As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory offers up a snippet from an interview I had with Bob Michel when I was reporting for a New Yorkerprofile of Cheney that appeared in 2001. Michel now looks like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for all the major civil-rights laws and who loved crafting legislative compromises with Democrats. In the eighties and early nineties, Michel was the House Minority Leader. The rise of Newt Gingrich and his incendiary brand of Republicanism eventually forced Michel aside—but during much of the time that Michel was leader, Cheney was one of his principal deputies. In the interview, I suggested to Michel that Cheney might be a conservative ideologue. Michel did an instant, reflexive double take: Dick Cheney? The phlegmatic-process guy? No way.
We were speaking some months before the September 11th attacks, and it’s likely that George W. Bush still saw Cheney in the same way that Michel did. Cheney had loyally served George H. W. Bush, a much more moderate Republican than his son, had been chief executive of a Dallas-based energy contractor, and had gone from running the 2000 Republican Vice-Presidential search—a perfect assignment for a neutral professional—to becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee himself. After 9/11, it instantly became clear that Cheney had been a genius at appearing to be neutral, at least to Republicans who outranked him, rather than actually having been neutral. Within minutes of the attacks, he was in charge (Bush was out of town), expertly putting the country on a path that led to the War on Terror and the Iraq War.
How did Cheney manage to strike people as something he wasn’t? When did he become so conservative? And, finally, his reappearance in recent years as a passionate opponent of Donald Trump raises what might be the most interesting question of all: What was it, exactly, that made the currently reigning version of conservatism so repellent to him?
My theory is that Cheney’s time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late nineteen-sixties was his ideological Rosebud. Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his home-town sweetheart from Casper, Wyoming, in 1964. Both of them were the children of career civil servants. With their echt-small-town middle-class backgrounds, plus Dick’s practice of saying as little as possible, they came across as generically, unremarkably Middle American. In 1966, the Cheneys enrolled as doctoral students in Madison; he in political science, she in English. Dick didn’t complete his degree because he went to work for Wisconsin’s governor, Warren Knowles, another moderate Republican. Lynne did finish, in 1970, the same year that radicals bombed a mathematics research center on the university’s campus, killing one person who was inside. The Cheneys appear to have taken from their time in Wisconsin an abiding conviction that the far left is an ever-present threat that Democrats and liberals are incapable of taking seriously. In 2001, Lynne told me that those years had converted them to conservatism. Dick said, “When I was given a choice between returning to academia or staying in the political area, it really wasn’t a close call.”
Dick Cheney was always far more interested in foreign policy than domestic policy. From H. Bradford Westerfeld, a professor he studied with during his brief time as an undergraduate at Yale (he left after two years and later graduated from the University of Wyoming), he absorbed the idea of the Cold War as a world-defining existential struggle. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, quickly commissioned a report suggesting that the United States become the world’s lone superpower—permanently, if possible. Even so, threats, including from radical Islam, preoccupied him. He saw 9/11 not just as an attack to be answered, but as an opportunity to make the U.S. safer by using military force to transform the entire Middle East into an America-friendly region. Cheney believed that our enemies, if shown strength at a level that was beyond the capabilities of liberals, would always submit to our will. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the Iraq adventure would not work out.
If you gave a modern Dr. Frankenstein the challenge of designing a Republican whom Cheney would find repellent, it would be impossible for him to invent someone more perfect than Trump: citified, undignified, showily rich, unable to ever remain silent, and drawn to dealmaking rather than force as the way to solve problems. Substantively, a crucial element of Trump’s appeal was his denunciation of the “forever wars,” of which Cheney had been the principal author. Cheney probably never had any illusion that his brand of maximal hawkishness had broad public support, but Trump demonstrating that he could make anti-Cheneyism unstoppably potent with Republican voters still must have stung. His very loyal and very Republican daughter Liz, whom he would have liked to see rise as high or higher than he did, wound up being unable to hold her father’s old seat in the House in the face of Trump’s vengeance, after she had become an unusually public intraparty critic of his.
Cheney’s life makes for a good means of tracking the evolution of the Republican Party and American conservatism over the past half century. He started his political career in a party dominated by moderates, and helped to make it far more conservative. But he was always an inside player, who didn’t anticipate that more conservative would also come to mean flamboyantly populist. In his own distinctively pessimistic way, he participated both in crafting the zenith moment of American power, around the turn of the millennium, and then in devising the overreach that brought that moment to an end. He saw a series of early twenty-first-century disasters—9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the financial crisis—lead to the revival of isolationism, the ideology he feared most, as the dominant element in his party, when he’d thought it resided mainly on the left.
Thanks to luck or grit, Cheney lived longer than anyone expected, given his spectacular heart problems: five heart attacks, beginning when he was still in his thirties, and then a transplant. His surprising survivability gave him the opportunity to change, in the end, from taciturn company man to florid dissenter. This wasn’t natural for him, and it couldn’t have made him happy. He must have died disappointed. ♦
President Donald Trump is facing legal action over the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, part of a $300 million plan to build a new ballroom on the executive grounds.
A Virginia couple, Charles and Judith Voorhees, filed an emergency motion in federal court on October 23 seeking to halt the project, alleging that it violates multiple federal preservation and planning laws.
Newsweek contacted the White House and attorneys for the couple for comment via email outside of normal office hours on Friday.
Why It Matters
The fight over Trump’s demolition project goes beyond a construction dispute—it’s a test of presidential power, public ownership, and historic preservation.
The Voorhees lawsuit seeking to halt the project argues that Trump bypassed laws meant to protect national landmarks and public transparency.
At stake is whether a sitting president can unilaterally alter one of the country’s most symbolically important buildings, or whether the “People’s House” must remain subject to the same review and accountability standards that govern other federal projects.
What To Know
The Lawsuit And What It Alleges
The filing, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, requests a temporary restraining order “to halt defendants’ destruction of the East Wing of the White House… without legally required approvals or reviews,” according to the plaintiffs’ application for injunctive relief.
The defendants are listed as Trump, in his official capacity, and Jessica Brown, director of the National Park Service.
Attorney Mark R. Denicore, who represents the Voorheeses, said he acted quickly to file the case. “I threw that together as fast as I could to try to get it filed as fast as I could,” Denicore told Politico on Thursday.
He added that his clients “are just people, U.S. citizens, that don’t like their house being torn down without going through proper procedures.”
The complaint argues that the administration began demolishing the East Wing without first submitting final plans to the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) or consulting with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office.
It also cites an alleged failure to seek guidance from the Commission of Fine Arts, which traditionally reviews exterior changes to federal landmarks.
Addressing questions about the president’s earlier remarks that his planned ballroom project would not affect the existing structure of the White House, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration had made clear from the start that the East Wing would need to be “modernized.” She added that “plans changed” after Trump consulted with architects and construction firms working on the project.
“We respectfully urge the Administration and the National Park Service to pause demolition until plans for the proposed ballroom go through the legally required public review processes,” wrote Carol Quillen, the organization’s president and chief executive.
Quillen said the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom “will overwhelm the White House itself,” which spans about 55,000 square feet.
The Project And Its Wider Implications
The White House has framed Trump’s new ballroom as the latest in a long tradition of presidential renovations, comparing it to historic presidential expansions from Theodore Roosevelt’s West Wing to John F Kennedy’s Rose Garden and Harry Truman’s full reconstruction.
Officials have likened it to past expansions such as the creation of the West Wing and reconstruction of the Executive Mansion. The East Wing, first built in 1902 and expanded during World War II, historically housed the first lady’s offices and the White House Social Office.
The structure sits above the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, a Cold War-era bunker constructed in 1942.
The White House has defended the project as both lawful and consistent with presidential authority. Trump has argued the White House needs a large entertaining space, criticizing the past practice of presidents hosting state dinners and other large events in tents on the South Lawn.
“President Trump has full legal authority to modernize, renovate, and beautify the White House—just like all of his predecessors did,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Politico.
Leavitt also described public criticism as “fake outrage,” telling Fox News that “nearly every single president who has lived in this beautiful White House… has made modernizations and renovations of their own.”
According to a July 31 White House press release, the ballroom will replace the “small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing” with a larger facility capable of hosting 650 guests.
The design, by Washington-based McCrery Architects, aims to match “the theme and architectural heritage” of the existing building, it added.
The statement said the project would be privately funded through donations from “patriot donors” and completed before the end of Trump’s term. But the White House has not released a full list of the donors who have contributed to the project, raising ethical concerns and questions about conflicts of interest.
Preservation experts note that the White House grounds are governed by multiple overlapping statutes, though the Executive Residence has historically been treated as exempt from some federal planning reviews.
Sara C. Bronin, Freda H. Alverson Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, and former chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, said: “There are other federal statutes requiring the administration to take certain steps before they act to do anything on White House grounds, if they had, they would have no doubt refrained from bulldozing our shared history.”
What Happens Next
It remains unclear whether the Voorhees lawsuit will gain traction. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., will decide whether to grant the temporary restraining order sought by the couple to halt the project, but no hearing date has been set in the case.
The court ruling will determine whether the renovation continues and could set precedent on how much control a president has over altering the nation’s most historic residence.
Federal courts generally require plaintiffs to show a specific, personal injury to establish standing—a high bar for citizens objecting to government property decisions since courts often dismiss cases brought by citizens without a direct stake.
Even if the case proceeds, most of the East Wing has already been torn down, making a work stoppage largely symbolic.
Oversight bodies such as the National Capital Planning Commission may still review the ballroom plans, but their authority over the Executive Residence is limited.
As more and more movies seem to be returning to the past as a means to avoid how conflict-free a script can become thanks to modern technology, Fly Me to the Moon is among the latest to join the ranks of recent “period pieces”—which, technically, even extends to a movie like Longlegs. The Rose Gilroy-written film goes slightly further back than the latter though, taking audiences to 1969, in the months leading up to the hype and anticipation of surrounding the moon landing.
In Gilroy’s narrative (directed by Greg Berlanti), all the buildup and excitement are a result of Kelly Jones’ (Scarlett Johansson) sudden involvement, tapped by a shadowy government operative named Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) to work the previously nonexistent “PR angle” of the project. After all, the U.S. was in a dark time (as usual), with constantly-playing, harrowing images from the Vietnam War on the news, in addition to the rash of assassinations and protests turned violent by police subjugation.
It’s with this in mind that Jones, a “shark” of an ad agency “man,” views the moon landing as an opportunity to refocus the public’s attention on something more positive. To see, once again, the “promise” of America and its potential (sort of like Beyoncé with her Olympics commercial). Not to mention reminding various Congress members that there was once a time when John F. Kennedy’s “greatest wish” (apart from fucking as many women as possible) was also theirs—as opposed to a bane to their other, more pressing budgetary concerns. Of course, it’s easy to support a lofty goal when it’s hot off the presses of relating to a collective American fear: “losing” to the Russians (a.k.a. letting communists dominate the Space Race). A peak concern (not that it still isn’t) during this period in U.S. history, when the Cold War incited manifold actions that were often dubious in nature.
As for Kelly, she’s been described as a Don Draper type (call her Don Draper with a pussy instead of a pair) mixed with a dash of Frank Abagnale Jr. (as rendered by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can). Gilroy (who, yes, is related to the writer Gilroys, Dan [her father], Tony [her uncle] and Frank D. [her grandfather]—in addition to being the daughter of Rene Russo) herself told The Hollywood Reporter, “Don Draper was absolutely a part of the conversation. Leo’s character in Catch Me If You Can was another character in the conversation. So Don Draper was totally an inspiration, and that scene of Kelly with the belly was actually in the first fifteen pages that I wrote on spec to win the job.”
Kelly’s inherent conning abilities aren’t entirely her fault, of course. In addition to the expected traumatic backstory, being a woman with ambition at that time meant having to play a bit of “hardball” (or “give ’em blue balls,” in her case). In short, acting the way men do all the time, but with far more subtlety about it. Well, sort of.
If you asked Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the launch director for Apollo 11 at Kennedy Space Center, he wouldn’t say Kelly was subtle at all. In fact, he’d probably say she was about as subtle as a rocket launch. But before he finds out that she’s the “PR girl” from New York, Kelly very nearly launches his rocket when they first meet at Wolfie’s Restaurant—an institution on the Cocoa Beach scene. The two have a quintessential meet-cute (befitting of the era that Fly Me to the Moon is set in) involving Kelly setting her notebook on fire without being aware of it.
Because the two already shared a flirtatious glance, when Cole approaches to tell her, “Uh, Miss, you’re on fire,” she replies, “Very original. No, I do not wanna stop, drop and roll with you.” But of course she does. And Cole himself makes no secret about being attracted to her, confessing as much before saying that despite this, he can’t pursue such feelings. He then leaves Wolfie’s, assuming he’ll never run into her again. Naturally, what makes a complete, truly effective meet-cute is a case of mistaken or unknown identity. Hence, when Kelly walks into Kennedy Space Center soon after their initial meeting, Cole is suddenly much less charmed (even though one can imagine Kelly wielding the Gracie Hart [Sandra Bullock] taunt, “You think I’m gorgeous, you want to kiss me, you want to hug me”).
