The New Yorker

How Loneliness from Coronavirus Isolation Takes Its Own Toll

By Robin Wright

At a White House press briefing on Friday, Peter Alexander, a correspondent for NBC News, asked President Trump about the psychological toll of the covid-19 crisis: “Nearly two hundred dead, fourteen thousand who are sick, millions, as you witnessed, who are scared,” Alexander said. “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?” Trump shot back, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.” For weeks, the President seemed oblivious to the scope of the coronavirus threat; now he seems heartless about the spiralling anxiety among Americans and ignorant about the physiology of fear, after a week unprecedented in American history, during which much of the country has closed down, the economy has ground to a halt, and millions have been told to stay home. Since last week, state officials have ordered one in three Americans—living in New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, Michigan, and Massachusetts—to remain indoors. For many of the rest of us, normal life has been suspended as the tally of cases soars. It all feels eerily apocalyptic—and, for most, scary.

The Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, demonstrated more compassion than Trump when he appealed, on the same day, for residents of America’s second-largest city to stay home. “I know there’s been a lot of crying, and it’s O.K. to cry,” he said. “I know there’s been a lot of fear, and it’s O.K. to be afraid.” On Saturday, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, acknowledged the “truly significant” psychological and social stresses of our uncertain times. “People are struggling with the emotions as much as they are struggling with the economics,” he said. “This state wants to start to address that.” He appealed to psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists willing to volunteer to contact the state to help set up a network to provide mental-health assistance for people who are anxious or isolated.

As governors across the nation began ordering lockdowns, I talked with neuroscientists and psychologists about the impact on the human body—not of this new pathogen but of the various stresses that accompany it.  Read on...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-loneliness-from-coronavirus-isolation-takes-its-own-toll

Finding Connection and Resilience During the Coronavirus Pandemic

By Robin Wright

Across the globe, a coronavirus culture is emerging, spontaneously and creatively, to deal with public fear, restrictions on daily life, and the tedious isolation of quarantine. “This is a bad science-fiction movie that is real,” Agustín Fuentes, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, told me, in a late-night discussion this week, about how covid-19 may alter the human journey. He envisions a profound evolutionary process to insure the survival of the species as pandemics become more common. It’s already visible.

“What is so important to humanity is connection. The kind of quarantines—in New York and Seattle, and what will happen in thousands of other places in the United States—will require people to connect in other ways,” he said. “One of the amazing things about the human species—once harmless critters not much more than monkeys running around—is that, over time, we have become very creative. We’ve adapted to survive. That’s what people will rely on now—coming up with incredibly imaginative ways to find connections even when they’re not in the same physical space together.”  Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/coping-camaraderie-and-human-evolution-amid-the-coronavirus-crisis

A Hostage-Taker Dies in Iran and Other Coronavirus Stories

By Robin Wright

Hossein Sheikholeslam spent years studying computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, before he returned to Iran, in 1979, to join the revolution and participate in the takeover of the U.S. Embassy. “I was there all four hundred and forty-four days,” he recalled, the last time I saw him, in Tehran, in 2015. “I helped put together and translate the classified cables that the Americans had shredded.” He went on to become a member of parliament, the Ambassador to Syria, and the deputy foreign minister. He was one of the leading figures in Iran’s attempt to export its revolutionary ideology. He had been in Syria and Lebanon days before a suicide bomber drove into the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Beirut, in 1983. In 2015, we had a painfully long argument about why the regime still rallied its followers to shout “Death to America” at public events more than three decades later. Sheikholeslam, who by then had a silvery beard and six children, had been nicknamed Gap Tooth by the hostages, for obvious reasons. I asked him if he knew that. He grinned wide enough to show me that the gap was gone. “It’s artificial,” he said, tapping his front teeth. Sheikholeslam died, on Thursday, of covid-19, which is caused by the new coronavirus. He was the latest in a growing list of Iranian officials to be felled by the disease. Eight per cent of Iran’s parliament has been infected; two members have died.

