Since leaving government at the end of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has spent the last four years calling for Democrats to put climate change at the center of US foreign policy.

He and his colleagues at National Security Action, a now-closed progressive foreign policy group filled with former Obama officials, said doing so was imperative because it was the world’s biggest long-term threat.

Now some of those same colleagues are in the Biden administration, which just convened a successful two-day international climate summit during which nearly all 40 nations made important commitments to reduce emissions, among other things.

Which means Rhodes’s wish came true. Or did it?

I called up Rhodes to see how he’s feeling now that a Democratic administration has finally put climate change at the “center” of US foreign policy, as explicitly stated by Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines.

But what Rhodes told me came as a surprise.

He’s not convinced yet that climate change is actually the central pillar of Biden’s foreign policy. It’s certainly a top priority, sure, but from Rhodes’s perspective, China is also taking up a lot of space in Biden’s foreign policy. So are democracy promotion and human rights.

Rhodes worries Biden may have to make some unpalatable trade-offs on climate change issues if he wants to make progress on those other priorities. Simply put, Rhodes believes Biden has many tough choices ahead, with traps awaiting him beyond the 100-day mark.

“If you’re a progressive who cares about both climate change and human rights in China, it’s a very difficult call as to which one you’re going to care about more. I don’t think we know how the Biden administration is going to answer that question,” he said.

It’s an important concern. Biden is only a few months into his presidency, and for now he has the wiggle room to push on his priorities. But eventually others (read: China) will push back and could force Biden into an uncomfortable situation.

It’s worth noting that Biden’s team rejects any suggestions that they would make any concessions to China solely for progress on climate change. “That’s not going to happen,” John Kerry, the special envoy for climate change, told reporters in January.

Yet Rhodes, who worked to sell the Iran nuclear deal to skeptics in Washington and now co-hosts the Pod Save the World podcast, firmly believes the hardest part — executing climate change policies while trying not to compromise on other priorities — is yet to come.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Alex Ward

When you were in the Obama administration, you worked with a lot of people who are currently in government. And you worked alongside some of those people, like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, to define foreign policy priorities for the next Democratic president while you all were out of power at National Security Action.

Help me understand why you settled on tackling climate change not only as a key pillar of a progressive foreign policy but also a key tenet of any administration’s national security strategy.

Ben Rhodes

In order to get to something like the Paris climate accord, you had to make the US government do things that it wasn’t designed to do on foreign policy. Two things stand out to me.

First, every bilateral or multilateral relationship increasingly became about climate change. If you were meeting with the leader of China or Brazil or South Korea, suddenly among the top three issues was a climate issue. For China, that’s obviously their overall emissions reduction plan; for Brazil, it’s the Amazon; for South Korea, it’s their financing of coal plants.

To deal with all that, you need an infrastructure in the US government to support everybody from the president of the United States all the way down to embassies. That’s the only way you’re going to prioritize climate change like we’ve prioritized terrorism or other vital US interests. That structure didn’t exist at the beginning of the Obama years; it was an ad hoc arrangement.

Second, similarly, was how to set up an interagency process to handle the climate. You had to make it a separate entity because you needed anyone from a global special envoy to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy around the table. Leading up to the 2015 Paris agreement, we set up an interagency process that was originally chaired by John Podesta and then was chaired by Brian Deese [who’s now the director of the National Economic Council in the White House].

This matters because it brings the international and domestic together, which you need when promoting clean energy and other things America is working on abroad.

Alex Ward

This sounds like “If you build it, they will come.” By building a federal government infrastructure, you begin to get the tools and processes in place to deal with climate change long term, somewhat independent of who sits in the White House.

Ben Rhodes

There’s also the resource question. How much money is the intelligence community putting into climate reporting? How much money is the Defense Department putting into transitioning their energy sources and scenario planning, contingency planning, around climate effects?

If climate is going to be an organizing principle of American foreign policy and America’s role in the world for the next 30 years — as I’m sure Jake Sullivan and Brian believe — what kind of government do you need to build to do that?

We built a post-9/11 government to fight terrorism. That’s had huge ramifications for all manner of national security agencies. In a way, you have to do something similar for climate change, even though it’s obviously a different challenge.

I think people shouldn’t lose sight of how big of a shift it is in terms of what kind of people you’re hiring, where you’re spending money, how you’re organizing yourself, how embassies are prepared for their relationships. It’s a huge thing to make this a real centerpiece and focal point of American foreign policy.

Alex Ward

With the climate summit, it feels like the work you, Jake, and others now in the administration did over the last four years paid off. Climate change, as you hoped for, is the centerpiece of US foreign policy, at least during the Biden years.

Ben Rhodes

Well, I’ll be totally honest with you, Alex, there are three main elements they’re proposing of a post-post-9/11 foreign policy, if you will.

The first is China, where everything has a China dimension and you’re kind of in a Cold War structure. Another is democracy, pushing back on the authoritarian trend. And the other is climate. I don’t know that they made a choice — I think they’re kind of doing all three of those things.

I couldn’t tell you whether climate or China is how they’re organizing themselves. I think they’re probably considering both, but it’s a little too early to say climate is the organizing principle for their foreign policy. To some extent, democracy is, too, but we’ll obviously have to see what comes out of their process.

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Alex Ward

This is interesting, because to make all three “organizing principles” is to invite a ton of tension. Not that there’s a zero-sum problem, but I think it’s fair to say to make progress on one of these fronts, you probably have to sacrifice gains in another.

Ben Rhodes

Looking back on the Obama years, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement was happening right when we were getting the Chinese to be more ambitious on climate ahead of Paris. Whether you think about it or not, there must be a trade-off there — you know, prioritizing democracy might mean making it harder to deal with China on climate change.

Alex Ward

This is something I ask progressives about often. They consider climate change the existential national security threat of our times. If that’s the case, then you’re probably going to have to make concessions on China’s aggressive behavior or crackdown on democracy. Similar problems arise for other nations we want to take climate change seriously.

None of that is good, but at some point you have to prioritize because you can’t have it all. It seems to me that this is an obvious tension and one that’s going to be problematic for this administration or any other that follows a similar playbook.

Ben Rhodes

I think you’re right. And look, nobody in government would want to say that out loud. Having been in government, it’s inevitable that you will face some very uncomfortable decisions between, say, getting the Chinese [government] to stop investing in dirty infrastructure and placing sanctions on China over the mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims and labeling it a genocide.

If you’re a progressive who cares about both climate change and human rights in China, it’s a very difficult call as to which one you’re going to care about more. I don’t think we know how the Biden administration is going to answer that question. But over the course of the next year or two, it will probably become evident, though I couldn’t predict in which direction they’ll go.

In some ways, the US-China relationship is big enough and complex enough. The analogy might be the Soviet Union, where we confront them on a whole bunch of issues, but we still sit down and make arms control agreements together. That’s the ideal, but I have to think that at some point there will be trade-offs made.

Alex Ward

That seems like a tough, and some would say bad, spot for any administration to be in.

Ben Rhodes

It’s going to be difficult.

On the one hand, you could argue that the Chinese have to act on climate and environmental issues for their own sake. They have huge environmental problems of their own.

The problem with that is as China becomes a superpower, we need Beijing to do stuff not just within China but outside of China. They could fix the air quality in their cities while they still build dirty infrastructure along the Belt Road. So I don’t think just appealing to China’s self-interest is going to be sufficient on these climate issues.

That suggests that if you are really provoking the Chinese on really important issues like Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, I just have to think that makes it harder to reach big, multilateral agreements on climate change.

So, yeah, I’m watching the trade-off space of the Biden team over the next year and a half up through the midterm election. They seem pretty wedded to kind of drawing a firm line with the Chinese. I’m speculating, but the US may just be testing how much they can get on climate from Beijing while still being a hardass on everything else.

Alex Ward

I’m glad you mentioned the midterm elections because there’s a political side to all this. If Biden’s three priorities are climate change, China, and democracy, then that causes headaches because they’re long-term issues. It’s hard to show voters — the few who care about foreign policy, anyway — real-time progress being made on those fronts.

Sure, there’s the coronavirus pandemic response the administration can point to. That’s apart from these challenges. But in the long run, it’s hard to see how this administration can politically boast about progress. It’s hard to show success but easier to demonstrate failure.

