The Winners and Losers in Syria's Ceasefire
By Robin Wright

Six years into the world’s grisliest war and worst humanitarian crisis, a ceasefire went into effect on Friday in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin, its co-mastermind, admitted that it is “fragile.” Two previous ceasefires—in February and September—lasted only weeks.The odds are stacked against this one bringing an end to all the fighting, since it deals with only one of multiple wars inside Syria, which have so far killed an estimated four hundred thousand people. But the current initiative—brokered by Russia and Turkey with Iranian support—is different from past efforts. It signals big shifts in the basics of the Syrian tragedy.

For now, Russia has “won” Syria. Moscow escalated its involvement, in September, 2015, by providing the government of President Bashar al-Assad the air power he needed to pummel the rebels. The pretext was to bomb the Islamic State; it was a ruse. Some ninety per cent of Russian airstrikes have been against the rebels challenging the Syrian government. Assad could not have regained control of Aleppo—the country’s largest city and former commercial center—earlier this month without Russia. And the rebel rout in Aleppo changed the strategic reality enough to allow the Russians to step in and take the diplomatic lead on behalf of its most important ally in the Middle East.

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-winners-and-losers-in-the-new-syrian-ceasefire

The New Yorker

The Trump Team's Holy War
By Robin Wright

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former five-star general and the Supreme Allied Commander in the Second World War, inaugurated the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. “I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that, under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion,” Eisenhower said. “Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience.”

Every President since then—including Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage drama, Ronald Reagan after the Marine-barracks bombing in Lebanon, George H. W. Bush during the Gulf War, and his son after the September 11th attacks—has reached out to the Islamic world, even as they were tough on extremism. President-elect Donald Trump, whose campaign rhetoric was repeatedly laced with xenophobic rants against an entire faith, is instead hinting at an almost primeval crusade after he takes office next month.

“I think Islam hates us,” he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in March, lumping 1.7 billion people spread across six continents into a dangerously simplistic stereotype. 
Read on...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-trump-teams-holy-war-and-the-remaking-of-the-world-order

The New Yorker

The Berlin Attack is Right Out 
of the Terror Handbook
By Robin Wright 

The world’s deadliest terrorist groups are increasingly open about their intentions, tactics, and targets. Last month, Rumiyah, the slickest terrorist magazine on the Internet market, was very precise. The “most appropriate” killing vehicle, the Islamic State publication advised, is a “load-bearing truck” that is “double-wheeled, giving victims less of a chance to escape being crushed by the vehicle’s tires.” It should be “heavy in weight, assuring the destruction of whatever it hits.” It should also have a “slightly raised chassis and bumper, which allow for the mounting of sidewalks and breeching of barriers if needed.” And it should have a “reasonably fast” rate of acceleration.

In the same issue, Rumiyah urged Islamic State members, or sympathizers anywhere in the world, to hop in vehicles—steal them, if need be—and attack outdoor markets, public celebrations, political rallies, and pedestrian-congested streets. “All so-called ‘civilian’ (and low security) parades and gatherings are fair game and more devastating to Crusader nation,” the magazine, which is published in several languages, said.

The rampage in Berlin on Monday—which the German government has now deemed a terrorist attack, though the motive behind the attack was still murky—was right out of the jihadi literature. 

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-berlin-attack-is-right-out-of-the-terror-handbooks

The New Yorker

Tea with Hezbollah's No. 2
By Robin Wright 

Naim Qassem, a cleric who wears a white turban and has a trim beard to match, is Hezbollah’s second-in-command. From Hezbollah’s public-relations office, two fighters drove me, in a black Chevrolet S.U.V. with draperies on the windows, to meet Qassem in Beirut’s poor southern suburbs, the movement’s stronghold. The flags of Hezbollah and Lebanon were in a corner of the meeting room; a plate of dates and almonds was on a table. Attendants brought in rotating trays of tea, juice, and water as we talked. I asked Qassem if the intervention was worth the increasing costs, human and political.

 “Since in the West you like to use metaphors and examples, I will give you one,” he said. “You have a house, and in this house there is a fighter, his wife, and children, and there is an enemy attacking this house. You have a garden and a wall, and a hundred metres away you have an olive grove. Is it better to protect the olive trees or the house? Near the olive grove the fighter will die. But if they get to the house, the house will be destroyed and everyone will die. We went to Syria, near the olive trees.” Qassem added, “We believe that as important as the losses or the sacrifices in Syria are, they are much less than if Syria had disintegrated.”