With the crux of the film’s “chutzpah” coming from the way they increasingly butt heads, by the end of the second act, that shtick gives way to a different “problem” angle for the film: Moe tasks Kelly with creating a fake version of the moon landing (and yes, Stanley Kubrick is alluded to as a potential director) in case things don’t quite work out with the real deal (a faulty transmission, etc.). Obviously, this is only going to contribute to the pile of lies she’s told to Cole, therefore making it even harder for him to accept her when the truth comes out (sort of like Josie Geller [Drew Barrymore] with Sam Coulson [Michael Vartan] in Never Been Kissed).
Eventually, her conscience gets the better of her, and she decides to confess what’s going on to Cole after she’s already gotten a diva-rific director, Lance Vespertine (Jim Rash), from her former agency to create the footage. The reaction is as expected, with the usual third-act waiting period for Cole to finally come around. But Fly Me to the Moon, in the end, isn’t as much about a budding romance between two people as it is about America’s budding romance with conspiracy theories in the modern era. Particularly as the Nixon administration would go on to prove that mistrust in institutions ought to be the norm, not the exception. A conviction that’s only become more fortified in the decades since Watergate.
Fly Me to the Moon offers a “light-hearted romp” with a conspiracy theory-related narrative as the backdrop, but, more often than not, it’s pretty much impossible to make light of the behaviors that stem from staunch conspiracy theorists (see: Pizzagate, the 2020 election was “stolen” and anything else related to QAnon). In this regard, Fly Me to the Moon truly does feel like a 60s-era film in that it gives the viewer enough credit to assume they’ll have a sense of humor about this sort of thing rather than taking it all too seriously.
The Kremlin’s spy chief Sergei Naryshkin warned the U.S. that Ukraine will turn into its “second Vietnam,” amid disagreement in Congress over funding for Kyiv.
“Ukraine will turn into a ‘black hole’ absorbing more and more resources and people,” Russian foreign intelligence chief Naryshkin said Thursday in a written statement published by his agency’s house journal, the Intelligence Operative.
“Ultimately, the U.S. risks creating a ‘second Vietnam’ for itself, and every new American administration will have to deal with it,” he added.
The U.S. was engaged in the Vietnam War — fought between South Vietnam and the U.S. on one side and communist North Vietnam backed by the Soviet Union and China on the other — for nearly two decades. The conflict claimed more than a million lives, including tens of thousands from the U.S., and ended with a comprehensive victory for the North Vietnamese forces.
According to a recent poll, 59 percent of Americans still support sending military aid to Ukraine.
What César really wanted was to get out of Cuba. A bartender struggling to make ends meet in Havana, he tried last year to reach Miami in a rickety boat but was forced to abandon the attempt when he was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard.
He’s now preparing a second escape attempt: with a direct flight to Moscow. His ticket has been paid for by a Russian recruiter but it comes with a hefty price tag nonetheless: As part of the deal, he will have to join the Russian army and fight in Ukraine.
“If this is the sacrifice I have to make for my family to get ahead, I’ll do it,” said César, who turned 19 this year and whose name has been changed to protect his identity.
“You can be a nuclear physicist and still die of hunger here,” he said. “With my current salary I can barely buy basic things like toilet paper or milk.” He said he hoped he would be allowed to work as a paramedic.
The news of Cuban fighters in Ukraine splashed across global headlines earlier this month when Havana announced it had arrested 17 people for involvement in a human trafficking ring recruiting young men to fight for Russia.
The news raised questions about the extent of cooperation between the two Cold War allies, and whether cracks were beginning to show in Havana’s support for Russia’s invasion.
Conversations with Cubans in Cuba and Russia reveal a different side of the story: of desperate young men who see enlistment in the Russian army as their best shot at a better life — even if not all of them seem to know what they were getting themselves into.
One recruit in his late 40s in the Russian city of Tula, whom we will call Pedro, said he was promised a job as a driver “for workers and construction material” but on arrival in Russia was being prepared for combat, weapon in hand.
“We signed a contract with the devil,” he said, recalling the moment he enlisted. “And the devil does not hand out sweets.”
Cold-war allies
Until recently, Havana — though formally neutral on Ukraine — made no secret of siding with Moscow in what it called its clash with the “Yankee empire.” The Castro regime is dependent on Russia for cheap fuel and other aid. But unlike, say, North Korea, it has little to offer in return other than diplomatic loyalty.
Since the Kremlin launched its full-scale assault last year, the countries have exchanged visits by top brass.
Critics have warned that, keeping with Soviet tradition, Cuba could send troops to help fight Moscow’s cause. They point to a May visit to Belarus by Cuba’s military attaché, where the “training of Cuban military personnel” was top of the agenda, and a trip to Moscow by Cuba’s defense minister several weeks later to discuss “a number of technical military projects.” But there has been no evidence of direct involvement.
Havana’s crackdown on the recruitment network followed the publication of an interview on YouTube in late August, in which two 19-year-old Cubans claimed they had been lured to Russia for lucrative construction jobs, only to be sent to the trenches in Ukraine. They said they had suffered beatings, been scammed out of their money and were being kept captive.
Cuba’s foreign ministry vowed to act “energetically” against efforts to entice Cubans to join Russia’s war effort, adding: “Cuba is not part of the conflict in Ukraine.”
The change in tone in Havana suggests that the recruitment of Cubans through informal backchannels has “hit a nerve,” said Christopher Sabatini, a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House.
“Cuba and the Soviet Union fought side by side in Angola and other places, but for ideological reasons,” he said. “Now it’s boiled down to the ugliest, most mercenary terms, giving it a transactional quality that goes against decades of friendship.”
In November 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree offering fast-tracked naturalization to foreigners who signed up as contract soldiers. “We are all getting Russian citizenship,” one recruit texted this reporter. That week, he and others told POLITICO, some 15 recruits, some of whom had been in Russia for only a couple of months, had been personally handed their passports by the local governor.
With heavy losses in Ukraine, Russia “needs the cannon fodder,” said Pavel Luzin, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He added most foreign recruits come from Central Asian and African countries, Syria and Afghanistan.
It is unclear exactly how many foreign citizens have joined Russia’s ranks. But Luzin says their limited numbers mainly serve to boost Russia’s narrative that it has international support for its war.
“Without speaking the language, knowing the local terrain, or the right training for modern warfare, they’ll be swiftly killed and that’s it,” he said.
Joining the 106th
For most of the Cubans with whom POLITICO spoke, their involvement with the Russian army began in late 2022, when somebody using the name Elena Shuvalova began posting on social media pages targeting Cubans looking to go abroad or already in Russia.
One post showed a woman in a long skirt in front of a car decorated with a Cuban flag and a “Z,” Russia’s pro-war symbol. In the accompanying text, Shuvalova offered a one-year contract with the Russian army, “help” with the required language exams and medical tests, and “express legalization within two days.”
Pay consisted of a one-off handout of 195,000 rubles (about $2,000) followed by a monthly salary of 204,000 rubles ($2,100). By comparison, Cuba’s average GDP per capita in 2020 was $9,500 per year.
Of the four recruits currently in Russia who shared their stories with POLITICO, three said they had been flown in from Cuba this summer. At home, they worked in hospitality, teaching and construction. One said he had a professional military background. Two others had completed two years of standard compulsory military service.
While they knew they would be employed by Russia’s military, they were reassured that they would be working far from the front line as drivers or construction workers. “To dig fortifications or help rebuild cities,” one recruit’s exasperated wife told POLITICO.
Because they could face charges of joining a mercenary group in Cuba or of treason or espionage in Russia for talking to a reporter, POLITICO changed the names of the recruits quoted in this story.
Each of them said they were flown in from Varadero along with several dozen other men. They said their passports were not stamped on departure, and that upon entering Russia their migration cards were marked “tourism” as their purpose of stay.
On landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the recruits were met by a woman who introduced herself as Diana, who said she was a Cuban with Russian ties. They were then loaded onto a bus and brought to what one recruit described as “an empty school building” near Ryazan, a city in western Russia 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
There, they underwent a cursory medical check and were subject to a mountain of red tape, including the signing of a contract with the Russian defense ministry. One recruit said a Spanish version of the text was made available to those who specifically requested it, but others said that a translator simply summarized its content verbally.
The recruits said that some of the new arrivals remained behind at a military unit in Ryazan. But most were transferred to the 106th Guards Airborne, a division based in the city of Tula near Moscow that has been deployed into some of the fiercest fighting in Ukraine.
Kyiv claims the 106th was largely “reduced to fertilizer” in the early days of the invasion when it tried to capture Kyiv. In recent months, it has been stationed around Soledar and Bakhmut, hotspots in eastern Ukraine.
“When they handed us the uniform and told us to go train I realized this was not about construction at all,” one recruit said. By then, however, he was locked in.
A legal adviser who is well-known within Russia’s Cuban community told POLITICO he has delivered the same tough message to scores of Cuban recruits who have appealed to him for help: “Once you’ve signed the contract, defecting is tantamount to treason.”
When POLITICO spoke to Pedro in Tula, he said he felt trapped by his decision.
“I came here to give my children a better life, not to kill,” he said, breaking down into tears. “I won’t fire a single bullet.”
He added he had considered trying to escape. “But where do I go?”
On landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, the recruits were met by a woman who introduced herself as Diana, who said she was a Cuban with Russian ties | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Willing participants
POLITICO could not determine whether Shuvalova or Diana were working for Russian or Cuban authorities. Neither woman responded to requests for comment — though Shuvalova told journalists at the Russian-language Moscow Times that she worked pro-bono.
While the Cuban Embassy in Moscow did not respond to multiple requests for comment, the government itself has sent mixed messages. Shortly after Cuba’s announcement that it had broken up the human trafficking ring, Havana’s ambassador to Moscow told the state-run RIA agency that “we have nothing against Cubans who just want to sign a contract and legally take part in this operation.”
Russia’s defense ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not easy to tell just how many Cuban citizens have joined the Russian military.
In conversations with POLITICO, the recruits said roughly 140 Cubans were currently in Tula. And a caller to a Miami-based Spanish-language television channel in early September said that he had some 90 Cubans under his command in Ryazan.
A trove of 198 hacked documents, allegedly belonging to recent Cuban recruits and published online by the Ukrainian website Informnapalm, showed the ages of those who joined the Russian army ranged between 19 to 69 years old. More than 50 of the passports were issued in June and July this year.
Not all Cubans POLITICO spoke to said they had been tricked into joining the war. In photos shared online and in messenger apps, many pose proudly in military gear, some carrying weapons.
“No one put a gun to their heads,” Yoenni Vega Gonzalez, 36, a Cuban migrant in Russia, said of his acquaintances in Ukraine. “The contract makes it clear that you’re going to war, not to play ball or camping.”
He said he had been refused the opportunity to join because he does not speak Russian. “Otherwise, I would have gone [to the front] with pride and my head held high.”
During the reporting of this article, several Cubans still on the island reached out saying they wanted to enlist. All cited economic, and not political, reasons as their core motivation.
Accounts of daily life behind the fences of the training sites differed greatly.
Some recruits described their interaction with the Russians as friendly and the atmosphere as relaxed. In their free time they smoked cigarettes and sipped on Coca-Cola (officially not available in either Cuba or Russia). On the weekends they went sightseeing and reveled in the city’s bars.
But those who say they were tricked into service, seemingly a minority, complain about payment delays and said they are threatened with incarceration for resisting orders.
When asked about the moral implications of his decision, one recruit in Tula said it wasn’t his primary concern.
“This is the way we found to get out of Cuba,” he said. “No one here wants to kill anyone. But neither do we want to die ourselves.”
VIENNA — No one does victimhood quite like Austria.
Over the past century, the Central European country has presented itself to the outside world as an innocent bystander on an island of gemütlichkeit, doing what it can to get by in a treacherous global environment.
“Austria was always apolitical,” insists Herr Karl, the archetypal Austrian opportunist, brought to life in 1961 by Helmut Qualtinger, the country’s greatest satirist. “We were never political people.”
Recalling Austria’s collaboration with the Nazis, Herr Karl, a portly stockist who speaks in a working-class Viennese dialect, was full of self pity: “We scraped a bit of cash together — we had to make a living…How we struggled to survive!”
Russia’s war on Ukraine offers a bitter reminder that Austria remains a country of Herr Karls, playing all sides, professing devotion to Western ideals, even as they quietly look for ways to continue to profit from the country’s friendly relations with Moscow.
The most glaring example of this hypocrisy is Austria’s continued reliance on Russian natural gas, which accounts for about 55 percent of the country’s overall consumption. Though that’s down from 80 percent at the beginning of 2022, Austria, in contrast to most other EU countries, remains dependent on Russia.