Ben Rhodes

It probably doesn’t lend itself to obvious agreements you can trumpet. Climate change, though, is pretty measurable in the sense that you can look at commitments and if emissions are dropping, etc.

With China, you can invest more in technologies to compete with China, that’s good. Though the danger of engaging in long-term competition is that you’re fueling the fires by sending a lot more weapons to Taiwan or sparking attacks on Asian Americans. Ratcheting up too much can have unintended consequences.

They’re going to have to be skilled in how they lay out what success looks like three, five, 10 years on regarding climate change and other challenges. They need to show they’re hitting targets and people feel a sense of progress, even if the problem feels unsolvable.

Alex Ward

That requires disciplined focus. This administration is just working on so much stuff — everything, really. It’s already hard to show progress on a few items, let alone a lot of them.

Ben Rhodes

Absolutely. If these three items are your real focus, then you need to deprioritize other things.

Like, if you guys really want to deal with China and climate change, you can’t spend the same amount of bandwidth on issues like Iran in the way this country has done over the last five years. Iran is a medium-size country, and it just makes no sense that it’s occupying so much of our time. They need to clear the decks a little bit.

Alex Ward

I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if there’s anything the Biden team is doing that you wish you had done during the Obama years.

Ben Rhodes

We could have done more of the structural work inside the US government to embed climate into how the State Department and the Defense Department and the intelligence community operate. We did some of that, and I’m thrilled that the Biden team is being really ambitious in the space.

We could’ve done more on China. We were getting pushed in the South China Sea and couldn’t pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. The TPP would have been a very useful strategic framework for dealing with China right now, by the way. They could use it, but this administration isn’t going to try and revive it for political reasons — both parties don’t like it.

We could’ve done more on democracy. For me, the HR 1 voting rights bill is a foreign policy bill. There are a lot of countries that need HR 1. Thinking of democracy as something that is on a continuum from the US domestic political circumstance to the circumstances in other countries, that’s an area where, if I could go back to like Obama’s reelection in 2012, we should’ve done more on.

Correction, 6:20 pm: A photo caption in an earlier version of this story mis-titled Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The bodies of the two brothers were left for more than a day. Their families knew they were there, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them collect the bodies. The soldiers left behind witnesses, though: two boys, barely teens, tied to a tree nearby, after the soldiers forced them to spend the night on the ground, between the bodies of the murdered men.

The brothers were Kahsay and Tesfay, who both cared for young children and elderly parents in a small village in the northeastern corner of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, in an area home to the Irob, a small ethnic minority.

Their homeland, on the border with Eritrea, has known unrest for decades, from the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1998 and the years of tension that followed until a shaky peace deal was finally reached in 2018.

Nothing compares to what they’re seeing now.

“It was never like this,” said Fissuh Hailu of the Irob Advocacy Association. Before, he said, “We had places to run away.”

Hailu now lives abroad, but many members of his family are still in Tigray. He and his colleagues are relying on witness accounts to document the atrocities happening in their part of the region, including the story he told me of the two brothers, which they largely attribute to the Eritrean army. (The incident has not been independently verified by Vox.)

It’s one of many chilling reports that have emerged in recent months from Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia that has been engulfed in war since November.

Tensions churned for months between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that represents the Tigray region. That erupted into violence after the TPLF attacked a federal military facility in Tigray in what it said was “preemptive self-defense.” The Ethiopian government launched what it called a “law enforcement operation” in response, a justification for a full-scale invasion.

The situation has since turned into a protracted conflict with disturbing humanitarian implications. Tigrayan defense forces are fighting against the Ethiopian National Defense Force, who have partnered with troops from neighboring Eritrea and other militias within Ethiopia, specifically Amhara forces.

Telecommunications blackouts and limited access to parts of Tigray have made it difficult to fully assess what is unfolding there. But in recent months, credible reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity have started to trickle out, including evidence of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans.

An internal United States government report, which the New York Times reviewed in February, assessed that the Ethiopian military and their allies were “deliberately and efficiently rendering Western Tigray ethnically homogeneous through the organized use of force and intimidation.”

There have been massacres and mass executions. Jan Nyssen, a geography professor at the University of Ghent, and a team of researchers have compiled a list of 1,900 Tigrayans killed in approximately 150 mass killings since the fighting began.

“This is ongoing,” Nyssen told me earlier this month. “In the last month, we recorded 20 massacres, and it continues almost at the same speed.” There is a common pattern, he said: When the Eritrean or Ethiopian forces lose a battle, “they take revenge on civilians in the surrounding areas.”

Rape has been used as a weapon of war; a USAID report includes testimony from a woman who recalled her rapist saying he was “cleansing the blood lines” of Tigrayan women. Eritrean forces have been accused of mass looting, pillaging, and wanton destruction of everything from banks to crops to hospitals.

Most of the alleged atrocities point to Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Amhara forces, though Tigray People’s Liberation Front-linked groups have also been linked to at least one mass killing. The Eritrean government has denied involvement, and only just last week admitted to its presence in Tigray.

In March, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged that reports “indicate that atrocities have been committed in Tigray region.” He said those responsible should be held accountable, though he also blamed the “propaganda of exaggeration.”

The security situation is fueling other crises. More than 60,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Sudan since the fighting began in November, and humanitarian groups — many of which remain cut off from parts of Tigray — say the security situation has likely displaced thousands of people internally.

The United Nations estimates that of Tigray’s 6 million people, 4.5 million are in need of food aid. A recent report from the World Peace Foundation warns of the risk of famine and mass starvation as people are displaced and crops, livestock, and the tools needed to make and collect food are destroyed.

One witness in Tigray, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety, told me that Eritrean soldiers will kill an ox and eat just one leg, leaving the rest of the carcass to rot. “The people are either dying by blood or by hunger,” he said by phone from Mekele, Tigray’s capital, earlier this month.

Prime Minister Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who was once seen as the country’s peacemaker and a democratic liberalizer, is now leading a country that is beginning to turn on itself.

Violence and ethnic tensions are flaring up in other parts of Ethiopia. Sudanese and Ethiopian troops have clashed in a disputed border territory, a sign of how Tigray’s unrest is spilling over into an already volatile neighborhood where Ethiopia had been viewed, at least by some international partners, as a stabilizing force.

The war in Tigray has no clear end, and the reports of killing and rape and looting are still happening. “Everybody is just waiting, just waiting — not to live, but waiting for what will happen tomorrow, or in the night,” the man in Mekele said.

“We never know what will happen,” he added. “You never know what will happen to anybody.”

A conflict that had been brewing finally breaks out

Tensions between Abiy’s government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front had been coursing for some time, and experts say anyone paying attention was warning of the possibility of war before it happened.

In 2018, Ethiopia’s government got a major shake-up. The Ethio­pian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a Marxist-Leninist party, had ruled the country for nearly three decades, having emerged victorious from a brutal civil war in 1991.

The party was a coalition representing four different regions or nationalities: the TPLF (made up of Tigrayans); the Amhara Democratic Party (representing the Amhara ethnic group); the Oromo Democratic Party (representing the Oromo ethnic group); and the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement, which represented a few ethnic groups.

But the Tigrayan wing of the party dominated.

The Tigrayan-led government presided over rapid economic growth, but not all of it was equal, and many Ethiopians felt left behind. In 2015 and 2016, after decades in power, the government faced popular protests over human rights abuses, corruption, and inequality.

Some, including members of the Amhara and Oromo ethnic groups, were particularly angry about the TPLF’s control of the most important positions in politics and the military, despite representing just 6 percent of the country’s population.

In 2018, Ethiopia’s prime minister resigned, and other members of the ruling EPRDF coalition united against the Tigrayan wing. They elected Abiy Ahmed, a relative newcomer from the Oromo, as the leader.

Abiy began to establish himself as a democratizer, releasing political prisoners and promising free and fair elections. He also pursued peace with neighboring Eritrea. The two countries had gone to war in 1998 over a disputed border in Badme (also in the Tigray region), and though they signed a peace deal in 2000, it had basically become a stalemate, with occasional skirmishes erupting for 20 years.

All of this made Abiy a star in Africa and around the world. In 2019, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the border war and “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.”