 Founded, trained, and armed by Iran after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah has been transformed by three tactical decisions. Each has been a progressively bolder gamble; with each, Hezbollah’s impact has grown, even as the costs have soared and its popularity has fluctuated.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/having-tea-with-hezbollahs-no-2

The New Yorker

The Battle for Aleppo, 
Syria's Stalingrad, Ends
By Robin Wright 

 Aleppo has been part of human history for some five thousand years. Abraham is said to have grazed his sheep on its slopes and donated their milk to the local poor. Alexander the Great founded a Hellenic settlement there. The city is cited in the Book of Samuel and Psalm 60, and for centuries its residents reflected the three great Abrahamic faiths. It was at one end of the ancient Silk Road, and a major metropolis in the many empires that conquered and ruled the region. Its medieval Citadel, pivotal during the Crusades, is one of the world’s oldest and largest castles. More recently, Shakespeare referred to Aleppo in both “Macbeth” and “Othello.”

The Battle of Aleppo, which since 2012 has pitted the despotic government of President Bashar al-Assad against an array of disorganized opposition rebels, now appears to be over. A deal to allow the safe passage of the last opposition fighters, their families, and any civilians who want to leave—an end to the agony—was brokered Tuesday by Russia and Turkey. “All militants, together with members of their family and the injured, currently are going through agreed corridors in directions that they have chosen themselves voluntarily,” Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the U.N. Security Council.

Much of the famed city, the largest in Syria, has already been destroyed. The Old City has been gutted. The destruction has been compared to that at Stalingrad and in the Warsaw Ghetto. In a crescendo of cruel air strikes, which have escalated since the summer, eastern Aleppo fell this week to the government forces holding the city’s western half.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-battle-for-aleppo-syrias-stalingrad-ends

The New Yorker

Tom Sutherland, the Magnanimous Hostage
By Robin Wright

In 1984, I used to visit Tom Sutherland and his wife, Jean, after running on the track at the American University of Beirut. They had dared to join the faculty at a time when Lebanon was a rough place to live. The civil war was in its ninth year; the Israeli invasion was in its second year. Hezbollah, the emerging Shiite militia, was taking control of West Beirut, including the scenic seafront area around the university. Fighting disrupted daily life—you often didn’t know which war was playing out around you—and made sleep difficult. Electricity was erratic; shops often had food shortages. That was the year the American University president was assassinated and a professor taken hostage. The Sutherlands and I would sit on their terrace, sipping cool drinks in the Beirut heat, and ponder the latest chaos around us.

Tom, who died on Saturday, was a loquacious man, with a slightly receding hairline and a subtle sense of humor. He had grown up in Scotland before moving to the United States for graduate work in animal science. He spent more than a quarter century teaching animal husbandry and genetics at Colorado State University, and became a naturalized American citizen, but he spoke with the lilting Scottish burr of his early years. He still had a kilt, and loved to find a reason to quote Robert Burns. In 1983, he took a leave from Colorado State to become the dean of agriculture at American University, which was known as the Harvard of the Middle East until the civil war broke out. Jean, an earthy Midwesterner who loved to laugh at her husband’s humor, taught English. They still believed in the innate goodness of people; I didn’t.

 Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/thomas-sutherland-the-magnanimous-hostage

The New Yorker

What Does NATO Do Anyway?
By Robin Wright 

Since 2013, Douglas Lute, a former three-star general and graduate of West Point, has been the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, whose headquarters are in Brussels. In 2007, President George W. Bush appointed Lute to be deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, a position nicknamed the “war czar” during the U.S. surge in Iraq. He was one of three senior officials retained by President Obama, who later appointed him to be the top envoy to NATO. Lute talked to me  about the role and history of NATO. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What role does NATO play in global security today?

After the Second World War, the U.S. and a set of eleven other countries joined together and said essentially, “We’re not doing that again. There’s got to be a better way forward. We can work together to prevent aggression against us and to insure we don’t aggress against each other.” The Washington Treaty was signed in 1949. The foundation of it is the “mutual defense” clause, Article Five, that says an attack on one nation is considered an attack on all of them.

And it’s worked. NATO has kept the peace in Europe and bound together the U.S., Canada, and European allies in a way that has been fundamentally stabilizing for the world order. It has had an outsized influence beyond that territory. It’s really served as the anchor for world security over the last sixty-seven years.

Where has NATO been deployed, and why? How has it evolved?

I’d break down the history of NATO into three parts. For the first forty years, NATO focused on its greatest risk—the threat that the Soviet Union posed to Western European security. When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, and, two years later, the Soviet Union broke apart, NATO took a few years to find itself. Its raison d’être had been removed. It became clear not long after 1991 that Europe faced new instability along its borders that could infect Europe itself, so NATO adapted. The earliest and most prominent case was the breakup of Yugoslavia. NATO was drawn in to stop the fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1995. Sixty thousand NATO troops left the central front and moved into the Balkans. Four years later, in 1999, NATO stopped the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo and then stabilized the security situation. NATO still has five thousand troops in Kosovo keeping watch on a fragile security situation.