Confront an Austrian government official with this fact and you’ll be met with a lengthy whinge over how the country, one of the world’s richest, is struggling to cope with the economic crosswinds triggered by the war. That will be followed by a litany of examples of how a host of other EU countries is guilty of much more egregious behavior vis a vis Moscow.
The unspoken, if inevitable, conclusion: the real victim here is Austria.
The myth of Austrian victimhood has long been a leitmotif of the country’s bilious tabloids, which serve readers regular helpings of all the ways in which the outside world, especially Brussels and Washington, undermines them.
Outside supervision
Earlier this month, the EU’s representative in Austria, Martin Selmayr, ended up in the sights of the tabloids — and the government — for uttering the inconvenient truth that the millions Vienna pays to Russia for gas every month amounted to “blood money.”
“He’s acting like a colonial army officer,” fumed Andreas Mölzer, a right-wing commentator for the Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s best-selling tabloid, noting with delight that both of Selmayr’s grandfathers were German generals in the war.
A few weeks before his “blood money” remarks, Selmayr told a Vienna newspaper that “the European army is NATO” | Patrick Seeger/EPA
“The Eurocrats have this attitude that they can just tell Austrians what to do,” Mölzer concluded.
Yet if Austria’s history since the collapse of the Habsburg empire in 1918 has shown anything, it’s that the country needs outside supervision. Left to their own devices, Austrians’ worst instincts take hold.
One needn’t look further than 1938 to understand the implications. But there’s no shortage of other examples: voters’ enthusiastic support for former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim as president in 1986, despite credible evidence that he had lied about his wartime service as an intelligence officer for the Nazis; the state’s foot-dragging on paying reparations to slave laborers used by Austrian companies during the war; the resistance to return valuable artworks looted from Jews by the Nazis to their rightful owners.
Not that Austrians learn from their mistakes. To this day, Austrians rarely heed the better angels of their nature unless the outside world forces them to, either by shaming them into submission or brute force.
That said, the West is almost as much to blame for Austria’s moral shortcomings as the Austrians themselves.
The Magna Carta for Austria’s cult of victimhood can be found in the so-called Moscow Declarations of 1943, in which the allied powers declared the country “the first free country to fall a victim to Hitlerite aggression.” Though the text also stresses that Austria bears a responsibility — “which she cannot evade” — for collaborating with the Nazis, the Austrians latched onto the “victim” label after the war and didn’t look back.
In the decades that followed, the country relied on its stunning natural beauty and faded imperial charm to transform its international image into that of an alpine Shangri-La, a snow-globe filled with prancing Lipizzaners and jolly folk enjoying Wiener schnitzel and Sachertorte.
Convenient excuse
A key element of that gauzy fantasy was the country’s neutrality, imposed on it in 1955 by the Soviet Union as a condition for ending Austria’s postwar allied occupation. At the time, Austrians viewed neutrality as a necessary evil towards regaining full sovereignty.
During the course of the Cold War, however, neutrality took on an almost religious quality. In the popular imagination, it was neutrality, coupled with Austrians’ deft handling of Soviet leaders, that allowed the country to escape the fate of its Warsaw Pact neighbors (while also doing business with the Eastern Bloc).
Today, Austrian neutrality is little more than a convenient excuse to avoid responsibility.
Austria’s center-right-led government insists that on Ukraine it is only neutral in terms of military action, not on political principle. In other words, it won’t send weapons to Kyiv, but it does support the EU’s sanctions and allows arms shipments destined for Ukraine to pass through Austrian territory.
Andreas Babler took over as leader of the Social Democrats in June AND has a long history of opposing not just NATO, but Austrian participation in any EU defense initiatives | Helmut Fohringer/APA/AFP via Getty Images
In the Austrian population as a whole, decades of fetishizing neutrality has left many convinced that it’s their birthright not to take sides. Most are blissfully unaware of the EU’s mutual defense clause, under which member states agree to come to one another’s aid in the event of “armed aggression.”
That mentality explains why Austria’s political parties — with the notable exception of the liberal Neos — refuse to touch, or even debate, the country’s neutrality and its security implications.
In March, just as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy began an address via video to Austria’s parliament, Freedom Party MPs placed signs stamped with “Neutrality” and “Peace” on their desks before standing up in unison and leaving the chamber.
The far right wasn’t alone in its disapproval of Zelenskyy. More than half of the Social Democratic MPs also boycotted the event to avoid upsetting Russia.
Geographic good fortune
Andreas Babler, who took over as leader of the Social Democrats in June, has a long history of opposing not just NATO, but Austrian participation in any EU defense initiatives.
In 2020, he characterized the EU as “the most aggressive military alliance that has ever existed,” adding that it “was worse than NATO.”
It’s an extraordinary assertion given that NATO is the only thing that kept the Soviet Union from swallowing Austria during the Cold War. The defense alliance, which Austrian leaders briefly entertained joining in the 1990s, remains the linchpin of the country’s security for a simple reason: Austria’s only non-NATO neighbor is Switzerland.
Austria’s neutrality and geographic good fortune have led it to spend next to nothing on defense. Last year, for example, spending fell to just 0.8 percent of GDP from 0.9 percent, putting it near the bottom of the EU league table with the likes of Luxembourg, Ireland and Malta.
A few years ago, the country’s defense minister even proposed doing away with “national defense” altogether so that the army could concentrate on challenges such as natural disaster relief and combatting cyber threats. The idea was ultimately rejected, but that it was proposed at all — by the person who oversees the military no less — illustrates how seriously Austria takes its security needs.
Over the past year, the government has pledged to increase defense spending, yet those plans are still well below what the country would be obligated to pay were it in NATO.
Put simply, Austria is freeloading on its neighbors and the United States and will continue to do so until it’s pressured to change course.
Reality check
That’s why it needs more straight talk from people like Selmayr, not less.
A few weeks before his “blood money” remarks, the diplomat told a Vienna newspaper that “the European army is NATO,” noting that the accession of Sweden and Finland to the alliance would leave only Austria and a few small island states outside the tent.
Austria’s neutrality and geographic good fortune have led it to spend next to nothing on defense | Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images
The reality check dashed Austria’s hope that it could avoid paying its share for EU defense by waiting for Brussels to create its own force.
Even so, rhetoric alone is not going to convince Austria to shift course. Nearly 80 percent of Austrians support neutrality because it’s so comfortable. The EU and the U.S. need to make it uncomfortable.
At the moment, most Austrians only see the upsides to neutrality; yet that’s only because the West has refused to impose any costs on the country for freeriding. That needs to change.
Critics of a more aggressive approach towards Vienna argue that it will only harden the population’s resolve to sustain neutrality and bolster the far right. That may be true in the short term, but the history of foreign pressure on Austria, especially from Washington — be it the isolation it faced during the Waldheim affair or the push to compensate slave laborers from the war — shows that the interventions ultimately work.
If forced to choose between remaining in the Western fold or facing isolation, Austrians will always chose the former.
Though almost no Austrian security officials will say so publicly, few have any illusions about the necessity of a sea change. More than one-third acknowledge that the country’s neutrality is no longer credible, according to a study published this month by the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy. A further third say the country’s participation in the EU’s common foreign and security policy has a “strong influence” on the credibility of its neutrality claim (presumably not in a good way).
And nearly 60 percent say the country needs to improve its interoperability with NATO in order to fight alongside its EU allies in the event of an armed conflict.
The problem is that no one is forcing them.
If Austria’s partners continue to avoid a confrontation, the country is likely to continue its slide towards Orbánism.
The Freedom Party, which wants to suspend EU aid for Ukraine and lift sanctions against Russia, leads the polls by a widening margin with just a year until the next national election. With neighboring Slovakia on a similar trajectory, Russian President Vladimir Putin may soon have a major foothold in the heart of the EU.
So far, the EU and Washington have been silent on the Freedom Party’s worrying rise, counting on Austrians to snap out of it.
Barring foreign pressure, they won’t. Why would they? With its populist prescriptions and beer hall rhetoric, the Freedom Party encourages Austrians to see themselves as what they most want to be: victims.
Or as Herr Karl famously put it: “Nothing that they accused us of was true.”
Dmitry Muratov, one of Russia’s best-known journalists, has been added to the country’s list of foreign agents, less than two years after the Kremlin praised the principled reporting that saw him awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
Muratov, the former editor of now-shuttered liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was included in an update Friday evening to the Russian Ministry of Justice’s register of journalists, politicians and activists that Moscow claims are acting on behalf of hostile states.
The designation of foreign agent, which has been repeatedly used on critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin and opponents of his war in Ukraine, means that Muratov will have to adhere to strict rules on political activity. It also bars him from engaging in public life. Any mention of him in Russian media or social networks must reference his status.
According to Human Rights Watch, “in Russia, the term foreign agent is tantamount [to] spy or traitor,” and has been used “to smear and punish independent voices.”
The decision to accuse Muratov of being under undue influence from abroad flies in the face of the Russian state’s own previous assessment of his journalism. After Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov offered his congratulations and said the long-time editor “consistently works according to his own values, is committed to those values, is talented, and is brave.”
Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Filipino-American reporter Maria Ressa for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Since the start of its increasingly catastrophic war in Ukraine, Russia has all but eliminated the country’s independent media outlets, imposing harsh penalties for those considered to be “discrediting the Russian armed forces.”
Many Russian journalists have been forced to move abroad to continue their work. Muratov’s Novaya Gazeta was forced to cease operations in Russia in April 2022, weeks after the start of the war and has since been forcibly closed by the state, though it has continued to publish online.
Moscow has also detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since March 29 on espionage charges, for which no evidence has been presented. U.S. President Joe Biden has branded the arrest, the first of an accredited correspondent on spying allegations since the end of the Cold War, “totally illegal.”
In August, POLITICO reporter Eva Hartog was expelled from Russia after she was refused an extension to her visa.
Earlier this week, the Nobel Foundation faced criticism from both Swedish and Ukrainian politicians after it decided to invite Russian ambassadors to attend this year’s awards ceremony.
When Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni walks into the Oval Office on Thursday, her transformation will be complete.
Gone is the ghoulish caricature of an extremist monster, sympathetic to Moscow, whose party was descended from fascists, and in her place stands a pragmatic conservative willing to do business with a grateful international mainstream.
For U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukraine’s backers in the West, securing Meloni’s long-term commitment to the war effort is vital: Italy will assume the leadership of the G7 next year, at what’s likely to be a critical time in the conflict.
Initially, the signs weren’t good. Before she was elected last September, Meloni alarmed officials in Western capitals with her blunt brand of far-right populism. She banged the drum for nationalist causes, vowing to slam the brakes on immigration, stand up to the European Union’s leadership in Brussels and even opposed sanctioning Russia over Ukraine.
Yet 10 months since Meloni won power, the picture has changed dramatically. She will receive VIP treatment at the White House Thursday, with a welcome from Biden that will be as sincere as for any other G7 ally. While the Democrat and the far-right populist share almost nothing in their political outlooks, their handshake is likely to be one of mutual relief.
Meloni’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, leader of the center-right Forza Italia party, told POLITICO that the Ukraine war had bolstered Italy’s relationship with the U.S. The Meloni government’s “three polar stars” are now the EU, the U.N. and NATO, he said.
“Italy is part of the Western alliance and wants to be a protagonist in the Western alliance and in particular in its alliance with the U.S.A.,” Tajani said. “Since the crisis in Ukraine, our relationship on issues of security and shared policy with the U.S.A. has been getting stronger.”
Putin’s pals
It is a far cry from the sort of rhetoric that had, until recently, emanated from Rome.
As leader of the hard right Brothers of Italy, she supported Putin’s strongman politics while in opposition, congratulating him after his re-election by saying “the will of the people appears unequivocal.”
After Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Crimea she repeatedly opposed sanctions against Russia, citing the need to protect Italian exports. During the pandemic Meloni endorsed Russia’s Sputnik vaccines. In a TV interview in 2022 before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she highlighted how essential it was to remain on good terms with Putin and accused Biden of “using foreign policy to cover up the problems he has at home.”
If Meloni seemed like a problem to Western leaders, her coalition partners were an even worse prospect. Matteo Salvini, leader of the right wing League, who once wore a T-shirt printed with Putin’s face to the EU Parliament, attempted to arrange a peace mission to Moscow with flights paid by the Russian embassy.
And Meloni’s coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi, who led the center-right Forza Italia party until his death in June, blamed Ukraine for the war and had a personal friendship with Vladimir Putin, continuing to exchange gifts with the Russian leader even after the invasion.
When she took power, there were deep, if private, fears within the White House, according to several Biden administration officials who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, that Meloni might shatter the G7 support for Ukraine.
But Meloni surprised U.S. officials at the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May with just how eager she seemed to build a strong relationship with Biden, according to two government officials who witnessed their interactions.
At the NATO summit earlier this month in Vilnius, Meloni stood just a few feet from both Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the G7 nations announced additional security guarantees for Kyiv that were meant as something of a make-good after NATO declined to fast-track Ukraine’s membership.
