Ibrahim Rayintakath

The outgoing climate envoy on what the world has, and hasn’t, achieved

When former Secretary of State John Kerry stepped into a newly created post as America’s top climate diplomat in 2021, the reputation of the United States abroad was, in his words, “in the crapper,” and the pathway to meeting the world’s climate goals looked, to most, very narrow.

Kerry, now 80, is stepping down this week to take a role on the Biden re-election campaign. In the last three years, the climate landscape has changed in two big and contradictory ways: The goal the world set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times is now functionally dead, but the world’s green transition is accelerating far more rapidly than most anticipated just a few years ago. I spoke with him in February about the way the planet and its future look to him now. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to start with comments you recently made at the Munich Security Conference, since I think they showcase your big-picture perspective on climate very clearly. You said: “We do stand next to another abyss. It is the test of our own times, a test as acute and as existential as any previous one. It is about survival.” If those are the stakes, how are we doing?

To understand the present tense, you have to go back a little bit in the road traveled. When Biden came in, the credibility of the United States was in the crapper, and we were viewed with suspicion if not derision. Our job was to go out and create credibility for our nation and for the president. At the time, the U.S. didn’t really have a global strategy, and so we laid out “keep 1.5 alive.”

Do you think the goal is still alive today?

If we did the things we could do — that we know how to do, and that we have the technologies for — we could actually do it. We’re just not. We’re not doing it on a global basis. Emissions are going up in too many countries. Oil and gas are still on a binge and their profits are obscene. I mean they’re just shocking. And everybody seems to be locked into a place of indifference.

What explains that?

Greed in a lot of cases, the ease of business as usual in a lot of cases and some wishful thinking in a lot of cases. And then, in some cases, just lies — complete distortion paid for by those profits.

And that is why I really believe Dubai was exciting and really different. In Paris we had to settle for every country going out and writing its own nationally determined contribution — a commitment to do only what it wanted to do. Some did something. Some didn’t. But in Dubai we succeeded in the dead hours of night in getting people to sign off on the transition away from fossil fuel.

Although just in “energy systems.”

But it’s the accompanying phrases, I think, which are critical. The text says “in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” It says “accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050.” It says “in keeping with the science.” Each of those to me is a big deal.

So we have moved extraordinarily, to be honest with you, but not yet at scale fast enough and not yet with the fervency needed.

The financing side of it seems really critical. It just seems we’re much further away from the clean energy transition in the poorer parts of the world, largely because of the cost of financing.

We need to be able to actually catalyze the funding. That’s the secret to me. That’s the whole thing.

And there are two different parts of the problem. One is the Asia coal problem. The other problem is helping Africa’s less developed regions, the poverty-stricken regions, to develop but to do so in a way that isn’t harmful.

And how do we solve that finance part of it? You’ve talked about going from billions to trillions in green investments, and you’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years trying to set up these Just Energy Transition Partnerships — customized financing schemes for particular countries. But the results there have been disappointing.

It’s been disappointing because the countries have not followed through. But there’s no magic here. It is simple, it’s economics, it’s basic market forces and how they work. And the problem is that gas and oil right now are making humongous, gigantic, windfall profit, in the trillions. And the margin for solar and wind can’t compete with that.

So the issue is: Can we go into Africa to try to find the projects that we think can be done and ought to be done, then get buy-in from the government that they’ll do certain things with respect to contracting, arbitration, law, currency certainty, maybe even guarantee something so that you can help attract the private capital? I don’t know any other way, honestly. I don’t know how you’re going to get the trillions moving in any other way. You’ve got to show that you can make a profit.

So that’s where we have to keep pushing. And we have to hold people more accountable, too. It shocks me that I and others are guilty of not really having focused on methane in Paris or before. Now we have 155 countries signed on to the methane pledge. And we now have technology, as you know better than anybody, which can trace methane leaks. And methane is responsible for 50 percent of the warming of the planet, but it’s also where you get the fastest reduction in heat. So if we can make the methane thing work, we actually can buy ourselves a little time.

You mentioned a few times the need to restore some global faith in American leadership. How do you answer questions about the country’s climate hypocrisy? There is an enormous amount America is doing, of course: the I.R.A., for instance, not to mention diplomatic efforts abroad. But we’re also now the world’s largest producer of oil. We’re the world’s largest producer of gas. When we signed the Paris accords, we were not meaningfully exporting either fossil fuel, and now we’re the world’s biggest exporter of the two combined. How do we square those two facts?

It’s an excellent question, and the answer is, we should think about them in a context of real transition. Remember, this is a transition. This isn’t something that happens overnight. And the key test is whether or not you’re really doing a transition, whether you are leading the transition. And we are tripling renewables, doubling energy efficiency, tripling nuclear. I don’t think that’s hypocritical.

We’ve been pushing for no permitting of any new coal-fired power plant. That is the transition.

I’ve warned again and again against building out new gas infrastructure, which is 25-, 30-, 40-year infrastructure. It’s going to be a stranded asset. And if you’re just switching to gas now, my message to every gas executive is, “Hey, man, when you get to 2030 and you’re not able to reduce those emissions, what are you going to do? What are you prepared to do?” And as long as we are putting that question to them and we are prepared to be tough, there’s no hypocrisy. On the other hand, if people are not prepared to be tough, then, absolutely, we’re being as guilty as other people are.

It’s pretty clear that we’re going to relatively quickly move past the 1.5-degree threshold if we haven’t already. What does it mean — politically, diplomatically, rhetorically — to fail to meet that target?

Let me begin by saying that I think the United States is doing a lot, and that we will meet our target, I believe, of reducing emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030. And I really think there are other countries, European countries, that are really moving and they’re getting on target. Our biggest problem, David, is the amount of coal that’s still being spewed into the atmosphere, unmitigated.

Primarily in parts of Asia.

And we’re fighting that really hard. How do I feel about it? I feel deeply frustrated. We’ve almost had shouting matches a couple of times over it with the Chinese. But that doesn’t get you anywhere. You’ve got to kind of work it through.

And China is now manufacturing and producing and deploying more renewables than the rest of the world put together. And I think it’s because they know they have this huge, huge cloud hanging over them in terms of their dependency on coal.

It’s sort of two stories at once: China the green behemoth, racing faster than everyone else, and China the coal behemoth, doing more damage than everyone else.

Correct — for now. But the International Energy Agency believes that they may well peak in the next couple of years. A lot of people think they may have peaked this year. And then the question is: Do they just go out and plateau, which was their original plan, or do they go down?

Now, they’ve committed to go down. But this gets deeply into the human psyche. Why do people not do things that they know are good for them? I was just shocked — there was a story yesterday about the Supreme Court being poised to knock the Environmental Protection Agency out from being able to hold Midwestern states accountable for the pollution they’re sending to the East. And I said to myself, who the hell is the constituency for more pollution? But that’s what they’re doing.

And I don’t understand how average folks all around the world are letting people get away with all this business-as-usual. I’ve likened it to a kind of de facto signature on a suicide pact. And we just sort of seem to be drifting down the road despite all the evidence.

What could change that?

The movement writ large needs to do a hell of a lot better job communicating to people that on the other side of this transition is a better world — cleaner, safer, healthier, more secure.

But for the moment, the guys with the money are spending that money to scare people and to put out a false narrative. No surprise, they’ve been doing it for 70, 80 years, since propaganda was invented. How do I feel about it? I feel really pissed off and frustrated.

If we want to take seriously the idea that damages can cross state lines, shouldn’t we also take seriously the idea that damage crosses international lines?

As I’m sure you know, President Biden’s E.P.A. recently revised its social cost of carbon. It’s now something like four times what the Obama administration estimate was. And it means that, by the E.P.A.’s own calculation, U.S. emissions are producing about a trillion dollars in damage every year. And yet when countries put $700 million into the Loss and Damage Fund at the COP meeting in Dubai, the United States offered just $17.5 million. That is a tiny fraction of the damage estimate not from a fringe advocacy group but the E.P.A. It’s less than one-50,000th of a trillion. There are five players on the Celtics making more money this year. It’s just not very much money.