In just the past two weeks, the number of covid-19 cases in Iran has soared to more than forty-seven hundred—up more than a thousand in just a day. In Qom, the holy city that is the epicenter of the outbreak, the cemetery has been unable to keep up with the number of deaths. On Wednesday, the BBC Persian Service posted a cell-phone video showing row after row of black body bags awaiting burial in Qom. Other videos show men wearing hazmat suits lowering shrouded bodies into the ground.

Iran is one of the epicenters of the global disease that, as of Friday morning, had infected more than a hundred thousand and killed more than thirty-four hundred globally.  Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/coping-camaraderie-and-human-evolution-amid-the-coronavirus-crisis

The New Yorker

 The One War That the Human Species Can’t Lose

By Robin Wright

On the final day of my expedition to Antarctica last year, ten of us set out on a Zodiac to tour dozens of icebergs in nature’s wondrous ocean museum. The frozen sculptures glistened in exquisite hues of blue and cyan; iceberg colors vary by the density of air bubbles. Each was formed after snapping off an ancient glacier. The iceberg that sank the Titanic in the Atlantic, in 1912, was considered a mere “bergy bit,” or a smaller piece of floating ice; it melted within a couple of years. The ones we saw around Antarctica were massive. Occasionally, we spotted blubbery elephant seals (which can weigh more than four tons) napping on icebergs, or Adélie penguins (so named by a French explorer, for his wife) leaping among them, or a Humpback whale’s blow unnervingly nearby. As we headed back to the ship, the naturalist steering the Zodiac suddenly turned off the motor. “Listen,” he said. Antarctica is usually a powerfully silent continent except for the gusting winds or the lapping waves on its coastline. He put his finger up, signalling to wait for it. We sat motionless. A thundering crack then ripped through the air, echoing across the water until it felt like it was going off inside my head. We watched a towering slice of the continent break off and crash into the Southern Ocean. It felt cataclysmic.

For almost a half century, I’ve covered wars, revolutions and uprisings on four continents, many for years on end. I’ve always been an outside observer watching as others killed each other. I lamented the loss of human life—and the warring parties’ self-destructive practices—from an emotional distance. In Antarctica, I saw war through a different prism. And I was the enemy. “Humans will be but a blip in the span of Earth’s history,” Wayne Ranney, a naturalist and geologist on the expedition, told me. “The only question is how long the blip will be.” Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/antarcticas-ice-the-one-war-that-the-human-species-cant-lose

The New Yorker

Ambassador Bill Taylor on Impeachment, Russia, and the Law of the Jungle

By Robin Wright

Ambassador Bill Taylor gained fame for a text message in which he challenged President Donald Trump’s decision to withhold aid to Ukraine until it announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor wrote to Ambassador Gordon Sondland, on September 9th. The text became a key piece of evidence in the impeachment of Trump on charges of abusing power for political gain. Taylor testified on the first day of the House impeachment hearings that he had adamantly opposed the decision to withhold aid. “I could not and would not defend such a policy,” Taylor said.

Among his colleagues, Taylor is also famed for a small notebook he carries with him, in which he takes copious notes on meetings and conversations. The notebook chronicled how Ukraine policy played out during the suspension of U.S. military aid after President Trump’s call to President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25th. Taylor has served the United States—as a soldier, in senior positions at the Pentagon and the State Department, and finally as an Ambassador—for a half century.  He spent most of his life dealing with conflict or post-conflict environments. In the course of his career, he coördinated U.S. aid efforts to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republic, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The George W. Bush Administration deployed him to Jerusalem as the U.S. special representative to the Quartet peace process and to Kyiv as the U.S. Ambassador from 2006 to 2009. President Obama appointed him to coördinate aid to Middle Eastern countries in transition after the Arab Spring. In June of last year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo personally asked Taylor to return as acting Ambassador after Marie Yovanovitch was abruptly recalled. Taylor did so despite having serious doubts and a warning from his wife not to take the assignment.

