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Leave now, extension, or indefinite stay: Biden’s 3 bad Afghanistan options

April 19, 2022 | News | No Comments

President Joe Biden has been presented with three broad options for how to prolong or end America’s involvement in the 20-year Afghanistan War — and all three have significant drawbacks for the administration and the Afghan people.

Here’s what Biden’s military and intelligence advisers offered up in recent days, as reported by the New York Times and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, details of which I later confirmed.

The first option is to adhere to former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban, which would require Biden to withdraw all remaining 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan by May 1. The second is to negotiate an extension with the insurgent group, allowing American forces to remain in the country beyond early May. And third is to defy the Trump-Taliban pact altogether and keep fighting in Afghanistan with no stated end date.

Each plan has serious pitfalls, experts and US officials say.

If the US leaves in the next three months, it’s likely the Taliban will overrun the US-backed Afghan government and once again make life worse for millions of Afghans, especially women and children.

Staying in Afghanistan just a little bit longer would likely delay that takeover, but would also expend any diplomatic capital the US has left with the Taliban and keep US troops in harm’s way.

Finally, violating the terms of the agreement and remaining indefinitely will almost certainly lead the Taliban to restart its campaign, put on hold ahead of the May 1 deadline, to kill American service members in the country.

“These are all bad options,” said Asfandyar Mir, a Stanford University expert on the Afghanistan War.

Multiple US officials told me in recent days that the administration’s Afghanistan policy review is nearing its end, with one telling me they expect Biden to make a decision “very soon.”

“I don’t know which way the president will go,” said this official, who like others spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about a sensitive national security deliberation. Another person familiar with the Afghanistan discussions told me it’s clear a full withdrawal by May 1 is “off the table.”

Public statements from the Biden team offer additional clues as to which way Biden will lean.

Biden promised during the presidential campaign to bring home US combat troops from Afghanistan, but gave himself until the end of his first term to do so (though, importantly, this statement came before the Trump-Taliban deal). He also said he would still potentially keep a small US military presence in the country to continue counterterrorism operations against ISIS and al-Qaeda. That meant it was always possible Biden wouldn’t abide by the terms of the Trump-era deal.

Recent statements by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also suggest a full withdrawal may not be on the immediate horizon. A Pentagon summary of his comments during a NATO ministerial last Thursday said Austin had “reassured Allies that the U.S. would not undertake a hasty or disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

In comments to reporters the following day, Austin added, “[W]e are committed to a responsible and sustainable end to this war, while preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorist groups … that threaten the interests of the United States and our allies, and ensuring a just and durable end to the long-running conflict.”

The signal many are getting from Austin and others is that Biden will be the fourth president to prolong America’s engagement in Afghanistan, most likely by pushing for an extension to the deadline.

Biden still hasn’t made a decision, though, so it’s worth taking a look at the three options he has in front of him — and why each is fraught with risk and danger.

Option 1: Withdraw all 2,500 US troops by May 1

Few experts or US officials I spoke to believe Biden will adhere to the timeline laid out in the Trump-Taliban peace deal — either because Biden wants to seek a more lasting diplomatic solution to the war in Afghanistan or because his team fears an intensified civil war on the heels of a US withdrawal would make the administration look bad.

In January, Secretary of State Tony Blinken told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that the US supports diplomatic negotiations between the government and the Taliban. America’s hope is to help “achieve a durable and just political settlement and permanent and comprehensive ceasefire that benefits all Afghans.”

But those talks are barely underway and have little to no chance of ending by the May 1 deadline. Both parties hold opposite positions on key questions — among them, how much power can the Taliban have in Afghanistan’s government? — that likely won’t be reconciled in a few months. What’s more, the Taliban hasn’t stopped killing Afghans or curbed it’s relationship with al-Qaeda.

To ensure those talks proceed instead of stalling out, many experts believe a small American troop presence must remain in the country.

Still, there is a vocal contingent advocating for the US to finally withdraw from Afghanistan after 20 years of war.

“I support leaving by May,” said Adam Weinstein, who served as a Marine in Afghanistan and is now a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, DC. “The Afghanistan talks may fall apart if we leave, but they also will fall apart if we stay.”

Weinstein acknowledges that the Taliban will surely intensify its civil war with the Afghan government once the US departs, further destabilizing an already bad situation. But that’s likely to happen whenever America withdraws its forces, whether in May or later. “Leaving by May frontloads these risks while not risking American lives,” he told me.

Which leads to the second reason observers doubt Biden will stick to the May withdrawal timeline: Images of a renewed, bloody war after America’s withdrawal plastered on the front pages of newspapers would embarrass the Biden administration. Pressure would mount on the president and his team to reenter the fray to quell the violence, just like many pushed Obama to send US forces back into Iraq to defeat ISIS.

It’s therefore possible that leaving prematurely might lead the US to reenter the conflict again — perhaps with an even larger troop presence.

Weinstein told me he knows that’s a risk and hopes Biden would resist such pressure. There will be problems, but all this comes down to the fact that America hasn’t proven its ability to win the war against the Taliban, even with tens of thousands more troops in the country.

Today, the insurgents control more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001 when the US invaded, making it even harder to push for a military victory.

“You could kick the can down the road, or you could accept the limits of US control of ground realities in Afghanistan,” he said.

In other words, leave now and don’t look back.

Option 2: Negotiate an extension with the Taliban, then leave

This is the option most people I spoke with favor and believe Biden will choose.

They argue that withdrawing by May is simply too soon, but that staying indefinitely is also politically and militarily infeasible. Delaying America’s full withdrawal for a few months or even years, then, allows the peace process to play out and for an unhurried US exit from Afghanistan.

“It’s unquestionable that an extension should be negotiated,” said Laurel Miller, who was the acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration.

Simply put, the Afghan government and the Taliban won’t strike a deal by April, but they might if given enough time. Penning an agreement would allow officials in Kabul to lead their country without the major threat of violence, while also giving the Taliban some governing power and global legitimacy.

“There’s reason to believe the Taliban would genuinely negotiate and accept some kind of political settlement [that] satisfies their interests,” said Miller, who’s now at the International Crisis Group.

With such a deal in place, the US and its NATO allies could extricate themselves from Afghanistan without fear their absence would lead to more bloodshed.

This is what Ghani, Afghanistan’s president, and others close to him have been pushing for. After NATO last week said its 5,000 troops wouldn’t leave the country imminently, Ghani said their presence would help provide a “window of opportunity to accelerate the peace process.”

An extension was also the key recommendation in a congressionally mandated report earlier this month from the Afghanistan Study Group, an independent, bipartisan commission of experts co-chaired by retired Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, and US Institute of Peace President Nancy Lindborg.

But this Goldilocks option has flaws, too.

For example, it’s unclear whether the Taliban would even agree to an extension. Their messaging for America to date, Stanford’s Mir said, is “leave by May 1 or we fight you.” Biden therefore risks adding to the 2,400 dead Americans in Afghanistan if the US overstays its welcome.

And even if it does, staying beyond May 1 would mean Biden chose to prolong America’s engagement despite having a ready-made excuse for withdrawal. That would no doubt anger a lot of people, namely progressives and some on the right, who hoped the Democrat would finally bring the US war effort there to a close.

“What’s worse: Being accused of being too status quo, or being accused of taking risks and having ugly eventualities happen on your watch?” Miller asked, describing the question the Biden team is wrestling with.

There’s also a glaring weakness with this plan: There’s just no guarantee that the Afghan government and the Taliban will actually make a deal. After months or even years of talking, it’s possible neither side will make concessions to the other to hash out a comprehensive peace pact. If that’s the case, US troops will have remained in danger for little to no progress.

Still, experts believe there are ways the US can get the Taliban to agree to an extension and perhaps pave the path toward a negotiated deal. That could include lifting UN and other sanctions on the Taliban, working with Kabul to release some or all of the group’s 7,000 prisoners, and removing the group from the State Department’s terrorist list.

Each of those moves would be politically costly and may end up strengthening the Taliban without eventually striking an agreement.

But for some, taking bold steps to improve the chance of peace after so many years of fighting is worth the risk.

Option 3: Stay in Afghanistan indefinitely

Everyone I spoke with said this is by far the worst option. Continuing the war with no clear end date would keep US troops in harm’s way and further doom any prospects of a negotiated peace, since one of the key reasons the parties are talking is because America said it was leaving soon.

Plus, there’s little popular support in the US for continuing the mission in Afghanistan, as most polling shows Americans prefer a withdrawal sooner rather than later.

More than that, there’s just no clear path to victory in the war.

As mentioned above, the Taliban today controls more territory than it did when the US invaded in 2001. After 20 years of war, trillions of dollars spent, and tens of thousands of deaths, the US has only managed to achieve what Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, humbly described as “a modicum of success” in Afghanistan.

At this point, there’s little reason to expect that the US staying in Afghanistan indefinitely, spending billions more and risking more US lives, will magically improve that outcome. And doing so is just not desirable considering the coronavirus pandemic has killed 500,000 Americans, Iran nears the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, China grows in strength, domestic terrorism threatens the homeland, and more.

So why even discuss this option? It’s not that Biden would pick it, but that he might be forced into it if the limited extension (option 2) fails to actually produce a peace agreement.

Again, few think Biden will withdraw all US troops by May 1, which means he will be keeping US service members in the country with or without the Taliban’s approval. If he does it without their approval, that could lead the insurgents to attack and kill American personnel as they overtake major Afghan cities, perhaps even Kabul.

At that point, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be harder, experts say, because the administration won’t want to look like it’s running away from the fight. A return to a larger war, then, would likely ensue, leading to more death and woes for the millions of Afghans who’ve already suffered tremendously.

“If a negotiated extension fails, there’s not going to be a withdrawal,” said the Quincy Institute’s Weinstein.

If there were a perfect option, the US would have found it by now. It hasn’t, and that’s left Biden with three paths to take, each full of obstacles and risk. It’s a tough spot to be in, but sometimes the options a president has range from horrible to bad.

The hope is he picks the least bad one.

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By Tncse

The latest consequence of climate change: The Arctic is now open for business year-round

April 19, 2022 | News | No Comments

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The Arctic is now open for business year-round after a large commercial ship sailed the Northern Sea Route from Jiangsu, China, to a Russian gas plant on the Arctic coast, for the first time ever during the month of February, when winter temperatures normally make the icy waterway impassable.

The tanker, owned by Russian maritime shipping company Sovcomflot, was able to make the trip through the Arctic sea ice because it is no longer frozen all winter due to human-induced global warming.

The ability to make this trip 365 days a year opens up vast new possibilities for the shipping industry, which carries 80 percent of the world’s cargo by volume and 70 percent of global trade by value. But it also raises concerns about how the scramble to capitalize on the new route could upend geopolitics.

To get a better understanding of what this new possibility in the Arctic means for the rest of the world, I spoke to Juliette Kayyem, Belfer senior lecturer in international security at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Kayyem served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, where she played a key role in handling major operations, including the administration’s response to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Kayyem reacted on Twitter to the news of the Arctic tanker’s historic trip, writing that the moment was “so consequential you can’t get your head around it.” To find out more about why she thinks this is so monumental, I gave her a call. Our discussion, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Jariel Arvin

What exactly has changed with this news?

Juliette Kayyem

In the past, trade had to work in a north-to-south way, just because the Arctic had never been navigational. Now ships can go from Europe to China on an east-west route. It’s going to put more competition on the north-south passages to retain their commercial activity.

Eighty percent of the world’s goods by volume are shipped by cargo, so this is no joke. For 100 years, cargo has essentially followed the same pathway through the Suez Canal. So, with days cut off transit time, as well as [not having to pay] all the taxes and fees that align with being a port city or canal like the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal — that’s all going to change.

Jariel Arvin

How does this change, for example, how a Chinese cargo ship would have traveled?

Juliette Kayyem

To do Europe alone, China would have gone from the Netherlands through the Suez Canal — south of India, up to China to Dalian, which is their main area. Now if you look at the route, it’s cut off by half. Now, you can go the northern route, east down. It’s mind-boggling.

Jariel Arvin

So, Russia and China are obviously going to be interested in moving goods up through that Northern Sea Route. Which other countries will be vying for a stake?

Juliette Kayyem

Japan, Vietnam, Russia, pretty much every country. Australia is going to want to go through there. I mean, why wouldn’t they, since it’s so much shorter? Now there’s going to be pressure and competition. Now you’ve just [opened up] a huge, huge competitive market.

Jariel Arvin

What about the US?

Juliette Kayyem

The United States, because we don’t really sign treaties anymore, is not signatory to the Law of the Sea. But we are a member of the Arctic Council, which is a sort of ad hoc [international] system to try to deal with everything in the Arctic, from who has access to what minerals to [how to manage] traffic.

Jariel Arvin

What do you think will be the impact of this new competition?

Juliette Kayyem

There are two pieces: the environmental piece and the geopolitical piece. For the environment, this is the equivalent of an ocean opening up. The waters are going to move in ways that they hadn’t moved before. The ice is melting in ways that mean that the water has to go somewhere, and that is going to cause sea level rise, impacting coastal cities throughout the world.