Then, in 2001, 9/11 takes place and NATO launches into its largest ever and longest ever combat operation in Afghanistan. NATO has over twelve thousand troops still stabilizing Afghanistan, training Afghan forces, and making sure that Afghanistan does not revert to a terrorist safe haven. So there’s a period of about the last twenty-five years where NATO has tried to promote stability beyond its territories and taken its military capacity beyond its periphery.

Today we may be on the edge of the next phase of NATO. We have now a very different Russia than the Russia we were dealing with in the past two decades. It’s aggressed against a neighbor. It’s seized parts of Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, and destabilized other parts of Ukraine. It’s increased its military budget. It’s promoted more aggressive conventional- and nuclear-war-fighting doctrines. It has fundamentally torn up the rule book that has stabilized Europe since the end of World War II. It’s a very dramatic geostrategic shift of the security situation in Europe.

At the same time, just as this is happening, we’ve also seen the rise of ISIS—and ISIS borders Europe. Turkey has a fifteen-hundred-kilometre border with Syria and Iraq. And along much of that border we’re fighting, contesting ISIS.

Beyond that, all across the NATO periphery—east, southeast, and across the Mediterranean due south—you have a set of weak, failing, or failed states which further the instability for Europe. This is most prominently seen by returning foreign fighters from Syria and Iraq who have bombed European cities, but also from mass migration at a level which we haven’t seen since the Second World War. So the combination of Putin’s Russia and its aggressive actions, terrorism, and mass migration is causing nato to go back to the basics—to the importance of security of the twenty-eight nations themselves and then looking at how we can promote stability among its neighbors. Today NATO is adapting again to these new challenges.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-does-nato-do-anyway?

The New Yorker

Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?
By Robin Wright 

Last month, Boeing signed a landmark agreement with Iran to sell or lease a hundred and nine passenger jets. The mega-deal, worth at least twenty billion dollars, would be the largest sale of American goods to the Islamic Republic since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, shortly after the 1979 Revolution. Iran Air badly needs new planes to modernize its fleet, which dates back to the Shah’s era. Iranians alternately joke and agonize about mechanical problems that plague the country’s aging aircraft, essential for travel in a country two and a half times the size of Texas.

The Boeing sale would mark the next phase in developing a pragmatic and profitable—if still unofficial—relationship with Iran, after the nuclear deal completed a year ago today. The fates of both initiatives, however, still face turbulent rides. The nuclear deal—formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.)—is fragile, at best. The diplomatic flirtation during two years of tortuous negotiations has also soured, despite nine meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in the past year. The detention of more Iranian-Americans, who were formally indicted this week, hasn’t helped. Presidential elections in the United States and Iran complicate the prospects of both the nuclear deal and the Boeing sale.

In Iran, a new poll released on Wednesday finds growing disillusionment with the nuclear deal, the leaders who produced it, and the United States. President Hassan Rouhani, the charismatic centrist who initiated the diplomacy, is facing a backlash. He ran, in 2013, on the promise that nuclear diplomacy would lift sanctions and improve the economy. Almost three-quarters of Iranians polled now say they have felt no improvements from the deal—and have little or no confidence that Washington will fulfill its commitments, according to the University of Maryland and Iranpoll.com.

“Iran paid a huge price,” Kayhan, the hard-line newspaper, wrote this week to mark the anniversary. “The public is asking: What has the nuclear deal accomplished for people’s livelihood and for the dignity of Islamic Iran?”

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/will-the-iran-nuclear-deal-survive

The New Yorker

Pity Elizabeth, the Brexit Queen
By Robin Wright 

In October of 1940, when she was still in curls and called Lilibet within the family, Princess Elizabeth made her first national radio broadcast. It was designed to calm the fears of Britain’s children, as London was being pounded by German bombers for fifty-seven consecutive nights. She was fourteen. “We know, every one of us, that in the end all will be well,” she said, on the BBC’s “Children’s Hour.” Seventy-five years later, amid the increasingly chaotic aftermath of the Brexit vote, Queen Elizabeth II is trying to do it again.

“Retaining the ability to stay calm and collected can at times be hard,” she conceded, at the opening of Scotland’s Parliament, on Saturday. “One hallmark of leadership in such a fast-moving world is allowing sufficient room for quiet thinking and contemplation, which can enable deeper, cooler consideration of how challenges and opportunities can best be addressed.”

For Elizabeth, the Brexit vote marks an almost Shakespearean turn. In the nineteen-twenties, when she was born, the British Empire was the largest in history. It covered almost a quarter of the earth’s land mass; it held sway over more than four hundred and fifty million people, about a fifth of the world’s population. It was “the empire on which the sun never set.” In the past year, her reign, now the longest in British history, has twice been fêted with imperial pomp and horsey parades—last fall, for setting the longevity record, and, this spring, as she reached the age of ninety. Even Washington celebrated. At the British Embassy, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer last month led the toasts at a lawn party honoring the Queen’s birthday. Big names from the White House and Congress also attended.

