a text from a friend, or a trip to the grocery store to buy Hot Pockets. Even when they are deemed eligible to be vaccinated, too many Americans are finding that maxed-out appointments, crashing websites, and endless hold times mean they can’t avail themselves of the opportunity. Cyrille Cohen’s two-minute sign-up this is not.

Israelis know exactly where to turn for their vaccine: their familiar HMO, which provides for all their family’s primary-care needs. Many Americans, even when their time for a shot has finally come, don’t know what to do or where to go. Employers, having built up trust and personal connections with their employees, could potentially fill that void in the United States.

Israel has “a system of community clinics and community public health. We don’t do that. I mean, what do we have? We have Sam’s Club and Rite Aid and Walgreens and hospital chains,” Hotez said. In the U.S., “it’s all privatized. And it works for some things. But for an ambitious undertaking to vaccinate the American people, it’s an abysmal failure yet again.”

The Damage Will Last

2020-11-27T07:00:00-05:00

“The guardrails of our system actually worked,” the political analyst Amy Walter marveled on Monday evening, capturing how many reacted to the Trump administration initiating a formal transition of power to the Biden administration. American democracy had survived its weeks-long brush with disaster, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims, surreal press conferences, and shaky legal challenges. All of this brought relief (“excellent news for American democracy”), triumphalism (“we saved ourselves and America”), ample use of the past tense (“Never forget how dangerous and abnormal this all was”), and ridicule of the Trumpian sideshow (“rage tweeting” and “comical lawsuits”).

This isn’t over, folks. While the decision to begin the transition process does amount to an implicit concession by the president, Trump hasn’t yet explicitly acknowledged his loss—and there are indications he might never do so. As I write, in fact, the president is continuing to insist that the “2020 Election Hoax” will “go down as the most corrupt election in American political history,” that he will continue to press this case, and that he “will never concede to fake ballots & ‘Dominion.’”

[Adam Serwer: The crisis of American democray is not over]

Trump’s attack on the election wasn’t and isn’t a sideshow. As far as American democracy is concerned, this is the main show. A democracy at grave risk one day cannot be pronounced healthy the next. The precedents Trump has set, the doubts he has sown, and the claims he has made will linger. Restoring faith in the democratic process will take time and effort—and a favorable result is by no means guaranteed.

As I wrote during the 2016 campaign, when Trump was threatening to not accept a loss to Hillary Clinton, democracy depends on the consent of the losers. The capacity of candidates to lose gracefully—or, more specifically, to consent to the winning candidates’ right to govern, and to restrain themselves from stirring up grievances among their supporters—is at the core of democracy.

As the authors of Losers’ Consent, a 2005 survey of old and new democracies around the world, pointed out, it’s typical for the losers of an election to be dissatisfied with the results of the race and the democratic process that produced them. But assuming that the vote is free and fair, they wrote, functioning democracies are predicated on the recurrence of a subtle miracle each election cycle, one we tend to not appreciate until it’s missing: The losers overcome that “bitterness and resentment” and prove “willing, first, to accept the decision of the election and, second, to play again next time.”

At the moment they might be most tempted to subvert democratic institutions, the losers must instead recognize as legitimate a process that just yielded a bad outcome for them. Since winners have much more of an incentive to continue playing the democratic game than losers do, “losers are the crucial veto players of democratic governance,” the authors wrote.

When I spoke with him ahead of the Trump administration authorizing the transition, Shaun Bowler, one of the co-authors of Losers’ Consent and a political scientist at UC Riverside, told me that he assessed Trump’s refusal to concede as not mere noise but also signal. When a football team loses the Super Bowl, he noted, the defeated players don’t rough up the referees and denounce them and the opposing team as crooked. They don’t seize the cameras as a victorious player declares, “I’m going to Disney World!” and yell, “No, you’re going down!”

“If you don’t [have] respect for the rules of the game, you don’t play that game anymore,” he explained.

The commentators who discount Trump’s attacks on the election tend to argue that Trump is unique, and so his challenge to the democratic process is best seen as an isolated event. But just as the president’s America First worldview channeled a real current of thought in the United States about the country’s role in the world, even as it amplified and shaped those views, Trump’s particular challenge to democracy is rooted in broader discontents.

“America is in deep trouble,” André Blais, another co-author of Losers’ Consent and a political scientist at the University of Montreal, told me late last week, pointing to the country’s struggling democratic institutions and severe partisan polarization. Blais believes that “there are very few politicians of the Trump type,” which is why he remains “cautiously optimistic” about American democracy over the long term. But he noted that the essential dynamic of losers’ consent is obviously “not working well” in the United States, and not just because of the president’s reaction to the election result. “The principle that it’s your turn sometimes and not your turn other times—at least some people don’t seem to accept it” anymore, Blais said.

[John Dickerson: Why you don’t mess around with presidential transitions]

Bowler said it was important to avoid overstating the danger that Trump’s refusal to acknowledge defeat poses to the U.S. political system. But he appended a big caveat to that note of reassurance: There’s no direct precedent in modern American history, or even among other democracies, for what’s happening now in the United States. He ticked off a series of potential foreign analogues before dismissing each one. Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refused to accept the results of his country’s 2006 and 2012 elections, but he wasn’t yet president at those times and democracy in Mexico is far less entrenched than it is in the United States. Charles de Gaulle railed against France’s Fourth Republic for years, but its collapse in 1958 gave way to a Fifth Republic that remained democratic. “This really hasn’t happened before [to] this degree,” Bowler said. “An established democracy walking away from its own democracy, walking away from its own processes.”

And the thing about something unprecedented is that it sets new precedents. Many of the rituals that have helped heal a divided country after past elections—the concession call and speech, the meeting of the current president with the president-elect at the White House, the orderly transition—have been absent in the weeks since the 2020 election. Other rituals (the incumbent’s presence at the president-elect’s inauguration, for example) could vanish as well. Refusing to recognize defeat and attempting to reverse the outcome of the election even if there’s no sound basis for questioning the results could take root as new precedents. That might be especially true if Trump’s brand of populism remains a gathering force in the United States. The political logic of populism argues against acknowledging electoral defeat, because populists would rather attribute their losses to elite conspiracies than acknowledge that they lack popular support.

Bowler said his concerns extend beyond Trump to the many (though not all) Republican leaders who have supported his unsubstantiated attacks on the integrity of the election. (Republican calls for Trump to concede have grown louder in recent days as states have certified election results.) There might be rational short-term political reasons for why they’re doing so, he allowed, “but there’s a longer-term consequence, which is that they’re standing by while someone denies the legitimacy of the electoral process and they’re saying, [to] varying degrees, ‘Yes, that’s right.’”

There are also clear signs that Trump’s message is resonating widely with his supporters. Republican trust in the electoral system has plummeted. (The president, in fact, has followed his announcement of the transition by tweeting about the high numbers of Trump voters who believe the election was stolen and who have lost confidence in the country’s democratic system, tending the doubts he has sown.) The key question, Blais told me, is how many Republicans truly believe Trump’s claims of fraud and how many are simply echoing the president’s narrative out of disappointment with the outcome—a distinction that the blunt instrument of polling can’t capture. “I assume it’s a small minority” who are true believers, Blais said, “but if it’s not a small minority, this is really a huge concern.”

[Tom Nichols: A large portion of the electorate chose the sociopath]

The recent threats of violence against public officials underscore the danger. “Once people begin questioning the legitimacy of the result and questioning the integrity of public officials, then things can begin to unravel pretty broadly,” Bowler said. “We can guess that from now on lots of close races will be contested and called out as being corrupted, so we will see lots of elected officials having to defend themselves from charges of fixing elections.” In today’s information environment, he added, conspiracy theories and allegations of cheating involving the 2020 election will stick around and animate actors—including networks such as OAN and Newsmax—with a stake in keeping alive bitter memories of the race. Trump supporters might remain politically disaffected for much longer than is typical after disputed contests, creating a segment of the electorate that is not just temporarily disappointed but also chronically disillusioned.

“People can nurse grudges for a long time,” Bowler said, especially when those grudges stem from claims of cheating. That’s why it’s so important for losing candidates to concede.

The statement Bill Clinton delivered on December 14, 2000, after the Supreme Court halted the recount of votes in Florida, is one of the best examples of losing gracefully. “Last night President-elect Bush and Vice President Gore showed what is best about America,” he said, referring to Al Gore’s concession speech and George W. Bush’s victory address. “The essential unity of our Nation was reflected in the words and values of those who fought this great contest.” Gore’s statement, and then Clinton’s, effectively delivered the presidency to Bush after one of the most contentious elections in American history. In Losers’ Consent, the authors cite Gore’s decision to concede after the Court’s ruling as a striking example of the “democratic bargain” functioning properly—especially since Gore had lost so narrowly, and polls at the time showed that 97 percent of his voters thought he was the rightful president of the United States.