And the role of human activity in accelerating this change is undeniable. Global warming has impacted the Arctic considerably. As I’ve written for the Boston Globe, it was about a decade ago that things began changing up there in the sense that countries were positioning themselves to take over.

You’re going to start seeing cruise lines. It’s beautiful up there. So this is why even 10 years ago, I started to feel — anticipatory nauseousness is how I would describe it — anticipatory because we’ve known the opening of the Arctic to all sorts of traffic was going to happen, and nauseous because there’s no question that human-induced climate change was having a major impact.

Jariel Arvin

So what do you think the future holds for the Arctic in terms of geopolitics?

Juliette Kayyem

You’re going to have a lot of countries with a lot of interest, without a lot of governance, and with a lot of traffic. And that, to me as a security person, spells trouble.

Jariel Arvin

Why is that trouble?

Juliette Kayyem

Well, it sets off a number of questions which bring up national security concerns. One of them is, who gets what routes when? And who gets to drill where? So let’s say a bunch of geologists discover that there’s a massive oil patch much further out so that no country has ownership of the well. So who gets to drill?

Jariel Arvin

As of right now, who is in control of helping manage these international tensions in the Arctic?

Juliette Kayyem

These are the kind of issues that the Arctic Council is going to have to deal with. It is also going to have to enforce things like offshore drilling, mineral ownership, traffic, and who gets to go first, which are all tough issues. Accidents are a huge issue. What if there’s an accident? There are now going to be a lot of issues to address.

Jariel Arvin

Is there anything that can be done about this new reality?

Juliette Kayyem

I think this new reality will mean greater US engagement in the Arctic, so this will be a big test of leadership for the Biden presidency because this is an issue in which we need a counter to Russia and China.

This also will be a big moment for John Kerry, who was pushing for greater Arctic governance against a Republican Senate when he was secretary of state and couldn’t get it through. It’s something Kerry’s been focused on a long time. And now, wearing the environmental hat as Biden’s climate envoy, the potential for him to get it done is much greater.

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By Tncse

A pro-democracy activist on Hong Kong’s year of turmoil: “The city itself is dying”

April 19, 2022 | News | No Comments

Hong Kong transformed in a year.

Starting in June 2019, the city convulsed with protests over a controversial extradition bill. That expanded into a pro-democracy movement that sought to push back against China’s efforts to further erode the city-state’s already tenuous autonomy, and the freedoms that went with it.

By June 2020, the power of those uprisings brought China’s full might down on Hong Kong, as Beijing implemented a draconian national security law that stifled dissent — or anything that looked even remotely like it in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party.

Do Not Split, an Oscar-nominated short documentary by filmmaker Anders Hammer, charts some of Hong Kong’s most tumultuous months of the pro-democracy uprising and its troubling, unclear end in the face of China’s crackdown. The story is told by the protesters and activists on the front lines, the young people who are trying to protect the freedoms of Hong Kong — freedoms that were supposed to be guaranteed until 2047 under the “one country, two systems” arrangement China agreed to when it took back control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997 — for as long as they can.

Even it’s a battle they know they are losing.

“It was very difficult to understand how this would work. How could this small group of young people fight China?” journalist and filmmaker Anders Hammer, the director of Do Not Split, told me. “At the same time, it was really something unique to watch how they work together. You could really sense that solidarity among the protesters, and a great deal of sacrifice and this communion feeling in the street.”

Do Not Split follows demonstrators to the edges of the protests: where they regrouped to recover from tear gas, where they camped out in a field after a clash with police at the City University of Hong Kong in November 2019.

The film also reveals just how explosive these protests became; frame after frame shows the escalation, from protesters shielding themselves with umbrellas from assaults of tear gas to protesters flinging firebombs at lines of police. (The full documentary is now available from Field of Vision.)

The Hong Kong protests were largely leaderless and anonymous, but the documentary follows a few characters closely, including Joey Siu, a student activist who, in the film, always seems to be hovering around the latest protest, observing and explaining what she’s witnessing, reckoning with what’s happening in Hong Kong in real time.

Siu, who is also a US citizen, decided to use her position as a student activist to try to lobby lawmakers abroad and bring attention to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy struggle, actions that became even riskier under the national security law. This fall, she made the decision to come to the United States and continue fighting for Hong Kong from America.

“It is always a struggle between staying and suffering with the others, or to leave and suffer on your own but to be able to do something. I made the choice,” Siu told me.

I called Siu to talk more about her experiences during the Hong Kong protests; how they have left her generation traumatized; and how the national security law has stifled the city she loves but is not giving up on yet.

Our conversation, edited and condensed, follows.

Jen Kirby

How did you first get involved in the extradition bill protests?

Joey Siu

It was, I would say, an accident. Every university in Hong Kong, we’ve got a student union, which represents the students and participates in all kinds of negotiations with the school and fights for the welfare of the students.

Right before the extradition bill movement broke out in Hong Kong, there was no one standing for the student union executive committee elections at my school. Then one of my friends said he was willing to be nominated as the acting president, and he asked, “Hey, Joey, are you willing to be the vice president?” I was pretty surprised when he approached me, because I never expected myself to be taking up the role.

I actually rejected him several times. I said, “No, I don’t feel like I can be good at this. I don’t feel like I’m a good choice for you.” But he insisted. So he convinced me, and I agreed to that. I was nominated by the Student Union Council right before the first protests on the 9th of June 2019, when the whole extradition bill movement broke out.

Then, when the movement broke out in Hong Kong, we realized that, as student leaders, we had the responsibility and the capacity to stand out and to do something. Alongside other university student unions, we had been organizing and encouraging people to participate in protests. We had been helping to allocate resources like safety goggles, gloves, and other protective gear.

That was how I started my activism. And then very soon, in July 2019, we realized that it is actually a leaderless movement, where we no longer need student leaders, we no longer need politicians, to guide us. We felt like, “Well, what can we do if we are no longer needed to organize protests and assemblies?”

And at that time, we found that the United States Congress was about to discuss the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. We felt like, as student leaders or as ordinary Hong Kong students, we might be able to provide a unique perspective on what was going on in Hong Kong and why it was so important for the international community to do something to help.

Since then, I have been more active in terms of international advocacy for Hong Kong. I had been flying around to different countries during 2019 — US to Canada, Germany, Brussels, the UK — to advocate for international solidarity with Hong Kong.

Jen Kirby

You said you got into it sort of by accident, but obviously you ended up being fully committed. What motivated you to do that?

Joey Siu

Personally, I have always been very candid on social issues, especially Hong Kong politics. I have always paid very close attention to what is going on in Hong Kong, locally and also internationally. That is the fundamental reason why I felt like I should be doing something for the people I care about and for the place I love.

So getting involved in international advocacy for Hong Kong, I felt like that might be the thing that I could do the best for Hong Kong. We all have different roles. Some of us are front-line protesters. Some of us are voluntary first-aid providers. Some of us are citizen journalists.

Every Hongkonger who loves the city, who believes in those values, is trying to find a way to devote ourselves. So I would say this is how I contribute. This is how I devote myself to defend the values that I care for.

Jen Kirby

Did you continue participating in the protests on the front lines?

Joey Siu

I had been starting to go on international advocacy visits ever since September 2019. However, during the time when I was still in Hong Kong, or where I came back to Hong Kong, there were still protests and assemblies, and I would still go to them because I felt like, as I have said, everyone is trying to do our best to devote to the city.

Jen Kirby

You mentioned that you took your first international trip in September 2019. That feels like a really pivotal time for the movement. In early September, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam rescinded the extradition bill, but the protests continued, and the world was really paying attention by that point. How did that affect your activism abroad?

Joey Siu

Well, at the very beginning, of course, we were protesting to take the extradition bill amendment down and to stop the Hong Kong government from again violating the will of the people. However, I think it was in late July 2019 — especially after the Yuen Long attack [Ed. note: A mob, believed to have ties to organized crime, violently attacked protesters] — when I think a lot of Hong Kong people realized and awakened to the unlimited power of the Hong Kong government and also the Chinese government.

From my personal experience, at the very beginning, we had been putting a lot of focus on telling people what the extradition bill amendment was about and why it was so important for us to take it down.

However, as we have realized that we are actually protesting against the Chinese communist regime, we have been shifting our focus in terms of telling people why we are doing that. Why it is so important for all of us to stand in solidarity in terms of containing the rise of the regime in Beijing. Why we have to pay attention to Hong Kong.

Jen Kirby

In the film Do Not Split, you say you had hoped to be a teacher, but you don’t believe it can be a path for you anymore because of your outspokenness. When did you realize that your activism in Hong Kong also meant a change in your future, and your identity?

Joey Siu

Well, I mean, I have always known that I want to be a person who could bring change to society. And that is one of the reasons why I would like to be a teacher, because I felt like by being a teacher, I could actually bring change to society by advocating and teaching my students the correct values, or the values that I believe in. So I felt like I have always been able to understand myself; it’s just that I did not expect myself to be going out to the public or to be changing society or bringing change to other people by becoming an activist.

Actually, the moment when I realized that I can no longer be a teacher is when I first found that my personal information was being posted online, on Facebook and on other social media websites, by the pro-Beijing camps. When I first saw myself being criticized by a lot of mouthpieces in the media who support the Beijing regime, that is when I realized, “Wow, this is going to bring a very big change to my life.” And that what I’d expected to do in the future might not be happening.

Jen Kirby

In the documentary, you also describe yourself as traumatized, and you say it’s a feeling you share with other protesters. Can you talk a little about that?

Joey Siu

I think it’s not only me, but most of those Hong Kong protesters who actually participated in protests, or have been following what is going on in Hong Kong, might have a sense of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] after going through all these experiences.

Especially because when we participate in protests, we very frequently witness police brutality going on and you can often see your fellow protesters, or people you know, getting beaten up by the police force with the batons, with tear gas, with pepper spray — all these kinds of weapons that they use to suppress us.

Participating in the protests is also very traumatizing because of the feeling that you are being chased by a whole bunch of police armed with so many kinds of lethal weapons that they might use and point at you. It’s really, really frightening. The kind of feeling where you have to escape.

The thing that I really couldn’t forget about was the death of the first protester in Hong Kong, which happened in June 2019. His surname was Leung. Mr. Leung jumped, or fell, from a building in [the] Admiralty [district], to protest against the government and to use his death as an awakening to call upon Hongkongers not to give up protesting against the evil regime.

That night, I was in a meeting with other student leaders. During meetings, we put our phones outside of the room so as to avoid any kind of information leakage. Before we put away our phones, we knew that Mr. Leung was on the building in Admiralty. He was standing there, protesting, holding a board. I mean, nobody would expect him to fall. Nobody expected that to happen.

After our meeting, we had a break, and I took my phone and I turned it on. I saw all this news, I saw the live broadcast, and I saw all these videos of him in a yellow raincoat, falling down from the building. I just couldn’t forget about it.

Jen Kirby

That seems really tough, and because this movement was so organic, I get the sense that there was a real sense of connection among all the protesters — it felt as if you all knew each other. I understand how that can weigh on you.

Joey Siu

In Hong Kong, we describe our fellow protesters, or people who have the same kind of beliefs as we do, as 手足 (sau zuk,) which in English means your arms and your legs. In other words, it means you are brothers and sisters.

A lot of protesters really [feel] that way. Even though I might not know the one who was standing beside me during a protest, I do believe he is actually my family member. I do believe that we have that connection.

I think that is the reason why I also feel very traumatized or have the sense of PTSD, after going through all this. Because when I was witnessing police brutality or arrests, I felt like that is my brother or my sister or a family member of mine. It is not just a random Hongkonger. I actually see the connection with the victim.

Jen Kirby

Given that deep sense of connection, and how powerful the movement was, it’s hard to believe how much has changed now, after China passed the national security law. What is your sense of how the law has changed the pro-democracy movement?

Joey Siu

The situation was deteriorating in a very rapid way, because after the imposition of the national security law, you see a lot of arrests made by not only the Hong Kong Police Force but also by [their] national security agents.

From those arrests, you can actually see how restricted the level of freedom of expression and freedom of speech and freedom of press is in Hong Kong — I mean, not to mention organizing or participating in a face-to-face protest or assembly — that it is not possible under the national security law.

Even when you’re expressing your own political beliefs online, or organizing very, very, absolutely peaceful democratic primaries in Hong Kong, or even when you’re trying to participate in institutionalized elections, they can still find a way to prosecute you under very serious criminal offenses, which could not only lead to 10 years to life in prison but could also allow the Hong Kong government to extradite you to mainland China [for prosecution].

So, yes, after the imposition of the national security law, Hong Kong’s situation just worsened so rapidly, in such a vigorous way, to where you can feel a sense of fear in the city. You can feel how frightened or concerned or worried people are, because we do not know what is going to happen.

We don’t know who is going to be arrested. We don’t know what kind of things that we say could lead us to being arrested. We don’t know, if we’re arrested, how many years are we going to spend in jail? And we don’t even know whether we are going to spend our time in Hong Kong or in mainland China.