But Elizabeth’s lifetime has also seen the dismantling of her kingdom’s vast empire in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Most of its former colonies, territories, and protectorates now govern themselves. The Brexit vote may now mean the demise of Great Britain, too.

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/elizabeth-ii-the-brexit-queen

Chris Stevens' Family: 
Don't Blame Benghazi on Clinton
By Robin Wright 

Dr. Anne Stevens, the sister of Ambassador Chris Stevens, has served as a family spokesperson since his death. She is the chief of pediatric rheumatology at Seattle Children’s Hospital. We spoke twice in the past three days, including shortly after the House Select Committee report was issued. Dr. Stevens recalled that her brother had been fascinated by the Middle East since childhood, when he dressed up as Lawrence of Arabia, with a towel and a pot atop his head. He served in the Peace Corps, in Morocco, before joining the Foreign Service, and he served twice in Libya before his final posting there, as well as in Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Riyadh. My interview with Dr. Stevens has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Whom do you fault for the lack of security that resulted in the death of your brother, in Benghazi?

It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State Department is under-budgeted.

I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now. But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took on himself.

What did you learn from the two new reports by House Republicans and Democrats?

It doesn’t look like anything new. They concluded that the U.S. compound in Benghazi was not secure. We knew that.

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/chris-stevenss-family-dont-blame-hillary-clinton-for-benghazi

Teaching an Orangutan to Breast Pump
By Robin Wright

On June 13th, the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., tweeted a tantalizing photo of a pregnancy stick. The test was positive. The zoo urged followers to visit its Facebook page at two the next afternoon to find out which animal, from among its three hundred species, was expecting a baby. Thousands did so. In a live video feed, zookeepers led viewers through the nonpublic alleys and cages of the Great Ape House until they reached Batang, a nineteen-year-old orangutan with soulful eyes and shaggy auburn hair who likes to craft makeshift hats from old sheets and towels. She is also well trained—and knows who has the treats. Amanda Bania, a primate keeper, fed grapes to Batang through the cage with one hand as she rubbed a gelled-up ultrasound probe across Batang’s belly with the other. The images of a fetus on a laptop monitor were clear.

“We’re looking at the top of the head,” a zoo veterinarian explained. Batang stuck her long tongue out for another grape.

The baby, due in September, is Batang’s first. For the National Zoo, it’s the first pregnancy of an orangutan—one of the world’s endangered species—in a quarter century. The population of orangutans in the wild has plummeted by eighty per cent in the past seventy-five years. The pregnancy has been more than a decade in the planning, courtesy of a great-ape version of Match.com. 

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/teaching-an-orangutan-to-breast-pump

FORMER AMBASSADOR ROBERT FORD: ON THE STATE DEPARTMENT MUTINY ON SYRIA

By Robin Wright

The Obama Administration has long been divided over what to do about Syria. The crisis produced one of the biggest differences between President Obama and Hillary Clinton, his first Secretary of State. The policy chasm has only deepened during the five years of conflict, which has now reportedly claimed almost half a million lives. The State Department acknowledged tersely on Friday that more than fifty American diplomats had recently submitted a letter of complaint about U.S. policy in Syria through its Dissent Channel, a sort of complaint box through which employees can voice their disagreement with official policy without fear of reprisal. Travelling in Europe, Secretary John Kerry told reporters, “I think it’s an important statement and I respect the process very, very much, and I will probably meet with people or have a chance to talk when we get back.”

What does the letter of dissent reflect?

Frustration at the State Department has come to a boil. People don’t write in the Dissent Channel every day. The cessation of hostilities in Syria has broken down completely. The bombings of hospitals in Aleppo and Idlib are a violation of every human norm—and that’s not including the barrel bombs and the chemical weapons. The effort to get a political deal is going nowhere. The Assad government has refused to make any serious concessions. It won’t let in food aid, in violation of U.N. resolutions. And the Americans are watching it all happen. So the Dissent Channel message is a reflection of frustration by the people who are responsible for conducting policy on the ground. I felt that way when I left—and that was after Geneva II, in January-February, 2014.

