Mandela's Dream for South Africa Is in Ruins
Wednesday, July 28, 2021
The New Yorker
Monday, July 19, 2021
The New Yorker
Iran's Hollywood Kidnapping Plot Exposes Its Paranoia
At first, Masih Alinejad didn’t believe the F.B.I. The Iranian-born journalist and activist thought that she was safe after going into exile, in 2009, even as government propaganda continued to target her from afar. State television variously reported that she was a drug addict and accused her of being a spy for Western governments. Her parents and siblings, who remained in Iran, were harassed, threatened with loss of employment, and instructed to lure Alinejad to neighboring Turkey for a “family reunion,” so that agents could supposedly “just talk” to her. “Stalin would have been proud,” Alinejad recounted. Her brother, Alireza, warned her about a potential trap. In 2019, he was arrested, and the next year he was sentenced to eight years in prison. He remains in jail.
Friday, April 9, 2021
The New Yorker
Why It's So Hard For America to End Its Wars
For millennia, politicians, from Cicero to Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon, have opined about “peace with honor” to end military engagements; writers, from Shakespeare and Edmund Burke to A. A. Milne, have waxed eloquent on the challenges. Biden is the fourth President to try to achieve it in the Middle East and South Asia in the twenty-first century. There’s a lot of debate in Washington about what he should do—and whether the U.S. should simply pack up and pull out of the region, which is what it did in Vietnam, in 1973, and in Lebanon, in 1984, under pressure from ragtag militias with vintage weaponry who were better strategists and willing to sacrifice more lives. With the pivot to Asia—a.k.a. China—and American energy independence, why stay longer? From a distance, it’s appealing; from the ground, it’s a more challenging call.
For Biden, his legacy could be either of two extremes—a President who finally extricated America from quagmires in the messy Middle East, or a leader who ceded ground to isis jihadis and the dictatorial Assad regime in Syria, Sunni extremists and well-armed Shiite militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Not to mention Russia, which now has access to bases on the Mediterranean, in Syria, and in Libya, farther west than it’s ever been. Biden’s legacy will shape America’s legacy, too. Read on....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-its-so-hard-for-america-to-end-its-wars
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
The New Yorker
On Afghanistan, An Anguishing Choice about Withdrawing Troops
Five factors will influence the U.S. role and the prospects for peace after two decades of war.
By Robin Wright
There’s a prophetic scene at the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the film that chronicles a flamboyant Texas congressman (played by Tom Hanks) and a rogue C.I.A. agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman) mobilizing what was then the largest U.S. covert intelligence operation in history. Operation Cyclone facilitated the training, arming, and empowering of the Afghan mujahideen—holy warriors—to fight the Soviet Union in the nineteen-eighties. America’s proxies prevailed, in the sense that the Soviets realized that their decade-long presence had become too costly—financially, politically, and militarily—and that they couldn’t achieve their goals. “What, are we going to sit there forever?” the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly told the Politburo in 1986. “Or should we be ending this war? Otherwise, we’ll disgrace ourselves in every respect.” In 1989, after losing more than fourteen thousand troops and spending at least fifty billion dollars, the Soviets withdrew. They just wanted out of an unpopular war. Afghanistan soon collapsed into a civil war that pitted rival warlords against one another, until the Taliban seized power, in 1996, imposed strict Islamic law, and welcomed other jihadis such as Al Qaeda. After Al Qaeda’s attacks in 2001, U.S. forces helped their Afghan allies to topple the Taliban. A new U.S.-backed government was ensconced in Kabul.
Two decades later, Joe Biden now faces an anguishing choice over whether to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1st. The deadline is part of an agreement brokered by the Trump Administration with the Taliban a year ago. Like Gorbachev, Biden clearly wants to go—and has, for more than a decade. In 2010, when he was Vice-President, he promised a pullout. “We’re starting it in July of 2011, and we’re going to be totally out of there—come hell or high water—by 2014,” Biden vowed, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Last year, in an article in Foreign Affairs, he wrote, “It is past time to end the forever wars.” Recent polls indicate that Americans are largely ambivalent about or uninterested in Afghanistan; twenty to thirty per cent of respondents in recent surveys didn’t even bother to answer about a pullout. The national fury spurred by the trauma of the 9/11 attacks has evaporated.