Before the national security law, the Hong Kong government was trying to rule by fear through the police force. After the national security law, they have been ruling by fear by arresting everyday protesters in Hong Kong.

Jen Kirby

Were you ever targeted specifically, or arrested at any point?

Joey Siu

I was not arrested; however, I was pretty frequently being followed by — I don’t know if they were national security agents or the Hong Kong Police Force, I simply knew that somebody was following me, but I couldn’t verify their identity.

That was pretty terrifying, because at that time, I was working alongside several friends to help another friend of ours with his democratic primary election campaign. We often worked until pretty late at night, and sometimes I found that I was being followed from the underground station to my home. Usually there would be minibuses; however, when it’s too late, there are no minibuses and the only way for me to get back home would be to walk.

It is pretty terrifying, because you don’t know who they are. You don’t know if they’re Hong Kong police or the national security agents. You don’t know if they’re really coming to get you; you don’t know whether you will be sent to a police station. I mean, it would be the best scenario to be sent to a police station in Hong Kong instead of being sent directly to mainland China. But you just do not know.

Jen Kirby

When did you start to notice someone was tailing you?

Joey Siu

I started being followed ever since June 2019, when I first came out as a student leader, but that was not so frequent, and that was not so frightening because you still felt like, “Oh, they are the Hong Kong police,” and if you’re arrested by them, you would be sent to a police station. You were still certain about the kinds of procedures that would happen if you were really being arrested. However, after the national security law in July 2020, you don’t even know what’s going to happen after an arrest.

Jen Kirby

That’s terrifying. Do you know people who were arrested under the national security law?

Joey Siu

A very close friend of mine, she had been involved pretty actively with a student group that advocated for Hong Kong independence that was suspended after the imposition of the national security law. However, still, she was arrested by national security agents in the Hong Kong Police Force for inciting secession of state.

That was a pretty early arrest under the national security law, and that was pretty terrifying. Because at that point, nobody knew what was going to happen. We didn’t know whether the court or the police force was going to allow them to get bail and then to come back home after being investigated for 48 hours. At that point, everything was so uncertain.

But after I left Hong Kong, things just kept getting worse. Like, every candidate that I met during the democratic primaries was arrested.

Jen Kirby

I can remember when the law was first passed, there was so much confusion about how it would be implemented, and I’m sure that uncertainty was terrifying. Can you give an example now of what happens when someone is arrested — for example, what did happen to your friend who was arrested for secession of state?

Joey Siu

She was arrested before I left Hong Kong. When she was arrested, she was investigated by the National Security Department [the Chinese government’s security agency in Hong Kong, established after the passage of the national security law] and also by the Hong Kong Police Force, for more than 30 hours, if I remember. Then her traveling documents were confiscated; she could not leave Hong Kong, and she has to report to the police station every month. Very recently, the police force returned to her traveling documents, telling her that you no longer have to come and report to us.

For the people that I know who were arrested a few weeks ago, during the massive arrests there, they were being investigated, their traveling documents were being confiscated, they had to report to the police station, they cannot leave Hong Kong.

That is pretty much the procedure. However, there are, of course, other more serious cases in Hong Kong; for example, Jimmy Lai, who was arrested under the national security law, and his bail was revoked.

My sense is the Hong Kong government and Chinese government have been trying to manipulate the law as a way to silence the dissidents in Hong Kong, because after being arrested, people cannot leave Hong Kong.

So their only choice would be to stay in Hong Kong. And to stay in Hong Kong and not to be arrested again, you cannot be so vocal as you used to be. You have to be more careful with things you say, the things you do, and everything.

Jen Kirby

So it sounds like, if I’m understanding you correctly, that many people are being arrested, but they’re in a holding pattern — they have to report to the police, but they can’t leave. Rather than handing down punishment, it sounds as if authorities are trying to just exert control.

Joey Siu

It’s kind of like silencing them. I also feel that it’s kind of a warning from the Chinese communist regime to not only the arrestees themselves, but also to the other voices in the society. They’re trying to use arrests to warn those vocal voices in Hong Kong not to say anything anymore, and also to warn the other ordinary, everyday Hong Kong citizens that, “Hey, we’re now arresting everyone from all of the political spectrum, for anything you say. So you people better mind your words.”

Jen Kirby

When did you decide that you needed to leave? What made you finally say, “I can’t stay in Hong Kong anymore”?

Joey Siu

Well, it’s pretty complicated. I was actually born in the States, and I moved to Hong Kong when I was very young because my parents wanted me to learn Chinese and also the Chinese culture. Ever since my family found out that I was becoming a student activist, they’d been trying to get me to leave Hong Kong because they felt like I might be arrested and that it wasn’t safe for me to stay in Hong Kong. And that if I have the choice of going back to the States, why don’t I?

They’d always planned to move back to the States when I completed my undergraduate degree. We had that plan in the future. But then they felt like there might be a need for me to return to the States earlier.

But I never thought about leaving Hong Kong because I felt that is the place where I grew up, where my friends are, where I really had the connection.

However, in June 2020, when they were talking about imposing the national security law, I began receiving a lot of warnings and advice from people I know, and all the advice I got was like, “It’s better for you to leave Hong Kong because not only are you a student activist, you’re also an American citizen.”

At that time, it was catching everybody’s attention that the Chinese communist regime was making use of “hostage diplomacy” [threatening to detain foreign citizens unless their governments accede to China’s demands] to make the other governments bow down to them. So they felt like, well, it makes it more dangerous, being an American citizen, so you should leave Hong Kong. Perhaps not permanently — but just to leave and see how things are going. If it is safe, you could still come back.

At first I felt like, “Well, nothing has been going on yet.” The national security law had not been imposed yet, and even if it is imposed, we don’t know what is going on; maybe they would not be making active use of it. So I still decided to stay until September 2020.

Because of the position I was in, the national security law stopped or paused my ability to make connections with people from other countries, because I didn’t want to get myself into big trouble for colluding with foreign forces.

But then there was the case of the 12 Hongkongers who tried to flee the city, but were captured by the Chinese authorities and then detained.

After that, I started to reconnect with human rights organizations and foreign politicians that I’ve met in the US, Germany, the UK, and Canada, to ask them to speak out on behalf of the 12 Hongkongers, and to encourage them to implement a “lifeboat scheme” to help Hong Kong protesters to relocate to other countries.

I had been secretly attending virtual meetings, and they’d been trying to persuade me not to. But then I asked them, “If I’m not going to talk to you, who in Hong Kong will?” And then after that, I felt like, “Well, perhaps by leaving Hong Kong, I could be making the best use of my abilities and the connections that I built over 2019.” So I decided to leave.

It is always a struggle between staying in a city and then somehow dying or suffering with the city, or to choose to leave the city and to suffer on your own but to be able to do something. I made the choice.

Jen Kirby

Do you see Hong Kong as dying right now?

Joey Siu

I would say the city itself is dying. You can actually see that Hong Kong is gradually becoming another mainland city of China.

However, I would say that I’m pretty optimistic when it comes to the Hong Kong people, because Hong Kong people are trying to sustain the movement in so many creative ways. The city itself might be dying. However, I would say the spirit of the Hong Kong people will be long-lasting.

Jen Kirby

This is a very tough question, but in talking to protesters, I always got the sense that they understood they might lose to China eventually — in 2047, for example, when the “one country, two systems” agreement was set to end. But the goal was to try to protect Hong Kong’s democratic values until that point, as much as possible. Do you think the success of that movement, in some ways, backfired? That it hastened China’s decision to clamp down on Hong Kong?

Joey Siu

Before the whole pro-democracy struggle started, a lot of Hong Kong people still felt like we might be able to maintain and to live well under the “one country, two systems” structure at least until 2047.

The pro-democracy struggle is an awakening call for a lot of Hong Kong people. I feel like the majority of Hong Kong people, no matter whether you are on the pro-democracy side or pro-Beijing side, we have all realized the fact that Hong Kong is not going to maintain a high degree of autonomy, or the same lifestyle, until 2047. I think this is a thing that all of us can agree on. Everybody can witness the encroachment and change in Hong Kong.

Most of the people in Hong Kong right now do not believe anything the Chinese Communist Party government says anymore. They’re not going to respect any kind of promises. Even if the “one country, two systems” agreement is part of an international treaty, they are not going to respect it.

Jen Kirby

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Capitol attack in January in the US, and how it contrasts with Hong Kong’s fight for democracy. How do you see the erosion of democracy in the US as affecting the struggle in Hong Kong?

Joey Siu

A lot of Hong Kong people have been relying or giving very high hopes on the United States to take action to defend Hong Kong or to stand up to China. However, with all the things going on, politicians in the US will, of course, prioritize those domestic issues.

With our plates being so full with different domestic issues of the transition, with all these kinds of issues in regards to racial justice, to gender equality, to climate change, to the bipartisanship around two parties, it would be understandable that people here in the US might not be paying so much attention to Hong Kong and China issues as they used to do in 2019 or 2020.

However, I always believe that the urgency of tackling the China challenge or the China threat will always be one of the most important issues of American politicians.

I also felt like it is definitely another lesson for Hongkongers to learn, because we have always admired the US for being the world’s greatest and most respected democracy. However, witnessing all the kinds of things to happen in the US in the past month, we have realized that no democracy in the world is a perfect one.

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By Tncse

Soccer fans destroyed the Super League

April 19, 2022 | News | No Comments

Twelve of the richest European soccer teams came up with an ingenious scheme to make even more money: Instead of taking part in a longstanding tournament with poorer and mostly weaker teams, they would create their own exclusive “Super League” to attract global interest, prestige, and cash.

There was just one problem: Fans hated the idea, and their revolt caused what would’ve been the biggest threat to the game in decades to dissipate after just 48 hours.

On Sunday, 12 of the richest teams from England, Spain, and Italy — the richest, mind you, not necessarily the best — announced they would create the European Super League. It would likely replace a more inclusive, preexisting annual tournament, the Champions League, where the top teams from European countries’ leagues compete to determine the continent’s strongest squad.

Then came the backlash, leading all six British teams and reportedly two Spanish teams to back out of the proposal after just two days of relentless fan pressure. The chair of one of them is on the verge of stepping down. And all clubs plan to discuss abandoning the idea, at least for the time being.

How did such an idea spark so much passion and backlash? After all, who wouldn’t want to see the most prominent clubs play each other regularly? And how did the Super League fall apart so quickly?

Consider this admittedly imperfect analogy: Imagine if the 12 richest NBA teams decided to form their own playoffs, regardless of how they performed during the regular season and without the league’s approval. That wouldn’t be fair to poorer teams who might’ve earned a playoff spot, and also goes against how NBA fans expect things to run.

That’s kind of what happened here. The 12 original teams — AC Milan, Arsenal, Atlético Madrid, Chelsea, FC Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Tottenham Hotspur — wanted to create a top-tier competition they’d all automatically qualify for regardless of their actual on-field performance, and would reap the financial rewards of without having to share any of that revenue with those pesky smaller teams.

The road to the Super League proposal was paved with greed, but also genuine panic caused by declining revenues during the coronavirus pandemic. And other than executives poised to make big bucks, few were happy about the plan. The backlash from fans, current and former players, and football/soccer media was thus fierce.

The idea is “nothing less than the death of football as we know it,” Germany’s leading sports monthly, 11 Freunde, wrote this week. “[It’s] an attempt to turn a sport which millions love, into a weekly circus show in order to squeeze the last shitty cent into the pockets of the superrich.”

That anger — which also came from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron — led Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Tottenham in England, and possibly FC Barcelona and Atlético Madrid in Spain, to back out of the Super League. What’s more, the chair of Manchester United, one of the teams most strongly pushing for the elite tournament, reportedly will resign on Tuesday under pressure.

While fans were angry at the idea in general, what they were really upset about was that the scheme proved that the decades-long ethos of soccer — a game for anyone and everyone, where prestige is won and lost on the pitch, not bought — isn’t really valued by the executives running things.

“I earnestly felt sick when I heard the news” of the Super League proposal, said Nate Scott, editor of USA Today’s For the Win sports website and fan of Fulham, a middling London team. “European soccer relies on the tenet that ‘anything is possible,’ on any given night you have your chance to upset the giants. It seems like those days are ending.”

For the moment, they’re not. Rarely, if ever, do you see a plan hatched by billionaires fail so fast against the will of the people.

The European Super League was all about money

Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper noted that the idea for a Super League has floated around for decades. On Monday, he cited this passage written by journalist Arthur Hopcraft in 1968: “There was a general expectation a little while ago of what was called a Super League, in which all the leading European clubs would play, breaking away from the domestic leagues in their own countries. It has not materialised.”

On Sunday, it materialized.

So why did it happen now? Experts say the answer is money.

Simply put, the Covid-19 pandemic — and the need to keep people from gathering in large groups, like at, say, soccer stadiums, to prevent the virus’s spread — hit the world’s soccer teams hard, but particularly the biggest clubs.

They’re the ones with the highest payrolls since they have the best, most expensive players; and they’re the ones with the largest, costliest stadiums to maintain. Without fans in attendance because of the pandemic, these teams’ balance sheets sank more and more into the red.