Well, sometimes in this business, in order to be able to get things done, you have to be able to be inclusive. If you want to push people away, then you can talk about damages, but you’re never going to get past the Congress. So if you’re going to be smart about this, you’ve really got to figure out how you’re going to talk about it. And we’re the largest humanitarian donor in the world, so Americans should be proud of what we do in terms of trying to care for people.

I didn’t think it was tenable for us to go out there and say, well, there are no damages. Obviously warming has had impacts. But we can’t talk about liability or compensation for the simple reason, you will never see a dime from us, because our political system won’t embrace that.

But there are two ways of thinking about it, right? There’s the argument from political realism, which you’re making now and which you’ve made before. And then there’s the moral claim, which is what you hear from the “global south.”

Exactly — I agree completely. There’s a huge moral question about it. And I wanted to see things happen. Therefore we decided, look, we’ve got to create a fund. But it’s got to be explicit about the liability and compensation issue, which it has been all the way along because people get it.

And we got $700 million in a fund. But that’s not money for damage; that’s not money for losses. That’s money to set up the institution that is going to be housed in the World Bank. And there will be a window to come to and say, we’ve had damages, we need help.

But in no way were the donations of Dubai meant to reflect the money that’s going to be given in order to take care of damage and so forth. I anticipate that’ll be in the billions, and I don’t know how many.

You’re leaving the job of climate envoy to join the Biden campaign, and you’ve said that’s because you think winning this election is the most consequential thing that could be done right now for climate. But Americans are also pretty ignorant about the Inflation Reduction Act — approximately 70 percent seem not to even know what is in it. What does it tell us about climate politics if the president staked his first term on this piece of legislation and it hasn’t even made a mark on the public?

It will have a profound impact, I hope. I’m pretty confident that over the course of the campaign, people are going to learn a lot more about it.

And I’m confident because 86 percent of the money is going to red districts and it’s creating a hell of a lot of jobs. Last year, the job growth in clean energy was 3.9 percent. The overall job growth in the U.S. work force was 3.1 percent. So for the first time, clean energy is winning in job growth. In addition, you had $1.8 trillion of investment in new technologies, clean energy, green energy. You had $1.1 trillion in the old energy. But still, that’s the first time historically that renewables and clean energy have beaten the amount of money that’s going into investment in fossil fuels. So I think we’re in the revolution. We’re in the transition. We’re just not moving fast enough and big enough to be able to do what we need to do to keep it to 1.5.

New York Times – March 6, 2024

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

With Donald Trump’s victories on Tuesday, he has moved to the cusp of securing the 1,215 delegates necessary to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The rest is a formality. The party has become a vessel for the fulfillment of Mr. Trump’s ambitions, and he will almost certainly be its standard-bearer for a third time.

This is a tragedy for the Republican Party and for the country it purports to serve.

In a healthy democracy, political parties are organizations devoted to electing politicians who share a set of values and policy goals. They operate part of the machinery of politics, working with elected officials and civil servants to make elections happen. Members air their differences within the party to strengthen and sharpen its positions. In America’s two-party democracy, Republicans and Democrats have regularly traded places in the White House and shared power in Congress in a system that has been stable for more than a century.

The Republican Party is forsaking all of those responsibilities and instead has become an organization whose goal is the election of one person at the expense of anything else, including integrity, principle, policy and patriotism. As an individual, Mr. Trump has demonstrated a contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law that makes him unfit to hold office. But when an entire political party, particularly one of the two main parties in a country as powerful as the United States, turns into an instrument of that person and his most dangerous ideas, the damage affects everyone.

Mr. Trump’s ability to solidify control of the Republican Party and to quickly defeat his challengers for the nomination owes partly to the fervor of a bedrock of supporters who have delivered substantial victories for him in nearly every primary contest so far. Perhaps his most important advantage, however, is that there are few remaining leaders in the Republican Party who seem willing to stand up for an alternative vision of the party’s future. Those who continue to openly oppose him are, overwhelmingly, those who have left office. Some have said they feared speaking out because they faced threats of violence and retribution.

In a traditional presidential primary contest, victory signals a democratic mandate, in which the winner enjoys popular legitimacy, conferred by the party’s voters, but also accepts that defeated rivals and their competing views have a place within the party. Mr. Trump no longer does, having used the primary contest as a tool for purging the party of dissent. The Republican candidates who have dropped out of the race have had to either demonstrate their devotion to him or risk being shunned. His last rival, Nikki Haley, is a Republican leader with a conservative track record going back decades who served in Mr. Trump’s cabinet in his first term. He has now cast her out. “She’s essentially a Democrat,” the former president said the day before her loss in South Carolina. “I think she should probably switch parties.”

Without a sufficient number of Republicans holding positions of power who have shown that they will serve the Constitution and the American people before the president, the country takes an enormous risk. Some of the Republicans who are no longer welcome — such as Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney — tried to hold their party’s leader accountable to his basic duty to uphold the law. Without such leaders, the Republican Party also loses the capacity to avoid decisions that can hurt its supporters. John McCain, for example, voted to save Obamacare because his party had not come up with an alternative and millions of people otherwise would have lost their health coverage.

A party without dissent or internal debate, one that exists only to serve the will of one man, is also one that is unable to govern.

Republicans in Congress have already shown their willingness to set aside their own priorities as lawmakers at Mr. Trump’s direction. The country witnessed a stark display of this devotion recently during the clashes over negotiations for a spending bill. Republicans have long pushed for tougher border security measures, and Mr. Trump put this at the top of the party’s agenda. With a narrow majority in the House and bipartisan agreement on a compromise in the Senate, Republicans could have achieved this goal. But once Mr. Trump insisted that he needed immigration as a campaign issue, his loyalists in the House ensured that the party would lose a chance to give their voters what they had promised. Even the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who pushed for the bill for months, ultimately abandoned it and voted against it. He is now considering endorsing Mr. Trump, a man whom he has not spoken to in over three years, according to reporting by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher of The Times. And last week, Mr. McConnell announced that he would step down from his leadership post.

Similarly, the party appears ready to ditch its promises to support Ukraine and its longstanding commitment to the security of our NATO allies in Europe. When Mr. Trump ranted about getting NATO countries to “pay up” or face his threats to encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to them, many Republican leaders said nothing.

The Republican Party has long included leaders with widely different visions of America’s place in the world, and many Republican voters may agree with Mr. Trump’s view that the United States should not be involved in foreign conflicts or even that NATO is unimportant. But once competing views are no longer welcome, the party loses its ability to consider how ideas are put into practice and what the consequences may be.

During Mr. Trump’s first term, for example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo persuaded him not to abruptly withdraw from NATO. If Mr. Trump were to try in a second term, Congress could, in theory, restrain him; in December lawmakers passed a measure requiring congressional approval for any president to leave NATO. But as Peter Feaver pointed out recently in Foreign Affairs, such constraints mean little to a party that has submitted to the “ideological mastery” of its leader. Marco Rubio, one of the authors of that legislation, now insists that he has “zero concern” about Mr. Trump’s comments.

It may be tempting for Americans to dismiss these capitulations as politicians doing whatever it takes to get elected or to ignore Mr. Trump’s bullying of other Republicans and tune out until Election Day. In one recent poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were “tired of seeing the same candidates in presidential elections and want someone new.”

But tuning out is a luxury that no American, regardless of party, can afford. Mr. Trump in 2024 would be the nominee of a very different Republican Party — one that has lost whatever power it once had to hold him in check.

This subservience was not inevitable. After Mr. Trump incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, some party leaders, especially in Congress, suggested that they were ready to break with him. The Republican Party’s disappointing results in the 2022 midterm elections appeared to further undermine Mr. Trump’s support, adding doubts about his political potency to the longstanding concerns about his commitment to democracy.