Recently, just as Trump was tweeting about the “meaningless” 2020 vote, I got on a Zoom call with Terry Edmonds, Paul Glastris, and John Pollack, the three speechwriters who worked on Clinton’s statement. They recalled springing into action once word came of the Court’s decision and Gore’s plan to concede, gathering on a well-worn yellow couch in Edmonds’s basement West Wing office to figure out what the president would say next.

They were young, idealistic, and aggrieved by what they perceived as an injustice rendered by the nation’s highest court—and, more practically, were now apparently out of the jobs they thought they might have in a future Gore administration. They recalled that early elements of the draft “came in hot.” Typed notes from Pollack observed that there was “justifiable frustration” and “even anger” over the fact that tens of thousands of ballots in Florida hadn’t been tallied, and pointed out that Gore got more votes than any presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. The country’s democratic system, he wrote, was based on the premise that every American’s vote should count. “It felt like the system, to me personally, was broken or breaking,” Pollack recalled.

Many of these points didn’t make it into the full draft that Pollack eventually walked over to the Situation Room and sent to Clinton, who was visiting the United Kingdom at the time. The heat had been dialed down. But that draft, while expressing the president’s commitment to ensuring a “smooth transition of power” to Bush, dwelled on Gore’s “principled defense” of “the right of every citizen to vote, and to have that vote count” and the need for “healing the partisan breach, and restoring public confidence in our electoral system.”

[Read: How Bill Clinton’s statement on Al Gore’s 2000 concession evolved]

The draft “wasn’t bitter” or “angry,” Glastris recalled. “It just acknowledged what the people who voted for Al Gore and supported Bill Clinton were feeling. It was, in its own way, magnanimous.”

But in the humbling experience that is the speechwriter’s lot, Clinton sent back the draft hours later having crossed out, with a black Sharpie, every word but “I … Vice President Gore” and “I … want to … the American people.” He’d rewritten it all. The reference to Gore’s defense of counting votes was gone. The mentions of the partisan breach and lack of confidence in U.S. elections were gone. Yes, the nation was divided and he disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision, Clinton allowed in the remarks he ultimately delivered. But he accepted the verdict, echoed Gore’s concession speech, and emphasized the need to rediscover “unity” and “common ground.”

“We worked for [people], for both the president and the vice president, who were statesmen, who were adults in the room, who understood that this was a moment that called for a lot more conciliation than rancor,” Edmonds told me.

“What I think [Clinton] did was take out anything that anyone could point to and say, ‘Sore loser,’” Glastris added. “His audience was the history books. His audience was the next administration. He didn’t want to … mar the message he wanted to deliver, which is: ‘You won. Pass the baton.’”

Pollack told me that he had deliberately tucked away his early notes on the statement in his official speechwriting file for posterity because he’d felt the point that every vote must count was so central to American democracy and the episode of American history he was living through, even if it wasn’t necessarily appropriate for Clinton to focus on it in his remarks.

But what happens to our democracy when the grievances of those who lose elections aren’t carefully wordsmithed out of presidential remarks and pocketed for the enlightenment of future generations, to avoid igniting the kindling of despair that elections leave behind? What happens when they are instead aired far and wide—indeed, fanned by an American president declaring the country’s entire democratic system “RIGGED”?

Trump is a unique political actor, Blais said, but “if the results of 2000 had happened today, [even] without Trump, but with all this partisan polarization, I don’t know what would have occurred.” He exhaled sharply, plainly bewildered by what he was witnessing across the border in the United States. “This will be tough. Very tough.”

The Pandemic Is Revealing a New Form of National Power

2020-11-15T06:00:00-05:00

Each geopolitical age places a premium on particular forms of national power—seapower and colonial possessions prior to the world wars, nuclear weapons and alliance networks during the Cold War, soft power after the Cold War. And the new era ushered in by COVID-19 has done so as well, revealing the salience of “resilient power”: a country’s capacity to absorb systemic shocks, adapt to these disruptions, and quickly bounce back from them. As the scholar Stephen Flynn once told me, the aim of resilience is to design systems not just so they can endure shocks, but also so they can “fail gracefully and recover nicely.”

The pandemic has taught us that today, a country’s best offense is a good defense. One of its lessons is that national clout and advantage, and thus international power dynamics, will be rooted in resilient power amid the types of mass traumas that look set to dominate this century—not just pandemics, but also climate change, cyberattacks, financial crises, and disinformation campaigns. And right now, it’s a measure of power where the United States is clearly falling short.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, most foreign-policy discussions focused on other challenges: The 9/11 attacks indicated the rise of non-state actors, while the nationalist administrations of Donald Trump in the United States and Xi Jinping in China signaled the dawn of great-power competition. These narratives were accurate, but incomplete. In ways we didn’t fully appreciate at the time, both developments were also early signs that countries needed to get serious about cultivating the capabilities to rapidly recover from the blows that terrorism, on the one hand, and the vulnerabilities inherent in international interdependence, on the other, would deal them. They were about the coming imperative of resilience, and its emergence as a source of state power.

When the coronavirus arrived, as the historian Sulmaan Khan has observed, it “didn’t care how many aircraft carriers you had or how many Confucius Institutes you could stick up around the world or what size your economy was. The virus asked simply how your least wealthy people would be treated in times of illness. How effectively you could trace the contacts of those it afflicted. How swiftly your medical system could cope with unexpected demands. It wouldn’t spare you completely, of course, but if you could meet it with a dull, technocratic honesty, it would be easier to survive.”

[Read: Why America resists learning from other countries]

The need for governments and societies to be resilient in order to thrive is not new. The political scientist Joseph Nye, who coined the term soft power, pointed, for example, to how the United States overcame the ravages of the Great Depression to fight World War II and to how Europe and Japan surmounted the physical devastation of that war. (Nye is on the board of the Atlantic Council, where I work.)

What’s new is the scale at which, and the frequency with which, that need is arising. “There’s a greater complexity” with contemporary threats as a result of globalization, Nye told me. “We have less historical precedent [for] or understanding” of today’s challenges, and that demands “a new dimension of resilience.”

When I asked William Hynes of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, who has been studying ways to shock-proof countries, what made resilience any more crucial an asset in this century than in previous ones, he recruited a clutch of economists, scientists, and engineers—Alan Kirman of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Benjamin Trump and Igor Linkov of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center—to help answer my questions. They wrote that while “increasing efficiency” in industry and society “was the main policy objective of the 20th century,” this spawned more interconnected systems with new vulnerabilities that have made enhancing resilience (often at the expense of efficiency) the main policy objective of the 21st. Nowadays, they noted, systemic shocks not only are more common and intense but also increasingly cascade from one complex system to another. Witness how the outbreak of a novel virus in Wuhan, China, swiftly paralyzed the global economy.

In such a world, power is not what it used to be. “Tomorrow’s successful states will probably be those that invest in infrastructure, knowledge, and relationships resilient to shock,” the U.S. National Intelligence Council predicted in a 2017 report. “Traditional calculations of state power” might include military spending, population size, or gross domestic product, but “rarely factor in a state’s resilience,” which depends more on matters such as strong alliances, an orderly society, robust critical infrastructure, and widespread public confidence in government, the analysts noted. Conversely, they added, “states can be fragile in ways that conventional measures of power do not capture.”

If there were one elemental building block of resilience shared by all nations that exhibit it—one weird trick that united every country that has made the most progress in combating COVID-19—then enhancing resilience might be easy. But the pandemic has shown that resilience comes in many different forms. It is, as The Atlantic’s Ed Yong has written, about the mundane alchemy of doing “enough things right.”

What makes some countries more resilient than others, Michele Grossman, a resilience expert at Deakin University in Melbourne, told me, is “how well the interdependent and interactive systems that make up ‘the nation’ are working.”

[Read: How the pandemic defeated America]

Australia has so far performed better against the coronavirus than has the United States, which Grossman attributed to a host of variables. She pointed, for instance, to the Australian government’s early restrictions and preparedness measures even before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, which reflected the “resilience principle of being adaptive and dynamic … in response to new circumstances.” Other factors ranged from the government’s prioritization of suppressing the virus over reopening the economy, which recognized that resilience requires “trade-offs between systems,” to Australians’ “long history of lived resilience” from experiencing natural disasters, which underscores that resilience emerges “in contexts of adversity.”

Australia is hardly the only template. Take democratic Germany’s gyroscopic variety of resilience, where social systems autocorrect through government policies such as short-time work programs that kick in as the economy starts to reel, or autocratic China’s far more volatile variety, where the authoritarian system both severely exacerbates the shock and plays a role in accelerating recovery. Writing in The Atlantic in March, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the most important variable for national performance against the virus was not regime type but the capacity of, and especially public trust in, government.