At home, things were a bit more complicated. Abiy had promised to reform the EPRDF, but in late 2019 he created a new Prosperity Party (PP) meant to deemphasize the role of ethnic groups in the name of unity.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front opposed this move and what it saw as Abiy’s attempt to consolidate federal power at the expense of regional and ethnic autonomy. The TPLF declined to join the PP, and though the party still retained control of Tigray’s regional government, members generally saw Abiy as taking steps detrimental to their interests and their region — and to the vision of Ethiopia that the TPLF had championed since the 1990s.

“At the root of the war in Tigray is this ideological difference between TPLF and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for the future of the country,” Tsega Etefa, an associate professor of history and Africana and Latin American studies at Colgate University, wrote in an email.

Experts said Abiy rode the wave of anti-TPLF grievance to try to consolidate his own power, especially as it became a lot harder to deliver on some of the political promises he’d made when he took over.

“In a bid to deflect the growing criticism of him, now that he was formally in charge, he began increasingly confronting Tigrayans and blaming them for everything that had gone wrong,” Harry Verhoeven, of the Oxford University China-Africa Network, told me.

Abiy portrayed Tigrayans as “the Ethiopian equivalent of the ‘deep state,’ if you like,” Verhoeven added.

Experts noted this kind of rhetoric had the effect of blurring the lines between the TPLF leadership — which had earned legitimate criticisms after decades in power — and the Tigrayan people themselves.

Tensions persisted into 2020, which was supposed to be an election year, until Abiy (with Parliament’s approval) postponed elections, citing the coronavirus pandemic. Abiy’s critics, including those in the TPLF, accused him of an anti-democratic power grab.

The Tigray region held elections anyway in September in an act of defiance. Abiy’s government deemed those elections illegal.

Ethiopia’s Parliament then voted to cut funds from the regional Tigrayan government, a move the TPLF said violated the law and was “tantamount to a declaration of war.” In late October, the TPLF blocked an Ethiopian general from taking up a post in Tigray. The International Crisis Group warned that this standoff “could trigger a damaging conflict that may even rip the Ethiopian state asunder.”

Just a few days later, Abiy accused the TPLF of attacking its military base. “The last red line had been crossed,” he said, as Ethiopian troops entered Tigray and he declared a six-month state of emergency. Reports of airstrikes accompanied the federal government’s push into the region.

The federal government’s communications blackout, combined with competing accounts from both the government and Tigray officials, made it hard to fully account for the situation.

By the end of the month, Abiy had declared the Ethiopian government “fully in control” of the region’s capital, Mekele.

Six months later, the war grinds on.

Why Eritrea is embroiled in Ethiopia’s war

Tigrayan defense forces have since regrouped and are now fighting a guerrilla insurgency against Ethiopian federal troops and those backing them up — namely, Eritrean troops and Amhara militia fighters from the region south of Tigray.

The Eritrean government — led by President Isaias Afwerki, the country’s longtime brutal dictator — and Abiy repeatedly denied the presence of Eritrean troops in Tigray, despite mounting evidence of their involvement.

It took until the end of March 2021 for Abiy to publicly acknowledge that Eritrean troops were present in Tigray. Shortly after, the Ethiopian government said Eritrean troops were withdrawing, though the TPLF had said there were no signs of any exit.

A top United Nations officials also said last week that there was no sign Eritrea was leaving. In response, Eritrea did, officially, confirm its presence in Tigray in an April 16 letter to the UN Security Council. In it, Eritrea said it had “agreed — at the highest levels — to embark on the withdrawal of the Eritrean forces and the simultaneous redeployment of Ethiopian contingents along the international boundary.”

But both advocates and experts are skeptical that Eritrea will exit quietly, or quickly.

“There is no sign that the Eritrean forces are withdrawing,” Alex de Waal, a research professor and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, told me earlier this month. “If anything, they are inserting themselves more deeply into the Ethiopian military and intelligence structure.”

But Abiy’s pact with Eritrea is forged from a common goal: the desire to crush the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Ethiopia and Eritrea have a long and tangled history, but to understand it, it helps to start after World War II, when world powers decided the fate of Eritrea after its previous colonizer, Italy, lost control of its territory in East Africa.

In 1952, the UN General Assembly voted to make Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia. Ten years later, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea, leading to a protracted battle for independence that culminated in an Eritrean independence referendum in the early 1990s.

During that struggle, Ethiopia’s TPLF cooperated with members of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the latter of whom were fighting for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia. They were both opposed to rule in Addis Ababa and had cultural and linguistic ties, but the two movements had ideological differences. It was, in some ways, a relationship of necessity, and tensions simmered — and sometimes spilled out into the open — even when they were partners.

After Eritrea gained independence in 1993, relations between the country and the TPLF-dominated Ethio­pian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front began to deteriorate.

At first, the disputes were minor. But in 1998, Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war over a disputed border town. The two signed a peace agreement in 2000, allowing an independent commission would settle the status of the area. That commission, however, ruled in favor of Eritrea, and the TPLF-led government in Ethiopia objected to the ruling. That led to two decades of tension and sporadic fighting.

When Abiy took over, he moved to make peace with Eritrea, agreeing to accept the commission’s decision. Meanwhile, the TPLF continued to try to thwart Abiy’s overtures to Eritrea.

Still, President Isaias of Eritrea accepted those Abiy’s olive branch. But in doing so, he didn’t exactly bury old grudges, and continued to criticize the TPLF as “vultures” for undermining Eritrea’s and Ethiopia’s normalization of relations.

“Today is payback time for a number of deeply felt historical injustices, real or perceived — but certainly deeply felt,” Verhoeven said of Eritrea’s involvement.

Isaias rules a repressive state on a constant war footing, and he sees an opportunity to finally vanquish his political rival and settle political scores. It’s also a chance to assert himself as the Horn of Africa’s most consequential leader, which Verhoeven said “is very much something he’s always aspired to.” And he may believe he can’t achieve that as long as a politically influential TPLF still resides on his border.

Isaias wanted freedom from the TPLF. So did Abiy, who saw the TPLF as a challenge to his agenda. Abiy fed that animosity by attacking the TPLF and blaming it for trying to destabilize Ethiopia.

Experts told me the TPLF also made miscalculations, such as trying to frustrate Abiy’s ability to implement the peace deal on the ground, which may have helped to push Abiy closer to Isaias. The Tigray elections provoked even more acrimony with Abiy, though the momentum toward conflict had already been set in motion.

“All the sides really wanted to go to war, and all the sides were making the wrong moves that made war possible,” Awet Weldemichael, a Horn of Africa expert at Queen’s University in Ontario, said.

Ethiopia’s civil war is exacerbating deep-seated ethnic tensions

Just as Abiy forged a political pact with an outsider, Eritrea, his reliance on ethnic Amhara militias to help fight his war in Tigray is accelerating Ethiopia’s internal strife.

Amhara militias have reportedly taken control of parts of western Tigray. Amhara officials say the TPLF annexed this territory when it came to power in 1991, and say it rightfully belongs to them and they are re-seizing it.

But Tigrayan civilians and officials claim that the militias are now forcibly driving out the Tigrayan civilians who live there through a campaign of threats and violence. Amharan officials have denied this, despite growing evidence of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Abiy has also defended the militias, saying in March that “portraying this force as a looter and conqueror is very wrong.”

This piece of land has been a longstanding source of tension between Amhara leaders and the TPLF, which fits into a broader history of grievances between the two.

Each held power at some point — Amhara’s elites before the rise of the EPRDF, the TPLF after that. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front considered the Amhara to be “oppressors” during their revolutionary campaign, and Amhara elites were marginalized during the TPLF’s reign.

Amhara’s elites also tend to interpret the TPLF’s vision of a federal Ethiopia — where each nationality has a degree of autonomy and power — as antithetical to their own. Theirs is one of a more unified Ethiopia with one national identity, albeit with them in control.

Abiy, too, has adopted that more unified vision, so the Amhara and Abiy found a politically beneficial partnership. But in aligning with the Amhara, just as with the Eritreans, Abiy is also putting his political survival in their hands.

Asafa Jalata, a professor of Africana studies at the University of Tennessee, said that Abiy didn’t care what the consequences were; he was focused on the TPLF and hadn’t planned beyond that. He, as other experts I spoke to did, thought Abiy showed his ineptitude and inexperience.