For years, Taylor has been my guide on Ukraine and many issues in the Middle East and Afghanistan. We sat down on Friday to discuss the impeachment drama, Russia, the Ukraine crisis, U.S. foreign policy, and the dangers that the world will return to the law of the jungle. The text has been edited for length and clarity. Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/ambassador-bill-taylor-on-impeachment-russia-and-the-law-of-the-jungle

The New Yorker

Trump Ready to Let Assad Stay on,
As Putin Declares Victory in Syria
By Robin Wright 
Despite the deaths of as many as half a million people, dozens by chemical weapons, in the Syrian civil war, the Trump Administration is now prepared to accept President Bashar al-Assad’s continued rule until Syria’s next scheduled Presidential election, in 2021, according to U.S. and European officials. The decision reverses repeated U.S. statements that Assad must step down as part of a peace process.
As recently as October, after a swing through the Middle East, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, “The United States wants a whole and unified Syria with no role for Bashar al-Assad in the government. The reign of the Assad family is coming to an end..”
The U.S. decision reflects the Administration’s limited options, the military reality on the ground, and the success of Syria’s Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah allies in propping up the beleaguered Assad regime. 

https://www.newyorker.com/sections/news/trump-to-let-assad-stay-until-2021-as-putin-declares-victory-in-syria

The New Yorker

Trump Sabotages His Own Mideast Peace Process
By Robin Wright
President Trump threw a diplomatic bomb into the Middle East peace process with his twin decisions to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. The decision broke with seven decades of U.S. policy by both Republican and Democratic Administrations. It defied every ally, save Israel, and disregarded a last-ditch global campaign that included key figures from the world’s three monotheistic religions—Pope Francis, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and American Jewish groups. Trump’s decision fulfilled a campaign promise, but it threatened to unravel one of his top foreign-policy pledges: to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, who have already called for “three days of rage” in response.
Read on....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-sabotages-his-own-mideast-peace-process

The New Yorker

The Saudi Royal Purge--with Trump Consent
By Robin Wright 

With the tacit support of President Trump, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his powerful son launched an unprecedented purge of their own family over the weekend. The major targets were royal brethren who controlled money, the media, or the military. Among the dozens arrested were eleven senior princes, several current or former ministers, the owners of three major television stations, the head of the most important military branch, and one of the wealthiest men in the world, who has been a major shareholder in Citibank, Twentieth Century Fox, Apple, Twitter, and Lyft.

“It’s the equivalent of waking up to find Warren Buffett and the heads of ABC, CBS and NBC have been arrested,” a former U.S. official told me. “It has all the appearances of a coup d’état. Saudi Arabia is rapidly becoming another country. The kingdom has never been this unstable.”

The purge sent shockwaves of fear through the kingdom—one of the world’s two largest producers and exporters of oil—as well as the Middle East, global financial markets, and the international community. The arrests continued on Monday, with no indication when the crackdown might end.

Read on...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-saudi-royal-purge-with-trumps-consent

The New Yorker

What Does the New York Attack Say About ISIS Now?
By Robin Wright 
Shortly after the terrorist attack in New York on Tuesday, a new account, @cnnbrea, which described itself as “CNN Breaking News,” appeared on Twitter. Its crude, explicit and ungrammatical tweets vowed more ISIS attacks on the United States. One warned: “O, Nation of Cross in America We will continue to terrorize you and ruin your lives.” It attached a photo of American police overlaid with a headline: “RUN The Islamic State is Coming.”
ISIS’s constantly evolving and mischievous propaganda is one of the few tools left for the group to spread its toxic message and inspire lethal attacks. It has now lost about ninety per cent of the territory that made up its pseudo-caliphate, which was the size of Indiana in 2014. Yet ISIS’s propaganda was sufficient to animate Saipov to carry out the worst terrorist attack in New York since 9/11—as he has now confessed, waiving his Miranda rights.
As John Miller, the New York Police deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told “CBS This Morning,” the United States has not yet figured out how to deal with the arc of radicalization. “This is something that has vexed us since 9/11,” he said. “We have no effective counter-message today.”
Read on....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-new-york-attack-says-about-isis-now