And resilience isn’t just some systemic, impersonal way of national being. It’s also, at its core, quite personal. Leadership matters. “Responding to scientific evidence and insight is now a source of national strength and therefore power; those [who] ignore it will not be able to build resilience to contain shocks,” Hynes and his colleagues told me. “It is hard to mobilize the relevant actors, ideas, and resources to face a threat that political leaders do not believe in.”

Several countries that have proved resilient during the pandemic have consequently become more influential actors in the world. Despite its tiny population and geographic isolation, New Zealand has emerged as a world leader “in implementing resilience governance,” Hynes and his colleagues said. Not only is it now involved in a coronavirus-coordination group with the United States and its top Asian allies, but it has also been part of a new, informal bloc of small and midsize countries—Australia, Israel, Singapore, and several European nations, known as “First Movers”—that have shared best practices in combating COVID-19 and explored forming trade and travel bubbles with each other. “Part of being resilient,” Grossman noted, is “knowing when you need to turn to others for help or support, whether you’re an individual or a nation.”

The scholar Bruce Jones has chronicled how a number of the world’s “middle powers” have, “in the absence of credible great-power leadership from the United States or China … led the way in coordinating health and economic responses” to COVID-19—an extension of their pre-pandemic efforts to bolster the multilateral system. They have, for instance, collaborated on financial responses through the Group of Seven and raised billions of dollars for international work on developing and distributing vaccines. Middle-power governments that have navigated the crisis relatively well have bolstered their reputations at home and abroad. Governments that have fared relatively poorly have sustained serious damage to their reputations and thus their standing at home and stores of soft power abroad.

The United States’ struggles thus far to contain the virus have had real (if potentially only temporary) negative consequences for U.S. power, placing the dollar in a more vulnerable position and devaluing the American passport. The crisis could significantly dent America’s economic power depending on when the country gets its outbreak under control, Nye said, and “our soft power in the short run is greatly diminished, because part of our soft power … was for competence, and we’ve demonstrated extraordinary incompetence.”

But the U.S. remains a military and economic superpower, and Nye argued that it is capable of recovering from these setbacks and regaining any power it has shed during the pandemic. He doesn’t think COVID-19 will ultimately alter the relative balance of power between the United States and China. Middle powers may come out of the crisis with more power than they had before, but that doesn’t mean their clout will suddenly rival that of the world’s great powers. When it comes to geopolitics, Nye cautioned, the pandemic appears to be “accentuating existing trends, but not reversing them.”

[Kori Schake: The damage that ‘America First’ has done]

The United States—with its diversified economy, cutting-edge scientific innovation, and numerous other resilience-oriented attributes—might have been expected to cope particularly well with a pandemic. But COVID-19 has exposed the country’s vulnerabilities: all-encompassing political polarization; debilitating economic and health-care inequality; a president who has downplayed the threat of the virus and rejected scientific guidance; a decades-long drive to optimize the economy and society for efficiency, not resilience; and a national creed of individualism, optimism, and exceptionalism that has rendered the U.S. resistant to learning from other countries. While many have marveled that just one year ago a Johns Hopkins study ranked the United States first among 195 countries in terms of preparedness for a pandemic, fewer have focused on the fact that the U.S. placed a middling 59th in what have turned out to be the under-appreciated subcategories of political risk and socioeconomic resilience (not to mention 175th on health-care access).

But these vulnerabilities are not destiny. The United States can bounce back from this crisis, and adapt to become more resilient in the process. That, however, will require the government recognizing that human security is national security; that societal resilience is a modern form of deterrence against new types of non-military aggression by adversaries; that investing in more redundancy and contingency planning is a prudent hedge against future risks, even at some cost to efficiency; and that military power isn’t all-powerful. When more than 80 times more Americans have been killed by a pandemic than by the 9/11 attacks, and when the American president, his top advisers, and many members of Congress have been placed at grave risk not by some attack on Washington but by a virus, it’s time to reevaluate U.S. spending priorities.

Greater resilience could entail everything from deepening and expanding the scope of U.S. alliances to shifting from a “just in time” to more of a “just in case” approach toward global supply chains. Two decades after 9/11, it could mean, as a recent Atlantic Council report advocated, reorienting the Department of Homeland Security toward addressing non-military threats, including a new fund for rapid recovery in the event that a cyberattack takes down critical infrastructure. It could mean confronting the fact that, with its high levels of partisanship and low levels of trust in the news media, the United States is exceptionally vulnerable to online disinformation. It could also mean acknowledging that fending off disinformation isn’t impossible. A number of northern and Western European countries are doing so successfully, and they have lessons to share.

The great challenge in applying these lessons is that, until disaster actually strikes, a country won’t really know whether it is a resilient power. “We cannot say when we have truly achieved resilience, since part of resilience is the capacity to react to change,” Hynes and his colleagues told me, “and one will never know in advance in a world of unknown unknowns who is best equipped” to do so.

Then again, a country never really knows the strength of its military, either, until it’s tested on the battlefield. What countries can do, Hynes and his colleagues added, is endeavor to identify and remedy “potential single points of failure.”

As Grossman reminded me, “Resilience is not the absence of vulnerability.” It is, instead, “the ability to manage existing or new vulnerabilities in ways that do not allow them to overwhelm us to the point where we just fold.” Americans haven’t historically folded. And they don’t have to now.

My Son Is Looking to Me for Answers—And I Don’t Have Them Anymore

2020-08-25T06:30:00-04:00

As I tucked my 5-year-old son into bed one evening this past spring, drained of all my energy and ideas, I turned to him in exhaustion: “What do you want to learn tomorrow?” The act of desperation, brought on by months of unexpectedly homeschooling my children, became something more. Every night since, I have given him the same prompt. And my wide-eyed son has countered with life’s biggest questions—at the very moment when, on the same cosmic scale, I am unlearning so much of what I used to know.

My generation, the Millennial generation, may not have been especially interested in history; many of us, after all, grew up during the purported “end of history,” an era of relative peace and prosperity. But history has made clear that it is interested in us. From 9/11, when many of us were in school, to the Great Recession, when many of us were launching our careers, to the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of us are becoming parents, we have repeatedly been jolted into the realization that our early-childhood years were an anomaly, that systemic shock is to be expected, that our lives will be abruptly upended again and again.

The pandemic should be humbling for us all, a rebuke to hubris about the nature of progress and the advance of scientific knowledge. Those places that have struggled most with the coronavirus have tended to be run by political leaders who resisted humility and failed to learn—from experts, from past outbreaks, from the blunders and the breakthroughs of counterparts contending with the same disease around the world. They claimed to have all the answers.

[Read: Being a parent has made my pandemic life simpler, if you can believe it]

I, too, thought I had a good grasp of the world I was bringing my kids into. I don’t anymore.

In the early days of the pandemic, my wife and I would greet my son and his little sister every morning with a schedule of activities written in bright colors on a whiteboard, in earnest imitation of the school day we assumed they would soon return to. That whiteboard is now buried somewhere under the invading army of toys that has proclaimed a reign of low-grade chaos in our home. For a while, sporadic school Zoom sessions provided brief intervals of structured learning. But for preschool-age kids, despite valiant efforts by teachers and administrators, these were no substitute for school.

We are done with the virtual Cincinnati Zoo (the live ocelot show proved underwhelming), done with the virtual National Aquarium (how long can you watch jellyfish?), done with Mo Willems’s virtual art lessons (even the best offerings lost their grip on my kids’ imagination after a few days). Everybody is streaming something, but very little of it connects with my children.

That’s why I finally asked my son what he wanted to learn. Like many children his age, my son is insatiably curious. The questions poured forth: “What is God?” “Who made the world?” “Does space ever end?” “How does the weather work?” “How does my body work?” “How do emotions work?” “Why did the dinosaurs disappear?” “When will the coronavirus end?” “What happens when you die?” Every day now, we devote time to answering the previous night’s question.

[Read: What my kids learned when they weren’t in school]

As the new school year approaches, one unlike any we’ve witnessed in living memory, I’ve been thinking a lot about this makeshift schooling tradition I’ve developed with my son. These have been some of the most fulfilling experiences I’ve had with him during the pandemic. But I’ve also been troubled by a paradox at work in each session: Over the spring and the summer, my wife and I were thrust into the role of our children’s primary educators, tasked with mass-producing answers, when we ourselves had more questions than ever before. One of the core contradictions of our circumscribed existence during the pandemic is that although each day in our personal lives may seem unchanging, it brings unprecedented change to the world around us.

I used to read a book to my son about a girl who tended to a seedling that grew bigger as she did, until eventually she and her father planted it in a park when she started kindergarten. “What’s kindergarten like?” my son would ask. I’d explain how he’d learn how to be a student while still having time to play with the new friends he’d make; how he’d be able to see his mother, a teacher, every day in the halls of his new school. I’d tell him that he would become a kindergartner around the time that the dead tree in our front yard came down; it was scheduled to be removed in the faraway summer of 2020.