At the NATO summit earlier this month in Vilnius, Meloni stood just a few feet from both Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy | Odd Andersen/AFP via Getty Images
With Italy set to take over the presidency of the G7 in January, Meloni’s support for the cause has prompted sighs of relief from both sides of the Atlantic.
“The President and the Prime Minister have built a good, productive relationship as they have worked together closely on a variety of issues such as our support for Ukraine and our approach to China, and President Biden is looking forward to continuing that conversation,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for Biden’s national security council.
Pleasantly surprised
Biden has told those around him he has been pleasantly surprised by Meloni’s leadership in the war effort but is eager to get to know the Italian leader better, according to multiple administration officials.
For Alessandro Politi, Director of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome, Meloni “understood very quickly that when you get into government you have responsibilities and the U.S.A. is a primary ally.”
Her visit to Kyiv in February was a clear sign she was following “an orthodox path” and a moment when “she convinced the wider international community that she was in charge of the coalition and that her allies had to follow her political line.”
Meloni’s support for the Western stance does not mean the whole of Italy feels the same way.
Some populists on both the left and right of Italian politics still hold pro-Russian views, and the question of whether it’s right to send arms to Ukraine elicits fierce debate in the media. Italy’s longstanding position on Russia has always been to try to act as a bridge, facilitating good relations between East and West.
But although a majority of Italians are opposed to it, Meloni has continued to back Ukraine with military aid. Ukrainians are “defending freedom and democracy on which our civilization is based,” she told the Italian Senate in March.
While Biden and Meloni are likely to agree on Ukraine, it is not certain that they will be in harmony on all issues.
In 2019 Italy became the only G7 country to join China’s Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative. Later this year it is up for renewal, but in the new cold war climate the U.S. expects the deal to be scrapped.
While Meloni has indicated that she might not extend the agreement with Beijing, calling it “a big mistake,” this position is not yet confirmed. If she does return to the more traditional Italian line of walking a middle ground, the cracks in the Biden-Meloni relationship will open up again.
Lionel Barber is former editor of the Financial Times (2005-20) and Brussels bureau chief (1992-98)
Nobody does “No” better than the French. Charles De Gaulle said “Non” twice to Britain’s bid to join the European Economic Community; Jacques Chirac said “Non” to the Iraq war; and Emmanuel Macron this week gave a thumbs down to Fiona Scott Morton, the American Yale academic selected for the post of top economist at the EU’s powerful competition directorate in Brussels.
L’affaire Scott Morton may seem trivial in comparison to the (still unresolved) debate over Britain’s place in Europe or armed conflict in the Middle East, but the French veto of the first foreigner to take up the post says an awful lot about the European Union’s current paranoia about America’s influence and power.
As Macron has pushed a vision of Europe that stands up to the U.S., resisting pressure to become “America’s followers,” as he put it in April, such thinking has strengthened in Brussels.
The Scott Morton fiasco brings back memories of a lunch in Brussels exactly 30 years ago when some officials suspected the U.S. was engaged in an Anglo-Saxon plot to sabotage their plans for economic and monetary union. “Remember James Jesus Angleton,” said a stone-faced Belgian bureaucrat, invoking the name of the legendary, obsessive CIA counterintelligence officer at the height of the Cold War.
Professor Scott Morton was selected as the best candidate in open competition. She enjoyed the backing of Margrethe Vestager, the Danish EU competition commissioner often described as the most powerful antitrust regulator in the world. She also had support from Ursula von der Leyen, German president of the European Commission, whose leadership during the Ukraine war and the COVID pandemic has won widespread praise on both sides of the Atlantic.
All this counted for naught. Despite her distinguished academic pedigree, Scott Morton, a former Obama administration antitrust official, worked for Apple, Amazon and Microsoft in competition cases in the U.S. The notion her background somehow disqualified her for the job shows George W. Bush was wrong when he complained the French had no word for “entrepreneur.” Today’s problem is that Paris has no understanding of the term “poacher turned gamekeeper.”
As Carl Bildt, former Swedish prime minister, tweeted: “Regrettable that narrow-minded opposition in some EU countries has led to this. She was reportedly the most competent candidate, and a knowledge of the U.S. and its antitrust policies should certainly not have been a disadvantage.”
Now, President Macron’s opposition to the appointment has attracted a good deal of support in the Commission, in the European Parliament and among European trade unions. Cristiano Sebastiani, head of Renouveau & Démocratie, a trade union representing EU employees, said senior EU officials should “be invested, believe and contribute towards the European project. The very logic of our statute is that an EU official can never go back to being an ordinary citizen.”
France’s veto of Professor Scott Morton is de facto a veto of Vestager, who was almost untouchable during her first term as competition commissioner between 2014-19. She won kudos for investigating, fining and bringing lawsuits against major multinationals including Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Qualcomm, and Gazprom. More controversially, at least in Paris and Berlin, she vetoed the planned merger between Alstom and Siemens, two industrial giants intent on creating a European champion.
Vestager’s second term has been a different story. She has suffered reverses in the courts which overturned punitive fines against Apple and Qualcomm. Then, although she ranks as a vice-president of the Commission, Vestager found herself challenged by a nominal underling in the shape of Thierry Breton, a former top French industrialist put in charge of the EU’s internal market.
Both have battled over the policing of the EU’s Digital Markets Act and over policy on artificial intelligence, a proxy fight for influence overall in Brussels.
Vestager and Breton have battled over the policing of the EU’s Digital Markets Act and over policy on artificial intelligence | Olivier Hoslet/EPA/AFP via Getty Images
Breton favors the so-called AI Pact, an effort to bring forward parts of the EU’s draft Artificial Intelligence Act. This would ban some AI cases, curb “high-risk” applications, and impose checks on how Google, Microsoft and others develop the emerging technology.
By contrast, Vestager favors a voluntary code of conduct focused on generative AI such as ChatGPT. This could be developed at a global level, in partnership with the U.S., rather than waiting for the two years it will take to secure legislative passage of Breton’s AI Pact.
So what’s the solution? If Europe is to have any chance of prevailing, so the argument goes, member states must take a far harder-nosed attitude to competition policy. This leads in turn to the creation of national or pan-European champions at the expense of crackdowns on subsidies and other anti-competitive behavior. In short, the very liberal policies designed to protect the single market’s level playing field and embodied by the fighting Viking.
For those who occasionally wonder how power has shifted inside the EU since Brexit took the U.K. out of the equation, it is proof indeed that “liberal Europe” is on a losing streak.
Ben Cohen wasn’t talking about ice cream. He was talking about American militarism.
At 72, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is bald and bespectacled. He looks fit, cherubic even, but when he got going on what it was like to grow up during the Cold War, his tone became less playful and more assertive — almost defiant.
“I had this image of these two countries facing each other, and each one had this huge pile of shiny, state-of-the-art weapons in front of them,” he said, his arms waving above his head. “And behind them are the people in their countries that are suffering from lack of health care, not enough to eat, not enough housing.”
“It’s just crazy,” he added. “Approaching relationships with other countries based on threats of annihilating them, it’s just a pretty stupid way to go.”
It wasn’t a new subject for the famously socially conscious ice cream mogul; Cohen has been leading a crusade against what he sees as Washington’s bellicosity for decades. It’s just that with the war in Ukraine, his position has taken on a new — morally questionable — relevance.
Cohen, who no longer sits on the board of Ben & Jerry’s, isn’t just one of the most successful marketers of the last century. He’s a leading figure in a small but vocal part of the American left that has stood steadfast in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the war in Ukraine.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tanks rolling on Kyiv, Cohen didn’t focus his ire on the Kremlin; a group he funds published a full-page ad in the New York Times blaming the act of aggression on “deliberate provocations” by the U.S. and NATO.
Following months of Russian missile strikes on residential apartment blocks, and after evidence of street executions by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, he funded a 2022 journalism prize that praised its winner for reporting on “Washington’s true objectives in the Ukraine war, such as urging regime change in Russia.”
In May, Cohen tweeted approvingly of an op-ed by the academic Jeffrey Sachs that argued “the war in Ukraine was provoked” and called for “negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.”
Ben Cohen outside the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington this month, before getting arrested | Win McNamee/Getty Images
I set up a video call with Cohen not because I can’t sympathize with his mistrust of U.S. adventurism, nor because I couldn’t follow the argument that U.S. foreign policy spurred Russia to attack. I called to try to understand how he has maintained his stance even as the Kremlin abducts children, tortures and kills Ukrainians and sends thousands of Russian troops to their deaths in human wave attacks.
It’s one thing to warn of NATO expansion in peacetime, or to call for a negotiated settlement that leaves Ukrainian citizens safe from further aggression. It’s another to ignore one party’s atrocities and agitate for an outcome that would almost certainly leave millions of people at the mercy of a regime that has demonstrated callousness and cruelty.
Given the scale of Russia’s brutality in Ukraine, I wanted to understand: How does one justify focusing one’s energies on stopping the efforts to bring it to a halt?
Masters of war
Cohen’s political awakening took place against the background of the Cold War and the political upheaval caused by Washington’s involvement in Vietnam.
He was 11 during the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Part of the reason he enrolled in college was to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungle to fight the Viet Cong.
When I asked how he first became interested in politics, he cited Bob Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Masters of War,” which takes aim at the political leaders and weapons makers who benefit from conflicts and culminates with the singer standing over their graves until he’s sure they’re dead.
“That was kind of a revelation to me,” Cohen said. Behind him, the sun filtered past a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s sign propped against a window. “I hadn’t understood that, you know, there were these masters of war — essentially I guess what we would now call the military-industrial-congressional complex — that profit from war.”
Cohen saw people from his high school get drafted and never come back from a war that “wasn’t justified.” As he graduated in the summer of 1969, around half a million U.S. troops were stationed in ‘Nam. Later that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand peace.
It was only much later, while doing “a lot of research” into the “tradeoffs between military spending and spending for human needs,” that Cohen came across a 1953 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, which foreshadowed the U.S. president’s 1961 farewell address in which he coined the phrase “military-industrial complex.”
A Republican president who had served as the supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower warned against tumbling into an arms race. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.
“That is a foundational thing for me, very inspiring for me, and captures the essence of what I believe,” Cohen said.
“If we weren’t wasting all of our money on preparing to kill people, we would actually be able to save and help a lot of people,” he added with a chuckle. “That goes for how we approach the world internationally as well,” he added — including the war in Ukraine.
Pierre Ferrari, a former Ben & Jerry’s board member who was with the company from 1997 to 2020, said Cohen’s view of the world was shaped by the events of his youth.
“We were brought up at a time when the military, the government was just completely out of control,” he said. “We’re both children of the sixties, the Vietnam War and the new futility of war and the way war is used by the military-industrial complex and politics,” Ferrari added, pointing to the peace symbol he wore around his neck.
Jeff Furman, who has known Cohen for nearly 50 years and once served as Ben & Jerry’s in-house legal counsel, acknowledged that his generation’s views on Ukraine were informed by America’s misadventures in Vietnam.
“There’s a history of why this war is happening that’s a little bit more complex than who Putin is,” he said. “When you’ve been misled so many times in the past, you have to take this into consideration when you think about it, and really, really try to know what’s happening.”
Ice-cold activism
Politics has been a part of the Ben & Jerry’s brand since Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield started selling ice cream out of an abandoned gas station in 1978.
The company’s look and ethos were pure 1960s; they named one of their early flavors, Cherry Garcia, after the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, whose psychedelic riffs formed the soundtrack of the hippy counterculture.
Social justice was one of the duo’s secret ingredients. For the first-year anniversary of the gas station shop’s opening, they gave away free ice cream for a day. On the flyers printed to promote the event was a quote from Cohen: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community from which it draws its support.”
In 1985, after the company went public, they used some of the shares to endow a foundation working for progressive social change and committed Ben & Jerry’s to spend 7.5 percent of its pretax profits on philanthropy.
In the early years, the company instituted a five-to-one cap on the ratio between the salary of the highest-earning executive and its lowest-paid worker, dropping it only when Cohen was about to step down as CEO in the mid-1990sand they were struggling to find a successor willing to work for what they were offering.
Most companies try to separate politics and business. Cohen and Greenfield cheerfully mixed them up and served them in a tub of creamy deliciousness (the company’s rich, fatty flavors were in part driven by Cohen’s sinus problems, which dulls his taste).
In 1988, Cohen founded 1% for Peace, a nonprofit organization seeking to “redirect one percent of the national defense budget to fund peace-promoting activities and projects.” The project was funded in part through sales of a vanilla and dark-chocolate popsicle they called the Peace Pop.
It was around this time that Cohen opened Ben & Jerry’s in Russia, as “an effort to build a bridge between Communism and capitalism with locally produced Cherry Garcia,” according to a write-up in the New York Times. After years of planning, the outlet opened in the northwestern city of Petrozavodsk in 1992. (The company shut the shop down five years later to prioritize growth in the U.S., and also because of the involvement of local mobsters, said Furman, who was involved in the project.)