The Champions League — the yearly best-of-Europe tournament run by UEFA, the continent’s governing soccer body — attracts tons of cash for teams in normal times. But these aren’t normal times, and so the body’s ability to help teams cover expenses has dwindled.

UEFA told clubs last October that “nearly $600 million has been lost due to the pandemic, and payouts to clubs will be reduced over the next five seasons,” according to ESPN’s Gabrielle Marcotti at the time.

This is hurting Europe’s richest clubs. Consider the plight of my beloved FC Barcelona, one of the 12 “founding members” of the Super League. Most of its troubles are due to its own gross mismanagement, but the coronavirus didn’t help, which is why it considered creating the tournament in the first place.

A former Barcelona board member told the New York Times in March that the pandemic will cost the club around $500 million in revenue. That’s a problem when the team’s annual salary bill hovers around $770 million, equal to about 74 percent of the team’s pre-coronavirus income.

And it gets worse: “In its most recent financial reports, Barcelona announced a loss for the year of $117 million. It estimates that it already has lost $246 million as a result of the pandemic,” the Times reported.

The other teams that wanted the Super League are in similar situations. So instead of relying on the hard-hit Champions League for cash, they decided to create their own league to try to recoup costs as quickly as possible.

The thinking was that a tournament composed of Europe’s top teams will attract more TV contracts and sponsorships, and those teams wouldn’t have to share revenues with UEFA or other smaller clubs who make it into any given year’s Champions League tournament. Within a few years, the goal was to have the Super League replace the Champions League altogether.

That smacked of a plot to make money at the expense of others, a common move by the game’s elite. JPMorgan Chase even committed around $4 billion to get the Super League up and running.

The league’s proponents didn’t exactly hide that that was their true motivation, either. “Here at Real Madrid we’ve lost a lot of money, we are all going through a very bad situation,” the team’s president and Super League chair Florentino Pérez said this week. “When there is no profit, the only way is to play more competitive games during the week. The Super League will save clubs financially.”

The Super League clubs also argued that it would be more fun for fans to watch two famous teams play each other during every round instead of, say, a team from Stockholm, Sweden, against a team from Budapest, Hungary, in the Champions League.

It seems they didn’t actually bother to run that idea past the fans first, though. If they had, they might have avoided the massive public outcry their proposal sparked.

After news of the Super League proposal broke, UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin threatened that any player who participates in the new competition wouldn’t be allowed to represent their national team in tournaments like the World Cup. “UEFA and the footballing world stand united against the disgraceful self-serving proposal we have seen in the last 24 hours from a select few clubs in Europe that are fueled purely by greed above all else,” he said.

It’s unclear if he actually wields such power, experts say. But the threat alone seemed to have been effective. Ander Herrera, a Spanish national team member who previously played for Manchester United, denounced the move as “the rich stealing what the people created.” And Mesut Ozil, who used to play for Arsenal and Germany’s squad, tweeted “Kids grow up dreaming to win the World Cup and the Champions League — not any Super League.”

What is clear is that current and former players, and most importantly the fans, hated that the Super League could become a reality.

Soccer isn’t supposed to be about the money. It’s supposed to be about the game.

While professional soccer started off in the 1800s as a game for the elite, it fairly quickly became a popular game. By popular, I don’t mean famous or trendy, I mean “popular” in the sense that the game was meant for anyone to play and watch.

“The history of these clubs is that they were local, and plumbers would play and fans would support their town,” said USA Today’s Scott. “It was almost a point of civic pride.“

That’s no longer the case. Soccer in recent years has become big business, which is to be expected as it’s the world’s most popular game. Its players, such as Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Juventus’ Cristiano Ronaldo, are some of the most recognizable and bankable figures in sports. The game’s rise has led to massive endorsement deals, TV contracts, major sponsorships, and multimillion-dollar profits for well-managed clubs.

Europe’s strongest leagues thus attracted billionaire investors, many of whom became owners and turned local clubs into ultra-rich international franchises and brands.

Many of these investors didn’t come from the club’s local fanbase, or even the countries where the clubs were located, but rather from places like the US, Russia, and the Middle East. Generally speaking, their main goal was less to give local fans something to be proud of, and more to fund win-at-all-cost machines with global reach and revenue streams.

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That’s long been a source of conflict. Gary Neville, once Manchester United’s captain and now a commentator for Sky Sports in the UK, railed against this trend during a television hit. “It’s pure greed. They’re impostors,” he said about foreign owners caring only for big bucks. “They’re nothing to do with football in this country … The fans need protecting.”

This has also long angered local fans, due to an increased gap between the game’s richer and poorer clubs. When the Champions League came around, it was typically the wealthiest clubs competing for the title, because they could buy the best players and managers, while teams with smaller coffers typically failed to go deep in the tournament.

And that, experts note, is why the Super League bothers fans so much. “I know these clubs are always going to be in the Champions League competing for the title anyway,” Scott said. “The deck is already stacked so much in these mega clubs’ favor, so [the Super League] just feels gratuitous, it feels piggish.”

Think about a team like Atalanta from Bergamo, Italy — one of the regions hardest hit early in the pandemic. The club is by no means destitute, but it’s not among the wealthiest, especially compared to those trying to form the Super League. And yet the team made it all the way to the Champion League’s quarterfinals during the 2019-20 season, nearly defeating a superstar-filled side from Paris.

Atalanta’s success became a global story, with the New York Times even covering how the team’s performance gave Bergamo’s faithful something to cheer about. “The suffering of the people mourning for their families cannot be relieved,” Maria Beatrice Stasi, the director general of the Pope John XXIII hospital, told the Times. “Sport cannot overcome that grief. But for the city as a whole, a city that has suffered a lot, it offers hope.”

The creation of a Super League would make a story like Atalanta’s less likely. While the tournament would allow for some non-founding European teams to play in the league, the number of spots for them would sharply decline. In essence, the chance for a dream run — like when a low seed makes it to the Final Four in college basketball — would basically go away.

That strips out what many fans love about the game: that any team on any given day has the chance to beat the big clubs. “That’s what’s leading to my heartbreak,” said Scott. “I should be an adult about this, but I still believe in the fairytale.” His Fulham, after all, once beat mighty Juventus in an international competition, a game that continues to live on in team lore.

Scott clearly wasn’t the only one heartbroken. Even fans of the teams creating the Super League railed against the decision. Outside Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium, fans put up a banner reading “LFC Fans Against Super League.” Current and retired players, including former Manchester United and England national team captain Rio Ferdinand, also decried the move. “It’s a disgrace, it’s a war on football,” he said on British television this week.

And Trent Alexander-Arnold, a star player for Liverpool right now, posted his displeasure with the Super League on Twitter, saying he and others were speaking out “For the fans. For the city.”

That backlash caused the six British teams to decide that the trouble of a Super League wasn’t worth the rancor. Chelsea’s fans, after all, blocked the team’s bus as it approached its home stadium ahead of a Tuesday game. It took a club legend, former goalkeeper Petr Cech, to get the crowd to let the bus through.

It seems like the Super League may be dead for now, but there’s always the chance that it could come back. If it does, the defining feature of the sport will die as a new elite league forms — but not if the fans have any say in the matter.

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By Tncse

Germany contained Covid-19. Politics brought it back.

April 19, 2022 | News | No Comments

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here.

Last summer in Berlin, Christine Wagner could safely do something Covid-19 prevented much of the world’s population from doing: go to a movie theater.

The possibility of strangers sitting together, indoors, for hours, taking off masks to eat popcorn and other snacks, led even big chains like AMC to shut down for some time in the US. But in Germany, things were different: The virus was under enough control for the country to reopen with some social distancing and masking rules. So Wagner could go out — and indoors — with her friends.

“Everyone was free,” Wagner, the head of pandemic communication and strategy at a local German health department, told me. “We could go out to travel, meet friends. … It was like normal life.”

That summer, the streets of Berlin and other German cities were busy. Foot traffic at retail outlets hovered around pre-pandemic levels, according to Google’s mobility data. The number of reservations to dine out actually increased at times compared to 2019, based on the online reservation app OpenTable’s restaurant data. In hospitals, doctors saw way fewer Covid-19 patients than a few months before: In a country of roughly 80 million people, new cases had dropped into the hundreds per day — half the daily rate of new cases in the European Union and United Kingdom last summer, and 95 percent less than the United States.

Today, Germany’s streets are emptier. Few people trickle along the sidewalks, and even fewer enter indoor establishments, as many of the businesses Germans could visit last summer have closed down. Dining out across the country has dropped nearly 99 percent compared to before the pandemic. Trips to retail and recreation outlets are now down around 38 percent compared to pre-pandemic times, according to Google’s mobility data. Daily new Covid-19 cases are below the second wave’s peak over Christmas 2020 but remain high — and have recently risen in Germany’s third wave.

“The only thing I do with other people is work in the intensive care ward, treating patients sick with Covid,” Petra Dickmann, a doctor and researcher at Jena University Hospital, told me. “There’s effectively no private life.”

In the span of a few months, Germany has gone from a shining example of a country that rallied the public behind a Covid-19 strategy to a cautionary tale about what can happen when that strategy falls apart.

No country has had a perfect response to Covid-19. But nations around the world took steps to successfully limit the pandemic’s damage. In this series, the Pandemic Playbook, Vox is exploring the victories and setbacks in six places, including Germany, where a summer of virus suppression eventually gave way to fall, winter, and now spring waves. Unified, clear public health communication saved lives — but as the months dragged on, it was no match for shifting national politics, a fragmented system of government, and a public so tired of the pandemic that they came up with a word for the exhaustion: “coronamüde.”

Germany still reports about two-thirds the Covid-19 deaths per capita as the rest of the EU, and about half the per capita death toll of the US. But its lead has shrunk over time, and at some points in the past few months, the country has reported more deaths relative to its population than either the EU or the US.

So what happened? Germany’s federalist system — in broad strokes, similar to the US’s division between federal and state governments — allowed discord among the country’s leaders to have a major impact on the country’s response, slowing down major decisions. Politics played a growing role as well: In 2018, well before the pandemic, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced she would retire in 2021; the political jostling to replace her featured politicians trying to draw contrasts, often with a less cautious approach to Covid-19 than Merkel’s.

All of this turned a nationwide response that was once marked by unity into one that was fragmented, dividing both the public and its leaders.

“It was very much complacency,” Ilona Kickbusch, a political scientist focused on global health at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, told me. “There was a feeling that we’ll get through this relatively quickly. Many, many countries made that mistake — they thought this pandemic response would be a question of three to six months, but it’s turning out to be between 18 months and two to three years.”

Germany’s experience during the coronavirus pandemic shows how a country can unite behind a single public health message and mission. But it also shows how fragile that victory can be — and how quickly an initial success can collapse once something goes wrong.

Germany was initially united on Covid-19

Merkel’s first major speech on Covid-19 could be summarized in three words: “Es ist ernst.” This is serious.

With the Reichstag parliamentary building and German and EU flags behind her, Merkel delivered a speech in her standard, matter-of-fact terms. “Take it seriously,” she urged. “Since German unification — no, since the Second World War — no challenge to our nation has ever demanded such a degree of common and united action.”

In my interviews with people in Germany, they all described tuning in to Merkel’s speech. It was even a family affair. “We were all sitting in front of the TV, listening to her,” Klaus Wälde, an economist who’s done Covid-19 research at the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, told me.

Merkel knew what she was doing. A scientist herself, with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, she explained the need for open communication on scientific and public health issues: “This is part of an open democracy: that we make political decisions transparent, and explain them, that we establish and communicate our actions as well as possible, so that it becomes relatable.”

She would continue to deliver these direct messages, breaking down what was going on and why Germany needed to take action. In another moment that went viral worldwide, Merkel explained the epidemiological concept of a pathogen’s reproductive number, or its R0, used by scientists to measure a virus’s potential spread. She warned that letting the virus spread at even a 10 or 20 percent higher rate could doom the country’s health care system months earlier than would otherwise be the case.

The message trickled down to the local level. Cities and states were eager to avoid the horrors reported at the time in Italy, where hospitals were overwhelmed and death rates were high.

One of those places was Jena, a city of around 110,000 located in the southern part of former East Germany. It had a major university hospital that left it well-positioned to confront the pandemic. In March, the Jena University Hospital made a crucial decision: It required staff involved in patient care to wear masks, well before mask mandates became the norm outside of East Asia. It subsequently found that masks sharply decreased Covid-19 infections among health care workers.

It wasn’t perfect evidence — certainly not a gold-standard randomized controlled trial — but it was good enough during an emergency, and public health officials took it to Jena Mayor Thomas Nitzsche.

“In a pandemic, you cannot wait for the evidence,” Mathias Pletz, director of the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Infection Control and a doctor at Jena University Hospital, told me. “Sometimes, you have to make pragmatic decisions.”

The mayor embraced the idea of masks. He told me he knew he wanted to get ahead of Covid-19. So he and his team devised what was in the spring a solution untried in Germany: a mask mandate.