But after Mr. Trump announced his candidacy and it became clear that the multiple indictments against him only strengthened his support, that resistance faded away. He is now using these cases for his own political purposes, campaigning to raise money for his legal defense, and has turned his appearances in court into opportunities to cast doubt on the integrity of the legal system.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal Jan. 6 trial, imposed a gag order on him to prevent him from intimidating witnesses. She noted that Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers did not contradict testimony “that when defendant has publicly attacked individuals, including on matters related to this case, those individuals are consequently threatened and harassed.” The leadership of the Republican Party has been silent.

With loyalists now in control of the Republican National Committee and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, in line to become its co-chair, the party may soon bend to Mr. Trump’s insistence that the party pay his legal bills. His campaign spent roughly $50 million on lawyers last year, and those expenses are mounting as the trial dates approach. One prominent Republican, Henry Barbour, has sponsored resolutions barring the committee from doing so, but he conceded that the effort can do little more than just make a point.

Mr. Trump has also taken over the party’s state-level machinery. This has allowed him to rewrite the rules of the Republican primary process and add winner-take-all contests, which work in his favor. That is the kind of advantage that political parties normally give incumbents. But in the process, he has divided some state parties into factions, some of which no longer speak to each other. Democrats may see the dysfunction and bickering among Republicans as an advantage. But it also means that for Democrats, even state and local races turn into ones against Mr. Trump. Rather than competing on the merits of policy or ideology, they find themselves running against candidates without coherent positions other than their loyalty to Trumpism.

Republican voters may soon no longer have a choice about their nominee; their only choice is whether to support someone who would do to the country what he has already done to his party.

New York Times – March 6, 2024

The justices ruled that the 14th Amendment did not allow Colorado to bar the former president from the state’s primary ballot. The justices offered different reasons, but the decision was unanimous.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday (click for decision) that President Donald J. Trump should remain on Colorado’s primary ballot, rejecting a challenge to his eligibility for another term that could have upended the presidential race by taking him off ballots around the nation.

Though the justices offered different reasons, the decision was unanimous.

The decision was the court’s most important ruling concerning a presidential election since Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000.

The case arose from a challenge brought by six Colorado voters who sought to disqualify Mr. Trump from the ballot for the state’s Republican primary based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The provision was adopted after the Civil War to forbid those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

A Colorado trial judge ruled that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection but accepted his argument that Section 3 did not apply to the president or to the office of the presidency.

The Colorado Supreme Court affirmed the first part of the ruling — that Mr. Trump had engaged in an insurrection. Among his efforts, as detailed in the courts’ opinions: setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election; trying to alter vote counts; encouraging bogus slates of competing electors; pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution; and calling for his supporters to march on the Capitol.

But the Colorado Supreme Court’s majority reversed the part of the trial judge’s decision that said Section 3 did not apply to the president or the presidency.

Mr. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, setting out more than half a dozen arguments about why the state court had gone astray and saying his removal would override the will of the voters.

“The court should put a swift and decisive end to these ballot-disqualification efforts, which threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and which promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead and exclude the likely Republican presidential nominee from their ballots,” Mr. Trump’s brief said.

His primary argument in the U.S. Supreme Court was that the president was not one of the officials covered by Section 3, which does not mention that office by name.

The full provision says: “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

It adds, “But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

It is true that neither the president nor the presidency is mentioned in so many words. But the Colorado Supreme Court said that was of no moment given the catchall phrases in the provision (“an officer of the United States” and “any office, civil or military”).

“President Trump asks us to hold,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, “that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

The State Supreme Court addressed several other issues. Congress does not need to act before courts may disqualify candidates, it said. Mr. Trump’s eligibility is not the sort of political question that is outside the competence of courts. The House’s Jan. 6 report was properly admitted into evidence. Mr. Trump’s speech that day was not protected by the First Amendment.

The case, Trump v. Anderson, No. 23-719, is not the only one concerning Mr. Trump on the Supreme Court’s docket. The justices said last week they would decide whether he was immune from prosecution for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, delaying trial proceedings in his criminal case as they consider the matter. And the justices already agreed to decide on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case against Mr. Trump, with a ruling by June.

New York Times – March 4, 2023

When Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.

Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.

“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.

But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.

In less than two weeks, the road reopened.

Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.

Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024 could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.

Across the country, there are Democrats who have outperformed expectations and had political success in places that aren’t reliably blue. Look at Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who won a second term last year, even though Trump took that state by 26 points in 2020. Trump took Kansas by almost 15 points, but its Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, secured her second term in 2022. In North Carolina, where I live, the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, won election and then re-election in years when North Carolinians simultaneously delivered the state to Trump. Obviously, some of Trump’s supporters also voted for Cooper.

Cooper, Kelly, Beshear and Shapiro might have benefited from flawed opponents, propitious circumstances, other lucky breaks. But many Democratic officeholders in red and purple states also have instructive qualities in common, starting with what Shapiro’s attention to I-95 reflected. They focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain.

“When people wake up in the morning, they don’t think about their party,” Beshear told me. “They think about their jobs. They think about the schools their children are going to. They think about the roads and bridges they’re traveling on and whether they’re safe.” The first of Gretchen Whitmer’s two successful campaigns for governor of Michigan is perhaps remembered best for her pledge to “fix the damn roads,” which was not only a concrete promise but also a kind of branding: She was more invested in results than theatrics. She cared less about preening than about potholes. She was blunt to the point of cursing.

Governors, admittedly, have advantages. They and other politicians operating at the state and local levels often aren’t expected to tackle — and don’t receive blame for — some of the especially big, tough issues by which presidents are judged. Inflation is Biden’s problem, not theirs. Immigration, too. While state-level politicians do adopt (or fail to adopt) plans to combat climate change, federal officials are often in the foreground of those debates.

State and local politicians also have relationships with voters unlike the ones forged by Washington lawmakers, who swim (or, really, splash around noisily) in the media-roiled, shark-infested waters of the nation’s capital. Voters largely regard their governors and mayors as administrators and service providers, so governors and mayors can prioritize administration and service in a manner that makes their efforts more visible and palpable to voters.

But in my recent examination of and conversations with Democratic governors, other Democratic officials and political experts in red and purple states, I was struck by the priorities they articulate and by how they articulate them. They take pains to rebut the accusations of elitism that Republicans direct at Democrats, or they have biographies and backgrounds that make those charges laughable. They also find ways in which to establish some separation from their party, and that’s not simply and solely a matter of necessity, given their states’ political leanings. It’s also an assertion of independence and authenticity in an era of profound political cynicism. Even Democrats in the bluest and safest of states can learn from that.

Shapiro proudly displays his deep Jewish faith, and while that puts him in a religious minority, it also distinguishes him from Democrats who often play down religion. He and his advisers have found that it’s a bridge to voters of all creeds, who relate to, and respect, his devotion.

He also indulges his tendency to speak in sports metaphors. The first words of a video that he released in tandem with the announcement of his campaign for governor: “Each of us has a responsibility in life — to get off the sidelines, get in the game.” He tells Pennsylvanians that his goal as governor is “to put points on the board.”

Whitmer tailgates at football games, visits sports bars and has a pronounced Michigan accent. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat in purple Wisconsin, has an uncloaked weakness for McDonald’s Egg McMuffins and speaks in a fashion so folksy that Wisconsinites can buy T-shirts emblazoned with one of his trademark phrases: “Holy mackerel!” Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is seeking a fourth term representing the deep red state of Montana, and Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat elected in purple Arizona in 2020, have careers well outside any Democratic mold. Tester was (and is) a farmer. Kelly, the son of two police officers, was a naval aviator and then an astronaut.

In Shapiro’s first full day in office, he sent a clear message to working-class voters by signing an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. He stresses the dual imperatives of holding college up as a possibility for anyone interested in it and of respecting people without college degrees and supporting careers that don’t call for one.