In early March, we hurriedly and unceremoniously picked up my son early from school to drive to a wedding, in what turned out to be our last act of normalcy before we were all instructed to stay home. His school, which he adored, closed right after. On the day of his graduation from preschool in June, as we readied our laptop to send him off with a slideshow and a matrix of flickering, once-familiar faces, the tree-removal crew showed up, right on cue. As the buzz of the saw drowned out the Zoom festivities, my son gazed out the window at the falling tree limbs. What would I say now when he asked what kindergarten would be like, or when he’d be able to go? My answers were gone. I had no idea.

[Read: The pandemic is changing my mind about having kids]

My children no longer ask every morning when they are going back to school; the not-asking is, in its own way, just as disheartening as having to repeatedly tell them “not yet.” But I know they’re listening to my conversations with my wife—to my conversations with pretty much everyone these days. As the psychologist Frank Worrell has observed, kids today “know something is happening, but they cannot see it, they cannot touch it,” even as “people are worried about it and people are talking about it all the time.” I want my kids to keep questioning what’s happening, to never stop wondering why one day they were suddenly plucked out of school and the world they knew disappeared. I don’t want them to be numbed by crisis into incuriosity.

So I’m using my son’s nightly questions as opportunities to investigate the world together. We watch a couple YouTube videos explaining the Big Bang theory and the creation story in Genesis, then discuss what we’ve seen. Or we Google an image of the solar system before constructing our own solar system with bouncy balls and a flashlight. We are learning together. We are confronting uncertainty together. I try to share in his wonder. And he loves it. He doesn’t need me to have the answers at the ready, so long as I am ready to explore his questions. He needs me to be on the journey with him—as a guide, yes, but not necessarily an expert one.

Alongside my children, I can examine what it means to grow up at a time of public-health emergency, economic upheaval, and reckoning on racial injustice, a time when there are more questions than answers. We can learn that this moment demands new answers, and that the first step in generating new answers is acknowledging that we don’t have the old answers to the old questions. I can speak as honestly and directly as possible with kids their age about what I know and what I know I don’t know, and teach them to do the same.

[Read: There’s no going back to ‘normal’]

A child of parents who endured the Great Depression once told the oral historian Studs Terkel that he repudiated the lessons he’d learned “secondhand” from his folks: that young people must eventually forsake their idealism and instead face the hard “realities of existence.” Today, we are struggling to figure out how to transcend the old normal that failed us during the pandemic, how to address the existential challenges of our age, and how to build back a better and more resilient world. If we want to face today’s hard realities, but somehow manage to retain and transmit our idealism and sense of wonder, the key won’t lie in the answers we give our children—but in the questions we explore together.

Why America Resists Learning From Other Countries

2020-05-14T12:02:05-04:00

Americans have long considered their nation a shining “city upon a hill,” with the “eyes of all people … upon us,” as the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop put it almost 400 years ago. Now those eyes are riveted on the United States for all the wrong reasons. The country is consumed by the worst COVID-19 outbreak on the planet, and the beacons of light are popping up elsewhere in the world.

R. Daniel Kelemen, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has studied what the United States could learn from European public policies, told me that those who subscribe to the ideology of American exceptionalism, or as he described it, “the notion that the United States is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations,” have traditionally resisted seeking out lessons from other countries’ experiences. At the very least, “this view leads many to think that the U.S. is simply so different that policies that might work in other countries could simply never work here,” he wrote in an email.

American exceptionalism has been pronounced dead numerous times, from the Vietnam War through the global War on Terror , and nevertheless managed to stick around through those difficult periods. But the coronavirus crisis may pose the greatest threat yet to the belief that America has little to learn from the rest of the world.

[Read: We were warned]

While U.S. policy makers do study other governments’ initiatives more than they necessarily advertise, American politicians typically resist engaging with ideas from abroad. Most U.S. public-policy debates, on matters including education reform and social mobility, occur in a bizarre vacuum, as if the encounters (good and bad) of the large majority of humankind with these same challenges yield no useful insights for the United States. On the rare occasions that politicians do invoke the policies of other governments, they often wield them as political props during highly polarized debates over issues such as health care and gun control.

And many American politicians, especially those on the right, have in recent years paradoxically doubled down on American exceptionalism (we have a president who ran on an “America first” platform, after all) even as American power has declined relative to other countries’.

This kind of insularity might have been “relatively harmless when America bestrode the world like a colossus, but it’s dangerous when the country faces a raft of global challenges from China, to climate, to COVID-19,” Dominic Tierney, a political-science professor at Swarthmore College (and a former contributing editor at The Atlantic), told me by email.

Pandemics are, in fact, particularly ripe moments for cross-cultural learning. Consider, for instance, the face mask. As Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews relayed to me, face masks were invented during a 1910 outbreak of the pneumonic plague in Manchuria, by a Chinese doctor named Wu Liande, who was inspired by surgical masks he’d seen while studying in England. They caught on, in Wu’s telling, because of a fateful refusal to learn from others: Only after a French doctor who had declined to cover his face while treating patients died were the masks widely adopted.

Today, in the case of COVID-19, “all states face the same essential threat, and each government’s response is a kind of laboratory experiment,” Tierney said.

“The United States had the advantage of being struck relatively late by the virus, and this gave [us] a priceless chance to copy best practices and avoid the mistakes of others,” he noted.

Instead, the United States squandered that advantage on many fronts. The Obama administration had developed a playbook for pandemic response that drew in part on lessons from other countries’ experiences, but the Trump administration disregarded it. When China began confining millions of people to their homes in January, the U.S. government should have gotten the message that the Chinese were grappling with a grave threat to the wider world, the Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis told me in March. “We lost six weeks” in the United States to prepare—“to build ventilators, get protective equipment, organize our ICUs, get tests ready, prepare the public for what was going to happen so that our economy didn’t tank as badly. None of this was done adequately by our leaders.” By one estimate, from the epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell, if social-distancing policies had been implemented just two weeks earlier in March, 90 percent of the cumulative coronavirus deaths in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic might have been prevented.

Rather than using diagnostic tests that the World Health Organization had distributed to other countries early in the global outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own, only to botch the rollout of those tests. Nations such as South Korea and Taiwan have raced ahead of the U.S. in their efforts to contain the outbreak.

[Read: There’s one big reason the U.S. economy can’t reopen]

Even now, as a number of countries have swum feverishly toward safer ground, the United States has spent the past couple of months of near-nationwide lockdown merely treading water. It has yet to roll out robust testing across the country, despite Donald Trump’s assertions since March that anybody who wants a test can get one. It has also failed to develop proper contact-tracing systems, as other nations have, and to meaningfully flatten the curve outside New York.

Amid all this, Trump has exhibited more hubris than humility. The president has repeatedly claimed that the United States is leading the world in testing, which in part is an unflattering reflection of the U.S. outbreak’s huge scale and also is not true on a per-capita basis. He has stated, referring to America’s coronavirus response, that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and “so many” other world leaders, “almost all of them—I would say all of them; not everybody would want to admit it—but they all view us as the world leader, and they're following us.” Even after he has asked the South Korean government to send tests and medical equipment to the United States to help combat the coronavirus, Trump is insisting that the country cough up much more money for the privilege of stationing U.S. troops there. It’s a measure of traditional American hard power that seems obsolete these days, relative to South Korea’s newfound clout as a world leader in addressing COVID-19. My colleague Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump’s proposal in April that people inject themselves with disinfectant, to the horror of scientists and laughter of people at home and abroad, marked an “acceleration point” for a “post-American, post-coronavirus world … in which American opinions will count less.”

As an example of ideas the United States could borrow from other countries, Tierney cited the fact that 750,000 people in Britain, which would be equivalent to nearly 4 million Americans, responded to the British government’s request to enlist in a “volunteer army” to help deliver food to vulnerable populations and provide other assistance. “How different might the American political scene be if the U.S. president had made a similar call for Americans to help?” he asked.

A number of countries that have had more success against the coronavirus have demonstrated greater open-mindedness about learning from their peers. Taiwanese officials are watching Iceland’s mass-testing efforts, while the German government is explicitly modeling its response after South Korea’s “trace, test, and treat” campaign.

Still, Kelemen cautioned that at least as far as European nations are concerned, they’re not all rushing to embrace the pandemic-response innovations on display around the world or necessarily concluding that those policy ideas are the right fit for them. “Things have moved so quickly that there hasn't been much time for considered lesson-drawing,” he noted. Some countries were slow to institute strict lockdowns, despite witnessing the horrifying spread of the virus in Italy, while others “embraced approaches that broke with the broader consensus,” including “Sweden’s proposal to pursue more of a herd-immunity approach.”