All of this has put Abiy in a very perilous position. “It makes very little sense,” Verhoeven said. “But it’s the course that he’s chosen to pursue, and Ethiopia is paying its price.”

“The hallmarks of ethnic cleansing are there”

The bullet that killed the 14-year-old boy brought his father down with it. The father stayed still beneath his boy’s bleeding body until the soldiers departed, leaving him and more than a dozen others rounded up from their homes for dead.

The father escaped. “They saw him from afar,” the source from Tigray told me, recounting what the man, a farmer from the Gulomakeda district of Tigray, had told him about an incident at the end of November.

“When the soldiers saw that some were escaping, they came back to the bodies to check whether they’d died or not.” The soldiers, whom the farmer believed were Eritrean, went one by one, cutting the throats of the bodies that remained to make sure they were dead.

Researchers and human rights groups have slowly begun to compile accounts like this, piecing together a troubling picture of cruelty and violence happening inside Tigray.

Communications and electricity blackouts, especially outside the major cities, have made it difficult to get information. Witnesses and victims also fear speaking out will provoke reprisal; their attackers are still lurking, still a threat.

“We never know who is there, who’s listening to what,” Fissuh, of the Irob Advocacy Association, said.

Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Amhara forces have been linked to most of the attacks on Tigrayan civilians, though the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front are also implicated in mass killings during the conflict. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in March that “credible information also continues to emerge about serious violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law by all parties to the conflict in Tigray in November last year.”

Among those violations are extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, and widespread destruction of property. The UN and the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, an NGO affiliated with the government, have agreed to launch an investigation.

“There is active looting and destruction of public infrastructure and private businesses, there is weaponized rape, there is weaponized hunger happening everywhere,” Meaza Gebremedhin, a US-based international researcher with Omna Tigray, a Tigrayan advocacy group, told me. “And there are massacres happening in different pockets of Tigray.”

Those with connections on the ground have reported Eritrean soldiers rampaging through houses and destroying food sources. “They take everything from your house,” the witness from Tigray told me. “What they can’t carry, they burn.”

At least 500 women have self-reported rape to five clinics in Tigray, which the United Nations says is likely a low-range estimate given the stigma and general lack of functioning health services.

“Women say they have been raped by armed actors, they also told stories of gang rape, rape in front of family members, and men being forced to rape their own family members under the threat of violence,” Wafaa Said, deputy UN aid coordinator, said last month.

A USAID report included testimony from one woman who said she and five others were gang-raped by 30 Eritrean troops, as the soldiers laughed and took pictures.

There is also evidence of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans. A recent report from the Associated Press spoke to Tigrayans who were issued new identity cards that erased their Tigrayan heritage. “This is genocide … Their aim is to erase Tigray,” Seid Mussa Omar, a Tigrayan refugee who twice fled to Sudan, told the Associated Press.

It coincides with reports of Tigrayans being driven from their homes in western Tigray by Amhara forces. “They said, ‘You guys don’t belong here,’” Ababu Negash, a 70-year-old woman fleeing Tigray, told Reuters in March. “They said if we stay, they will kill us.”

“The hallmarks of ethnic cleansing are there,” said Queen’s University’s Weldemichael, “and they’re not just allegations. They are a serious smoking gun to that charge.”

A top United Nations humanitarian official, Mark Lowcock, said in a closed-door meeting last week that the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate and that “the conflict is not over and things are not improving.”

More than 1 million people are believed to be internally displaced in Tigray, in addition to the 60,000 who have fled across the border to Sudan.

People are often fleeing from one place to another as violence erupts, taking shelter in schools and other overcrowded facilities — creating conditions that are especially worrisome amid the pandemic. In Tigray, just 13 out of 38 hospitals are functioning, and 41 out of 224 primary health facilities, according to Michele Servadei, UNICEF’s deputy representative in Ethiopia.

The region was already in a precarious position to begin with because of climate change and locusts. Ethiopia is approaching its rainy season — the traditional time for planting, to harvest food for the following year — but the destruction of property and the displacement of people from their lands may make this nearly impossible. Aid groups are trying to do what they can but are still unable to reach all parts of the region.

All of this has increased the very real possibility of famine in Tigray.

What happens now?

Ethiopian federal troops and their partners handed the Tigrayan Defense Forces early defeats. But the Tigrayan forces are now waging a war of attrition, and they have popular support. No one side really has the edge, so the prospects of a ceasefire look grim.

The longer the conflict goes on, the more dire the humanitarian consequences will become — and the more unpredictable Ethiopia’s future will be. As Ethiopian forces are bogged down in Tigray, long-simmering unrest is brewing in other regions of Ethiopia. Tigray is “unfortunately serving as a bit of a domino effect throughout the country,” Sarah Miller, a senior fellow at Refugees International covering the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, said. These multiple frontiers of conflict put Abiy in an even more uncertain position, both at home and abroad.

The international community has also started to be more vocal about what’s happening.

Earlier this month, foreign ministers from the G7 group of nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) issued a joint statement demanding the “swift, unconditional and verifiable” withdrawal of Eritrean troops.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has also called on foreign forces to withdraw from Tigray and asked for an investigation into potential human rights abuses — which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to as “acts of ethnic cleansing.” Sullivan also said USAID would be providing another $152 million to address humanitarian needs in the country. The United Nations Security Council this week finally expressed “deep concern” about the humanitarian situation in Tigray.

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International pressure is critical, experts told me, especially as Abiy’s sheen as a peacemaker wears off. “He’s playing for time and trying to deal with the international community, which has become slowly but surely ever more critical, and salvaging what remains of his influence in international affairs,” Verhoeven said.

Indeed, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) met with Abiy in March. But after the visit, Abiy confirmed the presence of Eritrean troops, admitted to possible violations, and said Eritrean troops were withdrawing. Again, there’s reason to be skeptical about these statements, but experts said it certainly is a sign that Abiy is sensitive to how the rest of the world, particularly the West, sees him.

Which is why experts told me they think the US and allies in Europe may be able to use this leverage and influence with Abiy. Economic pressure, many said, was particularly important, including the possibility of sanctions.

Stopping the carnage is the immediate concern, but finding a political solution looks precarious, as the status quo was already untenable. The war has pushed Tigray to embrace the possibility of independence, for example.

“Ethiopia may not survive as a country,” Verhoeven said.

All of this has troubling implications for the wider region as well. Ethiopia was seen as the steadying force in the Horn of Africa, something that Weldemichael said perhaps was a bit of wishful thinking — a reputation gained mostly because of the chaos around it.

“Think of a ship exploding, right? And you find yourself on a flat plank or a piece of wood that’s sailing smoothly in this messy water. That’s Ethiopia,” Weldemichael said.

But an Ethiopia in a protracted civil war could drag even more neighbors into the conflict — and generate even deeper humanitarian and refugee crises.

President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally refer to atrocities committed against Armenians as a “genocide” on Saturday, 106 years after the 1915 start of an eight-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire that left between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians dead.

Previous presidents have refrained from using the word “genocide” in connection with the mass atrocities committed against the Armenian people in the early 20th century, and Turkey categorically denies that a genocide took place. So Biden’s declaration marks a major break from precedent, and could signal an increase in tensions with Turkey, a longtime US and NATO ally.

“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden said in a statement Saturday. “And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”

By now, you’ve probably seen the videos: dark skies, illuminated by exploding balls of light, like alien spaceships doing battle or a terrifying fireworks display, scored by air raid sirens.

This is the view of Israel’s Iron Dome, the aerial defense system the country uses to intercept incoming short-range rockets. The intensifying conflict this week between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militia in control of Gaza, has offered a renewed glimpse of the Iron Dome in action.

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The system has been in place for about a decade, developed with heavy financial and technical backing from the United States. It is, according to Israeli officials, about 90 percent effective at blocking the short-range rockets commonly used by Hamas and other groups in the region.

The Iron Dome gives Israel what Jean-Loup Samaan, a research affiliate with the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore who has studied Israel’s missile defense, called an “insurance policy” — it reassures citizens and protects against loss of life and property damage.

But Israel’s ability to defend against these rocket attacks hasn’t altered how it responds to them, with airstrikes and artillery fire on Gaza or anywhere else rockets may be coming from. Palestinian civilians frequently bear the brunt of these strikes.