Cooper frequently visits farming areas and small towns not just because he grew up in rural North Carolina and is comfortable there but also because he wants to be seen in “places where many Democratic leaders don’t go,” he told me. It sets the right tone. “I’ve spent time listening to people in rural areas about their hospital being on the brink, needing more economic development, needing high-speed internet,” he said. And he has been able to explain to them how his agenda recognizes and addresses those very issues.

While Laura Kelly’s 2018 and 2022 victories in Kansas relied heavily on Democratic voters in urban strongholds, she pays careful attention to rural precincts, too. When we spoke recently — she placed the call, without any intermediary telling me to hold for the governor, and introduced herself simply as “Laura Kelly” — she shared a memory: Decades ago, when she was running for the State Senate, one of her chief advisers told her to ignore the rural part of the district because “there weren’t enough votes to make a difference,” she said.

“That didn’t feel right to me,” she continued. “So I spent an inordinate amount of time there.” She ended up winning by fewer than 100 votes. “If I had not knocked on all those doors, I wouldn’t have been in the State Senate, and I wouldn’t be governor.”

She has created an Office of Rural Prosperity within the Kansas Commerce Department. Just before our conversation, I read a transcript of the State of the State remarks that she delivered a few weeks earlier. It focused largely on jobs, and the word “rural” showed up 43 times, including in the characterization of “rural Kansas” as “fundamental to our identity.” The word “abortion” showed up precisely zero times, which I noticed mainly because the issue was front and center in Kansas just a year and a half earlier, when voters there rejected a measure to remove the right to abortion from the state’s Constitution.

I mentioned that omission.

“Not an accident,” she said. “I am and always have been a pro-choice human being,” she continued, but she determined over the years that raising such “a very divisive issue” with constituents when she wasn’t absolutely compelled to didn’t make sense. “It wasn’t a way that they were going to hear me any better, and it wasn’t a way to find common ground,” she said.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the defense of legal abortion has unquestionably given Democrats an advantage over Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers in red and purple states don’t shrink from it. But “since the Supreme Court overturned” is crucial, because only then did some Americans fully realize that the abortion debate wasn’t an abstract, ideological one: It concerned a fundamental freedom for women. It affected critical medical care.

“The prospect of Republicans banning abortion was not a big winner for Democrats until Republicans actually started banning abortions,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Voters are used to hearing about how apocalyptic the other side is. You have to have actual evidence.” The Roe reversal — and cases like those of Kate Cox, who was carrying a fetus with a deadly chromosomal abnormality and had to leave Texas to end her pregnancy — enable Democrats to discuss abortion rights in blunt, concrete, visceral terms.

“For too long, we’ve made politics too flashy, too Hollywood,” Austin Davis, Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor, told me. He was on the ticket with Shapiro, and he explained that their formula for victory was not to be “wrapped up in what’s going on on MSNBC, on CNN, in some local coffee shop that’s 90 percent Democratic. Most people don’t live in those echo chambers.”

Cooper’s long campaign to garner enough Republican support to pass Medicaid expansion in North Carolina — which was finally accomplished three months ago — didn’t hinge on partisan name-calling. But it did involve extensive meetings with law enforcement officials to persuade them that they’d be helped if the mentally ill people who commit some crimes had the treatment options that Medicaid expansion would provide. Toward the end, he said, “we would have some tough-on-crime Republican officials come into the legislature and say these people need health care, not handcuffs.”

The specificity and detail with which state-level Democrats, working on a smaller canvas, can portray problems, sketch solutions and describe successes make me wonder if Democrats would be wise to pitch more of their policies and concentrate more of their energies outside Washington. They often find better traction and make readier connections that way.

I think of Shapiro’s livestreaming of the fleet work on I-95. I think of many key lines from Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth remarks in January, when he advanced measures regarding climate change, economic development and job creation without dwelling on clinical phrases like “climate change,” “economic development” and “job creation.” He gave shout-outs to several companies “building the two largest electric vehicle battery plants on planet Earth, in Glendale, Ky.” He noted that “approximately 400 Kentuckians” had been hired. This was no fancy policy seminar. It was a straightforward report card.

That’s what Mallory McMorrow is always urging. Too many Democrats sound as though “they’re giving a lecture at a university rather than talking like a normal person,” she told me. She is the Democratic state senator in Michigan who captured national attention with a speech denouncing Republicans’ characterization of Democrats who support gay rights as “groomers,” and she has demonstrated a flair for getting a point across. “No matter what issue you’re talking about or how complicated it is, talk about it like you would talk to your friend in a bar, and if you can’t do that, you need to keep trying,” she said.

McMorrow presides over the Michigan Senate’s Economic and Community Development Committee, and she said that when arguing for crucial investments, she tells stories, like the one about Michigan missing out on a second Amazon headquarters because Maryland had better transit and education options for the company’s workers. Michiganders felt that loss, she said. They don’t feel statistics about where the state ranks in per capita spending on infrastructure.

The framing of issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.

I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.

He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”

“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”

“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.

New York Times – March 3, 2024

Does the West have a double standard when it comes to Israel, pouncing on everything it does with undue harshness?

When he was challenged about the bloodshed in Gaza on “Face the Nation” last weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded, “What would America do” after something like the Oct. 7 Hamas attack? “Would you not be doing what Israel is doing? You’d be doing a hell of a lot more.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier in The Jerusalem Post condemned “an unprecedented double standard” that relentlessly criticizes Israel’s bombing of Gaza but is unbothered by the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan in World War II. And the World Jewish Congress cites “criticizing Israeli defensive operations, but not those of other Western democracies” as an example of antisemitism.

All this strikes me as both right and wrong, a fair point and a false one. I’ll come to why it’s wrong in a moment, but it is undeniably true that the world applies more scrutiny to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians than to many other horrors.

In 2023, for example, the United Nations General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions critical of Israel, and only seven resolutions critical of all other countries in the world together, by the count of one pro-Israel group. Does anyone think that represents even-handedness?

People are more focused on Israel than on what Unicef describes as a “wave of atrocities” currently underway against children in Sudan, while the number of children displaced by recent fighting in Sudan (three million) is greater than the entire population of Gaza. University students in America and Europe protest about Gaza but largely ignore the 700,000 children facing severe acute malnutrition in Sudan, after a civil war began there last April.

The Darfur region of Sudan two decades ago endured what is widely described as the first genocide of the 21st century. Now bands of gunmen once more are killing and raping villagers belonging to particular ethnic groups. I was seared by my reporting from Darfur during the genocide, and it staggers me that the world is ignoring another round of mass atrocities there.

Meanwhile, some of the worst mistreatment of Arabs in recent years was inflicted by Arab rulers themselves, in Syria and Yemen.

So is there a double standard in global attention? Absolutely. Defenders of Israel have every right to point all this out, and sometimes it does reflect antisemitism. Yet — now we get to the other side — it also strikes me as unconscionable to use the world’s hypocrisy, however invidious, to justify the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza.

That would be an echo of Russian whataboutism: How can you talk about our war in Ukraine when you Americans invaded Iraq and tortured people there?

It’s also true that while some university campuses may be guilty of selective outrage, that is not true of all observers. Some of the most incisive critics of Israel’s actions are from the very U.N. agencies and human rights groups whose staffs are risking their lives in the field to save lives in Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries.

In any case, there is a reason to focus on Gaza today, for it is not just one more place of pain among many contenders but, in the judgment of Unicef, the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.

Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed.

Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old. I can’t think of any conflict in this century that has killed babies at such a pace.

Of course Israel had the right to respond militarily to the Oct. 7 attacks. Of course Hamas leaders should give up their hostages. But none of this excuses Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing, in the words of President Biden, and restrictions on food and other assistance.

Because of America’s support for Israel’s invasion and diplomatic protection for it at the United Nations, this blood is on our hands, and that surely justifies increased scrutiny.