The existing policy is failing and will continue to fail. Why? I don’t sense, in the message, dissent from the strategic objective, which is a negotiated settlement of the Syrian civil war, but I sense a sharp disagreement with the tactics the Administration is or is not using. The dissent message says that, without greater pressure on the Assad government, it will be impossible to secure the compromises necessary to win a political agreement and end the war. The message says that the Administration needs to reconsider tactics to generate that pressure. Read on... http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/former-ambassador-robert-ford-on-the-state-department-mutiny-on-syria

The New Yorker

LOVE JIHAD: ORLANDO AND GAY MUSLIMS

By Robin Wright

When he was twenty-five, Naveed Merchant, tormented by the tension between his Islamic faith and his homosexuality, swallowed almost three hundred Tylenol pills. His mother and brother found him and rushed him to an emergency room in Southern California. “But the struggle was not over just because I told them I was gay,” he recalled, two decades later. “I believed that I brought enormous shame on my family and that I’d never amount to anything—and so I should just die. Every time I tried to be straight, to fake being straight, I would get more depressed and it would lead me to a suicidal ideation.”

For fifteen years, the New York filmmaker Parvez Sharma attributed the death of his mother, a devout Muslim, to her discovery of his homosexuality. She died shortly after he came out to her, when he was twenty-one. She was livid; he was ashamed. “I always felt the pain I brought her was responsible,” Parvez, who is now forty-one, told me this week. “I carried a lot of guilt around for a long time.” The fact that his mother had cancer seemed beside the point. Reconciling his Muslim and gay identities has consumed him ever since.

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/love-jihad-orlando-and-gay-muslims

The New Yorker

Rescuing the Last Two Animals at the Mosul Zoo
By Robin Wright 

Mosul’s forlorn little zoo, a collection of rusted cages in a park near the Tigris River, was abandoned by its keepers in October, as the Iraqi Army began to liberate the city from the Islamic State. For three months, the zoo was a staging ground for isis fighters. More than forty of the zoo animals died, either as collateral damage—trapped between warring combatants—or from starvation. By January, when the eastern half of Mosul was freed, only two animals had survived: Lula, a caramel-colored female bear, and Simba, a three-year-old lion.

Animals, like people, suffer from war psychoses, including P.T.S.D. During the most intense urban combat in history, Lula ate her two cubs from hunger and stress. Simba had been one of three lions. Simba’s father, weak and emaciated, was killed by his mate to provide food for herself and Simba. In the wild, lionesses hunt for the entire pride. She, too, soon succumbed.

Concerned about the fate of Lula and Simba, residents in Mosul sent frantic Facebook messages to Four Paws International, an animal-protection agency based in Austria, appealing for help. In mid-February, the organization dispatched Amir Khalil to Mosul. Khalil is an Egyptian veterinarian who has spent a quarter century saving animals in war zones on three continents.. 
Read on.....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/rescuing-the-last-two-animals-at-the-mosul-zoo

The New Yorker

American Muslims in Mourning
By Robin Wright  June 12, 2016

Hena Khan, the author of best-selling children’s books, thought Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday was going to be a turning point for American Muslins. “Ali spent his life trying to show the real Islam—battling Islamophobia even as he battled Parkinson’s disease. That’s what was highlighted after he died,” she told me this weekend. “It was nice to feel proud—and to see people saying ‘Allahu Akbar’ interpreted in a positive way.”

On Saturday, Khan was herself honored for the publication of “It’s Ramadan, Curious George,” a groundbreaking new book that also tries to span the cultural chasm for a new generation. The Diyanet Center of America packed its auditorium with kids and their parents to hear Khan read from her book. In this latest spin-off, the mischievous simian learns from his friend Kareem about the sacred Muslim month of fasting, good deeds, contemplation, and evening feasts. 

At the end of Khan’s reading, a teen-ager dressed as Curious George raced down the aisles, onto the stage, and fist-bumped Khan. The kids went wild. “It was a weekend of hope and feeling inspired,” Khan told me. “It was a time of reaffirmation,” especially during the first week of Ramadan.

On Sunday, Khan woke up and, as is her habit, checked the news on her cell phone before waking her family. It was consumed with the killings at Pulse, the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. “First it was twenty people, then fifty,” she told me. “I thought, Not another shooting! When is this going to stop? This is insanity.

“Then I saw the name,” Khan said, her voice choking back sobs. Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-orlando-shootings-and-american-muslims

The New Yorker

Presidential Swag and the Gift Horse
Robin Wright  May 20, 2016

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln wrote to King Mongkut, of Siam (the “King and I” king), to gently reject his gift of “a supply of elephants” with which to populate America’s forests.“ This Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful,” Lincoln wrote. “Our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation.”

Lincoln could not legally accept the elephants, in any case. The Founding Fathers were sufficiently concerned about foreign corruption of their young democracy that they enshrined a ban, in Article I of the Constitution, on U.S. officials accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” George H.W. Bush faced a similar dilemma when the President of Indonesia with a flesh-eating Komodo dragon. The present—not a good match for Millie, the First Dog—ended up at the Cincinnati Zoo, where he more than thirty little Komodo dragons. 