Yet walking away isn’t so easy. Even after an investment of more than a trillion dollars, the U.S. hasn’t fully achieved the goals of its longest war, either. Navigating a way out—especially securing a comprehensive peace agreement—is proving to be messy and potentially deadly, too. In an interview with ABC News last week, Biden conceded that it may be “tough” to withdraw. He has no good choices; neither does the U.S. military, which has reduced troop levels from fifteen thousand when the U.S.-Taliban pact was signed a year ago to around three thousand today. If American troops withdraw, almost ten thousand nato troops from thirty-six nations and more than twenty-four thousand contractors who support the Afghan state and military are almost certain to leave, too.
On a rainy day in Kabul last week, the military headquarters of U.S. and nato troops in Afghanistan was a spooky place. You have to take a military helicopter from the airport to the nearby compound because driving is unsafe. The complex is surrounded by layers of concrete blast walls topped with barbed wire. Haunting murals adorn the barricades. One features a giant painting of a woman in uniform captioned, in black stencilled letters, “afghan female police a force for good.” Another advertises the Invictus Games, for wounded warriors. More than a hundred thousand Afghans, twenty-three hundred Americans, and hundreds of soldiers from nato countries have died in the twenty-year conflict; another twenty thousand Americans have been injured.
Biden’s decision will be influenced by five factors, according to current and former U.S. officials whom I interviewed in Afghanistan and the United States. The first is whether frantic last-ditch diplomacy will salvage peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban. As the U.S. deadline to withdraw approaches, the Administration is throwing spaghetti at the diplomatic wall to see if anything will stick. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a blunt letter to the Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, demanding that he “understand the urgency of my tone,” and calling for his “urgent leadership.” The peace talks, hosted by Qatar, have deadlocked since they started in September of last year as a sequel to the U.S. deal with the Taliban that February. In a new set of proposals, Blinken recommended creating an interim government in which the Taliban and current Afghan leaders share power. It sounded more like an ultimatum than a proposal.
Read on....History is at stake!
Friday, February 5, 2021
The New Yorker
The World Likes Biden But Doubts the U.S. Can Reclaim Global Leadership
Joe Biden’s “first love,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, mused this week, “is foreign policy.” His lifelong interest showed on Thursday when the President, just two weeks in office, addressed the world from the State Department, on his first foray to a federal agency. President Trump only ventured the five blocks to the State Department once, in 2018, sixteen months after taking office, and only for the ceremonial swearing-in of Mike Pompeo, his second Secretary of State. Biden’s speech marked the beginning of his long schlep to repair America’s place in the world after Trump. “America is back,” Biden vowed. “We are a country that does big things. American diplomacy makes it happen. And our Administration is ready to take up the mantle and lead once again.”
Friday, January 22, 2021
The New Yorker
The Awe and Anguish of Being an American Today
The lofty language and political togetherness of
Joe Biden’s Inauguration made for a day to believe, again, in America and the
idea of sharing power, even among people who disagree about almost everything.
Listening to the enchanting young poet Amanda Gorman, I got a little weepy as she told
us, “While democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently
defeated. In this truth, in this faith, we trust.” Lady Gaga’s powerful
rendition of our anthem—pounding home the
line “Our flag was still there”—was as relevant to the treasonous challenge to
Congress this month as it was when British warships bombarded Fort McHenry, in
1814. On the very site of an insurrection that, two weeks earlier, threatened
our union and resulted in five deaths, Joe Biden, our new President, promised
that “democracy has prevailed.” His optimistic energy was infectious.
The problem, after any Inauguration, is all those other days. We need to be honest with ourselves about the health of our democracy. America has made gradual progress, no doubt. We are evolving, albeit with millions still denying the election results. On Wednesday, a woman born to Black and South Asian parents took the oath of office for the Vice-Presidency from a Latina Supreme Court Justice, another woman. “We dream. We shoot for the moon,” Kamala Harris said on Wednesday night. “We are undaunted in our belief that we will overcome.” Others will surely feel the same way. Biden has appointed the most diverse staff in history—men and a record number of women; Blacks, whites, and a Native American; a gay man and a transgender woman—who finally represent the splendid diversity of our land.
Yet we are still vulnerable to the selfish and voracious demands
by many for more rights than others who are legally their equals. And to the
belief in an alternative truth untethered to reality. During
this sacred transition, some twenty-five thousand troops were deployed in my
beloved Washington, D.C., in concentric circles, in an area of only five square
miles—four times as many personnel as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria combined.