The New Yorker

On Christopher Robin, War and PTSD
By Robin Wright 

Named by my parents after Christopher Robin, I’ve been a lifelong Pooh-ologist. I memorized A. A. Milne’s “Vespers”—an enchanting little poem about his son’s bedtime prayers—as a tot decades ago. I can recite it still. That first poem, published in 1923, paved the way for the quartet of books that launched the winsome boy and his stuffed pal Winnie-the-Pooh, among the most cherished of characters in children’s literature. Last year, I visited the original bear and his chums—Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga, and Roo—where they reside, behind glass, in the children’s reading room at the New York Public Library. The century-old toys had just returned from rehabilitation at the stuffed-animal hospital, the librarian told me. For months now, I’ve eagerly awaited the première of “Goodbye Christopher Robin,” the film based on the real life of Christopher Robin Milne, the son of A. A. Milne and the basis for the mythical child. I hoped it would restore the simple sweetness of the narrative and the characters, from before they were Disneyfied.

In its many layers, the movie does much more. Pooh is largely a prop for a very adult exploration of the clash between reality and innocence, war and peace, privacy and fame, and parent and child. For all the sunny cinematography and British-esque scenes in the re-created woods of Sussex, the movie is candid about life’s cruelties, as well as the illusions that create much-needed escape.

It is antiwar at its core. 

Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/on-christopher-robin-war-and-ptsd

The New Yorker

ISIS Jihadis Have Returned In the Thousands
By Robin Wright

Over the past few months, as the size of the Islamic State’s caliphate rapidly shrunk, the Pentagon began citing the number of enemy dead as an important barometer of longer-term success. “We have killed, in conservative estimates, sixty thousand to seventy thousand,” General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the Aspen Security Forum, in July. “They declared an army, they put it on the battlefield, and we went to war with it.”

A high kill rate, which once misled the U.S. military about its prospects in Vietnam, has eased concerns in the U.S. today about future attempts at revenge from isis’s foreign fighters. “We’re not seeing a lot of flow out of the core caliphate, because most of those people are dead now,” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, Jr., the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, confidently told reporters this month. “They’re unable to manifest the former activities they did to try to pose themselves as a state.”

Yet the calculus is pivotal now that the isis pseudo-caliphate has collapsed: Just how many fighters have survived? Where are they? What threat do they pose? Between 2014 and 2016, the perpetrators of all but four of the forty-two terrorist attacks in the West had some connection to isis, the European Commission’s Radicalization Awareness Network said, in July.

A new report, to be released Tuesday by the Soufan Group and the Global Strategy Network, details some of the answers: At least fifty-six hundred people from thirty-three countries have already gone home—and most countries don’t yet have a head count. On average, twenty to thirty per cent of the foreign fighters from Europe have already returned there—though it’s fifty per cent in Britain, Denmark, and Sweden. Thousands more who fought for isis are stuck near the borders of Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq, and are believed to be trying to get back to their home countries.

Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/isis-jihadis-have-returned-home-by-the-thousands

The New Yorker

The Ignominious End of the ISIS Caliphate
By Robin Wright 

History will record that the Islamic State caliphate—a bizarre pseudo-state founded on illusory goals, created by a global horde of jihadis, and enforced with perverted viciousness—survived for three years, three months and some eighteen days. The fall of Raqqa, the nominal isis capital, was proclaimed on Tuesday by the U.S.-backed militia that spearheaded the offensive, a coalition of Kurdish and Arab militias advised by U.S. Special Forces. Mopping-up operations were still going on (especially around the Raqqa stadium, which isis fighters had converted into an arms depot and prison), but the liberation of Raqqa marked the symbolic demise of the Islamic State’s rule.