Nitzsche’s decision, announced on March 30, was not without risks. As in the US and other parts of the world, there were concerns across Germany about shortages of protective equipment, including masks, for health care workers. Some worried the public would reject a mask mandate as a violation of their freedoms.

Nitzsche knew the key to avoiding both these problems would likely come down to how the city’s leaders told the public about the policy. The government would need to transparently communicate the benefits of masks while acknowledging the downsides: Yes, they can be uncomfortable, but masks could flatten the curve, save your family and neighbors, and get life back to normal quicker. And to avoid a run on surgical masks, the local government would emphasize the value of cloth coverings, and encourage people to make masks not just for themselves but for others, too.

“This took a lot of arguing and a lot of information campaigning,” Nitzsche said. “It’s very important to do this together with the people and not on the people. They need to understand. They need to accept. They need to intrinsically want to participate. Then it can work.”

The city took a week before the mandate went into effect to persuade the public through its “Jena zeigt Maske” campaign. The local government blanketed public streets and walls with posters encouraging people to make and wear masks. City officials appeared on local and national media to explain their thinking and to push everyone to take the mandate seriously. Nitzsche posted his own messages on social media and YouTube.

The city was also helped by two factors: The university hospital, a local economic engine, made the population more receptive to public health action. And the national media took a deep interest in Jena’s first-in-the-country experiment, giving the city’s campaign free publicity.

When the mandate took effect in April, Nitzsche was at first surprised, then relieved. It seemed to work. People quickly and eagerly adopted cloth coverings. In public, mask use was nearly universal, as documented by media outlets in videos and photos that proliferated across the country.

Then the numbers came in: Jena was successfully keeping its curve flat. As a study by Wälde and three other researchers for the nonprofit institute IZA in June 2020 found, the difference between actual coronavirus cases in Jena and the number estimated without a mask mandate, as predicted by a mathematical model, widened over time. After 20 days, the level of Covid-19 cases was 23 percent below the predicted level.

Nitzsche began receiving calls from his peers who saw the results in Jena: How did you persuade people? How did you get masks to the public? What were the challenges?

By the end of April, each of Germany’s 16 states made masks compulsory. (By then, only seven states in the US had mandated masks; the total would never climb above 39.)

Wälde’s study also found the nationwide adoption of mask mandates worked: The policies “reduced the cumulative number of registered Covid-19 cases between 2.3% and 13% over a period of 10 days after they became compulsory” and reduced “the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 40%.”

Germany’s quick adoption of mask mandates shows what can happen in a united country. Germany’s federalist system, like the US’s, splits governing powers along local and state channels — a structure built, in part, to safeguard the former Third Reich against the risk of a takeover by a tyrannical leader.

In good times, the system enabled local experiments, like Jena’s mask mandate. With the public on board and public officials following Merkel’s lead, one city’s success could spread to the entire country in just a few weeks’ time.

By midsummer, as the US saw its second surge of the coronavirus, Germany reported less than 5 percent the Covid-19 deaths per day as America. It was a culmination of its quick embrace of mask mandates, but also of other efforts: a lengthy lockdown lasting until early May, a scaled-up testing and tracing system that caught outbreaks before they exploded out of control, and a generally cautious public. Merkel pushed to take the pandemic seriously, and Germany did so with a range of actions.

These kinds of numbers, enabled by the spirit of collective action, allowed Germany to open for the later parts of the summer. The warmer weather helped, as people were pushed outdoors and the virus struggled to spread in the open air and extra heat and humidity. But the change of seasons clearly wasn’t enough on its own. While the US suffered a unique second wave last summer, Germans had flattened the curve to the point that they could go back to restaurants and movie theaters without worrying so much about the coronavirus.

“The first wave was managed quite well,” Clemens Wendtner, a doctor and researcher affiliated with Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, told me. “There was a very close interaction between scientists, physicians, and politicians. All of these things were coordinated.” In contrast to the US, he added, “we faced the facts. We knew exactly what was going on. No one was denying anything.”

Over time, Germany became more fragmented

In September, after Germany’s summer of freedom, Oktoberfest arrived. Munich’s iconic festival was canceled, but some beer halls around Germany held their own celebrations. Organizers claimed the gatherings were regulated with masking and social distancing requirements.

But in reality, many Germans came together, maskless, by the dozens in indoor spaces, sitting tightly across long tables as they drank beer, yelled, and laughed — spitting all over each other particles that can carry the coronavirus and transmit the disease.

It was emblematic of the kind of freedom, beyond Oktoberfest, that Germans embraced when they came back home from summer holidays, pouring into risky indoor spaces and disregarding some of the precautions recommended by experts and officials to contain Covid-19.

So Germany’s Covid-19 cases, along with much of Europe’s, began rising once again. It matched what experts had warned about for months: As the weather cooled and people were pushed indoors, countries needed to step up their precautions, reeling back summer freedoms to prevent a fall surge. Merkel had told Germans that the months to follow would be “even more difficult than now.”

But now, much of the country didn’t heed the warnings.

Case numbers were still low compared to worse-hit nations, but they were rising, with daily new cases roughly tripling from July to August. Officials seemed content to keep letting the virus spread at a faster rate, letting things get worse bit by bit. Some state leaders resisted anything resembling a lockdown; North Rhine-Westphalia School Minister Yvonne Gebauer, bolstered by regional cases dropping to the national average, argued masks in classrooms were “no longer necessary.”

These state leaders were backed by vocal anti-lockdown segments of the population, which marched in the streets in August to oppose Covid-related restrictions. The initial success against the virus — and the short-term economic damage a lockdown would bring — had also left more of the public cool on the need for harsher rules.

By the end of October, the scenario Merkel warned about early in the pandemic when she explained exponential spread to a worldwide audience, came true: Daily new Covid-19 cases in Germany multiplied by seven times in the span of the month.

The success of the past few months had built complacency, and the federal system that allowed Jena to experiment with masks now suffocated further progress. The country’s 16 state governments and Merkel’s federal government couldn’t come to an agreement until it was too late, after they saw the results of exponential spread firsthand.

Even then, the country’s governments by November only agreed to what they called a “lockdown lite,” which closed bars, restaurants, and several other indoor spaces. Cases remained stubbornly high throughout November — more than triple the spring peak of Covid-19. It wasn’t until late November that Merkel finally got the 16 state governments to sign on to a stricter lockdown.

“That’s a federalist problem,” Fabian Hattke, a public policy expert at the University of Hamburg, told me. Until later in the fall, “the heads of states did not agree on common measures — some went stricter, some went looser.”

Public fatigue with Covid-19 — that coronamüde — also played a role. Based on his own analysis, Christian Karagiannidis, a researcher and ICU doctor at Witten/Herdecke University, told me that the second set of lockdowns was only “50 percent [as effective] as that from the first wave.” He added, “People are more or less fed up. They are tired. They are not adherent to the measures that were implemented by the German government.”

Even after the new lockdowns, Covid-19 cases spiked around Christmas and then again in early January. An increasingly strict lockdown wasn’t enough to stop the foundation that the coronavirus had been allowed to build just before the perfect time to strike.

Merkel appeared to see much of this coming. As Germany prepared to reopen last summer, she called the country’s success in fighting Covid-19 at the time “fragile,” adding that Germany should be “smart and careful” in the coming months, regularly reevaluating the rules it set in place. But Merkel’s constant message of caution ultimately wasn’t enough to counter a fragmented federalist system — especially as politicians began competing to eventually replace her.

A power vacuum made things even worse

In Germany, the current political era is sometimes referred to as “Merkeldammerung” — the twilight of Merkel. After more than a decade and a half as chancellor, and nearly two decades as leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany, she said in her retirement announcement that it was time for the country and her party “to start a new chapter.” Elections in September 2021 will decide the country’s new leader.

Merkel’s long grip on power had made her a defining force in German politics. But all of a sudden, the country found itself on the brink of a power vacuum. Politicians both in and out of Merkel’s party had a chance to vie for the country’s top political position. And many criticized her policies, in part to contrast themselves and bolster their own political fortunes.

All of that became apparent during the week of Ash Wednesday in February, which is traditionally used by German politicians to preview their electoral messaging for the year ahead and criticize their opponents. This year, the hot topic was the country’s continuing months-long lockdown.

Armin Laschet, who had been recently elected to head Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, criticized the lockdown — describing Merkel’s push for communal restrictions as the government treating voters like “underaged children.”

Markus Söder, who heads the Christian Democrats’ sister party and, like Laschet, is vying to lead the country after Merkel retires following September elections, fired back: “Everybody who plans to profit from Merkel in September must know that these votes will only come in combination with Merkel’s policy and not by positioning oneself against it.”

Nearly a year before, Germans who turned on the news would typically see a united front from Merkel down to the local level. Now, with the start of an election year, they saw some of the country’s top politicians — and members of the chancellor’s own party — debating whether Merkel had the right idea to begin with.

Without a strong leader at the federal level, it fell more to the lower levels of government to make decisions about Covid-19 — federalism ran wild.

Yet these leaders didn’t always have fully developed visions. During the summer, Michael Kretschmer, the governor of the state of Saxony, argued that the initial lockdown shouldn’t have been so strict. He said there would be “no tightening” of restrictions in September. By December, Kretschmer not only backed Germany’s new lockdown but enacted even tighter restrictions across Saxony, saying, “We have to bring this country to rest.” In January, Kretschmer called for a February end to the lockdown. By the end of March, he at least briefly supported a stricter Easter lockdown.

Now multiply this 16 times over. That’s the political back-and-forth that has engulfed Germany during Covid-19.

As I’ve asked experts in and out of Germany if anything could have averted the country’s recent failures, I’ve been met with a lot of shrugs and caveats. In theory, Germany may have avoided its second and third waves if the country continued to unite under Merkel — that worked in the first wave, and it’s an approach that seemed to work in much more consistent countries like Australia and New Zealand.

But German solidarity had major systemic forces stacked against it: a federalist system, a political battle to replace Merkel as head of the government, and a long pandemic that fatigued populations across Europe and the rest of the globe.

Countries might be able to overcome one or two of these factors at once — Australia has a federalist system; New Zealand had general elections in 2020 — but it could be that the full trifecta is too difficult to beat simultaneously.

The crisis “became more of a cooperation problem, in which everyone has a strong incentive to deviate from a common solution,” Hattke, of the University of Hamburg, said.

Some experts also argue Germany could have better used the time it bought with lockdowns and restrictions. It could have built more expansive test-and-trace systems to handle a higher caseload before the fall. Or it could have tried to procure some of its own vaccine supply, instead of relying on the EU’s ultimately botched approach — an approach that has left Germany with roughly half as many of its people receiving at least one vaccine dose as the US, and a third as many as world leader Israel, as of April 19.

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“That time wasn’t used to put strategies in place that would support Germany in a second, third, or fourth wave, or whatever’s coming,” Kickbusch, of the Graduate Institute, said. “It was clear that Germany’s health system was very good — hospital beds and all of that. But Germany’s public health system was much too weak.”

As the lockdown that began in November drags on and officials clash over it, public opinion has shifted. Shortly after Merkel’s primetime speech in March 2020, only 14 percent of the German population called the Covid-19 restrictions excessive; a year later, 35 percent said the measures in place were too much, according to public surveys.

“We interpret this with the fact that politicians were less unified in their statements [and] stopped speaking with one voice,” Rolf van Dick, a social psychologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, told me, citing his own research on Covid-19 and public opinion. As politicians split in their public stances, van Dick added, the public “got more fragmented.”

Even Merkel eventually caved. In the lead-up to Easter on April 4, Merkel and the governors had agreed to tight restrictions — discouraging domestic travel, closing down more businesses, and prohibiting larger gatherings, including in churches, from April 1 to 5.

The backlash was fierce. Churches demanded the ability to celebrate one of their holiest days. Businesses claimed that a stricter lockdown during a typically busy season would bring financial ruin. State leaders started to buckle under the opposition, calling for a redo on the agreement.

Under all this pressure, Merkel revoked the plan roughly 36 hours after it was announced. “This mistake is mine alone,” she said. “The whole process has caused additional uncertainty, for which I ask all citizens to forgive me.” Merkel added, “There were good reasons for it, but it could not be implemented well enough in this short time.”

One year before, Merkel had been the voice of Germany on Covid-19, with news of her speeches getting families to gather around the TV to listen to what she had to say. The public and politicians followed her lead, anxious to take the cautious approach that she advocated for against the coronavirus. That unity let the country crush Covid-19 during the early days of the pandemic, with headlines praising “A German Exception” and much of Germany, from restaurants to movie theaters, reopening and bustling in the summer.

In the spring of 2021, Merkel was forced to apologize for her caution. Now she hopes to adjust her plan to prevent another potential surge — perhaps by seizing powers originally held by the states. Meanwhile, daily new Covid-19 cases in Germany remain around 50 times higher than they were for much of last summer.

Jacobia Dahm is an independent photographer based in Berlin, with a focus on portraiture and reportage.