On Inauguration Day, there was still spray paint on the
Capitol’s marble columns—“A chilling reminder of what happened there just two
weeks ago,” Senator Amy Klobuchar told NPR. Amid the calls to mend fences, the
most striking images of the day were new fences, topped with prickly barbed
wire, which prevented the public from participating in the celebration of their
votes. Read on....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-awe-and-anguish-of-being-an-american-today
Monday, January 18, 2021
The New Yorker
Biden Faces More Aggressive Rivals and a Fraying World Order
Friday, January 8, 2021
The New Yorker
The World Shook as America Raged
Monday, January 4, 2021
The New Yorker
Biden Faces a Minefield in New Diplomacy with Iran
Monday, November 30, 2020
The New Yorker
Why the Assassination of a Scientist Will Have No Impact on Iran’s Nuclear Program
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
The New Yorker
Our Brains Explain the Season’s Sadness
I’ve been consumed this fall with a melancholy sadness. It’s different from the loneliness that I felt in the early stage of the pandemic, during the lockdown, when I took a picture of my shadow after a neighborhood walk failed to jumpstart exercise endorphins. Eleven months after covid-19 spread globally, and during what would otherwise be a joyous Thanksgiving, my sorrow, and surely the emotion of many others, is more complicated. Studies by health-care professionals show that our emotional challenges, from anxiety and depression to anger and fear, have been deepened by the pandemic. In June, just three months into a historic health crisis, a survey by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that forty per cent of Americans were already struggling with at least one mental-health issue. Among young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, one in four had thought about committing suicide during the previous thirty days. By July, more than half of Americans over the age of eighteen said their mental health had been negatively affected by emotions evoked during the pandemic, the Kaiser Family Foundation found. In October, A.A.R.P. reported that two-thirds of Americans felt increased anxiety.
For Americans, the pandemic’s spring scourge intersected with appalling human tragedies and unprecedented political rancor over the summer: the racial tension and unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd, in the Midwest; soaring unemployment, business shutdowns, and hunger nationwide; the raging wildfires in the West and record-setting tropical storms in the South; and a bizarre and bitter Presidential campaign. Each calamity intensified our emotional state. Now, our anxieties are further compounded by holidays without loved ones—at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah, then the New Year—and by the numbing rate of coronavirus infections and the darkening hours of winter.
Cheer up. Just understanding the phenomenon—and the science of the brain that copes with crisis—helps a lot. In an excellent and timely new book, “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live,” Nicholas Christakis writes that epidemics also produce fear and grief that “can themselves be contagious, forming a kind of parallel epidemic.” Christakis, a sociologist and physician who directs the Human Nature Lab, at Yale, described a phenomenon called “the cascades of grief.” He told me, “If the plague is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, then grief is its squire.” Christakis quoted the Greek general and historian Thucydides, who noted during a plague in the fifth century B.C. that “the most terrible feature in the malady” was public despair.
This year’s simultaneous health, social, natural, and political crises have produced psychological phases, almost like seasons, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, told me. “Early on, I saw a lot of solidarity,” she said. It was visible when people took to their balconies or streets during the first phase of the pandemic to bang pots in support of medical workers and first responders.
But over the summer, fatigue and denial set in. Holt-Lunstad explained, “Initially, we all hoped that the pandemic was a short-term pause in life, but it lasted much longer than many anticipated.” Social distancing and other restrictions exhausted patience and increased frustration; some got tired of complying, and others took them as an affront to personal freedoms.
The way our feelings bounce biologically off social networks is primitive and ancient, Christakis told me. “Our emotions have a collective existence. They depend not only on your own genes and experiences. They also depend on the biochemistry, genetics, physiology, thoughts, feelings, and actions of the people to whom we are directly—or even indirectly—connected.” Our emotional state depends on what’s happening around us. “It’s the same with the germ and the same with emotions,” he said. And it’s not limited to humans. Other species experience it as well. “If you map the social networks of elephants, you find that they are structurally the same as among humans—and our last common ancestor is from eighty-five million years ago,” he said. Read on...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/our-brains-explain-the-seasons-sadness
Thursday, November 19, 2020
The New Yorker
What Will A Vengeful President
Do to The World in His Final Weeks?