Cohen, with co-founder Jerry Greenfield, actress Jane Fonda and other climate activists, in front of the Capitol in 2019 | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Even after Ben & Jerry’s was bought by Unilever in 2000, there were few progressive causes the company wasn’t eager to wade into with a campaign or a fancy new flavor.
The ice cream maker has marketed “Rainforest Crunch” in defense of the Amazon forest, sold “Empower Mint” to combat voter suppression, promoted “Pecan Resist” in opposition to then-U.S. President Donald Trump and launched “Change the Whirled” in partnership with Colin Kaepernick, the American football quarterback whose sports career ended after he started taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of police brutality.
More recently, however, the relationship between Cohen, Greenfield and Unilever has been rockier. In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would stop doing business in the Palestinian territories. Cohen and Greenfield, who are Jewish, defended the company’s decision in an op-ed in the New York Times.
After the move sparked political backlash, Unilever transferred its license to a local producer, only to be sued by Ben & Jerry’s. In December 2022, Unilever announced in a one-sentence statement that its litigation with its subsidiary “has been resolved.”Ben & Jerry’s ice cream continues to be sold throughout Israel and the West Bank, according to a Unilever spokesperson.
Cohen himself is no stranger to activism: Earlier this month, he was arrested and detained for a few hours for taking part in a sit-in in front of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was protesting the prosecution of the activist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Unilever declined to comment on Cohen’s views. “Ben Cohen no longer has an operational role in Ben & Jerry’s, and his comments are made in a personal capacity,” a spokesperson said.
Ben & Jerry’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The world according to Ben
For Cohen, the war in Ukraine wasn’t just a tragedy. It was, in a sense, a vindication. In 1998, a group he created called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities published a full-page ad in the New York Times titled “Hey, let’s scare the Russians.”
The target of the ad was a proposal to expand NATO “toward Russia’s very borders,” with the inclusion of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Doing so, the ad asserted, would provide Russians with “the same feeling of peace and security Americans would have if Russia were in a military alliance with Canada and Mexico, armed to the teeth.”
Cohen is by no means alone in this view of recent history. The American scholar John Mearsheimer, a prominent expert in international relations, has argued that the “trouble over Ukraine” started after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest when the alliance opened the door to membership for Ukraine and Georgia.
In the U.S., this point has been echoed by progressive outlets and thinkers, such as Jeffrey Sachs, the linguist Noam Chomsky, or most recently by the American philosopher, activist and longest-of-long-shots, third-party presidential candidate Cornel West.
“We told them after they disbanded the Warsaw Pact that we could not expand NATO, not one inch. And we did that, we lied,” said Dennis Fritz, a retired U.S. Air Force official and the head of the Eisenhower Media Network — which describes itself as a group of “National Security Veteran experts, who’ve been there, done that and have an independent, alternative story to tell.”
It was Fritz’s organization that argued in a May 2023 ad in the New York Times that although the “immediate cause” of the “disastrous” war in Ukraine was Russia’s invasion, “the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears.”
The ad noted that American foreign policy heavyweights, including Robert Gates and Henry Kissinger, had warned of the dangers of NATO expansion. “Why did the U.S. persist in expanding NATO despite such warnings?” it asked. “Profit from weapons sales was a major factor.”
Cohen andGreenfield announce a new flavor, Justice Remix’d, in 2019 | Win McNamee/Getty Images
When I spoke to Cohen, the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a “financial bonanza.”
“In the end, money won,” he said with a resigned tone. “And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.”
I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in.
“I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,” he said. “I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war.”
The Grayzone
I tried to get a better answer when I spoke to Aaron Maté, the Canadian-born journalist who won the award for “defense reporting and analysis” that Cohen was instrumental in funding.
Named after the late Pierre Sprey, a defense analyst who campaigned against the development of F-35 fighter jets as overly complex and expensive, the award recognized Maté’s “continued work dissecting establishment propaganda on issues such as Russian interference in U.S. politics, or the war in Syria.”
Maté, who was photographed with Cohen’s arm around his shoulders at the awards ceremony in March, writes for the Grayzone, a far-left website that has acquired a reputation for publishing stories backing the narratives of authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia or Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. His reports deny the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria, and he has briefed the U.N. Security Council at Moscow’s invitation.
When I spoke to Maté, he was friendly but guarded. (The Pierre Sprey award noted that “his empiricist reporting give the lie to the charge of ‘disinformation’ routinely leveled by those whose nostrums he challenges.”)
He was happy however to walk me through his claims that, based on statements by U.S. officials since the start of the war, Washington is using Kyiv to wage a “proxy war” against Moscow. Much of his information, he said, came from Western journalism. “I point out examples where, buried at the bottom of articles, sometimes the truth is admitted,” he explained.
He declined to be described as pro-Putin. “That kind of ‘guilt-by-association’ reasoning is not serious thinking,” he said. “It’s not how adults think about things.” When I asked if he believed that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, he answered: “I’m sure they have. I’ve never heard of a war where war crimes are not committed.”
Still, he said, the U.S. was responsible for “prolonging” the war and “sabotaging the diplomacy that could have ended it.”
‘Come to Ukraine’
The best answer I got to my question came not from Cohen or others in his circle but from a fellow traveler who hasn’t chosen to follow critics of NATO on their latest journey.
A self-described “radical anti-imperialist,” Gilbert Achcar is a professor of development studies and international relations at SOAS University of London. He has described the expansion of NATO in the 1990s as a decision that “laid the ground for a new cold war” pitting the West against Russia and China.
But while he sees the war in Ukraine as the latest chapter in this showdown, he has warned against calls for a rush to the negotiating table. Instead, he has advocated for the complete withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine and “the delivery of defensive weapons to the victims of aggression with no strings attached.”
“To give those who are fighting a just war the means to fight against a much more powerful aggressor is an elementary internationalist duty,” he wrote three days after Russia launched its attack on Kyiv, comparing the invasion to the U.S.’s intervention in Vietnam.
Achcar said he understood the conclusions being drawn by people like Cohen about Washington’s interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But, he said, “it leads a lot of people on the left into … [a] knee-jerk opposition to anything the United States does.”
What they fail to account for, however, is the Ukrainian people.
“In a way, part of the Western left is ethnocentric,” said Achcar, who was born in Senegal and grew up in Lebanon. “They look at the whole world just by their opposition to their own government and therefore forget about other people’s rights.”
Cohen, with late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon in 2011 | Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Ben & Jerry’s
His point was echoed in the last conversation I had when researching this article, with Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister.
“It doesn’t really matter who promised what to whom in the 1990s,” Mylovanov said. “What matters is that there was Mariupol and Bucha, where tens of thousands of people were killed.”
Mylovanov taught economics at the University of Pittsburgh until he returned to Ukraine four days before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Things like war are difficult to understand unless you experience them,” he said. “This is very easy to get confused when you are sitting, you know, somewhere far from the facts and you have surrounded yourself by an echo chamber of people and sources that you agree with.”
“In that sense,” he added. “I invite these people to come to Ukraine and judge for themselves what the truth is.”
A palpable shift has occurred in Wes Anderson’s style and tone since the release of 2021’s The French Dispatch. One doesn’t want to use a cliché like “mature” to describe what’s been happening since that perceptible tonal pivot in his filmography, so perhaps the better way to “define” what’s happening to Anderson and his storytelling is that it’s gotten, as Cher Horowitz would note, “Way existential.” Not to say there wasn’t that element to some degree in previous films, but now, it’s amplified—ratcheted up to a maximum that was never there before. Some might proffer it’s because Anderson has transitioned to a new era of his life, therefore possesses a greater concern with mortality; others could posit that our world and society has become so fragile in the years since 2020, that even privileged white men have been rattled by it enough to let it color their work. Whatever the case, the increased focus on mortality and “the meaning of life” in Anderson’s oeuvre is no surprise considering one of his greatest directorial influences is Woody Allen. Yes, he might be cancelled, but that doesn’t change the effect he’s had on Anderson.
Of course, Anderson has managed to take the puerility of Allen’s lead characters and render them “quirky,” “oddball” and “postmodern” instead. What’s more, Anderson has the “marketing sense” not to make his characters come across as “too Jewy,” lest it “scandalize” the often white bread audiences he tends to attract. Some might argue that Asteroid City is his whitest offering yet—which is really saying something. And yes, like Allen, Anderson has begun to favor the “screenwriting technique” of setting his movies in the past, so as not to have to deal with the “vexing” and “unpleasant” complications of trying to address post-woke culture in his casting and narrative decisions. Defenders of Anderson would bite back by remarking that the director creates alternate worlds in general, and should be left to do his own thing without being subjected to the “moral” and “ethical” issues presented by “modern filmmaking requirements.” For the most part, that’s remained the case, even as occasional hemming-and-hawing about his “movies so white” shtick crops up when he releases a new film. But to those who will follow Anderson anywhere, the trip to Asteroid City does prove to be worth it. If for no other reason than to show us the evolution of an auteur when he’s left alone, permitted to be creative without letting the outside voices and noise fuck with his head.
In many regards, the “town” (or rather, desert patch with a population of eighty-seven) is a representation of the same bubble Anderson exists in whenever he writes and directs something. To the point of writing, Anderson returns to the meta exploration of what it means to create on the page (as he did for The French Dispatch), anchored by the playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Although he’s not one of the more heavily featured characters, without him, none of the characters we’re seeing perform a televised production of Asteroid City would exist. If that sounds too meta already, it probably is. With the host (Bryan Cranston) of an anthology TV series serving as our guide, the movie commences in black and white as he stares into the camera and proceeds to do his best impersonation of Rod Serling at the beginning of The Twilight Zone. Indeed, it’s clear Anderson wants to allude to these types of TV anthology series that were so popular in the post-war Golden Age of Television. And even on the radio, as Orson Welles showcased in 1938, with his adaptation of The War of the Worlds. A broadcast that caused many listeners to panic about an alien invasion, unaware that it wasn’t real. In fact, Cranston as the host is sure to forewarn his viewers, “Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast.” That warning comes with good reason, for people in the 50s were easily susceptible to being bamboozled by whatever was presented to them on the then-new medium of TV. Because, “If it’s on TV, it must be true.” And the last thing anyone wanted to believe—then as much as now—is that there could be life on other planets. Sure, it sounds “neato” in theory, but, in reality, Earthlings are major narcissists who want to remain the lone “stars” of the interplanetary show.
Set in September of 1955, Asteroid City centers its narrative on a Junior Stargazer convention, where five students will be honored for their excellence in astronomy and astronomy-related innovations. Among those five are Woodrow (Jake Ryan), Shelly (Sophia Lillis), Ricky (Ethan Josh Lee), Dinah (Grace Edwards) and Clifford (Aristou Meehan). It’s Woodrow who arrives to town first, courtesy of his war photographer father, Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman). Although they’ve arrived to their destination, Augie still has to take the broken-down car to the mechanic (Matt Dillon). After much fanfare and tinkering, The Mechanic concludes that the car is kaput. Augie decides to phone his father-in-law, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), to come pick up Woodrow and Augie’s three daughters, Andromeda (Ella Faris), Pandora (Gracie Faris) and Cassiopeia (Willan Faris). Stanley doesn’t immediately agree, instead opting to remind Augie that he was never good enough for his daughter (played briefly, in a way, by Margot Robbie) and that he ought to tell his children that their mother died. Three weeks ago, to be exact. But withholding this information is just one of many ways in which Augie parades his emotional stuntedness. Something that ultimately enchants Hollywood actress Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), who also happens to be the mother of another Junior Stargazer, Dinah.
All the while, the vibrant, almost fake-looking set seems there solely to reiterate that all vibrancy is belied by something darker beneath it. That was never truer than in postwar America. And talking of vibrant cinematography and explosions, if Barbie’s color palette had a baby with Oppenheimer’s explosive content, you’d get Asteroid City (which, again, features Margot “Barbie” Robbie herself). With regard to explosions, it bears noting that the intro to the movie includes a train plugging along, bound for Asteroid City carrying all manner of bounty: avocados, pecans and, oh yes, a ten-megaton nuclear warhead with the disclaimer: “Caution: DO NOT DETONATE without Presidential Approval.” So much about that wide array of “transported goods” speaks to the very dichotomy of American culture. Priding itself on being a land of plenty while also doing everything in its power to self-destruct all that natural wealth. What’s more, the presence of hazardous material on trains is only too relevant considering the recent tragedy that befell East Palestine, Ohio. And yet, these are the sorts of environmentally-damaging behaviors that were set in motion in the postwar economic boom of America. Complete with the “miracle” of Teflon.