On the other side, faced with a defense like the Iron Dome, groups like Hamas try to overwhelm the system, launching dozens if not hundreds of rockets, knowing most will be intercepted and never hit their intended targets but hoping that if they send enough, at least a few will. As of Friday, according to Israeli officials, militants in Gaza fired 2,200 rockets, with the Iron Dome intercepting 85 to 90 percent of rockets that threaten people or infrastructure.

All of this raises questions about how the Iron Dome has — and hasn’t — changed the nature of the conflict. I spoke with Samaan to find out more about how both Israel and militant groups like Hamas see the defense system; why, despite having such robust protection from rockets, Israel still responds to them with overwhelming force; and whether having the system makes peace more or less likely.

The contrast is growing more galling by the day.

In the US, more than half of adults have received at least one vaccine dose, Covid-19 transmission is the lowest it’s been in 11 months, and many Americans are partying and traveling and reveling in their new vaccinated status.

Meanwhile, thousands of unvaccinated people in less wealthy countries — from India to Brazil — are dying every day amid overwhelming surges of Covid-19. Delhi’s crematoriums have run out of room. Sao Paolo has resorted to exhuming old graves to make space for new bodies.

“We have a split screen. The US is looking great — everyone can get a vaccine! At the same time, in India, Southeast Asia, everywhere, I have health care worker friends who may not see a vaccine until 2022 or 2023,” said Craig Spencer, a professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University. Nearly a dozen countries are “vaccine deserts” where nobody, not even doctors treating Covid-19 patients, has gotten a single shot.

Against this backdrop comes the US decision to start offering vaccines to children ages 12 to 15. For some experts, many of whom have been calling on the Biden administration to send doses abroad for weeks, this latest development is almost unbearable to watch. It’s not that they think teenagers shouldn’t get the shot. It’s just that they think it shouldn’t be the priority right now.

Instead, they say, the US should donate doses to countries where the need is greater — immediately.

“Compared with children ages 5 to 17, people ages 75 to 84 are 3,200 times more at risk of dying from COVID-19,” three experts wrote in an article in the Atlantic. “For children, the risk of disease is not zero, but the mortality risk is comparable to that from seasonal influenza, and hospitalizations occur in about only 0.008 percent of diagnosed infections.”

Vinay Prasad, one of the authors of the article, told me that given these probabilities, it doesn’t make sense to vaccinate American children before vaccinating adults in India, where only 1 in 10 adults has received a dose. (The exception is American children with medical conditions that put them at risk.) “You will certainly save many more lives by diverting supply to older people globally.”

It’s also in America’s best interest to vaccinate the world quickly, because the longer Covid-19 runs rampant, the greater the risk that new variants will emerge — some of which may partially evade vaccine protection.

As pediatricians argued in a Washington Post op-ed, “Ethical arguments aside, the fact remains that the greatest threat to children in countries with well-advanced vaccine programs comes from areas where Covid remains highly prevalent.”

Although there’s still important work to be done vaccinating Americans, we’ve now reached a point where vaccination is slowing as supply outstrips demand. The surplus in doses, combined with the fact that the remaining unvaccinated population is less at risk, means that the US sending doses abroad makes all the sense in the world.

What the Biden administration has done — and still needs to do

The Biden administration has already sent some relief abroad, including shipments of oxygen cylinders, rapid tests, treatments, and personal protective equipment to India.

It also made headlines recently for agreeing to waive vaccine patents. But even with the recipe freely available, Covid-19 vaccines are incredibly complicated to make, requiring deep technical know-how and scarce raw materials. So, while waiving patents may be helpful in the long term, it doesn’t help people who are getting sick and dying right now.

What’s more helpful in the short term is simply donating doses.

Biden has promised to do that. In April, he pledged to send 60 million AstraZeneca doses to virus-ravaged countries. But it’s now mid-May, and doses are still sitting in a stockpile. Although they have to pass a federal safety review before being exported, and it’s obviously crucial to ensure safety, experts still say Biden’s plan to donate these doses over the next several months will be too little, too late.

The US can afford to give much more, much faster. After all, roughly 73 million doses are already sitting in the US stockpile, according to CDC data. By July, Duke University researchers estimate, the US will likely have at least 300 million excess doses — and that estimate is assuming that the US will retain enough doses to vaccinate the vast majority of children. In other words, every eligible or soon-to-be-eligible American could get vaccinated, and there would still be 300 million doses left over — practically enough to give an extra dose to every person in the country.

A surplus of that magnitude is so staggering that not sharing it with the world starts to look morally unjustifiable.

William Moss, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it would be “a very obvious decision” for the US to donate all its doses of AstraZeneca since that vaccine is not even authorized for use in the US. Another promising option would be to donate Johnson & Johnson’s doses in spades. “The advantage of getting that to countries like India is that it’s a single dose, and the cold-chain requirement is less stringent,” he said.

Moss, Prasad, and Spencer all argued that the US should also send Pfizer and Moderna doses to countries like India — even if contractual language says doses manufactured in the US have to be given to Americans. They want the Biden administration to ignore that language, given the scale of humanitarian crisis we’re witnessing.

“Sometimes you don’t ask for permission; you ask for forgiveness,” Prasad said, adding that the optics of Pfizer or Moderna suing the US government over such a move would be so horrible as to be unthinkable. “No one will ever dare question this. I don’t think the companies will fight it in court, and I don’t think anyone will seek retribution after the fact.”

Arguably, the bigger challenge for Biden would be justifying dose donations to the American people. A recent poll found that 48 percent of Americans surveyed believe the government shouldn’t donate vaccines at all. It’s worth noting that more middle-age and older Americans opposed donations, compared to members of Gen Z and millennials. And more Republicans than Democrats believed the US should keep a stockpile instead of donating — even though half the Republicans polled said they’re hesitant to get the shot or don’t plan on getting it.

The emotional logic — and moral limits — of vaccine nationalism

All the experts I talked to said that the US is clearly engaged in “vaccine nationalism,” where every nation just looks out for itself, prioritizing its citizens without regard to what happens to the citizens of other countries, especially lower-income countries that can’t afford to buy doses.

“We are focusing on America First,” Spencer said. When it comes to Covid-19, Biden still hasn’t quite broken with that Trumpian approach.

Of course, Biden was elected to be president of the US, not of the world. It’s his responsibility to take care of US citizens first. And he is doing that. But we’ve now reached a point where the US has secured millions more doses than it needs to vaccinate Americans.

Experts acknowledge that it’s a totally natural impulse for American parents to want to protect their own kids and ease the emotional toll that pandemic restrictions have taken on them. “Some people say, ‘I want my 12-year-old to get back to life.’ And I think, ‘Of course, who wouldn’t! I think that’s right too!’” Prasad said.

But he wants parents to remember that many of the restrictions we put on kids were less about protecting them — they’re at low risk — and more about protecting older adults. With 72 percent of Americans over age 65 now fully vaccinated and case rates falling, he believes we can let kids resume most normal activities, unvaccinated. (Different experts, however, express differing levels of caution about various activities.)

In moral philosophy, there’s a classic dilemma known as the trolley problem: Should I make the active choice to divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, I can save five people along a different track from getting killed?

Prasad pointed out that in this classic formulation, we’re asked to weigh one life against five lives. Any deaths in the pandemic are tragic, but our current global situation is a trolley problem on a different order of magnitude. In this scenario, on one track are a small number of American kids who might get ill or die if they’re not vaccinated in the next couple of months; on the other are tens of thousands of Indians and Brazilians and others who are at greater risk of severe illness, many of whom will certainly die without the shot.

In the coming months, the US will be looking at vaccinating children ages 2 to 11. Parents have a chance to weigh in on that, and in Prasad’s mind, the question they should ask themselves is this: Are we really willing to sit on millions of doses and prioritize Americans at much lower risk rather than stem the wave of devastation and death we’re seeing in other countries?

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“If you’re one of the many people who opposed blind American nationalism and America First policy under Trump, this is the moment to put your words into action,” he said. “Now is your chance to really oppose Trump’s vision of the world. Stick it to what he stood for and what he represents.”

Bat Yam is an Israeli seaside suburb, nestled just south of Tel Aviv. It’s primarily known for its pretty beachfront.