Yet here’s another double standard: We Americans condemn Russia, China or Venezuela for their violations of human rights, but the United States supports Israel and protects it diplomatically even as it has engaged in what President Biden has called an “over the top” military campaign.

“How can the U.S. condemn Russia’s bombing of civilians in Ukraine as a war crime but fund Netanyahu’s war machine, which has killed thousands?” Senator Bernie Sanders asked.

So it’s fair to talk about double standards. They are real. They run in many directions, shielding Israel as well as condemning it. And in a world where we are all connected by our shared humanity, I believe we should never let our very human tangles of double standards and hypocrisies be harnessed to deflect from the tragedy unfolding today for the children of Gaza, or America’s complicity in it.

New York Times – March 2, 2024

Ben Wiseman

In her make-believe quest for the Grand Old Party’s presidential nomination, Nikki Haley seems to be having a grand old time. Sure, she lost Michigan on Tuesday and her home state of South Carolina last week and Nevada even though Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot — that was some fluke of electoral physics — but none of that matters in relation to what Haley has been up to since the death knell of her defeat in the New Hampshire primary. Since before then, perhaps.

She’s not running for president, or at least that’s not her sole or even principal goal in 2024. She’s running for a different kind of glory, and to some degree, she’s winning it, even though she doesn’t deserve it. That’s why she sounds so strangely joyful at times. It’s the source of her curiously robust energy.

As 2024 dawned, Trump’s dominance endured and Haley grappled with the fact that she didn’t have any job other than her candidacy to return to, she identified the next best thing to beating Trump: using him, for as long as possible, as a yardstick. Being measured against him.

Every day that she officially remains an alternative to him — no matter how technical, no matter how notional, no matter her failure to get even 30 percent of the vote in Michigan this week — is a day when Americans with an unfavorable view of him (the majority, mind you) have a newly favorable view of her. It’s a day when journalists raptly trail after her, when she’s welcome on pretty much any television news show, when at least a few pundits will praise her guts and her gusto for standing up to Trump, even though she bowed down to him for much, much longer. It’s a big, bold billboard for the new model Haley, who is taking on a titan and telling inconvenient truths. Catch her latest put-down of Trump! Behold her stamina! When this is all over, her speaking fees will be astronomical.

Haley has never known hagiography like this. And she’s young enough to play a long game. Trump is almost certain to be the Republican nominee, but there’s a very real chance, what with all those indictments and all his inanity, that he loses in November, that his rigged-election shtick is too predictable to have as much traction as it did in 2020, that Republicans take fresh stock of all the times since 2018 that they’ve underperformed under Trump’s leadership, and that they ask themselves what might have been.

Yes, they could instead take inventory of and revenge on anyone who didn’t sing his praises in an overwrought and unflagging voice. They could blame apostates for the pope of Mar-a-Lago’s ruin. In that case, Haley’s churchless. But if their obsequiousness to Trump is exhausted, their adoration of him spent? If they turn to his runner-up? By dint of perseverance, Haley has claimed that title.

In her unbroken string of Republican primary losses, she may be creating a win-win. If it’s Biden-Trump in November and Biden beats Trump, Haley gets to say to Republicans, “I told you so.” If Trump wins, moves back into the White House and sucks us into a nonstop, democracy-imperiling, quasi-autocratic melodrama, Haley also gets to say, “I told you so.”

She has morphed into the “I told you so” candidate, one anticipating someone else’s future humiliations more than she is envisioning her own imminent triumph, and she has been telling us so with such frequency and such urgency of late that she’s seriously mangling her metaphors.

“What I am saying to my Republican Party family is, we are a ship with a hole in it,” she told Dana Bash in an interview on CNN on Tuesday, imploring Republicans to “take the life raft and move in a new direction.” The previous day, speaking to a group of reporters in Michigan, she said: “We can stop this sinking ship before it takes off.” I guess it’s the “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” ship, able to sprout wings and fly. And that’s Haley at the wheel, trying to steer the ship into greener pastures. (I can mangle a metaphor, too.)

I think the CNN anchor Abby Phillip had it right the other night. “Over the last few weeks, she’s making a case for herself maybe not for this cycle but maybe for the next one,” Phillip said. “This is not bad for her.”

But is it good for anyone else?

Haley has been the “I told you so” candidate for a matter of only months, and she started telling us so only when there was no other coherent strategy and rationale for a sustained campaign. Before then she shrank from telling us so and before then she praised Trump and propped him up. She’s the epitome of Trump-era inconstancy, a paragon of situational politics, but over the past two months, she has so thoroughly camouflaged that with belated and convenient candor that many Americans no longer see her that way.

Looks like victory to me.

New York Times – February 29, 2024

Mr. Coll is an editor at The Economist and the author of “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.”

America committed its worst foreign policy mistake of the post-Cold War era when it invaded Iraq in 2003 to disarm Saddam Hussein of his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The war that followed exacted an appalling price in Iraqi and American lives and resources, and it also empowered Iran, energizing regional proxy conflicts that have entrapped Washington in the Middle East, as the Biden administration has rediscovered painfully.

At a time when the United States has identified managing dictatorships in China and Russia as the country’s most important national security challenge and when North Korea’s isolated and idiosyncratic leader holds nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, Mr. Hussein’s case offers a rare, well-documented study of why authoritarians often confound American analysts and presidents.

How might the U.S. invasion of Iraq have been avoided? Much of our post hoc investigation has focused on the false and manipulated intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush’s choices, the selling of the war and the media’s complicity. Another central question has rarely been examined: Why did Mr. Hussein sacrifice his long reign in power — and ultimately his life — by creating an impression that he held dangerous weapons when he did not?

The question is answerable. Mr. Hussein recorded his private leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon. He left behind about 2,000 hours of tape recordings as well as a vast archive of meeting minutes and presidential records. The materials document the Iraqi leader’s thinking at critical junctures of his long conflict with Washington, including his private reactions to Sept. 11 and to the Bush administration’s plans to oust him. And they clarify the complicated matter of why he could not persuade U.N. inspectors, multiple spy agencies and many world leaders that he did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

On the tapes, as he rambles on about world affairs — his colleagues rarely dare to interrupt him — Mr. Hussein can be impressively shrewd and prescient. In October 2001, days after Mr. Bush announced the American-led war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Mr. Hussein asked his cabinet: “If America established a new government in Kabul according to its desires, do you think this will end the Afghan people’s problems? No. This will add more causes for so-called terrorism instead of eliminating it.” In the face of American hostility, he dodged and feinted, motivated by two goals above all: to remain in power and to achieve glory in the Arab world, preferably by striking Israel.

Mr. Hussein held profoundly racist beliefs about Jews and confused himself with elaborate conspiracy theories about American and Israeli power in the Middle East. He believed that successive U.S. presidents, under the influence of Zionism, conspired secretly and continually with Iran’s radical ayatollahs to weaken Iraq. The Iran-contra conspiracy of the 1980s, when America joined briefly with Israel to sell arms to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime, cemented the Iraqi leader’s convictions for years to come. That Iran-contra represented a strain of harebrained incompetence in American foreign policy did not occur to him.

The reasons Mr. Hussein failed to clarify that he had no weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to 2003 are embedded in his tragic, decades-long conflict with Washington: his furtive, mistrustful collaboration with the C.I.A. during the 1980s; the Gulf War of 1990 and 1991; the U.N.-backed struggle over Iraqi disarmament that followed; and the climactic confrontation after Sept. 11.

Shortly after the Gulf War, he secretly ordered the destruction of his chemical and biological arms, as Washington and the United Nations had demanded. He hoped this action would allow Iraq to pass disarmament inspections, but he covered up what he had done and lied repeatedly to inspectors. He did not tell the truth to his own generals, fearing that he might invite internal or external attacks. His decision to comply with international demands but to lie about it to U.N. inspectors defied Western logic. But Mr. Hussein would not submit to public humiliation, not least because he thought it wouldn’t work. “One of the mistakes some people make is that when the enemy has decided to hurt you, you believe there is a chance to decrease the harm by acting in a certain way,” he told a colleague. In fact, he said, “The harm won’t be less.”