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Biden’s Cuba policy is suddenly in the spotlight

April 19, 2022 | News | No Comments

The protests erupted Sunday in San Antonio de los Baños, a town outside Cuba’s capital city, Havana. They spread from there, with demonstrations bursting out across the country, from the streets of Havana to the countryside. They became the largest anti-government protests to happen in the country in decades — a remarkable show of resistance against Cuba’s communist regime.

Outrage and desperation over Cuba’s deepening economic crisis and a resurgent pandemic fueled the demonstrations. Food and medicine shortages are widespread. Prices for food and utilities are rising, making it harder for Cubans to afford the essentials. Frequent blackouts are intensifying the public’s frustration. Cubans are waiting in long lines for food they can barely afford and may not have a fridge to store in, or even a fan to get them through the island’s July heat.

Cuba’s economic problems largely predate the pandemic, but the coronavirus sharpened them. It decimated Cuba’s tourism industry, a huge slice of the island’s economy. Trump-era sanctions — which the Biden administration has not rolled back — have added to the pressure. And the pandemic itself is taking a toll: Cuba is currently experiencing a record surge in cases and deaths.

“It’s been a perfect storm,” said Lisandro Pérez, a professor and chair of the department of Latin American and Latinx studies at John Jay College. “All of these factors that have long been there — with the addition of the pandemic.”

But the sudden uprising in Cuba is also shaping up to be a perfect storm of a foreign policy problem for US President Joe Biden: another crisis at America’s doorstep, one with strong domestic political considerations that could have reverberations whether Biden acts — or doesn’t.

Biden said the US supports Cuba’s “clarion call for freedom and relief.” Both Democrats and Republicans have backed the protests, but US lawmakers are split over how to approach the demonstrations and acute humanitarian crisis on the island.

Biden promised during his 2020 campaign to roll back Trump’s sanctions on Cuba, but he hasn’t acted. Now, the issue is urgent — both for those who want to see the sanctions gone and for those who feel Biden must keep them in place to continue pressuring the regime.

Biden’s best-laid plans on foreign policy didn’t include Cuba as a priority. But now a crisis in Cuba is here. What the US should do is always a complicated decision, but it’s clear Biden can’t just ignore Cuba.

The US looms large in the Cuba protests. But there are no easy answers.

After the protests, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed much of the unrest on the United States, claiming US-backed mercenaries caused the unrest. He called on supporters to also go to the streets and “defend the revolution.” About 100 people were arrested, according to human rights groups.

Díaz-Canel also accused Washington of “economic asphyxiation” because of its sanctions policy. Michael Bustamante, of professor of Latin American history at Florida International University, said the position of the Cuban government before the protests, and definitely after, was “what happened is precisely the result of a US policy that has been intended to provoke destabilization.”

“They’re using that as a cudgel to not address any of their own shortcomings,” he added.

The specter of United States interference remains powerful in Cuba, given, well, a very long history of US intervention there. Fast-forwarding to the Cuban Revolution in 1959, communist revolutionary Fidel Castro overthrew the US-backed dictator and began to pursue closer ties with the Soviet Union — an absolute no-no for the US during the Cold War.

The US tried to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s, but after that failure, the US strengthened an economic embargo that largely blocked Americans from doing business or trade with Cuba. There have been tweaks on the margins since, but the embargo has long outlasted the Cold War.

In 2014, then-President Barack Obama began a historic diplomatic opening with Cuba, and as a result of the process, rolled back some economic restrictions tied to the Cold War-era US embargo and opened up travel.

Trump, as president, vowed to reverse those policies; he did throughout his time in office, significantly stepping up the pressure starting in 2019. He imposed renewed travel restrictions and other sanctions, including designating Cuba as a “state sponsor of terror” in his final days in office. A key pillar of Trump’s sanctions severely limited remittances to the island, which cut off another economic spigot.

As experts said, Cuba’s problems are deeper than US sanctions alone, but the Trump-era policy, especially coming during the pandemic, is adding to the strain. And that is creating a dilemma for Washington.

Biden’s Cuba foreign policy is often framed

Broadly, the Biden administration has made clear that it stands with protesters against Cuba’s authoritarian regime.

“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” Biden said in a statement Monday. “The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves,” he added.

But beyond the rhetoric, Biden is facing pressure to act, too. Or not act, depending on how you look at it. Some US lawmakers are calling on Biden to ease the Trump-era sanctions, which they say are making the humanitarian situation in Cuba much worse. Removing some measures won’t completely solve Cuba’s problems, but it could create a meaningful difference, for example, by making it easier for people in the United States to send money to family in Cuba.

“Cubans are facing profound hardship because of the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, the entrenched culture of corruption and mismanagement among Cuba’s leadership, and the strict sanctions callously imposed by the Trump Administration,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said in a statement.

“I call on President Biden to help alleviate the suffering in Cuba by rescinding the Trump era sanctions and offering additional humanitarian and vaccine assistance to the Cuban people,” he continued.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) also said it was “long past time to end the unilateral U.S. embargo on Cuba, which has only hurt, not helped, the Cuban people.”

Some experts also said that Biden offering aid or easing sanctions would also make it harder — especially for a frustrated public — for the Cuban regime to scapegoat Washington for all of its woes.

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But there is also a chorus demanding that Biden promise to keep the Trump-era sanctions in place, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D-NJ). Lifting sanctions now, they believe, would look as though the United States is giving in to the Cuban regime as it ignores the real grievances of its people and continues to crack down. They also see the protests in Cuba as proof that the Trump policies are working — creating the necessary pressure that is causing people to rise up against the regime. But some experts caution it’s still not clear if these protests are such a moment, and in the meantime, Cuban people are suffering.

Much of this comes down to timing. Biden promised during the 2020 campaign to undo some of Trump’s measures, which he said “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” But even as some Democrats pushed Biden to reengage on Cuba, the administration hadn’t taken any steps to ease sanctions, and Cuba remained on the US list of state-terror sponsors as recently as May. Still, even then, officials told Reuters in May Biden was committed to rolling back Trump policies on Cuba, but didn’t offer a timeline.

But as is often the case, foreign policy crises rarely adhere to a president’s foreign policy to-do list. Now Biden has to deal with Cuba whether he likes it or not — in a much more politically fraught environment.

And of course, this isn’t just about foreign policy, but domestic policy, too. Since the protests Sunday, solidarity protests in US cities from Miami to Dallas to New Jersey have erupted. The Cuban-American community is not at all a monolith, and not everyone supports the US embargo, but there is support for Trump’s more hardline policies, which Trump really sold to Cuban Americans. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump won the Cuban-American vote in Miami. As Vox’s Nicole Narea wrote, in Florida, the Trump campaign cast Biden “as a socialist and capitaliz[ed] on the fears of Latinos from failed socialist regimes.”

Republicans may seize on that talking point again if Biden tries to pursue an opening at this particular political moment. “If Biden had come in and reversed Trump’s sanctions, he’d have taken a bit of a political hit from the right,” William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert at American University, said. “But nothing like what he would take now — and now the situation has gotten way worse.”

In Washington, the status quo prevails. In Cuba, the crisis continues.

At least for now, nothing is changing. White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday that the administration didn’t have anything to announce regarding a policy shift.

“Our approach continues to be governed by two principles: First, support for democracy and human rights — which is going to continue to be at the core of our efforts — through empowering the Cuban people to determine their own future,” Psaki said. “Second, Americans, especially Cuban Americans, are the best ambassadors for freedom and prosperity in Cuba.”

Biden has learned the hard way in recent weeks that the foreign policy problems you don’t think you’ll have may end up being the ones you get. And with or without protests, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Cuba. Experts said there are ways for the US to offer or deliver more aid — food or vaccines, say. At the same time, US interference remains that ever-present cudgel for the Cuban government, and any US actions also come with a degree of distrust.

Cuba’s struggles could also become a migration crisis, as it did in the 1990s. Experts say the situation is nowhere near that yet, and it is unlikely to look anything like it did in the 1990s, when the Cuban government allowed Cubans to flee by raft to the US. Instead, most Cubans are coming to the southern border, like others seeking asylum here in the United States. But even the number of Cubans attempting to come by sea to the US has increased in the past year. On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned both Cubans and Haitians against fleeing to the US by sea.

The future of the protests is also uncertain, especially as a heavy presence from Cuban police forces appears to have slowed the outpouring onto the streets that the island saw last weekend. It’s still unclear how lasting the political movement may be, and just how much political pressure it might put on the Cuban government.

The fraught US-Cuba relationship means Cuban people are often torn between the beast they know — the communist regime — and the other beast they know, the United States. As Tanya Saunders, an associate professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, told me, the “Cuban people are always trying to pursue their own self-determination, with whatever resources they have.” This weekend’s protests, if nothing else, are another expression of that pursuit.

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By Tncse

GOP opposition to the Iran deal is threatening to sink a Biden Pentagon nominee

April 15, 2022 | News | No Comments

President Joe Biden’s pick to be the third-highest civilian leader at the Pentagon is already facing a tough confirmation challenge a week before his hearing — and it’s mostly because he staunchly supports the Iran nuclear deal.

A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me the lawmaker is concerned about Colin Kahl assuming the position of undersecretary of defense for policy. The person in that job oversees and develops how the Defense Department handles military threats from China, Russia, terrorist groups, and, yes, Iran.

However, the spokesperson added that “it’s still early in the process and there are still many steps before Sen. Inhofe makes a final decision.” When I asked if the senator would vote “no” if the confirmation vote were held today, the spokesperson reiterated that it’s “too early to say.” Politico was first to report Inhofe’s stance.

This whole situation is bigger than a lawmaker standing against the president’s nominee, though in a 50-50 Senate, any Republican opposition — especially from a prominent senator — spells trouble.

It’s really about how the 2015 Iran deal will be a perpetual source of tension between Republicans, some Democrats, and the White House for the next four years.

Political fights over the Iran deal have already begun

Congressional sources say Inhofe is following through on his threat, made in a Foreign Policy op-ed this month, to make Biden nominees favorable to the Iran deal sweat their confirmations.

The president should “reconsider his nomination to senior national security positions of former Obama administration officials who were directly involved in negotiating the original Iran deal, as well as those who promoted it,” the senator wrote.

Kahl is the exact kind of person Inhofe was talking about.

As a top Middle East official at the Pentagon and Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration, Kahl helped shape the nuclear pact known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal, simply put, had the US lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe curbs on Tehran’s nuclear work.

Out of government, Kahl spent time blasting the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the agreement in pursuit of a maximum pressure policy toward Iran.

“This a dangerous delusion,” Kahl wrote in a 2018 Foreign Affairs article. The Trump administration believed they could “force Iran to accept a better deal—one that eliminates the JCPOA’s sunset clauses, dismantles a significant portion of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, ends Iranian support for terrorism and regional militancy, and addresses the regime’s systematic violation of human rights at home.”

“It won’t,” Kahl continued. “Trump may hope to isolate Tehran, but it is Washington that finds itself largely alone.”

Kahl’s advocacy, and general Democratic support for the nuclear accord, has rankled Republicans for the past six years. Their overall view is that the Iran deal made Tehran stronger after sanctions were lifted, and that it did nothing to curtail the regime’s support for terrorist groups or its missile program.

In myriad conversations I’ve had, congressional Republicans cite these and other reasons for why they’re skeptical of Kahl’s nomination. (They also note Kahl was at the Pentagon serving in a key Middle East policy position when ISIS surged in Iraq in 2015, shortly after US troops left the country.)

But Democrats, including top members of the Biden administration, say the JCPOA was a targeted accord that put Iran’s nuclear work “in a box.” Only then, with the threat of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon off the table, could the US begin to try to convince Tehran to end the other aggressive aspects of its foreign policy.

The general belief was that the Biden administration would work quickly to rejoin the deal, especially since the president promised America’s reentry on his watch. But so far the US has been cagey in the process, holding firm that it won’t lift sanctions Trump reimposed until Iran stops enriching uranium beyond the pact’s caps.

Experts say that’s for two reasons. One is a clear-eyed assessment by Biden’s team that it can’t just lift financial penalties and hope Iran comes back into compliance with the accord, though they’re willing to talk to Tehran about a way forward. The other is that holding firm signals to Republicans that the Democrats in charge aren’t too eager to rejoin the agreement.

That underscores just how rancorous the policy debate over that issue remains and how the yawning gap between the two parties will continue to color America’s Iran policy in the years to come.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the Senate Armed Services Committee chair, told reporters on Wednesday that he’s “hopeful” Kahl can get through the confirmation process. “The committee hearing will be absolutely critical and crucial because he’ll have an opportunity to explain his positions, and then my colleagues will make a judgment.”

But that judgment won’t be about Kahl personally or his experience to do the job. It’ll be about what he represents.

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By Tncse

South Korea’s Covid-19 success story started with failure

April 15, 2022 | News | No Comments

This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook. Explore all the stories here.

DAEGU, South Korea — Jo Hye-min stepped off the train and into a situation she had only seen in movies: a completely, and eerily, empty station.