On Wednesday night, Bat Yam erupted in violence. A mob of Jewish extremists surrounded a man they presumed was an Arab and pummeled him mercilessly. Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, aired live footage of the unnamed man being beaten with a flagpole flying the Israeli flag.

“We are watching a lynching,” Kan reporter Daniel Elazar said during the broadcast.

What happened in Bat Yam is not an isolated incident. The current fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has led to an eruption of violence in Israeli cities, with dueling Jewish and Arab mobs roaming the streets, destroying property and beating innocents.

In the city of Lod, the epicenter of the communal violence, an armed Arab mob torched three synagogues on Tuesday. In retaliation, Jewish mobs lit Arab buildings aflame on Wednesday. The violence has continued since, in Lod and other places like Bat Yam. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that troops may be deployed to quell the fighting, a striking threat given that Israel is currently at war in Gaza.

While fighting between Israel and Hamas is unfortunately common, this kind of street violence inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders is not. Nothing at this scale happened in the prior three Gaza wars; in fact, nothing like this has happened since a wave of ethnic rioting in October 2000. Even then, the centers of the current violence — so-called “mixed cities” like Lod, with high proportions of both Arab and Jewish citizens — were relatively calm.

“I don’t think that, since the creation of the state of Israel, we’ve seen this kind of domestic violence,” Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI equivalent), tells me. “We are not far from … not a civil war, but a level of violence that I don’t know if we can control.”

Tunisia’s president has pushed the country’s fledgling democracy into crisis.

Over the weekend, President Kais Saied fired the country’s prime minister and suspended Parliament in what his political opponents have called a coup. But he says the move was justified after thousands of Tunisians took to the streets in recent days to protest the government’s handling of the pandemic, which has deepened the country’s economic woes.

Supporters of the president cheered his ousting of Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi and other government ministers, but those celebrations turned to clashes when those who opposed Saied’s moves also took to the streets to protest.

“One of the big question marks is: Is this a coup?” said Sarah Yerkes, a former State Department and Pentagon official and now a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Middle East Program who focuses on Tunisia. That’s a question a lot of people are asking right now, and it doesn’t actually have a straightforward answer, in part because democracy in Tunisia is still very new.

In 2010, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire to protest corruption after police officers tried to confiscate his goods. That set off a broader revolution in Tunisia against the authoritarian regime of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. In 2011, those protests spread across the Arab world to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and beyond.

The uprisings of the Arab Spring, however, largely failed to bring democracy to those countries as powerful, entrenched regimes launched counterrevolutions and cracked down hard on their citizens — in some cases resulting in outright civil war.

Not so in Tunisia, though, where protests toppled the regime, and civil society helped usher in a democratic transition. That still-fresh democracy is now being tested by Saied’s recent moves — though the toll of the pandemic and increasing polarization had been straining the institutions up until the president’s orders this weekend.

Which is why the verdict is still out on whether Tunisia’s political crisis will turn into a full-blown coup. I spoke to Yerkes to understand why, and what this might mean for Tunisia’s Arab Spring legacy. “I don’t think,” she said, “we should write off the democratic transition yet.”

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

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Jen Kirby

So my understanding is that President Kais Saied fired the prime minister and suspended Parliament over the weekend. So what is happening in Tunisia right now?

Sarah Yerkes

The president has, I would say, extralegally, or outside of normal legal channels, fired the prime minister. He is allowed to do that, although he has to consult with Parliament — but he also suspended Parliament. And so that is certainly not something he’s allowed to do.

He has fired other ministers, too. So he declared himself kind of the chief executive. He normally functions as the head of state, and then the prime minister is the head of government. The president, in normal times, just has control over foreign affairs, defense, and national security. The prime minister oversees everything else. But now the president is overseeing everything.

Some of the other ministries are still functioning, some of the more technocratic ministries. But for the most part, the country is now in this suspended animation, where the president is the only real figure operating with any sort of power.

Jen Kirby

And so what are the fired prime minister and suspended Parliament doing? Is Parliament still trying to operate?

Sarah Yerkes

The prime minister hasn’t really been too active, but the Parliament is certainly not taking this sitting down.

When the president made the declaration, he said he was following Tunisia’s Constitution. There is this article, Article 80, that allows the president to take on emergency powers. But I’ve been following various Tunisian legal experts on social media and through other conversations, and it seems that Article 80 does not really apply to how the president carried things out.

So one of the big question marks is: Is this a coup? Especially sitting in Washington, a coup has really clear legal implications for the ability of the United States to provide assistance to Tunisia, and has implications for other countries, as well.

But back to the Parliament. The main party there that Saied is unhappy with is the Ennahda Party, the Islamist party, which has a plurality of seats in Parliament. They only have about 25 percent of the seats, though. It’s a very fractured parliament.

But Saied’s really been in opposition to them from the get-go. And so a lot of people are also framing this as kind of an anti-Islamist move. That’s where there are a lot of comparisons to Egypt, where the current leader ousted the Muslim Brotherhood in a coup. It’s not an entirely accurate parallel, but there is certainly an element of that.

But Ennahda is not taking this sitting down; they are issuing statements, they are trying to rally international attention to say this has been done illegally, this is a coup, and that people need to step in and remove [the president from] power, or at least put him back in his place as president and let the other institutions function as they’re supposed to be functioning.

There’s also been a ton of protests throughout the country. We’ve seen the supporters of the president take to the streets, cheering and singing the national anthem, excited that he’s ousted the prime minister, who a lot of people were very unhappy with over his handling of the pandemic and his inefficiency. But then you’ve also seen supporters of Ennahda and others who are opposed to the president take to the streets as well. You’re seeing these violent clashes of the two sides who are trying to protest what’s going on.

Jen Kirby

Is the president affiliated with a particular political party?

Sarah Yerkes

He is independent. He does not have a political party that he’s affiliated with, and that was a part of his appeal when he won election in October 2019. He really didn’t campaign a lot.

He was part of this populist wave that took over the whole world. And Tunisia got to populism a little later than some other countries. But Saied came in as an outsider, and that’s a lot of his appeal to people.

Jen Kirby

And so is the president right-wing or left-wing, or do those terms not really apply here?

Sarah Yerkes

It’s hard to separate into right and left. The Islamist/non-Islamist divide is certainly one of the pieces that’s at play. The president, he’s not secular by any means. He’s a religious man. He’s very conservative. But he’s not a fan of the Islamist party.

The other important political player right now is a party that’s hard to classify on a US or Western spectrum, but they are promoting the return to authoritarianism, the return to the [Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali regime. It’s the Free Destourian Party — destour means “constitution” in Arabic — led by Abir Moussi, who’s a really outspoken member of Parliament — other people have tried to beat her up in Parliament. She’s the third wing of the different factions that are operating right now.

Jen Kirby

Interesting. So for that third faction, are they supportive of what the president has done?

Sarah Yerkes

They are definitely not a fan of him. But they’re also being interestingly silent. They’re very anti-Islamist; they’re probably the most anti-Islamist faction that’s out there. So you would expect them to be really happy about the fact that the president kicked the Islamists to the curb. But I think they’re trying to wait to see what happens.

Jen Kirby

Why is there this tension between the Islamist parties and the other factions?

Sarah Yerkes

It goes really to the debate over the role of religion and change in Tunisian society. Tunisia, before the revolution, really prided itself on being one of the more secular states in the region, and valuing religious freedom, and being this kind of safe space for people who didn’t really want to practice Islam.

If you ask any Tunisian, they’ll say they’re Muslim; so it’s not that they’re not Muslim, it’s more like the American conception that people are Christian, but they don’t necessarily go to church every week.

So it goes to this history of Tunisia as a more secular state, where religion and politics were very much separated. The Islamist party had been thrown in jail and banned and Islamists were tortured under Ben Ali. But after the revolution, when they were welcomed back, that led to a lot of tension with people who really wanted Tunisia to continue to be a country that was more secular in nature and not become an Islamist country.

Jen Kirby

Is there a reason the tension seems to be heightening now, or has it constantly been brewing below the surface?