Mr. Hussein believed the C.I.A. was all but omniscient, and so, particularly after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush accused him of hiding weapons of mass destruction, he assumed that the agency already knew that he had no dangerous weapons and that the accusations were just a pretense to invade.

A C.I.A. capable of making an analytical mistake on the scale of its miss about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was not part of his worldview.

While researching Mr. Hussein’s conflict with America, I sued the Pentagon, and with help from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, I obtained a batch of his tapes and files, including some never released. They proved invaluable for my book project, but it is unfortunate that I had to go to such trouble. It is plainly in the interests of the United States that the full archive be made available to researchers, so that insights about Mr. Hussein’s dictatorship can inform the American public and their government.

My work concerned the back story of the 2003 invasion, largely from the Iraqi leader’s perspective. Yet I could not help reflecting on how U.S. decision makers might have done better and what lessons their failures might hold today. Mr. Hussein was not the first mass killer I had written about in depth, but I was reminded about how difficult and uncomfortable it can be to fully empathize with someone who acts and thinks in ways you find appalling. Yet it is all but impossible to understand or influence other people without suspending judgment and seeking to see the world from behind their eyes. As a writer, I had the means to humanize Mr. Hussein without sanitizing him. I could also discern how hard it would be for an elected American president to attempt this.

The incentives of competitive democratic politics reward the demonization of enemies and offer little credit for reflecting thoughtfully about a tyrant or for bucking conventional wisdom about his motives. In theory, nonpartisan intelligence analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies should be able to think and advise freely about the character and motives of America’s most dangerous adversaries. In reality, career analysts too often fall into groupthink that recycles prevailing political or public opinion. That certainly helps to explain the intelligence community’s misjudgments about Mr. Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

Domestic political incentives also discourage presidents from talking to enemy autocrats, not least because doing so might undermine economic sanctions the United States is trying to enforce. “If I weren’t constrained by the press, I would pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch,” President Bill Clinton told Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain privately in 1998, discussing Mr. Hussein. “But that is such a heavy-laden decision in America. I can’t do that.” Indeed, after early 1991, so far as is known, no significant American official ever talked directly with Mr. Hussein or his top envoys. Only after his capture in December 2003, when he shared cigars with various C.I.A. and F.B.I. interrogators at a prison outside Baghdad, did he begin to offer insights that helped to explain America’s misjudgments about him.

As one of Mr. Hussein’s aides once put it, citing an Arab proverb, “You overlook many truths from a liar.” The best way to avoid that is through periodic private conversation. Such contact with Mr. Hussein before 2003 might have revealed that as he reached his 60s, he had lost much of his prior interest in military affairs and had become obsessed with writing novels.

In his many contradictions and inconsistencies, Mr. Hussein was not an unusual dictator. Important features of his reign are often found in autocracies — paranoia about threats to the leader’s power, unreliable information provided by unctuous and terrified aides and an inability to fully grasp adversaries’ intentions.

Like Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un today, Mr. Hussein unnerved the world by talking loosely about nuclear war. During the conflict over Kuwait, he was so convinced that an atomic strike by Israel or America was coming that he commissioned plans to evacuate Baghdad’s population to the countryside. His thinking rattled even his ruthless cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” who was later hanged for his role in the gassing of Kurdish civilians during the 1980s. “All this hoopla about the effects of nuclear and atomic attack … frightens children,” he complained during one recorded meeting.

To which Mr. Hussein exclaimed: “What are we, a bunch of kids? I swear on your mustache … pay attention to civil defense!”

Yet the Iraqi leader wanted to avoid a nuclear conflict. The most important lesson from his example may be that even a reckless dictator can be deterred from aggression if he understands clearly that his life, legacy or hold on power may be lost.

Deceived by Mr. Hussein and misled by bad advice from Arab allies, President George H.W. Bush failed to deliver a clear deterrence message to the Iraqi leader before Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The president corrected that error early in 1991, as he prepared to order a U.S.-led force to oust Iraqi troops from the emirate. He dispatched Secretary of State James Baker to convey to Mr. Hussein’s chief envoy that if Iraq gassed American troops, the United States would take down his government. Mr. Baker did not mention nuclear weapons, but the Iraqi leader already believed that America would not hesitate to drop atomic bombs. As war neared, he deployed chemical weapons to strike U.S. and allied soldiers, but he hesitated at the moment of decision and did not use gas. Months later, he destroyed the weapons. Deterrence worked.

It may not always work. Mr. Hussein’s case is a paradox. He was erratic enough that it would have been unwise to gamble with America’s security by guessing at his intentions. The better policy was to act on the basis of Iraq’s capabilities and to issue clear and convincing deterrence messages. Yet in the end, America made a profound misjudgment about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities because it failed to understand who he really was.

New York Times – February 28, 2024

Ibrahim Rayintakath

War is on the rise everywhere. When the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London published its authoritative Armed Conflict Survey in early December, it counted 183 conflicts globally in 2023 — higher than had been recorded in 30 years. The most remarkable episode of this harrowing new era of global violence is an astounding spate of military takeovers in what has come to be known as the coup belt, stretching uninterrupted across Africa’s Sahel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea: six countries enduring 11 coup attempts, eight of them successful, since just 2020.

When Steven Pinker’s sweeping history of violence, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” was published a little more than a decade ago, it quickly became a touchstone for a cohort of geopolitical optimists making broad claims of human progress. The book’s core empirical claim was about death: that global rates of murder and war had been declining both notably and steadily for a very long time and that the world was now far more peaceable than it had ever been.

On the time scale of human civilization, this might still be true, particularly when it comes to interpersonal violence. But on the time scale of human memory, it isn’t true any longer, particularly when it comes to warfare. Counting by the number of conflicts, the world as a whole is a more violent place than it has been for at least 30 years. By some measures, it’s more conflict ridden than at any point since the end of World War II. Nonstate violence — conflict between nongovernmental armed groups, such as gangs — has more than tripled, according to Sweden’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, since a low point in 2007. Violence by state forces against civilians has more than doubled since 2009, and assassination attempts are on the rise.

These conflicts are also producing much more bloodshed. In 2011, when Pinker published “Better Angels,” there were nearly 40,000 deaths from warfare worldwide, Uppsala estimates. In 2022, they say, the number was above 238,000 — a nearly sixfold increase and almost double that of 2021. It had nearly doubled in a single year.

For Americans, this shift has been marked by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But there are more than two wars going on in the world, many of them with much more tenuous connections to U.S. interests and far less American attention as a result.

Today, one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises is unfolding in Sudan, where a civil war has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced nearly eight million and, according to U.N. officials, has produced “one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history.” Nearly seven million people have been displaced by fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, amid accusations of mass killings, and the United Nations plans to withdraw its peacekeepers this year. The ongoing conflict in Yemen has left more than a quarter-million dead and more than 20 million in need of humanitarian assistance. Some studies estimate that Ethiopia’s recent war against its separatists may have killed as many as 600,000 people over two years, and in the Central African Republic, a 2023 report published in the journal Conflict and Health suggested, nearly 6 percent of the total population might have died in 2022.

In many ways the most remarkable unrest has been in the Sahel — in the coup belt stretching across the continent just south of the Sahara, from Guinea in the west to the Nile basin and the Horn of Africa in the east. As recently as five years ago, some political scientists believed that coups were on their way out of world history. But now you can walk 4,600 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and pass through only countries toppled by coups d’état in those same five years.

All told, this is a remarkable geopolitical phenomenon and may be the most conspicuous episode of civic instability and turmoil anywhere in the world since the fall of the Iron Curtain — more governments falling to military takeover in one region than were overturned during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, which brought down governments in four countries, or the color revolutions of the previous decade, which brought down four. “These days, a question crops up when African officials gather to discuss governance,” Comfort Ero and Murithi Mutiga wrote in December in Foreign Affairs. “Which president will be ousted by his military next?”