Nick Wilson, a public-health expert at the University of Otago in Wellington, told me that New Zealand’s record of learning from other countries is similarly mixed, despite its world-leading progress in combatting the virus. He noted that the government emulated Asian countries in instituting an early lockdown, and it recognized that “things could get very bad very quickly with COVID-19” after watching the outbreak play out in Italy. His colleague at the University of Otago, Michael Baker, told me that as a government adviser on the nation’s coronavirus taskforce, he was personally very influenced by a February 2020 WHO-China Joint Mission report, which suggested that the pandemic could be contained, and led him to advocate for New Zealand’s current strategy of eliminating the virus entirely from the country.

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump has no plan]

Yet Wilson added that New Zealand has lagged behind Asian countries in encouraging mass mask wearing, in rigorously quarantining incoming travelers, and in using digital technologies for contact tracing. New Zealand “still doesn’t learn quickly enough from other countries,” he wrote in an email. “It might have some prejudice against learning from Asia [because of] an assumption of cultural differences, even though places like South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are all democracies.”

In the United States too, even before the virus hit, attitudes toward learning from other countries were beginning to change. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton critiqued Bernie Sanders’s proclivity to look to other countries for policy insights and innovations (“We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America,” Clinton said), but many of Sanders’s fellow candidates during the 2020 Democratic primary echoed his admiration for other countries’ achievements. “The No. 1 place to live out the American Dream right now is Denmark,” Pete Buttigieg stated during one debate.

Some shifting is even occurring on the right. As a Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney condemned Barack Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism, and spoke of “standing a little taller” when he traveled abroad, because as an American he “had a gift that others didn’t have.” Now, as a senator, Romney is urging the U.S. government to follow South Korea’s lead and “learn from those countries that were successful” in dealing with their outbreaks. Conservatives are championing Sweden’s laissez-faire approach as a blueprint for how to mitigate public-health damage while preserving freedom and the economy.

“There has actually been some discussion—even in conservative circles—of taking lessons from countries like Germany regarding its Kurzarbeit program of wage subsidies for employers who keep staff on payroll,” Kelemen said. But he added that, with the exception of the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program, “most of our economic-policy response has ignored useful lessons from abroad, explaining why our unemployment rate is skyrocketing above those in many other affected countries.”

Kelemen noted that the coronavirus crisis has led to a surge in interest among the American public and U.S. policy makers in harvesting lessons from other countries, most evident in the fact that everyone is following “the comparative charts of how countries are doing over time on infection rates or changes in year-on-year death counts.” And there have been other periods in U.S. history when American policy makers were more open to exploring and experimenting with policy ideas from other countries, including during the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he added. Perhaps this could be another one of those periods.

[David Frum: Trump has lost the plot]

The United States, of course, still has tremendous capacity to teach. But it also may need to emerge from this crisis recognizing that it has equal capacity to learn. To learn is to admit room for improvement, and thus to improve, especially in dealing with modern-day threats such as pandemics, which America doesn’t have much experience contending with as a superpower. The United States could, for example, easily seize on the momentum among many of its allies to pool lessons learned and coordinate policies to combat the virus and reopen economies.

As C. Jason Wang, a Stanford professor who has studied Taiwan’s COVID-19 response, told me in March, “Taiwan ran out quickly” to confront the virus, but the United States is still a “giant” with “a lot of capabilities.” And “once it starts running, it runs fast.”

Brazil’s Pandemic Is Just Beginning

2020-05-10T08:00:00-04:00

The United States is clearly ground zero for the coronavirus outbreak at the moment, but the next one may already be emerging 4,500 miles south.

“Brazil is probably the next epicenter of the pandemic in the world,” Luciano Cesar Azevedo, a physician who has been spending his days and nights treating COVID-19 patients in intensive-care units in São Paulo, the country’s largest city, told me this week. “I think Brazil is going to get close to 100,000 deaths.” On the day we spoke, Azevedo noted that ICU beds in the city’s public health-care system were at 90 percent occupancy. He said Rio de Janeiro, whose health-care system is already seriously strained by the outbreak, could become Brazil’s New York.

Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that the country reported 3,700 new daily cases on April 23. Less than two weeks later, on May 6, new daily cases had more than tripled, to 11,896. The developments in Brazil “are really concerning,” Inglesby told me.

The nation of more than 200 million people has so far recorded fewer than 10,000 deaths from COVID-19, a small fraction of America’s death toll. But confirmed cases and fatalities are rapidly growing, each day leading to dismal new records and rendering Brazil the hardest-hit country in Latin America and one of the worst-off in the world. Flu season hasn’t even arrived yet (the Southern Hemisphere is heading into winter), and a dengue outbreak in the country may peak just as the coronavirus outbreak does. Inadequate testing means that Brazil’s official case count, which is already well over 100,000, could actually be as much as 10 times higher, according to Azevedo, who is also a professor of critical care and emergency medicine at the University of São Paulo, which runs a public hospital, and the head of education at Hospital Sírio-Libanês, a private facility. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, one of the world’s leading coronavirus deniers, is pushing to ease social-distancing restrictions and reopen the economy, which could accelerate the spread of the virus. “We are only at the beginning,” Azevedo said.

[Read: The coronavirus-denial movement now has a leader]

Just as it has in countries such as the United States, the virus is also mixing toxically with Brazil’s ugliest underlying conditions—most significantly, its status as one of the most unequal countries on the planet. If COVID-19 initially seemed like an egalitarian affliction, upending the lives of everyone, everywhere, it has with time revealed itself to be a plague that often hitches a ride on social inequities. It disproportionately torments poor people who don’t have the luxury to social distance, to adhere to lockdowns, in some cases to even wash their hands, and who are more prone to the health risks associated with the virus. The cruel irony is that in several countries, including Brazil, the wealthy first brought the disease there, before retreating into self-isolation as it began ravaging the poor.

In Brazil, “the first wave of people infected were better off, with high purchasing power, who traveled abroad and returned with the virus,” Maria Laura Canineu, the Brazil director for Human Rights Watch, told me. “They were mostly white people who have access to tests and to private hospital services. But more recently, we’ve seen increasing numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among black people in the same manner that you guys have seen in the U.S.”

Black Brazilians are concentrated in poor, crowded urban neighborhoods, including the sprawling favelas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where Canineu is based. Many who live in these areas lack proper sanitation such as access to clean water, let alone soap or hand sanitizer. So the simplest and most consistent advice during the pandemic—wash your hands—isn’t necessarily practical for them. Some families live with 10 or 12 people in a single room, which makes social-distancing impossible. Many work in Brazil’s large informal sector (as, say, construction workers or street vendors) and must leave home to earn money, presenting them with an awful choice: Risk your health to protect your livelihood, or risk your livelihood to protect your health. These “are the perfect conditions for the spread of the virus,” Canineu said.

[Read: A guide to staying safe as states reopen]

Residents of favelas, where about 13 million Brazilians live, also largely depend on the public health-care system, which is being battered by coronavirus cases. Chronic diseases such as diabetes, tuberculosis, and high blood pressure are especially prevalent among this population, putting them at higher risk for serious complications from COVID-19.

Gilson Rodrigues, the president of the residents’ association in São Paulo’s Paraisópolis favela, told me that public policies on COVID-19 don’t yet include “guidelines that take into account the reality of favelas.” In the absence of those, he helped found a national network of favelas that has hired its own doctors, enlisted its own fleet of private ambulances, manufactured its own masks, provided accommodation for those who can’t otherwise self-isolate, organized food deliveries, and offered financial assistance to self-employed professionals who have lost their jobs.

In Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, the public health-care system is reeling from a surge in COVID-19 patients. Speaking about the bleak situation recently, Manaus’s mayor burst into tears on television. “Videos circulating on social media have demonstrated the desperation of families seeking urgent care, while bodies pile up next to patients in understaffed hospitals in Manaus,” Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, an international-human-rights expert at Cardozo Law in New York, wrote in a recent analysis of Brazil’s predicament.

This “perfect storm” of public-health vulnerabilities, as Kestenbaum described it, is descending on Brazil just as it struggles with political paralysis at the highest levels of government. Bolsonaro, keen to jump-start the economy, is battling local officials and the courts to relax lockdowns. (“Some people will die,” he said. “That's life.”) The president is also mired in a scandal that could lead to his impeachment.

In a country where a quarter of the population lives in poverty, and one that is still recovering from a major recession even as it hurtles toward another economic collapse, the poor are being hit hard every which way—by the coronavirus and by efforts to contain it. As Brian Winter, the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, memorably put it to me, “Street vendors can’t work from home.”

[Read: Venezuela’s coronavirus crisis is different]

Kestenbaum argued that the Brazilian government’s actions are also indicative of the nation’s underlying inequities. Policy makers who can easily socially distance and have access to proper health care assess risk differently from “most of the individuals living in the country,” she told me. She argued that the only reason Brazilian officials have had to resort to such severe lockdown measures is because the government was so slow in rolling out testing and contact tracing to contain the outbreak. “Right now, we have to make sure that everyone stays healthy,” she said. “Healthy people equals a productive workforce, right?”