For President Obama, the most famous gift was to the youngest recipient. Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/presidential-swag-and-the-gift-horse

The New Yorker

What the Pope Saw at Hiroshima
By Robin Wright  May 12, 2016

A charred tricycle, its rubber pedals melted away, is one of the most evocative relics of war in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum. It belonged to three-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani, who was riding it when an American B-29 dropped a nine thousand-pound over the city, on August 6, 1945. Shinichi’s father found his son, barely alive, still grasping the handlebars under the rubble. He died a few hours later. Because Shinichi had loved that tricycle, his father decided to bury it with him—so that his son would not be lonely—in the back yard, where his son would still be close. Before the attack, the Americans had given the bomb a nickname—Little Boy. Four decades later, Shinichi’s father had his son’s remains exhumed for formal reburial in a cemetery. He donated the unearthed tricycle to the museum.

On May 27th, President Obama is scheduled to become the first sitting President to visit Hiroshima’s war memorial.  The fanfare around Obama’s visit has revived the tormented debate about the Second World War’s concluding acts—the merits and morality of America’s decision to drop the first nuclear bombs, in order to force Japan to surrender and avoid a ground war on the Japanese mainland. Everyone agrees that the bombings wreaked an enormous toll on humankind. The bigger, and more pressing, question is whether Obama’s trip will change anyone’s thinking about future use of the bomb. Read on...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-pope-saw-at-hiroshima

The New Yorker

Iran's Grim News From Syria 
By Robin Wright

Iran is taking increasingly heavy casualties in Syria. A statement from the Revolutionary Guards announced on Saturday that thirteen of the corps’ élite forces were “martyred” in the escalating battle near Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has become the front line in the five-year civil war. Another twenty-one Iranians were wounded. It is, for Iran, the largest single casualty toll since the country intervened to rescue the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The fighting took place in Khan Touman, a village nine miles south of Aleppo. There’s no hiding the human costs in a war that is being played out graphically on social media. Syrian rebels immediately posted grisly photographs and videos of a pile of corpses dressed in camouflage, as well as photos of wallets with Iranian documents, identity cards, and currency.

Read on: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-grim-news-from-syria

The New Yorker

How the Curse of Sykes-Picot
Still Haunts the Middle East 
By Robin Wright

In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman Empire’s vast land mass into British and French spheres of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process—and other deals, declarations, and treaties—that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass. The new borders ultimately bore little resemblance to the original Sykes-Picot map, but their map is still viewed as the root cause of much that has happened ever since.

May 16th will mark the agreement’s hundredth anniversary, amid questions over whether its borders can survive the region’s current furies. “The system in place for the past one hundred years has collapsed,” Barham Salih, a former deputy prime minister of Iraq, declared at the Sulaimani Forum,  in Iraqi Kurdistan, in March. “It’s not clear what new system will take its place."
Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-curse-of-sykes-picot-still-haunts-the-middle-east

The New Yorker

Zarif on Fraying Nuclear Deal, 
U.S. Relations & Holocaust Cartoons
By Robin Wright 
Three months after Iran dismantled large parts of its nuclear program, in compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the international nuclear deal—the country’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, declared last week in New York that the United States is falling seriously short of its commitments. Iran’s Central Bank chief, Valiollah Seif, delivered a similar message during his first meeting with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, on April 14th, and he told the Council on Foreign Relations, “Nothing has happened.” In an interview, Zarif discussed sticking points in relations between Washington and Tehran. 
Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-javad-zarif-on-the-fraying-nuclear-deal-u-s-relations-and-holocaust-cartoons

The New Yorker

Iran's Daring Dissident Cleric
Pleads to be Put on Trial
By Robin Wright 

     In a melancholy yet defiant open letter, from one revolutionary to another, Mehdi Karroubi pleaded over the weekend to be put on trial in Iran. His dissent could no longer be silenced, he wrote in his letter to President Hassan Rouhani, a former colleague, and he declared, “We must stand up against the idea of a regime with one single voice, made so through monopolizing an unaccountable power.”
     But a trial could also mean the death sentence for a man who was twice a presidential candidate and who served for eight years as Speaker of Parliament. A man who was jailed nine times under the shah is now viewed as a "seditionist" by his own revolution.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-iranian-opposition-leader-pushes-to-be-put-on-trial?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

The Pigeon Boy
And Other Fugitives from ISIS
By Robin Wright 

Mohammed Hussein, a six-year-old Iraqi boy, was born with a condition known as glanular hypospadias, in which the opening for the urethra is not in its usual place at the tip of the penis. When his father, Saad Hussein, pulled the child’s trousers down to show me, his mother and five sisters seemed unsurprised. Need had long ago superseded modesty. We were clustered together on the floor of a small tent in Baharka, a camp outside Erbil, in northern Iraq, for people who have fled ISIS but who haven’t left the country. The family has been quartered there for almost two years.