Each of these coups — in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Mali and Sudan — has its own complicated and idiosyncratic back story. And it’s possible that the clustering of these coups may be a coincidence. This is a famously inhospitable region known for underdevelopment, humanitarian catastrophe and political instability. But Ero and Mutiga call it a “crisis of African democracy,” and Naunihal Singh, a scholar of coups, emphasizes that it is an especially visible example of a global backsliding of democratic norms.

There may be a contagion effect, too, in which one coup provides a permission structure for the next, though as Singh notes, historically juntas have operated less according to external logic than internal motivation. And while many American commentators blame the end of a Pax Americana and a resulting vacuum of geopolitical leadership, those closer to the Sahel tend to see the American war on terrorism, particularly the U.S.-led invasion of Libya in 2011, as a major contributor to regional instability. On the ground, animosity toward the French is also pervasive, and there is influence jockeying and obvious strategic meddling by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, along with widespread suspicion about Russia (with its state-funded military contractor the Wagner group recently rebranding on the continent).

The past few years have been especially difficult ones across the Sahel, with the pandemic and Covid recessions and a surge in hunger partly driven by the war in Ukraine. Public revenues have fallen, countries are struggling through sovereign debt crises, and inflation has been soaring. Islamist militants, now largely forgotten or ignored by civilians in the United States, continue to be a source of Sahelian instability, with the failure to contain them in certain countries widely seen as an indictment of existing elites. There are generational dynamics at play, too, with booming youth populations increasingly frustrated with older leadership regimes and demographic ones as well, with rapid and disorderly urbanization from an increasingly harsh and conflict-ridden agricultural countryside.

I think it’s also worth flagging another possible contributor: climate change.

Climate researchers have long projected that the Sahel would be one of the regions most threatened by the impacts of warming. The Institute for Economics and Peace has consistently identified the Sahel as one of its ecological threat hot spots, and according to Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative’s index, all six countries in the region rank among the least prepared places in the world. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2022, Beza Tesfaye noted that “Sahelian countries are simultaneously among the most affected by climate change and the least prepared to adapt,” an observation underlined last year by the I.M.F. as well. And in November 202 the United Nations warned that climate impacts could bring about political instability and further conflict in 10 nations of the greater Sahel. In the last five years, those 10 nations have experienced a total of eight attempted or successful coups.

Across the region, environmental struggle has profoundly shaped a half-century of history, but the recent disruptions are nevertheless significant. In Niger, there have been nine droughts and five major flooding events in the last 20 years, with food crises every four years and many parts of the country without a good harvest in a decade. In 2022, an intense rainy season produced devastating flooding in Mali and Chad, events the World Weather Attribution network estimated were made 80 times more likely by climate change. Southeast of the coup belt, a three-year drought in the Horn of Africa has left more than four million people in need of humanitarian assistance; according to the W.W.A.’s “conservative estimate,” the drought was made 100 times more likely by climate change.

These disasters aren’t the source of all of the recent political turmoil. As in many unstable parts of the world, climate change may not be directly causing political disruptions, but it is pressuring already fragile systems. “The patient, as it were, is suffering from lots of different kinds of ailments,” the political scientist Kenneth Schultz told me. “But this is another one.” Last August, Roland Ngam, of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, wrote in South Africa’s Daily Maverick that “behind all the coups” are “weak institutions and especially climate change which has caused a massive ecosystem collapse over the last century.” And in November Abdoulie Ceesay, the deputy majority leader of the Gambian National Assembly, wrote in The New Internationalist: “The simple fact is that the rise of militarism has gone hand in hand with the rise in poverty, food insecurity, economic crises and extreme weather. His conclusion: “To belittle the role of climate change in these crises seems to me obscene.”

New York Times – February 28, 2024

I’ve spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman, and I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people: I am seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel’s standing among friendly nations — a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades. And if Biden is not careful, America’s global standing will plummet right along with Israel’s.

I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage, over the deaths of so many thousands of Palestinian civilians, particularly children, with U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war in Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame.

That such anger is boiling over in the Arab world is obvious, but I heard it over and over again in conversations in India during the past week — from friends, business leaders, an official and journalists both young and old. That is even more telling because the Hindu-dominated government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only major power in the global south that has supported Israel and consistently blamed Hamas for inviting the massive Israeli retaliation and the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, the majority of them civilians.

That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context. But when so many civilians die in a retaliatory invasion that was launched by an Israeli government without any political horizon for the morning after — and then, when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally offers a morning-after plan that essentially says to the world that Israel now intends to occupy both the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely — it is no surprise that Israel’s friends will edge away and the Biden team will start to look hapless.

As Shekhar Gupta, the veteran editor of the Indian newspaper ThePrint, put it to me: “There’s enormous love and admiration for Israel in India. But a war with no end will strain it. Initial shock and awe apart, Netanyahu’s war is damaging Israel’s greatest asset: the widely held belief in the invincibility of its army, the infallibility of its intelligence services and the justness of its mission.”

Each day brings new calls for Israel to be banned from international academic, artistic and athletic competitions or events. That so much of it is hypocritical in singling out Israel for censure — while ignoring the excesses of Iran, Russia, Syria and China, not to mention Hamas — is true. But this Israeli government is doing things that make it too easy. Many of Israel’s friends are now just praying for a cease-fire so that they don’t have to be asked by their citizens or voters — especially their youth — how they can be indifferent to so many mounting civilian casualties in Gaza.

In particular, many Arab leaders who privately want to see Hamas destroyed, who understand what a warped and destructive force it is, are being pressured from the streets to the elites to publicly distance themselves from an Israel that is unwilling to consider any political horizon for Palestinian independence on any border.

Or, as Netanyahu put it in the morning-after plan he issued last Friday: Israel will keep security control over Gaza, the territory will be demilitarized, the strip’s southern border with Egypt will be sealed much more tightly in coordination with Cairo, the United Nations agency that provides primary health and education services for Palestinian refugees will be disbanded and education and administration will be completely overhauled. Civil administration and day-to-day policing will be based on “local elements with administrative and management experience.” Who will pay for all of this and how local Palestinians will be enlisted to perpetuate Israel’s control is not explained.

I have real sympathy for the strategic dilemma that Israel faced on Oct. 7 — a surprise attack by Hamas that was designed to make Israel crazy by murdering parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents, sexually abusing and mutilating women and kidnapping infants and grandparents. It was pure barbarism.

It felt to me, at least, that the world was ready initially to accept that there were going to be significant civilian casualties if Israel was going to root out Hamas and recover its hostages, because Hamas had embedded itself in tunnels under homes, hospitals, mosques and schools and made no preparations of its own to protect Gazan civilians from the Israeli retaliation it knew it would trigger.

But now we have a toxic combination of thousands of civilian casualties and a Netanyahu peace plan that promises only endless occupation, no matter if the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank transforms itself into a legitimate, effective, broad-based governing body that can take control of both the West Bank and Gaza and be a partner one day for peace.

So the whole Israel-Gaza operation is starting to look to more and more people like a human meat grinder whose only goal is to reduce the population so that Israel can control it more easily.

Netanyahu refuses to even consider trying to nurture a new relationship with non-Hamas Palestinians, because to do so would risk his prime minister’s chair, which depends on backing by hard-right Jewish supremacist parties who will never cede an inch of the West Bank. Hard to believe, but Netanyahu is ready to sacrifice Israel’s hard-won international legitimacy for his personal political needs. He will not hesitate to take Biden down with him.

But the broader point is that a unique opportunity to permanently diminish Hamas, not only as an army but also as a political movement, is being squandered because Netanyahu refuses to encourage any prospect, however long term, of building toward a two-state solution.