Canineu noted that millions of poor Brazilians have not been able to access a government benefit of about $100 a month to help tide them over, because of a lack of good internet, a lack of information about how the process works, or hiccups with the process itself. That includes her manicurist, an informal worker with two kids, who downloaded the necessary app and registered to receive the relief, only to be told for nearly two months now that her case is “under analysis.”

She “cannot go to work” and therefore “doesn’t have money to do anything,” Canineu said. “She is desperate.”

I Have Seen the Future—And It’s Not the Life We Knew

2020-05-01T11:01:59-04:00

Last week, confined to my home in America, I glimpsed the future. Or more precisely, one of several possible post-pandemic futures.

Christopher Suzanne, an American who teaches English in Wuhan, China, took me on a tour of the city where the novel coronavirus originated, where the first lockdown was implemented, and where restrictions are now being eased as the outbreak ebbs.

On a video call, as he ran an errand around 11 p.m. on a weeknight, Suzanne showed me a largely lifeless street that would typically be bustling at that hour. He walked past dark, boarded-up storefronts; one lit-up restaurant with three empty bar stools assembled outside and some perceptible human activity inside; another restaurant with a table blocking its door and a menu planted on the sidewalk for customers wishing to place their to-go orders; a few people in masks milling about the entrance to a kebab joint.

This was not normal. “If you’re familiar with Spanish culture, they [have] the siesta during the daytime, and then they’ll come back out at night full force. That’s Wuhan culture, just without the siesta,” he explained, his voice muffled by an N95 mask.

When he caught a taxi to head home, Suzanne had to present the driver with documents detailing his health status, which were checked and photographed. When he arrived at the gated community where he lives, a masked police officer wearing gloves scanned his wrist to check his temperature before allowing him inside. Suzanne carried a card, a kind of pass to the outside world, that listed his temperature each time he left the compound. “It’s not just for taxis. It’s to leave your community. It’s to go into the hospital. It’s to go to even those small restaurants that I just showed you. If I wanted to buy something from that kebab place, I would have [had] to scan a code or show them my paperwork,” he said.

One of the strangest things about this pandemic is that while it’s afflicting the entire world, it’s doing so asynchronously, transforming countries into cautionary tales and object lessons, ghosts of outbreaks past, present, and yet to come.

[Read: Should you get an antibody test?]

As the United States engages in its own agonizing debate about how far to go in easing lockdown measures, I’ve spoken with people in China, South Korea, Austria, and Denmark to get a sense of what they’re witnessing as their countries’ respective coronavirus curves flatten, their social-distancing restrictions abate, and they venture out into life again. And although that life doesn’t look like the present nightmare those still locked in coronavirus limbo are experiencing, it doesn’t look like the pre-COVID-19 past either.

Here are some of the common themes:

There are two kinds of post-lockdown people.

Zak Dychtwald, who runs Young China Group, a consultancy focused on Chinese Millennials, noted in an email to subscribers that the coronavirus crisis has sown “fear that the careful balance of our lives—personal, financial, or otherwise—can be broken at a moment’s notice.” Dychtwald has observed two types of responses to that fear, based on interviews he’s done with Chinese contacts over WeChat and his reading of Chinese sources.

Some people, who skew younger, are taking the “YOLO” approach of enjoying life while they can because “tomorrow isn’t promised.” They’re eating out, hanging out, “revenge shopping,” traveling. “In the last few days Chinese friends in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu have sent video[s] of dense crowds drinking and partying hard on club dance floors,” he wrote. But others, especially those walloped by the economic toll of the lockdown, have resolved to “live cautiously” because “life is fragile.”

People wearing masks walk over a bridge near the Yeouido district of Seoul. (Ed Jones / AFP / Getty)

Sujin Chun, a staff writer who covers global affairs for the South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, told me that bars, restaurants, and public transportation are filling up again in the country, which has one of the world’s best test-and-trace systems for COVID-19 and never had to go into full lockdown. Still, she added, “We are very well aware that it is not time to relax and [think], Things are normal now; let’s party. It’s not like that.”

[Read: Georgia’s experiment in human sacrifice ]

In Austria, many companies are continuing to urge employees to work remotely if they can, even though nothing prohibits them from returning to the office, Thomas Czypionka, a health-policy expert at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, told me. When restrictions first eased, many people headed to big home-improvement stores—suggesting they were still contemplating spending a lot of time at home—rather than to newly reopened smaller shops where avoiding close contact with others is difficult.

Gradual reopenings can send unintended signals.

When the Danish government recently reopened day cares, kindergartens, and primary schools after its lockdown, Séamus Power and Merlin Schaeffer, both professors at the University of Copenhagen, noticed something interesting. The government had made the move in part because Denmark has the highest share of working mothers among developed nations, and keeping young kids at home with two parents working full-time was exacting too high a cost on productivity. But many Danes seemed to see the move as a sign that the public-health threat posed by the coronavirus was subsiding. They flocked outdoors on the subsequent weekend to enjoy the spring weather, jogging and gathering in small groups in parks and public spaces.

“It’s full sunshine, some people have shorts … The parks are blooming … Everything feels like a new beginning. It’s not. We all know it’s not,” said Schaeffer, who is working with Power and other colleagues on a study of the impact of social-distancing policies on everyday routines, mental health, and family life. Their preliminary survey results suggest that people are gradually shedding practices such as frequent hand-washing, keeping social distance, and staying at home. Yet Schaeffer noted that COVID-19 cases in the country have increased from hundreds before lockdown to thousands today, “so the probability to get it is much higher now than it has ever been.” Nevertheless, people are latching onto any opportunity to extrapolate normalcy from the reopening of schools, hair salons, massage parlors, and small shops. Just “because the schools open, doesn’t mean you should stop washing your hands,” Schaeffer told me.

“People are going to keep interpreting this tiptoe back to normality in a more extreme way than it’s intended by the government,” Power said. “This has to be one of the next big challenges of the unfolding crisis around the world: when things start to open, how people are subjectively understanding this.”

Life returns in dribs and drabs, and the new normal is not the old normal.

Many of the people I spoke with described returning to a slippery sense of normalcy, a post-lockdown life that looked like the life they used to lead but failed that test upon closer inspection.

Parents and children wait to get inside Stengaard School north of Copenhagen, Denmark. (Ólafur Steinar Gestsson / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP / Getty)

Yes, schools are now open again in Denmark. But Power and Schaeffer described an alien, atomized environment of outdoor classes, hourly hand-washing, and fewer teachers. “The kids are not allowed to touch each other, to play together, to embrace each other, to do high fives, things like that,” Schaeffer said. “There’s only one child per table, because normally you have two kids sitting [at] one, two-person table.”

Chun, in Seoul, said she’s now taking public transportation again. But when she once forgot to wear a mask on the bus, she got aggressive stares. “I sort of get it myself. Because this is a time to be extra careful,” she said. Chun is back at the newsroom, but with guards at the entrances to take people’s temperature and hand sanitizer everywhere. She is receiving fewer emergency text messages from the government than she did at the height of the outbreak in South Korea, but they’re still a presence in her life: She’d recently received one confirming another COVID-19 case in her neighborhood and alerting her to which restaurants in the area he had visited. She had “mixed feelings” about the messages, which provided helpful information but also had an unnerving “Big Brother” feel to them. Some people say “now is [the] time for Big Brother, for protection,” she said.

[Graeme Wood: There’s no simple way to reopen universities]

Justin Lovett, an American freelance videographer and photographer in South Korea, worries that people are more suspicious of him in public now because the main remaining transmission pathway for the virus in the country is through foreigners traveling there. He’s back to being shoulder to shoulder with people on the subway, but he makes sure to wear a mask and avoids coughing or sneezing, “because I know everyone’s noticed me already.”

Children wear masks while playing at the zoo in Wuhan, China. (Getty)

In Wuhan, the city is coming alive again, Suzanne told me when I checked in with him this week. Trains, highways, and buses are humming anew and people venture out more. Yet many businesses have not reopened, many people (including Suzanne and his wife) are still working from home, many restaurants are still open only for takeout, and the local economy is still a shadow of its former self. “There’s a lot of traffic, but looking around, I just don’t know where these people are going,” he said.

"I don’t want people to think Wuhan is this booming city again, and everyone’s ready to go, and the economy is roaring,” he added. “No, it’s 20 to 30 percent open for business. Maybe 70 percent of people are outside."

Living in the shadow of another wave is scary.

To ease restrictions, at least for some time, is to fly blind. Once lockdowns are loosened, the coronavirus’s long incubation period means governments won’t detect any resultant increase in infection rates for many days, Czypionka explained. That’s why the Austrian government is lifting its lockdown in phases. “Until we have substantial immunity, either through infection or vaccination, social distancing and masks on some occasions will accompany us for a year or more,” he told me.