It was February 2020, when the threat posed by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was only starting to become clear in much of the world. But the situation in Daegu was already dire: Hospitals were overwhelmed and on the brink of collapsing. Hundreds of people believed to have been exposed to the virus were being isolated in private rooms. A nurse’s association in Daegu issued a plea for volunteers to help.

“It felt like war had broken out,” Jo says, and the 28-year-old nurse enlisted. The national disease control agency called her at 10 pm, asking if she could be in Daegu by 9 am the next morning. She dropped off her cat with a friend and made the 60-mile trip from her home in Busan. When she arrived at the isolation facility, she was told it would be at least a month before she could leave.

Jo was joining a frantic, all-out effort by South Korean officials to contain a burgeoning epidemic.

A woman in her 60s, who would later become known as Patient 31, had tested positive for Covid-19. Public health authorities learned she was a member of a secretive religious movement and attended services in the days before being diagnosed, potentially exposing more than 1,000 people.

South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the infected and the potentially exposed — to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading any further.

It was a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate. And it worked. Within a week of Patient 31’s diagnosis, the country was performing the most Covid-19 tests in the world; it implemented perhaps the most elaborate contact tracing program anywhere; and it set up isolation centers so thousands of patients could quarantine.

As other countries saw their outbreaks spiral out of control, measures like these helped South Korea keep Covid-19 in check. On March 1, South Korea had about 3,700 confirmed cases; Italy, the first hot spot in Europe, had 1,700 and the US had just 32 cases, though its dismal testing meant the virus was likely spreading unsurveilled. By the end of April, Italy had topped 200,000 cases; confirmed cases in the US were already above 1 million. South Korea still had fewer than 11,000. Adjusted for population, South Korea’s first wave of coronavirus cases was about one-tenth as big as that in the United States.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the US was considered better prepared than any country in the world to stop an infectious disease outbreak. But the first months of the pandemic response in the US were marked by now-familiar stumbles. The virus escaped containment. While South Korea tested, traced, and isolated, the US struggled, a critical early failure that cost lives.

No country had a perfect response to the pandemic. Every approach came with trade-offs and caveats, and even success stories can go awry in the face of global, exponential growth. But around the world, nations took successful steps to limit the pandemic’s damage. We talked to Jo and other South Koreans as part of Vox’s Pandemic Playbook series, which will explore the successes — and setbacks — in six nations as they fought the virus.

South Korea’s early, decisive action was crucial. South Korea was one of the first countries where Covid-19 was seen outside of China, before much was known about the virus at all. It seemed at high risk for an unstoppable outbreak — and instead, it staved off disaster. To date, the US ranks 10th in its total cases per capita; South Korea ranks 145th. Though it has been slower to vaccinate its population than world leaders like the US, South Korea is still seeing fewer than 700 new cases per day on average; the United States, meanwhile, is averaging more than 70,000.

“South Korea was able to flatten the epidemic curve quickly,” researchers from Harvard and Seoul National University wrote in a review of the country’s response. Among the top reasons for its success: “conducting comprehensive testing and contact tracing and supporting people in quarantine to make compliance easier.”

Testing capacity quickly expanded. Contact tracing began. And at the isolation center, Jo settled into a new routine, calling up to 50 patients a day to check on them. If they fell sick, she had no treatment to offer. Nobody knew what would work. They had one option: test, trace, and isolate.

Patients lapsed into depression. They had nothing to do but watch TV and eat out of their lunchboxes; some people would vomit when they took their daily Covid-19 tests, administered through the nose. In the most extreme cases, a patient would stop responding to the nurses’ calls. A nurse in protective gear would enter the room and try to provide the person with more direct emotional support.

“I could see the patients started to lose it mentally and emotionally,” Jo said. “I was always on alert, and the emotional care was really difficult for me.”

The strategy was not without its costs, and not all of its components may be universally applicable; Americans especially already have a deep distrust of the government and government surveillance. And South Korea has made mistakes. In some cases, public officials leaked patients’ personal information. Civil rights advocates say the government unconstitutionally overreached to track people’s locations. Clusters continue to pop up, and businesses still operate at limited capacity.

But the country’s response saved lives. Thousands of health care workers and millions of everyday South Koreans made the sacrifices necessary to prevent the kind of mass death seen in much of the Western world. To date, fewer than 2,000 South Koreans have died from Covid-19. The country has never issued an official stay-at-home order; subway trains and buses have been mostly packed with commuters, and people have been working in their offices as usual since last spring. Masks are commonplace, but otherwise, Covid-19 has not altered the fabric of everyday life in South Korea the way it has in much of the Western world.

Five years earlier, an outbreak of the MERS virus, which appeared to be even more lethal than Covid-19, led to strict social distancing protocols. The country took action after that crisis so it would be better prepared for the next outbreak.

“I think back then, Koreans didn’t realize that new infectious diseases can be a threat to all of us,” Park Young-joon, a top official at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), says. “These experiences led to a change in attitude.”

They were determined never to be caught off guard again.

After a deadly failure, South Korea reformed its public health system

In December 2019, about two dozen of South Korea’s top epidemiologists and health officials gathered at the KDCA for a training exercise. The scenario: A hypothetical coronavirus had originated in China, and a family of four was bringing the new respiratory virus into South Korea from Hong Kong.

After the exercise, an internal review singled out the importance of using GPS and credit card data to track contacts with the infected patients. Another idea proposed during the simulation would also prove prescient: The country should develop testing materials that could be quickly adapted to any new coronavirus.

The country committed to running these pandemic war games after it was threatened by two of the most frightening respiratory pathogens to appear in the 21st century.

During SARS-1, in 2003, South Korea was considered a model for its decisive response. Just three people died.

Then came MERS, an even deadlier coronavirus, in 2015.

A man in his late 60s visited several Seoul-area hospitals and health clinics before he was diagnosed with MERS. He was likely the country’s patient zero, and he infected other patients and medical workers over a 10-day period. The outbreak, the largest outside the Middle East, led to 186 confirmed cases and 38 deaths, and highlighted weaknesses in the country’s contact tracing and quarantine programs.

A year earlier, a very different disaster — the sinking of the Sewol ferry that killed more than 300 people — sparked outrage at government incompetence. South Koreans were losing faith in the government’s ability to handle a crisis. In the wake of MERS, public officials were criticized for failing to apply the lessons of SARS-1. People wanted something done.

“People freaked out,” Kelly Kim, general counsel at Open Net Korea, a civil rights group, says. “If something bad happens, they always blame the government and ask the government to do something about it. The easiest thing is making a law.”

The government passed a total of 48 reforms after MERS, all toward the goal of being better prepared for the next pandemic. The country committed to a playbook: test, trace, and isolate. Crucial changes were made to the system for contact tracing — the process where health workers talk to infected people and get a list of those they were in recent contact with, and then work outward, asking those contacts to get tested and isolate themselves.

But that system only works if the patients are forthcoming. During the MERS outbreak, one man had reportedly lied to health workers about his presence at a conference attended by 1,000 other people.

“It put the whole country into this crisis,” Park Kyung-sin, a professor at Korea University Law School, says. “The lesson was clear: Location tracking has to be done on a mandatory basis.”

The post-MERS changes passed by the national legislature authorized federal agencies to access credit card transactions, cellphone location data, even CCTV footage if needed. People could be fined for breaking quarantine. The number of infection control staff and isolation units was increased.

There was a culture change, too. Public health officials started running the periodic outbreak simulations to test their readiness. And Park Young-joon read daily status updates on emerging diseases.

A few weeks after the pandemic simulation, one of those reports came from Wuhan, China, noting an outbreak of aggressive pneumonia. At first, he didn’t take the reports of an unknown respiratory virus too seriously. But then he learned the Chinese government was locking down the entire city. That was when he first believed it would spread to South Korea.

“I realized this disease was different,” he says. “We felt it was just a matter of time.”

When Covid-19 hit, South Korea put its new protocols in action

There were still only four confirmed Covid-19 cases in South Korea on January 27, 2020, when government health officials gathered representatives from more than 20 medical companies in a conference room in Seoul’s biggest train station.

The message was simple: We need tests for this dangerous new virus, as soon as humanly possible, and we will approve yours quickly if it works.

After the MERS scare, the government budget for infectious diseases nearly tripled in five years, spurring a boom in the biotech sector. Some of that new funding was spent on research and development for testing kits.

A week after the train station meeting, on February 4, South Korea approved its first Covid-19 test. The same day, in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration okayed a testing kit designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The US test would prove unreliable, setting efforts back by weeks. South Korea’s was swiftly validated at more than 100 laboratories. Companies were soon shipping thousands of test kits to labs and hospitals across the country.

By March 1, South Korea was performing more than 10,000 tests every day. The US couldn’t even manage 100. When adjusting for population, it wouldn’t be until mid-April — when South Korea’s outbreak was under control — that the US would finally overtake Korea in total tests performed.

The surge in testing capacity came just in time. Patient 31 was about to figure into the country’s first known superspreader event, which would stretch Korea’s ability to rapidly test for Covid-19, trace the contacts of infected people, and isolate them.

On February 17, the patient, a woman in her 60s, tested positive for Covid-19 and was interviewed about her recent movements. Korean officials quickly realized they had a crisis in the making.

The woman had traveled between Seoul and Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city, in the days before testing positive. She also attended services at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, an insular Christian group based in Daegu.

Park Young-joon, as the head of epidemiological investigations at the KDCA, was quickly dispatched to Daegu. The government set up testing centers all across the area, including drive-through sites that could perform three times as many tests as regular clinics. After public pressure, the church group handed over a list of its members for contact tracing. Conscripted military personnel were called in to help.

Within days, hundreds of church members had tested positive. Park Young-joon decided the best way to contain the outbreak was to isolate everyone who may have been exposed. Thousands of people, tracked down through security footage and phone data, were urged to self-quarantine. The government struck a deal with Samsung and LG to transform their training dormitories into isolation centers for people deemed at higher risk. Noncompliance came with a hefty fine: more than $8,000 US.

The call went out to nurses like Jo Hye-min, pleading for volunteers to staff the isolation centers. More than 3,000 patients would enter the facilities during the month of March.

The country’s outbreak quickly leveled off. After averaging more than 500 new cases every day during the first week of March, the rate of daily new cases slowed dramatically. Over the first week of April, South Korea saw about 500 new cases total.

“We did an impossible task,” Jo says. “It was as though we built the Great Wall in a week.”

But Covid-19 wasn’t gone.

The next big scare arrived a month later, in early May: a cluster of infections linked to the Itaewon nightclub district. The clubs had reopened on April 30 — and by May 6, several cases were confirmed among people who had partied at one of them.

Jang Hanaram, a member of the military doing contact tracing work in Seoul, was put on the case. Jang says he was soon working 24 hours a day while sleeping in the bunk bed in his office. His days were a blur of phone interviews: He estimates that at the height of the effort, he was making more than 200 calls without a break.

Tracing contacts from the Itaewon outbreak added an extra degree of difficulty: Some of the nightclubs were favored by the LGBTQ community. There is still a lot of discrimination against LGBTQ people in South Korea, and people were not always forthcoming about where they’d been and whom they’d been in close contact with for fear of being outed or outing others.

One man, Jang says, lied to him during a contact tracing interview. But he and his team had other options. He could pull the man’s credit card and GPS data instead.

“Even when people weren’t so cooperative, we can find out where this person went and when,” Jang says.

By the end of May, using cellphone location data, South Korean authorities had identified nearly 60,000 people who had spent at least 30 minutes in the vicinity of the Itaewon nightclubs between April 30 and May 6.

Those people were simply urged to get tested. But another 1,200 deemed to be at higher risk of exposure were required to self-quarantine while being monitored by the government. Those patients checked in with health workers over a smartphone app; the government also sent them groceries and toiletries, and offered them psychological counseling.

Ultimately, the Itaewon cluster was linked to just 246 cases, and overall caseloads stayed well below what was seen in Daegu. The country didn’t see a second significant wave until late August, ignited by the protests of another church group.

But the extraordinary phone surveillance required to identify the 60,000 possible contacts in Itaewon has come under scrutiny from civil rights advocates, who saw some of their fears about the powers granted to the government in 2015 coming true.

“This was not the use envisioned by the people who passed the law after the MERS outbreak,” Park Kyung-sin says.

Privacy advocates worry about how much information the government can get — but it’s a “lonely fight”

South Korea’s epidemic response is distinct from that of the US and almost every other country in the world in one important way.

In the US, disease investigators must rely on interviews and, in theory, opt-in phone tracking apps, though those have struggled to attract enough users to be effective. In South Korea, cooperating with contact tracing isn’t done out of altruism, though everybody we spoke to stressed that South Koreans do feel a strong sense of civic responsibility. It’s the law — and if you refuse to comply, the authorities can get your financial or location data anyway. No such legal obligation exists in the US.

“The right to collect and use very personal information was an essential part of the [2015] legislation,” Park Young-joon says.

South Korea’s government has stretched that authority as far as it can go during the current emergency — beyond what is legally permissible, according to some civil rights lawyers we spoke with.