Accordingly, it’s no coincidence that as the “progress” associated with modern life accelerated at a rate not seen since the first Industrial Revolution, some were concerned about the potential fallout of such “development.” After all, with technological advancement could arise as many inconveniences as conveniences (see also: AI). For those who came of age after the so-called war to end all wars, a natural skepticism vis-à-vis “advancement” was also to be expected. Perhaps the fear of modern existence, with all the implications of war and invasion being “leveled up” due to “better” technology (i.e., the atomic bomb), planted the seed of suddenly seeing flying saucers all the time starting in the 40s and 50s. A phenomenon that many government officials were keen to write off as being somehow related to atomic testing (this being why the Atomic Age is so wrapped up in the alien sightings craze of the 50s). The sudden collective sightings might also have been a manifestation of the inherent fear of what all this “progress” could do. Especially when it came to increasing the potential for interplanetary contact. For it was also in the 50s that the great “space race” began—spurred by nothing more than the competitive, dick-swinging nature of the Cold War between the U.S. and USSR. That was all it took to propel a “they’re among us” and “hiding in plain sight” mentality, one that was frequently preyed upon by the U.S. government via the Red Scare. Such intense fear- and paranoia-mongering does fuck with the mind, you know. Enough to make it see things that may or may not really be there (literally and figuratively). The term “alien,” therefore, meaning “foreigner” or “other” as much as extraterrestrial as the 50s wore on.
So it was that Americans did what they always do best with fear: monetize it! To be sure, Asteroid City itself only exists to commodify the terror of an asteroid hitting Earth and leaving such a great impact thousands of years ago. Then, when news of an alien infiltrating the Junior Stargazer convention leaks, a fun fair materializes to sell merch (“Alien Gifts Sold Here”) related to commemorating the “event.” As such, the train that goes to Asteroid City suddenly becomes the “Alien Special” and there’s now “Alien Parking,” as well as signs declaring, “Asteroid City U.F.O.” and “Spacecraft Sighting.” With this American zeal for exploitation in mind, plus the alien element, there’s even a certain Nope vibe at play throughout Asteroid City as well. And a dash of Don’t Worry Darling, to boot. Mainly because of the unexplained sonic booms that go on in the background while the housewives are trying to kiki.
Anderson extracts the paranoia element that might have been present in films of the day (like Flying Saucers Attack!) and instead relates the discovery of an alien life form to the added feeling of being insignificant as a human in this universe. To highlight that point, J.J. Kellogg (Liev Schreiber), father to Junior Stargazer Clifford, demands of his son’s escalating antics related to performing unasked dares, “Why do you always have to dare something?” He replies meekly, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid otherwise nobody’ll notice my existence in the universe.” To be sure, the reason most people behave obnoxiously is to get the kind of attention that will convince themselves they matter. They mean something in this grand abyss.
Even Midge, a movie star, feels mostly unseen. So when Augie takes her picture in such an intimate way, she can’t help but feel allured by him. Seen by him. That, in the end, is what everyone wants. In the spirit of alluding to 50s Americana, Midge herself seems to be a loose representation of Marilyn Monroe, also prone to pills and alcohol, and constantly referred to as a brilliant comedienne despite flying under the radar as such. Then there’s another six degrees of Marilyn separation when Willem Dafoe appears as Saltzburg Keitel, an overt homage to Elia Kazan and his Actors Studio—a version of which we see when Earp shows up to a class to try to get insight on how to convey a certain scene. And yes, the concern with whether or not the acting in the play is being done “right” keeps coming up, reaching a crest as a metaphor for what Asteroid City is all about: what is anyone’s place in the universe? Does any of it mean anything? So yeah, again with the Woody Allen influence.
Toward the end of the play/movie, Jones Hall, the actor playing Augie, asks Schubert Green (Adrien Brody), the director, “Do I just keep doing it?” He could be asking about his performance as much as his very existence itself. Schubert assures, “Yes.” Jones continues, “Without knowing anything? Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of answer out there in the cosmic wilderness?” When Jones then admits, “I still don’t understand the play,” that phrase “the play” doubles just as easily for “life.” Schubert insists, “Doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.” In other words, just keep rolling the dice and living as though any of it means anything at all.
And maybe nihilism, for some people, is part of compartmentalizing that meaninglessness. This much appears to be the case for Midge, who tells Augie stoically, “I think I know now what I realize we are… Two catastrophically wounded people who don’t express the depths of their pain because…we don’t want to. That’s our connection.” But a connection is a connection—and that’s all anyone on Earth is really looking—starving—for…no matter how many decades fly by and how many according “advancements” are made. It’s likely the convention-interrupting alien could sense and see that desperation among the humans during his brief landing.
So it is that Augie tells Midge afterward, “I don’t like the way that guy looked at us, the alien.” Midge inquires, “How did he look?” “Like we’re doomed.” Midge shrugs, “Maybe we are.” “Maybe” being a polite euphemism for “definitely.” But even though we are, maybe the art will make sense of it all in the end. Even if only to “just keep telling the story.” For posterity. For whoever—or whatever—might come across the ruins and relics in the future. Hopefully, they’ll learn from the mistakes that we ourselves didn’t.
Pakistan has enough problems — including escalating attacks by Taliban insurgents and a spiraling economic crisis — without the added headache of a new Cold War between China and the U.S.
In an interview with POLITICO, Pakistan’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar insisted Islamabad had no appetite to pick a side in the growing global rivalry between Washington and Beijing.
As a nuclear-armed heavyweight of 250 million people, Pakistan is one of the most closely watched front-line states in the contest for strategic influence in Asia. While Pakistan’s old Cold War partner Washington is increasingly turning its focus to cooperation with Islamabad’s arch-foe India, China has swooped in to extend its sway in Pakistan — particularly through giant infrastructure projects.
Khar insisted, however, that Islamabad was worried about the repercussions of an all-out rupture between the U.S. and China, which would present Pakistan with an unpalatably binary strategic choice. “We are highly threatened by this notion of splitting the world into two blocs,” Khar said on a visit to Brussels. “We are very concerned about this decoupling … Anything that splits the world further.”
She added: “We have a history of being in a close, collaborative mode with the U.S. We have no intention of leaving that. Pakistan also has the reality of being in a close, collaborative mode with China, and until China suddenly came to everyone’s threat perception, that was always the case.”
It’s clear why Pakistan still sees advantages to walking the strategic tightrope between the U.S. and China. Although U.S. officials have expressed frustration over Pakistan’s historic ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan — and have rowed back on military aid — Washington is still a significant military partner. Last year, the U.S. State Department approved the potential sale of $450 million worth of equipment to maintain Pakistan’s F-16 fighter jets.
Simultaneously, Beijing is pledging to deepen military cooperation with Pakistan — partly to outflank the common enemy in India — and is delivering frigates to the Pakistani navy. China is also building roads, railways, hospitals and energy networks in its western neighbor. While these Chinese investments have boosted the country’s economic development, there are also downsides to going all in with China, with Beijing’s critics arguing that Pakistan has become overly indebted and financially dependent on China.
Khar grabbed headlines in April when a leaked memo appeared in the Wall Street Journal in which she was cited as warning that Pakistan’s instinct to preserve its partnership with the U.S. would harm what she deemed the country’s “real strategic” partnership with China.
She declined to comment on that leak, but took a more bullish line on continued American power in her interview in Brussels, saying the U.S. was unnecessarily fearful and defensive about being toppled from its plinth of global leadership, which she argued remained vital in areas such as healthcare, technology, trade and combating climate change.
“I don’t think the leadership role is being contested, until they start making other people question it by being reactive,” she said. “I believe that the West underestimates the value of its ideals, soft power,” she added, stressing Washington’s role as the world’s standard setter. China biggest selling point for Pakistan, she explained, was an economic model for lifting a huge population out of poverty.
Leverage — and the lack of it — in Kabul
Khar’s sharpest criticism of U.S. policy centered on Afghanistan, where she said restrictions intended to hobble the Taliban were backfiring, causing a humanitarian and security crisis, pushing many Afghans to “criminal activities, narcotics strategy and smuggling.”
The Taliban in Kabul are widely seen as supporting an expanding terror campaign waged by the Pakistani Taliban | Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images
A weakened Afghanistan is causing increased security problems for Pakistan, and the Taliban in Kabul are widely seen as supporting an expanding terror campaign waged by the Pakistani Taliban. Ironically, given the long history of Pakistan’s engagement with the Afghan Taliban, Islamabad is finding it difficult to exercise its influence and secure Kabul’s help in reining in the latest insurgency wave.
When the Afghan Taliban seized power in Kabul in 2021, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan celebrated their victory against “[American] slavery” and spy chief Faiz Hameed made a visit to Kabul and cheerily predicted “everything will be O.K.” Khar, who took office last year, said Khan had reacted “rather immaturely” and argued her government always knew “the leverage was over-projected.”
While the violence has put Pakistan’s soldiers and police on the front line of the fight against the Taliban at home, Khar said Islamabad was taking a highly diplomatic approach in seeking to win round the Taliban in Afghanistan, pursuing political engagement and focusing on economic development — rather than strong-arm tactics.
“Threatening anyone normally gets you worse results than the ones you started with. Even when it is exceptionally difficult to engage at a point when you think your red lines have not been taken seriously, we will still try the route of engagement.”
She firmly rejected the idea that any other country — either the U.S. or China — could play a role in helping Pakistan defeat the Taliban with military deployments. “When it comes to boots on the ground, we would welcome no one,” she said.
Pakistan is seeking bailout cash from the International Monetary Fund as the economy is hammered by blazing inflation and collapsing reserves. When asked whether she reckoned Washington was holding back on supporting Pakistan, partly to test whether China would step up and play a bigger role in ensuring the country’s stability, Khar replied: “I would be very unhappy if that were the case.”
No to navies
When it came to Europe’s role in the Indo-Pacific region, she was wary of the naval dimensions of EU plans, an element favored by France. She was particularly hostile to any vision of an Indo-Pacific strategy that was dedicated to trying to contain Chinese power in tandem with working with India.
One of the leading fears of the U.S. has long been that China could use its investments in the port of Gwadar to build a naval foothold there, a move that would inflame tensions with India, and allow Beijing to project greater power in the Indian Ocean.
Khar said Europe should tread carefully in calibrating its plan for the region.
“I would be very concerned if it is exclusively or predominantly a military-based strategy, which will then confirm it is a containment strategy, it must not be a containment strategy,” she said of the EU’s Indo-Pacific agenda.
“[If it’s] a containment strategy of a certain country, which then courts a certain country that is a very belligerent neighbor to Pakistan, then instead of stabilizing the region, it is endangering the region.”
It’s an hour before dawn breaks over the North Sea. Aboard the KV Bergen, the officer of the watch is wide awake.
The 93-meter long Norwegian Navy Coast Guard vessel is on patrol, 50 miles out to sea. The sky is dark, the sea darker. But off the starboard bow, bright lights gleam through the rain and mist. Something huge and incongruous is looming out of the water, lit like a Christmas display.
“Troll A,” says Torgeir Standal, 49, the ship’s second in command, who is taking the watch on this bleak March morning.
It’s a gas platform — a big one.
When it was transported out to this desolate spot nearly 30 years ago, Troll A — stretching 472 meters from its seabed foundations to the tip of its drilling rig — became the tallest structure ever moved by people across the surface of the Earth. Last year, Troll, the gas field it taps into, provided 10 percent of the EU’s total supply of natural gas — heating homes, lighting streets, fueling industry.
“There are many platforms here,” says Standal, standing on the dark bridge of the Bergen, his face illuminated by the glow from the radar and satellite screens on his control panel. “And thousands of miles of pipeline underneath.”
And that’s why the Bergenhas come to this spot today.
In September 2022, an explosion on another undersea gas pipeline nearly 600 miles away shook the world. Despite three ongoing investigations, there is still no official answer to the question of who blew up the Nord Stream pipe. But the fact that it could happen at all triggered a Europe-wide alert.
The Norwegian Navy’s KV Bergen, seen in the background, after departing from the port of Bergen
Against a backdrop of growing confrontation with Moscow over its brutal invasion of Ukraine and its willingness to use energy as a weapon, the vulnerability of the undersea pipes and cables that deliver gas, electricity and data to the Continent — the vital arteries of comfortable, modern European life — has been starkly exposed.
In response, Norway, alongside NATO allies, increased naval patrols in the North Sea — an area vital for Europe’s energy security. The presence of the Bergen, day and night, in these unforgiving waters, is part of the effort to remain vigilant. The task of the men and women on board is to keep watch on behalf of Europe — and to stop the next Nord Stream attack before it happens.
The officers of the watch
But what are they looking for?
In recent weeks the Bergen has tracked the movements of a Russian military frigate through the North Sea — something that it has to do “several times every year,” says Kenneth Dyb, 47, the skippsjef, or commander of the ship.
The Russians have a right to sail through these seas out to the Atlantic, and it is very unlikely Moscow would be so brazen as to openly attack a gas platform or a pipeline. But, says Dyb, as his ship steams west to another gas and oil field, Oseberg, “it’s important to show that we are present. That we are watching.”