On the Friday afternoon after schools reopened in Denmark, Power sat on a park bench with a colleague and had a beer. “We talked about everything except coronavirus,” and it gave him “a sense of hope that things are opening and maybe a model of how things might look. But if I think about it intellectually, I’m more cautious.” Schaeffer interjected. It could be “a false sense of hope,” he noted. After all, the Danish government has indicated that some social-distancing measures will stay in place until the end of the year and that life might shut down again if infection rates increase. “We will not reach pre-corona life” in 2020, he said.

[Read: Why the coronavirus is so confusing]

As Dychtwald sees it, both the carefree and cautious responses to post-lockdown life in China are informed by the specter of a second wave of the virus. “The first are having fun in what feels like [it] could be the eye of the storm. The second are battening down the hatches,” he wrote.

A couple lies on the grass in the garden of Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria. (Getty)

Suzanne said that although he’s still fearful of the virus, he “can’t be inside locked up” for long. Nevertheless, he’s not spending time with friends, in part because there are few places to meet, but also because everyone knows this ordeal isn’t over. The government is still sending texts with messages such as “‘wash your hands, be afraid, the second wave may be coming,’ so everyone is kind of expecting this second wave. And we definitely don’t want to be a part of it,” he explained.

[Read: We are living in a failed state]

“In the very beginning of the lockdown you start thinking, Oh, this is just a quick thing; it’s just like a hurricane; it’ll be done in a couple of days,” Suzanne continued. “And then a couple of weeks into it, you start reading into conspiracy theories and rabbit holes, and then you get past that point, and you’re talking with your group-chat buddies and they’re sharing their cooking videos, and how they’re using beer and ketchup to cook food, just to make jokes. And then it gets to this point like, okay, this is getting old … when is it going to go back” to normal?

If Suzanne, in Wuhan, is asking that question, then what does it mean for those of us on the other side of the world still very much in the midst of our outbreaks? More than four months into the worst pandemic in a century, no one can predict whether we’ll ever return to something like the life we used to know.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet

2020-04-19T08:00:00-04:00

The coronavirus pandemic may be the largest test of political leadership the world has ever witnessed. Every leader on the planet is facing the same potential threat. Every leader is reacting differently, in his or her own style. And every leader will be judged by the results.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel embraces science. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro rejects it. U.S. President Donald Trump’s daily briefings are a circuslike spectacle, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi holds no regular briefings at all, even as he locks down 1.3 billion people.

Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand, is forging a path of her own. Her leadership style is one of empathy in a crisis that tempts people to fend for themselves. Her messages are clear, consistent, and somehow simultaneously sobering and soothing. And her approach isn’t just resonating with her people on an emotional level. It is also working remarkably well.

People feel that Ardern “doesn’t preach at them; she’s standing with them,” Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister from 1999 to 2008, told me. (Ardern, a fellow member of the Labour Party, got her start in politics working for Clark during her premiership.) “They may even think, Well, I don’t quite understand why [the government] did that, but I know she’s got our back. There’s a high level of trust and confidence in her because of that empathy.”

[Read: What’s it like to have a scientist in charge? Ask Germany. ]

She is “a communicator,” Clark added, noting that Ardern earned a degree in communications. “This is the kind of crisis which will make or break leaders. And this will make Jacinda.”

One of Ardern’s innovations has been frequent Facebook Live chats that manage to be both informal and informative. During a session conducted in late March, just as New Zealand prepared to go on lockdown, she appeared in a well-worn sweatshirt at her home (she had just put her toddler daughter to bed, she explained) to offer guidance “as we all prepare to hunker down.”

She sympathized with how alarming it must have been to hear the “loud honk” that had preceded the emergency alert message all New Zealanders had just received essentially informing them that life as they knew it was temporarily over. She introduced helpful concepts, such as thinking of “the people [who] will be in your life consistently over this period of time” as your “bubble” and “acting as though you already have COVID-19” toward those outside of your bubble. She justified severe policies with practical examples: People needed to stay local, because what if they drove off to some remote destination and their car broke down? She said she knows as a parent that it’s really hard to avoid playgrounds, but the virus can live on surfaces for 72 hours.

She expected the lockdown to last for several weeks, Ardern said, and for cases to rise steeply even as New Zealanders began holing up in their homes. Because of how the coronavirus behaves, “we won’t see the positive benefits of all of the effort you are about to put in for self-isolation … for at least 10 days. So don’t be disheartened,” she said.

In a more recent Facebook Live, one of Ardern’s staffers walked into her office just as she was launching into a detailed explanation of what life would look like once the government began easing its lockdown. “Oh look, it’s Leroy!” she exclaimed, assuring viewers that he was in her “work bubble.” A children’s toy was visible just behind her desk. The scene seemed apt for an era in which work and life are constantly colliding.

While Ardern conducts more formal and conventional daily briefings with other top officials and journalists, she puts her personal touch on these as well. “Trump does his briefings, but that’s a different kind of show,” Clark said. “On no occasion has Jacinda ever spun out and attacked a journalist who’s asked a question,” she noted, in reference to the American president’s repeated tirades against journalists. (When a reporter forgot his question upon being called on during a recent briefing, Ardern jokingly told him that she was concerned he wasn’t getting enough sleep.)

[Yascha Mounk: The virus will win]

“She doesn’t peddle in misinformation; she doesn’t blame-shift; she tries to manage everyone’s expectations at the same time [as] she offers reassuring notes,” Van Jackson, an international-relations scholar at Victoria University of Wellington and a former Defense Department official during the Obama administration, wrote to me in an email. “She uses the bully pulpit to cue society toward our better angels—‘Be kind to each other’ and that kind of thing. I think that’s more important than people realize and does trickle down into local attitudes.”

Ardern’s style would be interesting—a world leader in comfy clothes just casually chatting with millions of people!—and nothing more, if it wasn’t for the fact that her approach has been paired with policies that have produced real, world-leading results.

Since March, New Zealand has been unique in staking out a national goal of not just flattening the curve of coronavirus cases, as most other countries have aimed to do, but eliminating the virus altogether. And it is on track to do it. COVID-19 testing is widespread. The health system has not been overloaded. New cases peaked in early April. Twelve people have died as of this writing, out of a population of nearly 5 million.

As a collection of relatively isolated islands at the bottom of the South Pacific, New Zealand was in a favorable position to snuff out the virus. “Because we had very few cases wash up here, we could actually” work toward an elimination strategy, Clark said. “It is undoubtedly an advantage to be sitting down on the periphery [of the world], because you have a chance to see what’s circulating from abroad.”

But Ardern’s government also took decisive action right away. New Zealand imposed a national lockdown much earlier in its outbreak than other countries did in theirs, and banned travelers from China in early February, before New Zealand had registered a single case of the virus. It closed its borders to all nonresidents in mid-March, when it had only a handful of cases.

[Read: All the president’s lies about the coronavirus]

Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, two of New Zealand’s top public-health experts, wrote last week that while the country’s ambitious strategy may yet fail, early intervention bought officials time to develop measures that could end the transmission of the coronavirus, such as rigorously quarantining at the country’s borders and expanding COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

Jackson, the international-relations scholar, said that the decision by Ardern’s government to unveil its four-level alert system (it moved to Level 4 in late March) at the outset of the crisis “was great at getting us ready psychologically for a step-up in seriousness,” a model that “couldn’t be more different from Trump’s ‘What will I do today?’ approach.”

The success, of course, isn’t all Ardern’s doing; it’s also the product of an impressive collective effort by public-health institutions, opposition politicians, and New Zealanders as a whole, who have largely abided by social-distancing restrictions.

And that collective may be fraying. Although the government has unveiled many economic-stimulus measures, some opposition politicians and public-health experts are now demanding that the lockdown, which may be eased this week, be rolled back even further. They accuse the government of overreacting and argue that Australia has managed to reduce new coronavirus cases without the severe lockdown that New Zealand has endured.

Ardern is similar to Barack Obama in that she’s “polarizing at home [while] popular abroad,” Jackson said. “But her favorables are never higher than when she’s pulling the country through a crisis.”

[George Packer: We are living in a failed state]

Indeed, one poll by the market-research firm Colmar Brunton in early April found that 88 percent of New Zealanders trusted the government to make the right decisions about addressing COVID-19, and 84 percent approved of the government’s response to the pandemic, in each case higher than what the company found in the world’s seven largest advanced economies, including the United States. New Zealand citizens had come to support the government’s policies even though many were feeling economic pain, at least in the short term, as a result of them.

Jackson cautioned that while Ardern and many young European leaders have expertly navigated the coronavirus crisis, he still worries about how this new generation of leaders will handle what comes after it.

“Strategic decision making and crisis decision making are very different,” he noted. “The world is going to be changed, largely for the worse, in the coming years. A great depression seems all but inevitable. China’s strategic opportunism knows no bounds. Dictators everywhere are using the pandemic to solidify control of societies. Multilateral institutions aren’t delivering as promised. Getting through this crisis intact is just one step in a longer process toward a brave new world.”