The camp holds some four thousand Internally Displaced People (I.D.P.s), as they’re officially known. Legally, they aren’t refugees—they remain in their home country—but they are often worse off than refugees, who can hope for aid from the countries that take them in, or from the international community. I.D.P.s remain at the mercy of governments at war, receiving limited aid and enduring all the inherent dangers of war zones.

“Access to safety without delay is the major problem faced by I.D.P.s in Iraq, due to constantly shifting warfronts and the need for security screening to prevent infiltration by ISIS,” Bruno Geddo, the representative in Iraq of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told me. “A related problem is restrictions to freedom of movement and family separation on security grounds.” I.D.P.s are frequently limited in where they are allowed to go; sometimes, they aren’t even allowed to leave the camps. The displaced often become the forgotten people.

Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-pigeon-boy-and-other-forgotten-fugitives-from-isis

The New Yorker

On the American Front Line Against ISIS
By Robin Wright 
America’s front line facing the Islamic State is more than two thousand miles from Brussels, as the crow flies, and then another ninety minutes by country road from the Kurdish capital of Erbil, in northern Iraq. The trip to Camp Swift, in Makhmour, the forward U.S. base, can be deceptively pastoral. I was slowed by a flock of sheep and goats crossing the road to a grassy plain sprinkled with budding yellow wildflowers. A curly-haired eighteen-year-old sheepherder, Mustafa Maghdid, picked up a young lamb to show me. A woolly white ram played at his feet. Millions of Iraqis fled as ISIS blitzed through the north, in 2014, but a determined few have been reluctant to surrender their herds or small farms. Tales of ISIS’s plunder are rampant. There is little left, according to the war grapevine, for those who may one day want to return.

The farming district of Makhmour is also one of the areas where ISIS has used primitive but deadly forms of chemical weapons—mustard gas and chlorine—since last August, most recently last month. It’s also the place where a Marine was killed this month by ISIS rocket fire. He was the second American killed since the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, in 2011. He was deployed just 15 minutes from the border of the Islamic State's caliphate. 

Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/on-the-american-front-line-against-isis

The New Yorker

The Bride Wore Green
What a Wedding Says about Iran's Future
By Robin Wright 

Wearing a flowing green gown and a string of pearls that hung, flapper-style, below her waist, Narges Mousavi was married Friday, in Tehran. The bride, a painter, was born into the revolutionary élite. Her father, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was Iran’s Prime Minister for eight years. In the eighties, he led the new Islamic Republic through a grisly eight-year war with Iraq at a time when the world sided largely with Saddam Hussein, and in 2009 he ran for the Presidency. The bride’s mother is Zahra Rahnavard, a sculptor and the Islamic Republic’s first female university chancellor. During her husband’s campaign, the Iranian media compared Rahnavard’s lively appearances to Michelle Obama’s.

Neither of Mousavi’s parents attended the wedding. For the past five years, they have been under house arrest for their role in the Green Movement protests that challenged the 2009 election results. They have never been charged, never tried—just isolated. Narges, the youngest of their three daughters, can see her parents only when she receives a call telling her to visit. Visits are limited to an hour.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-bride-wore-green-what-a-wedding-says-about-irans-future

The New Yorker

Will the US Olympic Flag-Bearer Be Wearing Hijab? 
By Robin Wright 
This is one of my favorite stories in years. Ibtihaj Muhammad--or Ibti to her friends--has defied discrimination as both an African-American and a Muslim to become an Olympian at this summer's games in Rio. She will be the first ever American competing in any sport in hijab. Her story is so compelling--defiantly braving all the odds to rise to excellence--that I'm betting she carries the flag for Team USA. In a speech on February 3, Obama dared her to bring home the gold. 
Read on...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/will-americas-olympic-flag-bearer-be-wearing-a-hijab?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Is ISIS Finally Hurting? 
By Robin Wright 

For the first time since its blitz across Syria and Iraq, in 2014, the Islamic State is on the defensive in both countries. Its caliphate is shrinking. Its numbers are down. It hasn’t launched a new offensive since May, 2015. The new U.S. Expeditionary Targeting Force in Iraq—led by some 50 Delta Force commandos—has scored the first capture of a key ISIS operative. Yet ISIS has become a global phenomenon over the past year, attracting pledges of fealty from extremist groups on three continents. It remains the world’s wealthiest terrorist organization, and the first to create its own state, from large swaths of both Iraq and Syria, with a capital in the Syrian city of Raqqa. Here's a full status report--from the US vantage point. I saw down with the President's Special Envoy to counter ISIS to get his assessment. Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-the-islamic-state-hurting-the-presidents-point-man-on-isis-speaks-out?