“How far they’ve fallen. It’s a striking contrast to three years ago, when they planted the flag, in the summer of 2014, and proclaimed God’s kingdom on Earth had come again—and now they’ve evaporated,” Will McCants, the author of the best-selling book "The ISIS Apocalypse: the History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic States," told me.

Read on...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-ignominious-end-of-the-isis-caliphate

The New Yorker

Trump Defies World on Iran 
By Robin Wright 
Defying most of the world, President Trump announced on Friday that the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal is no longer in the U.S. interest, and took the first step toward unraveling it. The accord—brokered jointly with Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia, during two years of often tortuous diplomacy—is the most significant agreement stemming proliferation of the world’s deadliest weapon in more than a quarter century. It now faces a precarious future—with the United States, not Iran, shaping up as the first country to violate its terms.
Read on....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-defies-the-world-on-iran

The New Yorker

Did Trump Just Make Iran More Popular?
By Robin Wright

On Monday, I sat in One U.N. Plaza, the high-rise hotel across the street from the United Nations, and watched a parade of European diplomats head into meetings with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani. Boris Johnson, the blond-mopped British foreign minister, sauntered through the lobby in deep conversation with his delegation. The new French President, Emmanuel Macron, led by a military officer wearing the distinctive stovepipe kepi, and accompanied by a dozen aides and several photographers, scurried by next. One by one, the Europeans came to confer with the leader of a country that has been ostracized by the outside world, for decades, as a pariah. No longer.

The outside world now comes calling on Iran.

During his campaign and since taking office, President Trump has targeted the Islamic Republic with some of his most wrathful language. At his U.N. début, on Tuesday, he called Iran “reckless” and a “corrupt dictatorship” on a “path of poverty, bloodshed, and terror.” He has repeatedly implied that he wants to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated by the world’s six major powers in 2015. As required by Congress, the President must certify every ninety days that Iran is complying with the deal. Trump has certified twice but has indicated that he might change course in mid-October, which would undermine the most significant (whether you like the terms or not) nonproliferation agreement in more than a quarter century.

Trump’s tough talk and sophomoric antics may have had the opposite effect of what he intended, however. Across the board, the world’s other major powers, most of America’s closest allies, and the vast majority of governments at the United Nations this week made clear that they favor the deal. They are siding with Iran this time.

Read on...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/did-trump-just-make-iran-more-popular

The New Yorker

Trump Debuts War Doctrine at the U.N.
By Robin Wright

Donald Trump this week made his début on the world stage—on the same elegant green-marble dais, donated by Italy after the Second World War, that he had mocked in a 2012 tweet as ugly. “The 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind speaker at UN always bothered me,” Trump wrote. “I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.” Trump’s thoughts about the United Nations were bigger—and badder—this time around.

“Major portions of the world are in conflict, and some, in fact, are going to hell,” Trump declared. He vowed to “totally destroy” North Korea if it didn’t abandon its nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles that deliver them. He came close to calling for regime change in “reckless” Iran, for policies that “speak openly of mass murder, vowing death to America, destruction to Israel, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.” Trump called the nuclear deal—brokered by all the veto-wielding nations of the world body—“an embarrassment” to the United States, implicitly insulting the European allies that initiated the effort and the Security Council, which unanimously endorsed it. He implied a willingness to use military action in Venezuela “to help them regain their freedom, recover their country, and restore their democracy.” He blasted Cuba and took sharp digs at China and Russia.

The President also delivered a few campaign-style zingers—like his pledge to “crush loser terrorists.” About North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump pronounced, “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

Trump reportedly insisted, over aides’ objections, that he keep the reference to the Elton John song in his speech. The line is sure to become part of U.N. lore—along with the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s quip, in 1987, “Remember, President Reagan, Rambo only exists in the movies,” and the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s insult, the day after George W. Bush’s 2006 U.N. speech, “The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still.”

For a body more accustomed to nuanced diplomatic speak, and now yearning for leadership in an unsettled world, Trump’s bellicose speech was his America First doctrine on steroids.

Read on....

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trumps-war-doctrine-debuts-on-the-world-stage