Anthony Fauci, Lightning Rod

2020-04-14T19:30:18-04:00

Anthony Fauci considers himself a no-nonsense fact-finder, a servant of science rather than politics or ideology. “No matter what happens to me, I’m going to keep” telling the truth, Fauci told us recently.

He’s so allergic to telling the president what he wants to hear (as opposed to what he needs to know) that he has cited, as a “dictum to live by,” the advice he once received from a Nixon-administration official: Be prepared for each visit to the White House to be your last.

It’s a professional credo that helps explain how the 79-year-old doctor has managed to stick around as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through six American presidents of both parties, beginning with Ronald Reagan, whom he alerted to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But the traits upon which Fauci built his reputation during past administrations could be his undoing in this one, as he guides Donald Trump through the worst pandemic in a century.

Fauci seems to have emerged as a convenient proxy for those who are upset about the rolling tragedy but are loath to blame Trump. Fauci is a safer target: a career public-health official. Trump allies who want to see him win in November but are also uneasy about spiraling infections and dwindling stock prices; the fiasco over COVID-19 testing; and the failure to track, trace, and limit the virus’s spread can redirect their anger toward Fauci.

Which is how it came to be that when Fauci strode into the White House yesterday for yet another briefing by the coronavirus task force, everyone was asking the question he may often ask himself: Would this be his last time there?

[Read: Anthony Fauci’s plan to stay honest]

The scientist had committed what in Trumpworld is a potentially unforgivable sin: suggesting that the president had erred. In a CNN interview on Sunday, Fauci said he’d faced “a lot of pushback” internally when he called for imposing tougher measures to stop the virus’s spread.

Fauci’s message clashed with Trump’s repeated claim that his handling of the outbreak has been flawless. Stoking a running drama about Fauci’s status—one that took off after Fauci face-palmed as Trump was talking at a press briefing last month—the president retweeted a former Republican congressional candidate’s hashtag: #FireFauci. Privately, Fauci asked the task-force team if he could make a statement at Trump’s daily news conference about the CNN spot. He tried to disabuse Americans of the notion that there was tension inside the White House: “Pushback,” Fauci told the press yesterday, was the wrong word to describe the normal give-and-take among government aides. He bristled when a reporter asked if someone had compelled him to clarify his position. “Please. Don’t even imply that,” he said, shooting a brief and uncharacteristic glare at the reporter.

The pandemic has plunked Fauci into a White House that has long been a cauldron of rivalrous aides with competing agendas. It’s an odd fit. Fauci is mixed in with ideologues who are suspicious of “deep state” bureaucrats; free-marketeers who want to quickly reopen the country and minimize the economic wreckage; and Trump loyalists who owe their jobs to one man.

Inside the building, some aides are sympathetic to his predicament, others suspicious of his advice. Outside it, partisans on the right scour his statements for any hint of disloyalty to Trump, while the left looks for clues that he might get fed up with the president and bolt.

One White House official voiced impatience with anyone who might want Fauci to depart. “I guess I don’t understand why people want Dr. Fauci to quit or be fired,” the official told us. “Do you want more body bags? Do you want more disruption in the task force’s work? We’re all working overtime. Everyone else is home sitting on their asses telecommuting. I’m sure they’re working too, but we’re here every day, seven days a week.”

An occasional, prominent adversary inside the White House is Peter Navarro, the Trump trade adviser and China hawk who has been wrangling medical supplies needed in the crisis. Navarro gave an interview to The New York Times in which he criticized unnamed “medical experts and pundits” who weren’t attentive to the full societal damage that would spring from “an extended economic shutdown.”

In at least two private White House meetings, Navarro has clashed with Fauci. In the Situation Room on January 28, Fauci argued that there was no evidence that travel restrictions work, said a person familiar with the matter, who, like others we talked with, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to share their views more candidly. Navarro balked at Fauci’s position. (According to the Times, Fauci and other top public-health officials changed their minds on the wisdom of restrictions within days.) Earlier this month, Fauci and Navarro sparred again in the Situation Room about the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump has touted as a potential “game-changer.” When Fauci reiterated a point he had made publicly, that accounts of the drug’s effectiveness were merely anecdotal, his comment sparked a rebuke from Navarro, according to a report in Axios.

Outside the White House, one notable outpost of Fauci criticism is a daily podcast and radio/TV show co-hosted by Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, who, like Navarro, was part of the White House’s economic-nationalist wing. Bannon has faulted Fauci on his show for delivering briefings that he says are too vague and imprecise, while generally praising Trump’s management of the disaster. “We want accuracy and accountability when it comes to Dr. Fauci,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump-campaign adviser and Bannon’s co-host. “No one is saying that this response is his fault, and no one is saying that something is ‘on him.’ It’s How do we go forward?”

[Read: We were warned]

The unsettling truth is that pandemics are navigated by imperfect leaders relying on imperfect information. That includes Miller’s and Navarro’s champion, Trump—and the widely admired Fauci.

In the case of the novel coronavirus, Fauci was notably sanguine at first about how the outbreak was likely to play out in the United States, even though he describes his approach to his work as assuming the worst-case scenario and aiming to avert it. In his many interviews and public statements, Fauci has given critics occasional fodder to argue that he’s been inconsistent in his characterizations of the coronavirus threat and the White House’s response to the outbreak.

In another interview Fauci gave on Sunday, for example, he said it “became clear” to him by “the middle to end of January” that “we were in real trouble,” as evidence emerged that the virus was spreading undetected from one person to another within communities.

Critics point out, however, that at least in his public remarks, Fauci argued through January and much of February that the coronavirus didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. Consider comments Fauci made in mid-February, when he described the threat of the coronavirus as “minuscule” relative to that of the seasonal flu. For weeks by that point, Chinese authorities had been restricting the movements of millions of people; COVID-19 had been circulating under the radar in the United States; and some public-health experts, both inside and outside government, had been warning that the country was dangerously unprepared for a coming outbreak.

Fauci has said that his views evolved as he and the government’s other top experts learned more about the spread of the disease within the United States, and news reports suggest that he issued darker warnings in private as February progressed. All of his remarks, moreover, were couched in the trademark carefulness of a public-health official. He repeatedly emphasized early on that while the virus didn’t present significant risks to Americans at that very moment, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a serious global health hazard and couldn’t endanger the United States in the future.

Public-health officials strive to not get ahead of the scientific evidence they’ve collected and to avoid warning of nightmare scenarios that might not materialize, which would undermine their credibility during the next crisis, John Auerbach, who was a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2011 to 2017, told us. (Auerbach is married to the Atlantic senior editor Corby Kummer.)

“Was there a period of time when … [Fauci was] saying things that may not have been accurate if more information [had been] gathered? I’m sure that was true,” he said. “But I think the goal in a situation like this is to gather as much information as you can” and make decisions based on the available data. That, he argued, is what Fauci did.

As for whether Fauci is being sensitive enough to the economic fallout of social distancing, Auerbach maintained that that’s not the role of public-health officials. They’re focused on “what will save the most lives,” he noted; they’re “not experts in deciding what’s good for the economy.” It falls to the president and vice president to hear from both health and economic experts and make the difficult trade-offs.

Ultimately, many Americans, buoyed by the idea that there’s a steady, expert hand at the rudder of the U.S. government at this tumultuous time, may be expecting too much of Fauci alone. Auerbach, who now leads the nonprofit Trust for America’s Health, noted that Fauci’s employer, the National Institutes of Health, is not the federal agency tasked with responding to public-health crises. That’s typically the CDC’s role. Fauci is “a researcher, and an incredibly smart and skilled one on infectious disease, but it’s not the same as having the thousands” of emergency responders that the CDC has at its disposal, he said.

[Read: The real point of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences]

No one working for Trump, aside from his family members, is untouchable. The president has a history of purging and humiliating high-ranking appointees he perceives as disloyal. Fauci could meet a similar fate. But amid a pandemic, that would go down as perhaps Trump’s most self-defeating move to date. Fauci’s credibility is a precious asset. A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month showed that 78 percent of Americans approved of Fauci’s handling of the outbreak, a higher rating than New York’s Andrew Cuomo and other governors in cities with large outbreaks received. Only 46 percent approved of Trump’s response.

Another White House official told us that Fauci deserves some latitude, given the demands on his time. “We’ve asked the guy to go out and do a lot of interviews,” the official said. “Somewhere along the line, there’s going to be mixed messaging, or, in today’s reality, a reporter who tries to play gotcha. I think he’s in good standing.”

We recently spoke with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and confidant of Trump, about the difficult choices ahead in reopening the country and sending people back to work. Even as others in his party want the economy rebooted swiftly, Graham had a piece of advice for the president: Make sure Fauci is on board.

If Trump’s decision is ultimately “backed up by Fauci” and Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, Graham told us, “then his political exposure will be very limited.”