Recent reports that Russian naval ships — with their trackers turned off — were present near the site of the Nord Stream blasts in the months running up to the incident have reinforced the importance of having extra eyes on the water itself.
The Oseberg oil and gas field, 130 kilometers north-west of Bergen
Of course, the gas didn’t come for free. Norway has profited hugely from the spike in gas and oil prices that followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The state-owned energy giant Equinor made a record $75 billion profit in 2022. Oslo is sensitive to accusations of war profiteering — and keen to show Europe that it cares about its neighbors’ energy security as much as it cares about their cash.
But the threat to the pipelines could also be more low-key. One of the many theories about the Nord Stream attack is that it was carried out by a small group of divers, operating from an ordinary yacht. In such a scenario, something as seemingly innocent as a ship suddenly going stationary, or following an unaccustomed course through the water, could be suspicious. The Bergen’s crew have the authority to board and inspect vessels that its crew consider a cause for concern.
Russia’s covert presence in these waters has been acknowledged by Norway’s intelligence services in recent weeks. A joint investigation by the public broadcasters in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland uncovered evidence of civilian vessels, such as fishing ships, being used for surveillance activities. This is something that has been “going on forever,” according to Ståle Ulriksen, a researcher at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy, but it has increased in intensity in recent years.
“We always look for oddities, anything that is unusual, like new ships in the area that have not been here before,” says Magne Storebø, 26, senior petty officer, as he takes the afternoon watch on the bridge later that day.
The sky is leaden and the horizon lost in cloud. Coffee in hand, Storebø casts his eye over the radar and satellite screens as giant windscreen wipers whip North Sea spray from the floor-to-ceiling windows. There are few ships around, all of them familiar to the crew; service vessels plying back and forth from the gas and oil platforms.
The Nord Stream incident and the new security situation has changed the way Storebø thinks about his work, he says.
He is “more aware of the consequences suspicious vessels could have,” he says. “More awake, you could say.”
Senior Petty Officer Magne Storebø keeps watch from the bridge
Soft-spoken and calm beyond his years, Storebø is philosophical about the potential dangers of his work. He has been in the Navy for four years, in which time war has broken out on the European continent and the threat to his home waters has come into sharp focus.
“If you are going to put a rainy cloud over your head and bury yourself down, I don’t think the Navy or the coastguard is the right place to work in,” he says in conversation with two shipmates later that day. “You need to adjust and to look in a positive direction — and to be ready in case things don’t go that way.”
Energy war round two
As Europe emerges from the first winter of its energy war with Russia, its gas supplies have held up better than almost anyone expected.
But as the Continent braces for next winter, the risk of another Nord Stream-style attack to a key pipeline is taken seriously at the highest levels of leadership.
“Things look OK for gas security now,” said one senior European Commission official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters of energy security. “But if Norway has a pipeline that blows up, we are in a different situation.”
EU policymakers see four key risks to gas security going into next winter, the senior official added: exceptionally cold weather; a stronger-than-expected Chinese economic recovery hoovering up global gas supply; Russia cutting off the remaining gas it sends to Europe; and last but not least, an “incident” affecting energy infrastructure.
Such an event might not only threaten supply but could potentially spark panic in the gas market, as seen in 2022, driving up prices and hitting European citizens and industries in the wallet. And nowhere is the potential for harm greater than in the North Sea.
Norway is now Europe’s biggest single supplier of gas. After Russian President Vladimir Putin and the energy giant Gazprom shut off supply via Nord Stream and other pipelines, Norway stepped up its own production in the North Sea, delivering well over 100 billion cubic meters to the EU and the U.K. in 2022. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Troll A herself in March this year — the first visit of a Commission president to Norway since 2011 — to personally thank the country’s president, Jonas Gahr Støre, for supplies that “helped us through the winter.”
“We have a huge responsibility, supplying the rest of Europe with energy,” Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram told POLITICO. “To be a stable, reliable producer of energy, of gas, is an important role for us and we take that very seriously. That is why we are also doing so much to protect this infrastructure.”
The vast majority of that gas is transported into northwest Europe via a complex network of seabed pipes — more than 5,000 miles of them in Norway’s jurisdiction alone. The North Sea has an average depth of just 95 meters. That’s not much deeper than the Nord Stream pipes at the location they were attacked.
“It actually doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated capability to attack a pipeline in relatively shallow waters,” says Sidharth Kaushal, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in the U.K. A small vessel, “some divers and an [explosive] charge” are all it could take, Kaushal says.
The navy chief
After the Nord Stream incident in September, suspicion instantly fell on Russia. Moscow has a record of operating in the so-called gray zone — committing hostile acts short of warfare, often covertly.
To date, the three investigations looking into the incident have yet to confirm that suspicion. But European governments — and their militaries — are not taking any chances.
In the days immediately following the explosions, NATO navy chiefs started calling each other to try to coordinate efforts to protect energy infrastructure, says Rune Andersen, the chief of Norway’s navy, speaking to POLITICO at Haakonsvern naval base, before the KV Bergen’svoyage.
Everyone had the same thought, he says. “If that happens in the North Sea, we will have a problem.”
Andersen joined the Navy as a young man in 1988, in the last days of the Cold War. Now 54, he is used to the Russian threat overshadowing Norway’s and Europe’s security.
“After decades of attempts to integrate or cooperate with Russia, we now have war in Europe. We see that our neighbor is brutal and willing to use military force,” he says grimly. “I worked in the Navy in the ’90s when it was enduring peace and partnership on the agenda. We are back to a situation where our job feels more meaningful — and necessary.”
Kenneth Dyb, the skippsjef, or commander of the ship
However, he points out, his own forces have so far not seen any Russian movements or operations “that are different to what they were before” the Nord Stream attacks. “The job we are doing is precautionary, rather than tailored to any specific threat,” he adds.
Even so, those early discussions with NATO allies have now formalized into daily coordination via the Allied Maritime Command headquarters in the U.K., to ensure there are always NATO ships on hand that can act as “first responders” to potential incidents. British, German and French ships have joined their Norwegian counterparts in the monitoring and surveillance effort.
It is “by nature challenging” to protect every inch of pipeline, all of the time, Andersen says.
The role of the Bergen and ships like it, he adds, is just “one bit of the puzzle.” Simply by their presence at sea, these ships increase the chances of catching would-be saboteurs in the act, and hopefully deter them from trying in the first place.
The goal, in other words, is to reduce the size of the “gray zone” — or to “increase the resolution” of the navy’s picture of the activity out on the North Sea, as Andersen puts it.
In collaboration with the energy companies and pipeline operators, unmanned underwater vehicles — drones — using cameras and high-resolution sonar have been used, Andersen says, to “map the micro-terrain” around pipelines. These are sensitive enough to spot an explosive charge or other signs of foul play.
Equinor, alongside the pipeline operator Gassco, has carried out a “large inspection survey” of its undersea pipeline infrastructure, a company spokesperson says. The survey revealed “no identified signs of malicious activities” but pipeline inspections are ongoing “continuously.”
Senior Petty Officer Simen Strand speaks to the crew. “We haven’t had much to fear in the past. We are probably less naïve nowadays,” he says.
Perhaps understandably, the heightened level of alert has led to the occasional false alarm. A spate of aerial drone sightings near Norwegian energy infrastructure around the time of the Nord Stream attacks last year included a report of a suspicious craft circling above Haakonsvern naval base itself.
“After a while, we concluded it was a seagull,” says Andersen, with the shadow of a grin.
Europe on alert
The navy chief is nonetheless deadly serious about the potential threat. A Nord Stream-style attack in the North Sea is possible. Anderson will not be drawn on the most vulnerable points in the network, saying only that “easy to access” places and “key hubs” are “two things in the back of mind when we think [about] risk.”
Throughout Europe, the alert has been raised. This month, NATO warned of a “significant risk” that Russia could target undersea pipelines or internet cables as part of its confrontation with the West.
Several countries are increasing patrols and underwater surveillance capabilities. The British Royal Navy accelerated the purchase of two specialist ocean surveillance ships, the first of which will be operational this summer. The EU and NATO have established a new joint task force focusing on critical infrastructure protection, and a “coordination cell” has been established at NATO headquarters in Brussels to improve “engagement with industry and bring key military and civilian stakeholders together” to keep the cables and pipelines secure.
Norway — and Europe — are in this struggle for the long haul, Andersen believes.
Indeed, even as Europe transitions from fossil fuels to green energy, the North Sea will remain a vital powerhouse of offshore wind energy, with plans for a huge expansion over the next 25 years. Earlier this year, the Netherlands’ intelligence services reported a Russian ship seeking to map wind farm infrastructure in the Dutch sector of the North Sea. “We think the Russians wanted to investigate the possibilities for potential future sabotage,” Jan Swillens, head of the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service tells POLITICO in an emailed statement. “This incident makes clear that these kinds of Russian operations are performed closer than one might think.”
At the same time in the Baltic, countries are shoring up security around their infrastructure, at sea and on land. Late last year, Estonia carried out an underwater inspection of the two Estlink power cables and the Baltic Connector gas pipeline linking it to Finland, the Estonian navy says. Lithuania, meanwhile, is paying “special attention” to security around its LNG terminal at Klaipėda and the gas cargoes that arrive there, a defense ministry spokesperson says.
Torgeir Standal, left, the KV Bergen’s second in command
It was in Lithuania that Europe had its first major false alarm since the Nord Stream incident, when a gas pipeline on land exploded on a Friday evening in January. Foul play was briefly considered a possibility in the immediate aftermath but was quickly ruled out. The pipe was 40 years old, and had been subject to a technical fault.
The danger posed by Russia to infrastructure throughout Europe should not be underestimated, says Vilmantas Vitkauskas, director of Lithuania’s National Crisis Management Centre and a former NATO intelligence official.
“We know their way of thinking, [the way] they send signals or apply pressure,” Vitkauskas says. “We understand Russia quite well, and we are quite worried by what we see — and how vulnerable our infrastructure is in Europe.”
The watchers on the water
Back aboard the Bergen, life for the sailors carries on as normal. It’s a young crew, with an average age of around 30. Some are conscripts. It’s still compulsory in Norway for 19-year-olds to present themselves for national service, but only around one in four are actually recruited for the mandated 19-month stint.
The days are long. Surveillance, maintenance and exercises in search and rescue are all part of the crew’s regular routine. A helicopter from one of the Oseberg oil and gas platforms soars overhead, and the crew are drafted into an exercise winching people on and off the deck of the Bergenin the dead of night, simulating a rescue operation.
The ship needs to be ready to respond to an incident should the call come in from naval headquarters that help is required, or a suspicious vessel has been identified in their patch of the North Sea. But in their downtime, the sailors head to the gym on the lower deck, or play FIFA on the X-box in the sparse games room. Three hearty meals a day are served in the galley kitchen. There is even a ship’s band, cheekily named “Dyb Purple” after their commander. Dyb “takes it well,” says Senior Petty Officer Storebø.
In the daily whirl of activity, most of the young sailors don’t think of their work in the grand strategic sense of protecting the energy security — the warmth, the light, the industry — of an entire continent.
But the context of the Ukraine war — and the precedent set by the Nord Stream attack — has added a note of solemnity just below the surface of the comradeship and bonhomie.
“We are probably less naïve nowadays,” says 33-year-old Senior Petty Officer Simen Strand, who has a wife and two children, a boy and a girl, back home in Bergen. “We haven’t had much to fear in the past, there hasn’t been a concrete threat.”
Storebø agrees but is characteristically sanguine. “Russia has always been there … I’ve not personally felt any more unease than before.”
The next day, Storebø has the night watch, from midnight to four in the morning, as the Bergen travels back to base for a short stop before heading out to sea again.
It’s dark up on the bridge, with the glow of the control panel screens the only light inside. Twenty miles away, little lights can be seen on the Norwegian coast. A lighthouse flares to the south, at Slåtterøy, not far from Storebø’s home island of Austevoll. Beneath the waves, unseen, gas flows from the Troll field back to the mainland, where it is processed. From there, it continues its journey south to light the dark of European nights.
All is quiet but Storebø can’t afford to lose focus. “Coffee and music help,” he says. “I like the night shifts.”
As the officer of the watch, he has to be ready, should the radar, the satellites, or his own eyes see something out of the ordinary — ready to call the captain and raise the alarm.
That’s the job, he says. “You always have it in the back of your mind.”
More than three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic officially became an emergency, and much of the world froze in place while politicians and public-health advisers tried to figure out what on Earth to do. Now the emergency is officially over—the World Health Organization declared so on Friday, and the Biden administration will do the same later this week.
Not every lesson has to be a cautionary tale, however, and the end of the COVID-19 emergency may be, if nothing else, a chance to consider which pandemic policies, decisions, and ideas actually worked out for the best. Put another way: In the face of so much suffering, what went right?
To find out, we called up more than a dozen people who have spent the past several years in the thick of pandemic decision making, and asked: When the next pandemic comes, which concrete action would you repeat in exactly the same way?