During the Itaewon outbreak, for example, the public health authorities didn’t just notify the people who had come into close contact with the patients who later tested positive. They used phone location data to alert anybody who was in the area of their potential exposure, which South Koreans focused on privacy rights saw as a serious overreach.

Park Kyung-sin explains the difference with an analogy about how police might investigate a crime: Normally, investigators get a warrant to follow specific people, targeting specific phone numbers.

But what South Korea did in Itaewon, he says, was more comparable to the National Security Agency surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden. Anybody who was within a certain area, no matter the individual risk of exposure, had their location data scooped up by the government.

“When that’s done against your consent, that is a problem,” Park Kyung-sin says. “We are not really fighting the law but the use of the law.”

One man who lied to contact tracers after the Itaewon outbreak was a teacher who worried about the consequences if people found out he was gay. Because he misled investigators, he was arrested and sentenced to six months in jail.

A couple of months after the Itaewon outbreak, Park Kyung-sin and his colleagues at Open Net Korea filed a constitutional challenge against the government’s use of the 2015 laws, asking for restrictions on mandatory location tracking and clear commitments from the government about deleting information.

And yet, broadly speaking, the public has accepted the measures. About nine in 10 South Koreans said in May 2020 that they supported disclosing patient location information. Attitudes may be changing as the pandemic drags on — Park Young-joon said he and his colleagues have noticed a decline in support — but most people continue to comply.

“Most Koreans are willing to compromise their privacy for their life,” Kelly Kim at Open Net Korea, the civil rights group, says. For privacy advocates, “it’s been a really hard fight, a kind of lonely fight.”

South Korea’s system worked because it acted early

South Korea’s citizens don’t regard the country’s response as perfect. They have endured their share of strife.

Park Jeong-uk, a pub owner in Seongnam, saw his monthly revenue drop by 50 percent during a small wave of cases in August. A winter surge that necessitated more social distancing measures was even harder. He had to let two part-time workers go, and has taken out bank loans he’ll have to start paying back soon. He lost a lot of sleep.

But he’s feeling pretty optimistic these days.

“Despite the shortcomings, I agree the Korean government did their best, given the circumstances,” Park Jeong-uk says. “And Koreans did an excellent job cooperating with the government. Most people trusted the government and followed the protocols.”

In some ways, South Korea simply may have lucked out. It is almost like an island, sharing only a militarized land border with North Korea, making it easier to isolate and monitor incoming travelers. Its people were better acquainted than most with social distancing measures, having lived through MERS. There is generally a lot of government surveillance that may have inured people to their private actions being fodder for public health monitoring.

Contact tracing alone isn’t a panacea. The US struggled on the first step in the test-trace-isolate process, when the first CDC testing kit failed, and that allowed the virus to spread undetected. By the time testing was closer to adequate levels, infections were so widespread it would have been extremely difficult to conduct comprehensive contact tracing, especially without the extraordinary tools available in South Korea.

Testing, tracing, and isolating is a good way to put out small fires, as the preferred metaphor among epidemiologists goes. Once the whole forest is ablaze, it loses its utility.

But that is also the point. South Korea saw a small fire spring up in Daegu in February 2020 and focused the full power of the government on stamping it out — then watched to ensure no new sparks would create a conflagration. Those efforts succeeded.

“We’ve been training for this,” Jang Hanaram says. “We are in this together; our community comes first. Koreans have really stepped up.”

Jun Micheal Park is a documentary photographer and filmmaker from Seoul. He has extensively covered South Korea’s Covid-19 response.

This project was supported by the Commonwealth Fund, a national private foundation based in New York City that supports independent research on health care issues and makes grants to improve health care practice and policy.

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Why South Africa is still so segregated

April 15, 2022 | News | No Comments

For decades, South Africa was under apartheid: A series of laws divided people by race. Then, in the 1990s, those laws were dismantled. But many of the barriers they created continue to divide South Africans by skin color — determining their quality of life, access to jobs, and wealth. Racial division was built into the fabric of cities throughout South Africa, and it still hasn’t been uprooted.

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That’s partly because while apartheid was the culmination of South Africa’s racial divisions, it wasn’t the beginning of them. That story starts closer to the 1800s, when the British built a network of railroads that transformed the region’s economy into one that excluded most Black people — and then made that exclusion the law.

To understand how this long history still impacts South Africans around the country today, watch the video above. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.

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5 things to know about the new US climate commitment

April 15, 2022 | News | No Comments

The United States has an aggressive new commitment for fighting climate change: cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels in less than a decade.

The announcement came at the White House’s Earth Day summit on Thursday, where 40 world leaders met virtually to discuss and announce their new ambitions for curbing greenhouse gases.

“The United States isn’t waiting; we are resolving to take action,” said President Joe Biden on Thursday, highlighting his plans for investing in agriculture to store carbon in soil, making electric vehicles, capping pipelines that leak methane, and building green hydrogen plants. “By maintaining those investments and putting these people to work, the United States sets out on the road to cut greenhouse gases in half by the end of this decade.”

The new target is a step forward for the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after China. And it’s meant to signal to the rest of the world that the US is jumping back into the 2015 Paris climate accord with both feet after withdrawing in late 2020.

Some climate change activists and analysts are arguing that it’s not enough. And there are already some misleading claims about the target that have taken root.

To put it in context, here are some key things to know.

What is an NDC? And what makes the new US climate target so special?

Under the 2015 Paris agreement, countries agreed to limit warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to average global temperatures before the industrial revolution in the 1800s. The agreement also has a secondary target of limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees C.

To achieve that goal, every signatory to the accord (nearly every country in the world) is required to act. But it’s voluntary, and every country gets to set their own targets.

Those self-imposed targets are known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. From the outset, it was clear that the first round of NDCs that countries came up with wouldn’t be enough to meet the Paris goals. But the idea was that over time, as technology improved and as urgency mounted, countries would become more ambitious.

The United States plays an outsize role in the process as the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, but also as the country that played a dominant role in shaping the Paris agreement to begin with. Previous attempts at organizing international climate agreements fell apart for many reasons, but a major hurdle was US objections to setting binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. The US also opposed letting some countries, particularly developing countries, off the hook for their emissions. Hence why every country has to produce an NDC but gets to set its own target.

But when the US officially exited the Paris climate agreement in November, it became the only country to back out, which was particularly frustrating for countries that joined and came up with targets at the US’s behest. So the new, more ambitious commitment from the US (following Biden’s reentry into the agreement in January) is an important way to rebuild trust.

The US issued its first NDC back in 2015. It aimed to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below the level of emissions produced in the year 2005. The new target aims to bring the US 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

According to the White House, these new goals are in line with keeping average warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“As we look at the trajectory, the question for us very much has been: How can you make it consistent with getting on track to hold a temperature increase to less than 2, well less than 2, and to try to keep 1.5 degrees in sight alive? And that looks like it is consistent,” said a senior administration official on a call with reporters on Wednesday.

Beyond the impact on warming, the goal could spur countries that don’t already have comparable goals to step up their own ambitions.

“That is an extraordinary step that should be commended, and emulated by everyone,” said Christiana Figueres, one of the main negotiators of the Paris climate agreement, in a statement on Thursday.

US officials, however, were vague about exactly how the country is mapping its route to its new climate goals. But a key component is going to be Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan. The proposal aims to ramp up clean energy and electric vehicles, and facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels, but it still needs to become bills that can be approved by Congress.

The US’s new climate target is not a doubling of ambition or halving of current emissions

While Biden framed the new commitment as cutting US emissions in half, there are some critical caveats.

Again, this is not the first US commitment to curb greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris agreement. The initial pledge made under President Obama was aimed at 2025. The new NDC is aimed at 2030.

If the US were to simply meet its previous commitment, it would be on track to reduce emissions roughly 38 percent by 2030. So the new target is actually a 12 to 14 percent increase from the previous goal, not a doubling. And, to be clear, the US is currently not on track to meet its previous NDC, let alone the new one.

The other thing to keep in mind is the baseline. The US target is pegged to 2005, a year when annual US greenhouse gas emissions peaked above 6 gigatonnes. By 2020, emissions had fallen by roughly 21 percent compared to 2005, to 5.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, although the Covid-19 pandemic fueled the unprecedented drop in emissions last year.

Emissions are expected to rise again in 2021 as the economy recovers. All of this is to say that the 50 to 52 percent reduction target is relative to where the US was 16 years ago, not where it is today, when emissions are lower. The new target is closer to a 42 percent reduction from 2021.

It’s the biggest US commitment yet, but it still may not be big enough

On one hand, if the US were to meet these new goals, it would still likely be the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter by the end of the decade. On the other hand, the new target represents an enormous reduction in emissions, about 2.1 gigatonnes in nine years. This is almost the entire output of India in a given year. It’s a vast financial, technological, and political challenge.

While meeting this goal will help bring the world closer to limiting global warming this century, it doesn’t fully match the US contribution to the problem. The US currently produces about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions but is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions.

Climate change is a cumulative problem; if one were to add up all the greenhouse gases the US has emitted, the US would top every other country. The largest share of human-produced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now came from the US.

The energy that created those emissions helped the US become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The US also continues to have some of the highest per capita emissions of any country. Now the impacts of climate change are here, raising sea levels, fueling extreme weather, and wreaking havoc across economies, and the countries that contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most.

That’s why some activists are arguing that the new NDC doesn’t go far enough. “As the world’s biggest historical emitter, the US has a responsibility to the most vulnerable nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, in a statement. He added that a fairer US target would be closer to a 70 percent cut in emissions, coupled with financial support to developing countries suffering under climate change.

US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry envoy acknowledged on Thursday that there is still more the country could do to limit warming beyond the new NDC. “Is it enough? No. But it’s the best we can do today and prove we can begin to move,” Kerry said.

The US could pull this off, but it won’t be easy or cheap

The US has already seen a general decline in its greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade, but that came largely from replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas, which produces about half of the emissions per unit of energy. And before the Covid-19 pandemic, US emissions were beginning to creep up again.

President Biden, however, has set a target of making the entire US economy carbon neutral by 2050. In the meantime, he wants an entirely carbon-free power grid by 2035. That means even the natural gas plants will have to go, or will have to add carbon dioxide scrubbers. And to curb emissions by 50 percent relative to 2005 by 2030, the US would have to start taking drastic action right away.

A number of researchers and environmental groups have already analyzed whether such a target is feasible (see this Twitter thread highlighting the various papers out there looking at the new target). Almost all of them show that it is possible with our current technologies.

For example, an analysis by Energy Innovation found that the US would have to phase out all of its remaining coal power plants and halve its natural gas use over the next decade. The country would also have to dramatically increase its energy efficiency and electrify vehicles. The analysis doesn’t lay out a figure for the outlay but estimates that these changes would add $570 billion per year to the US economy via creating new jobs and avoiding pollution and health problems associated with fossil fuels.

According to a December study by researchers at Princeton University, the US is poised to spend $9.4 trillion over the next decade on energy infrastructure on its current trajectory. But getting on a path of net-zero emissions would just add an additional $300 billion to the price tag, raising it by 3 percent.

Other research has shown that the health benefits alone from getting off of fossil fuels are massive and would more than pay for the transition toward clean energy.

However, while there are massive health and economic benefits in switching toward clean energy, those benefits are dispersed over the whole population and spread out over years. To start on the journey toward the new 2030 target, the US would have to start making major investments and changes now — phasing out coal, building electric vehicle chargers, restoring ecosystems that can sequester carbon, pricing carbon, funding research and development to solve thorny technology problems, and setting new efficiency standards. That’s a political challenge, and it remains to be seen whether Biden has enough political capital to start this process.

The United States is not the only game in town

To limit climate change, the whole world needs to act not only to zero out greenhouse emissions but also to begin withdrawing them from the air by the middle of the century.

At the Earth Day summit, other world leaders highlighted their own new targets. Canada is now aiming to reduce its emissions 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Japan is aiming for 44 percent under the same benchmarks. And China is expecting that its emissions will continue to rise over the next decade but will peak before 2030 and decline thereafter, reaching net-zero emissions by 2060.

These new commitments will be formalized at the next major international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, later this year. In total, about 59 countries have set some sort of benchmark for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

But the total global commitments to date are still not enough to reach the 1.5-degree target, and that target is slipping further out of reach every day. That’s going to be even more challenging as lower-income parts of the world develop. About 13 percent of the planet’s population, 940 million people, still don’t have access to electricity. They desperately need energy, and fossil fuels are often the only sources available to them.

And many of these targets are set decades in the future. It’s the interim targets where the rubber will meet the road and more tangible results will be visible, yet many countries are reluctant to commit to specific climate benchmarks over the next five to 10 years.

So a fresh round of more ambitious targets for limiting emissions has to be met with real-world action and meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is intense global momentum for action on climate change, but that has yet to bear out in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have now crossed 420 parts per million, the highest levels in human history. The planet has already warmed by at least 1 degree Celsius, and those effects are already visible in the ice caps, torrential rainfall, and wildfires. Some countries are certainly more responsible for climate change than others, but as Biden said, “no nation can solve this crisis on their own.”

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