Sarah Yerkes

It’s always been there. The difference is the polarization — before, there was kind of a consensus government and all the parties put aside their differences. And now, people are literally beating each other up in the Parliament. And you also have the more extreme parties, including the one I mentioned before, Abir Moussa’s party, but also you have the Al-Karama coalition, which is a much more conservative Islamist party that is trying to fill in the gap; they don’t think Ennahda is religious enough or promoting religion in the state enough, so you have them entering the fray.

Before, you’ve had more centrist parties. Now, with this more fractured government, you have more of the extremists in power.

Jen Kirby

That’s helpful background. But back to this overarching question that you brought up: Is this a coup? What were the justifications that the Tunisian president used to take these actions?

Sarah Yerkes

The most direct precipitating event was a series of protests over the weekend that were over the government’s response to the pandemic. Tunisia is currently facing its worst wave of the pandemic. They’re having their highest number of cases that they had the entire pandemic right now.

So people are, understandably, incredibly frustrated, and are in the streets protesting. The president, for several months, has been foreshadowing this sort of power grab. There was a leaked memo that may have been real, or might have not been real, a couple of months ago that outlined basically exactly what’s happened, how the president would throw away the Constitution and take power and dissolve Parliament and all that.

So it’s not a surprise that he’s doing this. But he probably saw these protests and thought, “This is a way I can get goodwill — by coming in right now and saying, ‘Okay, we have to stop this.’ People are so angry, I’m going to take over.”

A few days ago, the president decided to have the military take over the operation of dealing with the pandemic. So he’d already been playing into this. And then I think, again, saw this opportunity of, “Well, people are really angry at the government, I’m going to come in and be the savior now and get rid of them and step in and take charge.”

Jen Kirby

And so it sounds like his supporters are happy with this move? But is there a divide between them and people who were understandably frustrated with the government but see this potential power grab as a step too far?

Sarah Yerkes

There was a lot of euphoria, frankly, over him acting and doing something. There’s really been this stalemate, where there’s been no action and no activity. So I think the supporters are a combination of people who like this idea of a strongman leader, or just someone taking charge, but also people who are glad to see Prime Minister Mechichi kicked out of government. And there is really a big opposition camp as well, who’s very unhappy with what the president is doing.

Jen Kirby

And so what about the civil society, particularly some of these groups that helped bring about democracy in Tunisia? Where do they stand on this situation?

Sarah Yerkes

They are also divided. I would say a lot of the democracy activists are really, really worried — and rightfully so. A lot of people have been really concerned about the president for some time. He is someone that they see as anti-democratic and who really just doesn’t abide by democratic norms and procedures.

There’s a lot of nuance, but if I can generally categorize the view of civil society, I would say it’s that they are really concerned with what they see as these really anti-democratic moves.

Jen Kirby

So it seems like there are two threads going on here. One is that many people were really unhappy with the inaction of the government, especially around Covid-19. And the Tunisian president took action. But I guess when it comes to whether this was a coup or not, that really depends on what happens next.

Sarah Yerkes

I think that’s true. If we give the president the benefit the doubt — if he were to come in and put in a new prime minister, someone who’s independent, who’s respected by all sides, and either say Parliament’s reinstated or call for elections in a couple of weeks, that would point to this scenario that maybe he really was just trying to reset things.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen, because he has been pretty vocal about his disdain for Parliament as an institution — not just this particular Parliament — even when he was campaigning. He had weird ideas of wanting to have direct democracy instead of representative democracy, which meant the Parliament wouldn’t exist.

So again, I don’t know. I hate to speculate too much. But we need to see how things unfold over the next few days. It will be really crucial to see which way things move.

Jen Kirby

What are you looking for as something that might give you a clue as to how this might play out?

Sarah Yerkes

A couple of things. One is just what the president does — what he does and what he says. If he slow-rolls this, then I’d be quite concerned.

The other piece of it is the role of the security services. Tunisia, not directly related to this, has seen a rise in police brutality over the past six months or so. And that, I think, is something to really pay attention to — the prime minister’s out, President Saied is the only guy in charge, and it’s up to him to rein in the police and the security forces. Is he going to try to use them to be his personal, self-serving security forces? Or is he going to let them do their job? Is he going to try to get the military into the streets? Is he going to try to use the military as national symbols as we see authoritarians do?

You know, what are we talking about here? Is he trying to really, fully consolidate all the power into his own hands? Or is he taking a couple of emergency measures that he’ll then release?

One of the things that’s been a little frightening is we saw that they shuttered the Al Jazeera offices in the capital, Tunis. Obviously they’re closer to Ennahda, to the Islamists, but shuttering a media organization is right out of the authoritarian playbook.

Jen Kirby

Of course, the background for all this is that Arab Spring began in Tunisia in 2011, and it was the one place that successfully transitioned to democracy after uprisings and protests. How does the relative newness of the government factor into what we’re seeing right now?

Sarah Yerkes

I think that’s a big factor; and part is the newness of the Constitution, which is even younger — it was only officially written in 2014.

A lot of things are being tested, directly related to the Constitution. And the Constitutional Court, which is Tunisia’s Supreme Court equivalent, doesn’t exist yet. They are the ones who right now would be coming out to say “this is a coup” or “it’s not a coup” or “he’s operating extralegally” or “he’s not.”

The president himself is to blame for it not being in existence. Parliament chose the final members — it had been a years-long process — but Saied recently refused to sign off on the members that Parliament had chosen.

I think that’s a lot of foreshadowing, too — okay, he doesn’t want there to be a Constitutional Court because he’s going to do stuff that’s extraconstitutional. I do think a lot of it is related to just how young the democracy is.

Jen Kirby

You mentioned that there is a strain within Tunisia that wants to see the return of authoritarianism. Is this sense of disillusionment with the democratic transition something that’s broadly felt in Tunisia?

Sarah Yerkes

There’s been some nostalgia for the old regime that’s been there the whole time, but that’s really resurfaced. This woman I mentioned before — Abir Moussi, who wants to return to the Ben Ali era — she’s really fed on that and tried to nurture that.

In part, the pandemic really decimated the economy. So a lot of people are much worse off than they were 10 years ago. And so what has democracy brought you? You can criticize the government, yes, but you can’t feed yourself — is that worth it? Do you want that trade-off? And for a lot of people, the answer is, “No, I’d much rather prefer to eat and be silent than vice versa.”

Obviously, it’s a false equivalency. Had the pandemic not occurred, the economy was starting to improve, and there were a lot of positive signs related to the [democratic] transition. But I do think people are willing to put up with more repression because the economy is so bad, and because the situation with the pandemic is so bad that [some political actors are] trying to take advantage of some of that nostalgia.

Jen Kirby

That’s true for a lot of places, of course. And it’s probably a bit too early to say, but I’m curious what you think all of this means for Tunisia’s Arab Spring legacy?

Sarah Yerkes

I still think we should consider it a major success. I don’t think we should write off the democratic transition yet. I do think that these actions in the past few days have been — and will continue to be — a major threat to the democratic transition.

But I still think the fact that you have protesters, you have people questioning what’s going on, you have members of Parliament trying to hold steady, speaks to the strength of Tunisia’s democracy. And I hope that the democracy prevails. I think it’s possible that the Tunisian people are strong, civil society is strong, and I really, really hope that this does not break down or become the end of the democratic transition.

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One of the emerging tenets of the Biden presidency is that the United States and China are locked in ideological conflict over the fate of democracy.

In March, during his first press conference as president, he declared that “this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” In April, during his first address to a joint session of Congress, he labeled this struggle “the central challenge of the age” — and that China’s Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest about becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world.”

More recently, in last week’s CNN town hall, he warned that Xi “truly believes that the 21st century will be determined by oligarchs, [that] democracies cannot function in the 21st century. The argument is, because things are moving so rapidly, so, so rapidly that you can’t pull together a nation that is divided to get a consensus on acting quickly.”

Inasmuch as there is a Biden doctrine, the notion that the US needs to protect democracy from China’s authoritarian model is at the center of it. “Biden’s administration [is] framing the contest as a confrontation of values, with America and its democratic allies standing against the model of authoritarian repression that China seeks to impose on the rest of the world,” Yaroslav Trofimov writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Biden’s thinking captures an important insight: that the struggle over democracy’s fate will be one of the defining conflicts of the 21st century. But his analysis is crucially flawed in one respect: China is not an especially important reason why democracy is currently under threat — and centering it is not only wrong, but potentially dangerous.