Donald Trump, whose mood in his final weeks varies from sulking to spiteful, seems to be plotting to rescue his own image by derailing the Presidency of the man who defeated him. Joe Biden was already going to inherit a world far more dangerous than it was four years ago, but Trump’s final acts on foreign policy threaten to slow, complicate, or stymie Biden’s attempts to stabilize the country and the world.
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
The Seven Pillars of Biden’s Foreign Policy
Anne Hidalgo, the first female mayor of Paris, succinctly framed the global reaction to Joe Biden’s election. “Welcome back America,” she tweeted. For all the past resentment, envy, or fear of American power, most long-standing allies, and even many adversaries, have yearned for an end to the unnerving pettiness, whimsy, and personality-driven policies of Donald Trump. “Almost all countries are happier with Biden than Trump, even those that made it look like they were close to him, like Japan,” Robin Niblett, the director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, in London, told me. “Trump’s unpredictability and reliance on bilateral bullying to get his way built up deep resentment.”
The President-elect may prove more popular abroad than he is at home, partly because of his global experience. Between his first election to the Senate, in 1972, and becoming Vice-President, in 2009, Biden did two stints as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, travelled for decades to conflict hot spots and disaster zones, and met with nearly a hundred and fifty foreign leaders from almost five dozen countries. The President-elect is a well-known commodity. So are his views.
“Certainly Biden is the most well-versed American President in the sausage-making process of foreign policy, and in terms of learning about every country and how each functions,” Douglas Brinkley, a scholar of the Presidency at Rice University, told me. “Nobody’s had the experience on foreign policy that Biden has had.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-seven-pillars-of-bidens-foreign-policy
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
The New Yorker
America, the Infected and Vulnerable
Just as the White House became an epicenter of the pandemic and congressional negotiations on the ailing economy collapsed, the Pentagon made its own startling announcement on Tuesday. The entire Joint Chiefs of Staff—the highest-ranking officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and other services—went into quarantine for two weeks. These are not only commanders who control the world’s mightiest military, run wars, order bombings, and authorize special-operations raids; they are part of the most consistent and sane wing of the American government right now.
The Joint Chiefs are the highest-ranking members of the military to be impacted by the pandemic, but far from the only ones. As of Wednesday morning, almost seventy thousand members or employees of the military—who put their lives at risk daily to protect the country—have been infected, the Pentagon reported on a special Web site about covid-19. Almost forty per cent of the two hundred and thirty-one U.S. military installations around the world still face travel restrictions because of the pandemic. From multiple angles, including the fact that President Trump is also Commander-in-Chief, the coronavirus is now a genuine national-security threat for the United States. And the rest of the world knows it. The potential dangers abound. Read on....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/america-the-infected-and-vulnerable
Sunday, October 4, 2020
The New Yorker
Presidential Illnesses Have Change the Course of World History
The world might be a different place if American Presidents had not been felled by disease or hidden debilitating conditions. In February, 1945, just two months before his death, President Franklin Roosevelt—paralyzed by polio, weakened by congestive heart failure, and with his blood pressure hitting 260/150—travelled all the way to Yalta, a resort on the Crimean coast, to meet the Soviet Premier, Joseph Stalin, and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. F.D.R. was by then a shell of a man, with skin hanging from his bones, raccoon rings around his eyes, and hands that often shook. But he agreed to the six-thousand-mile journey because the final phase of the Second World War and its aftermath were at stake. He wanted Stalin’s coöperation on a new international organization to foster peace, principles for governing countries liberated from Nazi rule in Europe, and military help in the Pacific theatre against Japan.
In the Yalta Declaration, the three leaders set the stage—or so Roosevelt thought—for the postwar world. They agreed to Stalin’s request to divvy up Germany, Roosevelt’s dream of the United Nations, and to ceding chunks of Asia to the Soviet sphere. The most sensitive point was the fate of Eastern Europe after liberation from the Nazis. The three leaders pledged to allow those countries to form governments “representative of all democratic elements” and to facilitate imminent and free elections. Stalin specifically agreed to early elections in strategic Poland, which had been liberated by Soviet troops, and to allow non-Communist members to participate. Upon his return home, Roosevelt gave a speech to Congress extolling the “unanimous” agreements with Moscow. “Never before have the major Allies been more closely united—not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims,” he boasted. More important than the agreement, he said, “We achieved a unity of thought and a way of getting along together.”
Except that Stalin reneged on his commitments, as well as on the spirit of Yalta, in ways that shaped the next half century. Read on....