The New Yorker

 Iran's Election Message to Hardliners
By Robin Wright 
Over the weekend, as Iran's election results showed that long-entrenched hard-liners were losing, a new joke circulated in Tehran: Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had called Secretary of State John Kerry with an offer: “John, we have just succeeded in defeating our hard-liners. Let us know if you want advice on how to beat Mr. Trump.”
My piece for The New Yorker on Iran's important poll.

Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-voters-sent-a-message-to-the-hard-liners?

The New Yorker

Iran's Technicolor Election 
By Robin  Wright
My piece for The New Yorker on Iran's Technicolor Election. To help voters choose among 6,000 candidates in a (yes, only!) eight-day campaign, new coalitions have selected colors: Turquoise for the Universal Coalition of Reformers. Bright yellow for Grand Coalition of Principlists. Indigo for conservatives. Pity the color blind voter! Lots at stake in this poll, which will pick a new parliament as well as an Assembly of Elections, a rough equivalent  of the College of Cardinals, as it selects the Supreme Leader, the ultimate authority in Iran. 
Read on...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-technicolor-elections?intcid=mod-latest

A Ceasefire in Syria? 
By Robin Wright 
My New Yorker piece on prospects for the new ceasefire in Syria--and the daunting odds against it. Trust the Russians? (Really? Remember Ukraine.) Trust the Syrian regime to comply? (No brainer.) And then there's the nasty little fact that ISIS is not part of the deal. (The beheaders.)
And yet, after at least 250,000 dead, 4 million refugees and 13.5 million dependent on humanitarian aid for daily survival, there's nothing else visible. Read on...
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-ceasefire-in-syria?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Iran's Revolutionary Grandchildren
By Robin Wright 
My New Yorker piece on the grandchildren of Iran's revolution--and how their fate reflects the tensions within Iran on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's return from exile to replace the monarchy with a theocracy and on the eve of pivotal elections that will determine Iran's future. 
Read on....

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-revolutionary-grandchildren?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Beastie Boys and Girls:

The New Anthropomorphism
By Robin Wright 
I had so much fun writing this piece!
Turns out it’s perfectly human to imagine ourselves as animals. In Britain, an Oxford don decided to experience life as a badger, slithering on the ground and eating worms. The Furry Movement holds conventions for fur-suited humans whose spirits “align” more with animals. On Twitter, users who tweet as pandas, cobras, cats and other animals have accumulated huge followings. @bronxzooscobra has as many followers on Twitter as Bernie Sanders. Who knew!
The human imagination is utterly amazing.
Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/beastie-boys-and-girls-the-new-anthropomorphism

The New Yorker

Female Genital Mutilation--Now 200 million 
By Robin Wright 
My New Yorker piece on a stunning UN finding that it had underestimated the number of little girls whose genitals had been scrapped, pricked or sliced--by 70 million. The new numbers mean that at least two hundred million girls and women across the globe (including thousands in the United States) have gone through "female genital mutilation." The UN reports that the trend is now global, not just in Africa. The UN has declared it an “irreversible human-rights violation.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/female-genital-mutilation-the-numbers-keep-rising

The New Yorker

Iran's Comeback Tour
By Robin Wright
My New Yorker piece on "Iran's Comeback Tour." After four decades as a pariah nation, Tehran is being courted by both East and West. It's one of the fastest turnarounds in history. On his first tour of the Middle East, China's president pledged Saturday to work with Iran to reopen the ancient Silk road trade route, this time with high-speed trains, and generate $600 billion in trade over next decade. On Monday, Iran's president began a European tour that will include buying more than 100 Airbus planes and a visit with Pope Francis. However, the comeback tour may not be a sell-out. Iran still has a revolutionary government with all the uncertainties that entails. Big banks and businesses still nervous.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/iran-is-back-in-business?intcid=mod-latest

The New Yorker

Obama's Secret Second Channel to Iran
By Robin Wright

Fourteen months ago, President Obama authorized a top-secret, second diplomatic channel with Tehran to negotiate freedom for Americans who had disappeared or been imprisoned in Iran. It was a high-risk diplomatic gamble. The initiative grew out of nuclear negotiations, launched in the fall of 2013, between Iran and the world’s six major powers. On the margins of every session, Wendy Sherman, the top American negotiator, pressed her Iranian counterparts about the American cases. The Iranians countered with demands for the release of their citizens imprisoned in the United States for sanctions-busting crimes. More than a year of informal discussions between Sherman and her counterpart, Majid Takht Ravanchi, the Iranian Foreign Ministry official in charge of American and European affairs, led to an agreement, in late 2014, that the issue should be handled separately—but officially—through a second channel. After debate within the Administration, Obama approved the initiative. But it was so tightly held that most of the American team engaged in tortuous negotiation on Iran’s nuclear program were not told about it.

Read on...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/prisoner-swap-obamas-secret-second-channel-to-iran