In countries where democracy is at real risk of collapse or even outright defeated — places like India, Brazil, Hungary, Israel, and, yes, the United States — the real drivers of democratic collapse are domestic. Far-right parties are taking advantage of ethno-religious divides and public distrust in the political establishment to win electorally — and then twist the rules to entrench their own hold on power. Leaders of these factions, like former US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aid and abet each other’s anti-democratic politics.

More traditional authoritarian states, even powerful ones like China or Russia, have thus far played at best marginal roles in this struggle.

“Much of the recent global democratic backsliding has little to do with China,” Thomas Carothers and Frances Brown, two leading experts on democracy, write in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. “An overriding focus on countering China and Russia risks crowding out policies to address the many other factors fueling democracy’s global decline.”

This misdiagnosis has real policy stakes. Leaning into competition with China could lead the US to excuse anti-democratic behavior by important partners, like Modi or the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, in a manner reminiscent of US relations with anti-communist dictators during the Cold War. Moreover, too much emphasis on competition with China could distract from the place where Biden has the most power to affect democracy’s fate — the home front, an area in which voting rights advocates increasingly see him as indefensibly complacent.

There are real problems associated with China’s rise. Its increasing military belligerence, predatory economic practices, and horrific human rights abuses in places like Xinjiang are all very serious concerns. But the fact that China is the source of many real issues doesn’t mean it’s the source of democratic erosion worldwide — and positioning it as such will do little to advance the democratic cause.

Democracies are rotting from within, not without

In his public rhetoric, Biden often argues that the US needs to prove that democracy “works” — that it can “get something done,” as he said last week — in order to outcompete the Chinese model.

While he hasn’t spelled out the nature of this competition all that precisely, the concern seems to center on Chinese policy success: that its rapid economic growth and authoritarian ability to make swift policy changes will inspire political copycats unless democracies prove that they can also deliver real benefits for their citizens.

“I believe we are in the midst of an historic and fundamental debate about the future direction of our world,” the president wrote in a March letter outlining his national security strategy. “There are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward. And there are those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting all the challenges of our changing world.”

But at this point, the fear of Chinese political competition is mostly hypothetical. While the Chinese government and state media frequently tout the superiority of its political model to American-style democracy, there’s little evidence that these efforts are all that influential globally — and certainly not in the countries where democracy is most at risk.

A look back at the Soviet Union, the last major challenge to the hegemony of liberal democracy, is telling. ln ideological terms, there’s no comparison: Soviet communism was a far more powerful model than Chinese authoritarian state capitalism is today.

Marxist ideals inspired revolutionary Communist movements and governments around the globe, successfully toppling Western-backed governments in countries ranging from Cuba to Vietnam to China itself. By contrast, there are vanishingly few foreign governments or even political parties today openly vowing to emulate modern China. While the Soviets had the Iron Curtain in Europe, modern China’s most notable client state is North Korea — perhaps the most isolated and mistrusted government on the planet.

In the countries that observers worry most about — established democratic states experiencing “backsliding” toward authoritarianism — Chinese influence is minimal at best.

In backsliding democracies, authoritarian-inclined leaders win and hold power through the electoral system for domestic reasons. Corruption scandals in India and Hungary, violent crime in the Philippines, a racist backlash against America’s first Black president: These are some of the key factors in the rise of authoritarian populists, and they weren’t created or even significantly promoted by China.

Elected authoritarians still bill themselves as defenders of democracy while in power — even after they start undermining the electoral system with tactics like extreme gerrymandering and takeovers of state election agencies. Their political appeal isn’t grounded in an overt rejection of democracy in favor of a Chinese model, but rather a claim to be taking democracy back from corrupt elites in the name of the “true” people, typically defined in ethno-nationalist terms.

The ideology driving modern democratic decline is vastly different from the sort that China promotes at home and through official state media. It represents a home-grown challenge inside the democratic world, rather than an externally stoked, Cold War-style threat.

That’s not to say China does nothing to undermine democracy outside its borders. It has, for example, exported surveillance technology and provided training in “cybersecurity” for foreign officials that amount to teaching them tools for controlling public opinion — underscoring its role as a global pioneer in using technology to repress dissent.

Yet even in this area, China’s influence can easily be overstated. Backsliding countries typically do not ban websites outright or arrest online dissidents in the way China does. Instead, they rely on spreading misinformation and other more subtle uses of state power. When they do use more traditional authoritarian tools, they often don’t need China’s help in doing so — as shown by recent reporting on Israel’s NSO Group, a company with close links to the Israeli state that sold spy software to India and Hungary (whose governments allegedly used it to surveil journalists and opposition figures).

In his recent book The Rise of Digital Repression, Carnegie Endowment scholar Steven Feldstein attempts to systematically document the use of digital tools and tactics for undermining democracy around the world. He found that while such practices were indeed becoming more widespread, this is largely due to domestic factors in authoritarian and backsliding countries rather than Chinese influence.

“China really wasn’t pushing this technology any more so than other countries were pushing advanced technology or censorship technologies,” he told me in an interview earlier this year. “What I saw — when I spoke on the ground to intelligence officials, government officials, and others — was that there were many other factors at play that were much more determinative in terms of whether they would choose to purchase a surveillance system or use it than just the fact that China was trying to market it.”

The problem with blaming China for democracy’s crisis

Biden and his team recognize that many of the challenges to democracy have domestic roots. But in casting the rise of anti-democratic populism as part of a grander ideological struggle against an authoritarian Chinese model, they conflate two distinct phenomena — and risk making some significant policy errors.

Again, an analogy to the Cold War is helpful here. One of the most grievous errors of America’s containment policy was its repeated willingness to align itself with anti-communist dictators. The perceived need to stop the expansion of Soviet influence consistently trumped America’s commitment to democracy — with horrific consequences for the people of Iran, Argentina, Indonesia, and Bangladesh (to name just a handful of examples from a very long list).

The more China is treated like the new Soviet Union — the principal ideological threat to democracy whose influence must be curtailed — the more likely the US is to repeat that mistake.

Take India, for example. In the past six months, Biden has courted Modi’s government as a potential counterweight to China. “There are few relationships in the world that are more vital than one between the U.S. and India. We are the world’s two leading democracies,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a July 28 press conference in New Delhi.

Yet this is an Indian government that has assailed the rights of its Muslim citizens, strong-armed US social media companies into removing critical posts, and arrested a leading protest figure. Earlier this year, V-Dem — a research group behind the leading academic metric of democracy — announced that India under Modi was an “electoral autocracy,” rather than a true democracy. It’s easy to see how an emphasis on China could lead to these problems getting swept under the rug.

“There has long been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that India is a critical ally in its attempt to check Chinese influence in Asia,” the Indian intellectual Pankaj Mishra wrote in a June Bloomberg column. “In overlooking the Modi government’s excesses, Biden probably counts on support from a US foreign policy establishment invested more in realpolitik than human rights.”

If you take the notion that democracy’s crisis is emerging from within seriously, then it follows that very best thing that Biden could do for democracy’s global future has nothing to do with China or even foreign policy. It’s arresting creeping authoritarianism at home.

Biden has acknowledged this at times, writing in his March letter that his global strategy “begins with the revitalization of our most fundamental advantage: our democracy.” And yet that urgency hasn’t translated into action — legislation necessary to safeguard American democracy from the GOP’s increasingly anti-democratic politics appears stalled out. Biden, for his part, has refused to publicly endorse more aggressive action to break the logjam — like abolishing the filibuster for voting rights bills.

The New York Times recently reported that “in private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression’” — an implausible claim that reflects an administration that, according to activists, has “largely accepted the Republican restrictions as baked in and is now dedicating more of its effort to juicing Democratic turnout.”

Shoring up American democracy after the recent attacks it has suffered should be the top priority of any US government concerned with democracy’s global fate. But for all of Biden’s lofty language about out-competing China and winning the future for democracy, there’s a striking lack of urgency when it comes to the perhaps the most important backsliding country — his own.

In this sense, China has very little influence over the future of democracy globally. The key battles are happening not in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait, but in the legislatures of New Delhi and Washington. If there really is to be a grand struggle for democracy’s survival in the 21st century, it needs to start there.

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