Still so traumatized by Oct. 7, Israelis, in my view, are failing to see that at least making an effort to move slowly toward a Palestinian state led by a transformed Palestinian Authority and conditioned on demilitarization and hitting certain institutional governance goals is not a gift to Palestinians or a reward for Hamas.

It is instead the most hard-nosed, selfish thing Israelis could now do for themselves — because Israel is losing on three fronts at once today.

It is losing the global narrative that it is fighting a just war. It has no plan to ever get out of Gaza, so it will eventually sink into the sands there with a permanent occupation that will surely complicate relations with all its Arab allies and friends across the globe. And it is losing regionally to Iran and its anti-Israel proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, who are pressuring Israel’s northern, southern and eastern borders.

There is one fix that would help on all three fronts: an Israeli government prepared to begin the process of building two nation-states for two people with a Palestinian Authority that is truly ready and willing to transform itself. That changes the narrative. It gives cover for Israel’s Arab allies to partner with Israel in rebuilding Gaza, and it provides the glue for the regional alliance Israel needs to confront Iran and its proxies.

In failing to see that, I believe Israel is imperiling decades of diplomacy to get the world to recognize the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination and self-defense in their historic homeland. It is also relieving Palestinians of the burden and depriving them of the opportunity of recognizing two nation-states for two people and building the necessary institutions and compromises to make that happen. And, I repeat, it is going to put the Biden administration in an increasingly untenable position.

And it is making Iran’s day.

New York Times – February 27, 2024

The alliance’s expansion, with Finland last year and soon Sweden, was a consequence from the invasion of Ukraine that Russia’s president may not have calculated.

Steven Erlanger has covered NATO for many years and has reported from Sweden, Finland and Norway since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

BERLIN — Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago was an enormous shock to Europeans. Used to 30 years of post-Cold War peace, they had imagined European security would be built alongside a more democratic Russia, not reconstructed against a revisionist imperial war machine.

There was no bigger shock than in Finland, with its long border and historical tension with Russia, and in Sweden, which had dismantled 90 percent of its army and 70 percent of its air force and navy in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After the decision by Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, to try to destroy a sovereign neighbor, both Finland and Sweden rapidly decided to apply to join the NATO alliance, the only clear guarantee of collective defense against a newly aggressive and reckless Russia.

With Finland having joined last year, and the Hungarian Parliament finally approving Sweden’s application on Monday, Mr. Putin now finds himself faced with an enlarged and motivated NATO, one that is no longer dreaming of a permanent peace.

As NATO countries look with some trepidation at the possibility that the unpredictable Donald J. Trump, no fan of the alliance, may become U.S. president again, its European members are taking measures to ensure their own defenses regardless.

Critics consider their actions to be too slow and too small, but NATO is spending more money on defense, making more tanks, artillery shells, drones and jet fighters, putting more troops on Russia’s borders and approving more serious military plans for any potential war — while funneling billions of dollars into Ukraine’s efforts to blunt Russia’s ambitions.

The reason is sheer deterrence. Some member states already suggest that if Mr. Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he will test NATO’s collective will in the next three to five years.

If Mr. Trump is elected and casts serious doubt on the commitment of the United States to come to the defense of NATO allies, “that might tip the scales for Putin to test NATO’s resolve,” said Robert Dalsjo, director of studies at the Swedish Defense Research Agency.

Even now, Mr. Dalsjo said, Mr. Trump or not, Europe must prepare for at least a generation of heightened European containment and deterrence of a Russia becoming militarized, and where Mr. Putin clearly “has considerable public support for his aggressive revanchism.”

Still, with Hungary finally voting for Sweden’s accession to NATO, at last the pieces are falling into place for a sharply enhanced NATO deterrent in the Baltic and North Seas, with greater protection for the frontline states of Finland, Norway and the Baltic nations, which border Russia.

Once Hungary hands in a letter certifying parliamentary approval to the U.S. State Department, Sweden will become the 32nd member of NATO, and all the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, with the exception of Russia, will be part of the alliance.

“Sweden brings predictability, removing any uncertainty about how we would act in a crisis or a war,” Mr. Dalsjo said. Given Sweden’s geography, including Gotland, the island that helps control the entrance to the Baltic Sea, membership “will make defense and deterrence much easier to accomplish,” he said.

It was Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago that pushed Finland into deciding to join NATO, and Helsinki pulled a somewhat more reluctant Sweden into applying to join as well.

Finland, with its long border with Russia, saw the most imminent danger; the Swedes did too, but were also convinced, especially on the political left, by a sense of moral outrage that Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, would seek to destroy a peaceful, sovereign neighbor.

“Overall the feeling is that we’ll be safer,” said Anna Wieslander, a Swede who is director for northern Europe for the Atlantic Council.

History mattered, too, said Mr. Dalsjo. “If Finland joined we had to — we could not be a wall between Finland and its helpers in the West one more time,” as neutral Sweden had been during Finland’s brave but losing “Winter War” against the Soviet Union in 1939, when Finland had to cede some 11 percent of its territory to Moscow.

With Sweden and Finland together in NATO, it will be much easier to bottle up the Russian surface navy in the Baltic Sea and to monitor the High North. Russia still has up to two-thirds of its second-strike nuclear weapons there, based on the Kola Peninsula.

So the new members will help provide enhanced monitoring of a crucial part of Russia’s military, said Niklas Granholm, the deputy director of studies at the Defense Research Agency.

Russia’s fleet in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania, is only 200 miles away, and so are its Iskander nuclear-capable missiles. NATO planners have long worried about how to support the Baltic nations if Russia seized the 40-mile “Suwalki Gap” between Kaliningrad and Belarus, but Sweden’s position straddling both the North and Baltic Seas would make it much easier to send NATO reinforcements.

Russia will still retain its land-based missiles, of course, but its nuclear-armed submarines may find it more difficult to maneuver out into the open sea without detection.

Sweden, with its own advanced high-tech defense industry, makes its own excellent fighter planes, naval corvettes and submarines, designed to operate in the difficult environment of the Baltic Sea. It has already begun to develop and build a new class of modern submarines and larger corvettes for coastal and air defense.

With NATO membership, it will be easier now to coordinate with Finland and Denmark, which also have key islands in the Baltic Sea, and with Norway.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stockholm decided that war was a thing of the past. It removed nearly all of its forces from Gotland, and reduced the national army by around 90 percent and the navy and air force by about 70 percent.

The forces are slowly being restored, and spending on the military, which was close to 3 percent of gross domestic product during the Cold War but sank to about 1 percent, this year will reach 2 percent, the current NATO standard. “These investments will take time, and we need to move faster,” Mr. Granholm said.

Sweden may also join NATO’s multinational enhanced forward brigade in Latvia, intended to put allied troops in all the alliance countries bordering Russia.

Sweden’s main tasks, Ms. Wieslander said, will be to help guard the Baltic Sea and the airspace over Kaliningrad; to ensure the security of Gothenburg, which is key for resupply and reinforcements; and to serve as a staging area for American and NATO troops, with agreements for the advance positioning of equipment, ammunition, supplies and field hospitals.

For both Finland and Sweden, membership is the end of a long 30-year process of what Mr. Dalsjo called “our long goodbye to neutrality.” First came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decision to join the European Union, which meant dropping neutrality for what both countries called “military nonalignment.”

Sweden, which had quiet defense guarantees from the United States, gradually became more explicitly Atlanticist and integrated more and more with NATO, he said. “And now we take the final step.”

Sweden will need to adapt its strategic culture to working within an alliance, Ms. Wieslander said. “It will be a big difference for us, and allies will expect Sweden to show some leadership.”

Like Finland, Sweden will need to integrate its forces into NATO and develop new capabilities for collective defense rather than concentrating solely on defending the homeland.

“It’s a steep learning curve,” said Mr. Granholm. “We don’t yet have the full picture of NATO’s regional plans,” but will now as a full member. “Then we need to sink our teeth into what NATO wants us to do, and what we want to do. We are doing this to protect ourselves, after all.”

New York Times – February 26, 2024