What they told us is by no means a comprehensive playbook for handling a future public-health crisis. But they did lay out 23 specific tactics—and five big themes—that have kept the past few years from being even worse.
Good information makes everything else possible.
Start immediate briefings for the public. At the beginning of March 2020, within days of New York City detecting its first case of COVID-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio began giving daily or near-daily coronavirus press briefings, many of which included health experts along with elected officials. These briefings gave the public a consistent, reliable narrative to follow during the earliest, most uncertain days of the pandemic, and put science at the forefront of the discourse, Jay Varma, a professor of population health at Cornell University and a former adviser to de Blasio, told us.
Let everyone see the information you have. In Medway, Massachusetts, for instance, the public-school system set up a data dashboard and released daily testing results. This allowed the entire affected community to see the impact of COVID in schools, Armand Pires, the superintendent of Medway Public Schools, told us.
Be clear that some data streams are better than others. During the first year of the pandemic, COVID-hospitalization rates were more consistent and reliable than, say, case counts and testing data, which varied with testing shortages and holidays, Erin Kissane, the managing editor of the COVID Tracking Project, told us.The project, which grew out of The Atlantic’s reporting on testing data, tracked COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. CTP made a point of explaining where the data came from, what their flaws and shortcomings were, and why they were messy, instead of worrying about how people might react to this kind of information.
Act quickly on the data. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, testing made a difference, because the administration acted quickly after cases started rising faster than predicted when students returned in fall of 2020, Rebecca Lee Smith, a UIUC epidemiologist, told us. The university instituted a “stay at home” order, and cases went down—and remained down. Even after the order ended, students and staff continued to be tested every four days so that anyone with COVID could be identified and isolated quickly.
And use it to target the places that may need the most attention. In California, a social-vulnerability index helped pinpoint areas to focus vaccine campaigns on, Brad Pollock, UC Davis’s Rolkin Chair in Public-Health Sciences and the leader of Healthy Davis Together, told us. In this instance, that meant places with migrant farmworkers and unhoused people, but this kind of precision public health could also work for other populations.
Engage with skeptics. Rather than ignore misinformation or pick a fight with the people promoting it, Nirav Shah, the former director of Maine’s CDC, decided to hear them out, going on a local call-in radio show with hosts known to be skeptical of vaccines.
A pandemic requires thinking at scale.
Do pooled testing as early as possible. Medway’s public-school district used this technique, which combines samples from multiple people into one tube and then tests them all at once, to help reopen elementary schools in early 2021, said Pires, the Medway superintendent. Pooled testing made it possible to test large groups of people relatively quickly and cheaply.
Choose technology that scales up quickly. Pfizer chose to use mRNA-vaccine tech in part because traditional vaccines are scaled up in stainless-steel vats, Jim Cafone, Pfizer’s senior vice president for global supply chain, told us. If the goal is to vaccinate billions of patients, “there’s not enough stainless steel in the world to do what you need to do,” he said. By contrast, mRNA is manufactured using lipid nanoparticle pumps, many more of which can fit into much less physical space.
Take advantage of existing resources. UC Davis repurposed genomic tools normally used for agriculture for COVID testing, and was able to perform 10,000 tests a day, Pollock, the UC Davis professor, told us.
Use the Defense Production Act. This Cold War–era law, which allows the U.S. to force companies to prioritize orders from the government, is widely used in the defense sector. During the pandemic, the federal government invoked the DPA to break logjams in vaccine manufacturing, Chad Bown, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who tracked the vaccine supply chain, told us. For example, suppliers of equipment used in pharmaceutical manufacturing were compelled to prioritize COVID-vaccine makers, and fill-and-finish facilities were compelled to bottle COVID vaccines first—ensuring that the vaccines the U.S. government had purchased would be delivered quickly.
Vaccines need to work for everyone.
Recruit diverse populations for clinical trials. Late-stage studies on new drugs and vaccines have a long history of underrepresenting people from marginalized backgrounds, including people of color. That trend, as researchers have repeatedly pointed out, runs two risks: overlooking differences in effectiveness that might not appear until after a product has been administered en masse, and worsening the distrust built up after decades of medical racism and outright abuse. The COVID-vaccine trials didn’t do a perfect job of enrolling participants that fully represent the diversity of America, but they did better than many prior Phase 3 clinical trials despite having to rapidly enroll 30,000 to 40,000 adults, Grace Lee, the chair of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told us. That meant the trials were able to provide promising evidence that the shots were safe and effective across populations—and, potentially, convince wider swaths of the public that the shots worked for people like them.
Try out multiple vaccines. No one can say for sure which vaccines might work or what problems each might run into. So drug companies tested several candidates at once in Phase I trials, Annaliesa Anderson, the chief scientific officer for vaccine research and development at Pfizer, told us; similarly, Operation Warp Speed placed big bets on six different options, Bown, the Peterson Institute fellow, pointed out.
Be ready to vet vaccine safety—fast. The rarest COVID-vaccine side effects weren’t picked up in clinical trials. But the United States’ multipronged vaccine-safety surveillance program was sensitive and speedy enough that within months of the shots’ debut, researchers found a clotting issue linked to Johnson & Johnson, and a myocarditis risk associated with Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA shots. They were also able to confidently weigh those risks against the immunizations’ many benefits. With these data in hand, the CDC and its advisory groups were able to throw their weight behind the new vaccines without reservations, said Lee, the ACIP chair.
Make the rollout simple. When Maine was determining eligibility for the first round of COVID-19 vaccines, the state prioritized health-care workers and then green-lighted residents based solely on age—one of the most straightforward eligibility criteria in the country. Shah, the former head of Maine’s CDC, told us that he and other local officials credit the easy-to-follow system with Maine’s sky-high immunization rates, which have consistently ranked the state among the nation’s most vaccinated regions.
Create vaccine pop-ups. For many older adults and people with limited mobility, getting vaccinated was largely a logistical challenge. Setting up temporary clinics where they lived—at senior centers or low-income housing, as in East Boston, for instance—helped ensure that transportation would not be an obstacle for them, said Josh Barocas, an infectious-diseases doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Give out boosters while people still want them. When boosters were first broadly authorized and recommended in the fall of 2021, there was a mad rush to immunization lines. In Maine, Shah said, local officials discovered that pharmacies were so low on staff and supplies that they were canceling appointments or turning people away. In response, the state’s CDC set up a massive vaccination center in Augusta. Within days, they’d given out thousands of shots, including both boosters and the newly authorized pediatric shots.
Also, spend money.
Basic research spending matters. The COVID vaccines wouldn’t have been ready for the public nearly as quickly without a number of existing advances in immunology, Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told us. Scientists had known for years that mRNA had immense potential as a delivery platform for vaccines, but before SARS-CoV-2 appeared, they hadn’t had quite the means or urgency to move the shots to market. And research into vaccines against other viruses, such as RSV and MERS, had already offered hints about the sorts of genetic modifications that might be needed to stabilize the coronavirus’s spike protein into a form that would marshal a strong, lasting immune response.
Pour money into making vaccines before knowing they work. Manufacturing millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that might ultimately prove useless wouldn’t usually be a wise business decision. But Operation Warp Speed’s massive subsidies helped persuade manufacturers to begin making and stockpiling doses early on, Bown said. OWS also made additional investments to ensure that the U.S. had enough syringes and factories to bottle vaccines. So when the vaccines were given the green light, tens of millions of doses were almost immediately available.
Invest in worker safety. The entertainment industry poured a massive amount of funds into getting COVID mitigations—testing, masking, ventilation, sick leave—off the ground so that it could resume work earlier than many other sectors. That showed what mitigation tools can accomplish if companies are willing to put funds toward them, Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert in Arizona affiliated with George Mason University, told us.
Lastly, consider the context.
Rely on local relationships. To distribute vaccines to nursing homes, West Virginia initially eschewed the federal pharmacy program with CVS and Walgreens, Clay Marsh, West Virginia’s COVID czar, told us. Instead, the state partnered with local, family-run pharmacies that already provided these nursing homes with medication and flu vaccines. This approach might not have worked everywhere, but it worked for West Virginia.
Don’t shy away from public-private partnerships. In Davis, California, a hotelier provided empty units for quarantine housing, Pollock said. In New York City, the robotics firm Opentrons helped NYU scale up testing capacity; the resulting partnership, called the Pandemic Response Lab, quickly slashed wait times for results, Varma, the former de Blasio adviser, said.
Create spaces for vulnerable people to get help. People experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance-abuse disorders, and survivors of domestic violence require care tailored to their needs. In Boston, for example, a hospital recuperation unit built specifically for homeless people with COVID who were unable to self-isolate helped bring down hospitalizations in the community overall, Barocas said.
Frame the pandemic response as a social movement. Involve not just public-health officials but also schools, religious groups, political leaders, and other sectors. For example, Matt Willis, the public-health officer for Marin County, California, told us, his county formed larger “community response teams” that agreed on and disseminated unified messages.
If there were a silver lining in her son being convicted of high treason, it was that Yelena Gordon would have a rare chance to see him.
But when she tried to enter the courtroom, she was told it was already full. But those packed in weren’t press or his supporters, since the hearing was closed.
“I recognized just one face there, the rest were all strangers,” she later recounted, exasperated, outside the Moscow City Court. “I felt like I had woken up in a Kafka novel.”
Eventually, after copious cajoling, Gordon was able to stand beside Vladimir Kara-Murza, a glass wall between her and her son, as the sentence was delivered.
Kara-Murza was handed 25 years in prison, a sky-high figure previously reserved for major homicide cases, and the highest sentence for an opposition politician to date.
The bulk — 18 years — was given on account of treason, for speeches he gave last year in the United States, Finland and Portugal.
For a man who had lobbied the West for anti-Russia sanctions such as on the Magnitsky Act against human rights abusers — long before Russia invaded Ukraine — those speeches were wholly unremarkable.
But the prosecution cast Kara-Murza’s words as an existential threat to Russia’s safety.
“This is the enemy and he should be punished,” prosecutor Boris Loktionov stated during the trial, according to Kara-Murza’s lawyer.
The judge, whose own name features on the Magnitsky list as a human rights abuser, agreed. And so did Russia’s Foreign Ministry, saying: “Traitors and betrayers, hailed by the West, will get what they deserve.”
Redefining the enemy
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of Russians have received fines or jail sentences of several years under new military censorship laws.
But never before has the nuclear charge of treason been used to convict someone for public statements containing publicly available information.
A screen set up in a hall at Moscow City Court shows the verdict in the case against Vladimir Kara-Murza | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
The verdict came a day after an appeal hearing at the same court for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who, in a move unseen since the end of the Cold War, is being charged with spying “for the American side.”
Taken together, the two cases set a historic precedent for modern Russia, broadening and formalizing its hunt for internal enemies.
“The state, the [Kremlin], has decided to sharply expand the ‘list of targets’ for charges of treason and espionage,” Andrei Soldatov, an expert in Russia’s security services, told POLITICO.
Up until now, the worst the foreign press corps feared was having their accreditation revoked by Russia’s Foreign Ministry. This is now changing.
For Kremlin critics, the gloves have of course been off for far longer — before his jailing, Kara-Murza survived two poisonings. He had been a close ally of Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin.
But such reprisals were reserved for only a handful of prominent dissidents, and enacted by anonymous hitmen and undercover agents.
After Putin last week signed into law extending the punishment for treason from 20 years to life, anyone could be eliminated from public life with the stamp of legitimacy from a judge in robes.
“Broach the topic of political repression over a coffee with a foreigner, and that could already be considered treason,” Oleg Orlov, chair of the disbanded rights group Memorial, said outside the courthouse.
Like many, he saw a parallel with Soviet times, when tens of thousands of “enemies of the state” were accused of spying for foreign governments and sent to far-flung labor camps or simply executed, and foreigners were by definition suspect.
Treason as catch-all
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive.
In court, hearings are held behind closed doors — sheltered from the public and press — and defense lawyers are all but gagged.
But they used to be relatively rare: Between 2009 and 2013, a total of 25 people were tried for espionage or treason, according to Russian court statistics. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, that number fluctuated from a handful to a maximum of 17.
Former defense journalist Ivan Safronov in court, April 2022 | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Involving academics, Crimean Tatars and military accused of passing on sensitive information to foreign parties, they generally drew little attention.
The jailing of Ivan Safronov — a former defense journalist accused of sharing state secrets with a Czech acquaintance — formed an important exception in 2020. It triggered a massive outcry among his peers and cast a spotlight on the treason law. Apparently, even sharing information gleaned from public sources could result in a conviction.
Combined with an amendment introduced after anti-Kremlin protests in 2012 that labeled any help to a “foreign organization which aimed to undermine Russian security” as treason, it turned the law into a powder keg.
In February 2022, that was set alight.
Angered by the war but too afraid to protest publicly, some Russians sought to support Ukraine in less visible ways such as through donations to aid organizations.
The response was swift: Only three days after Putin announced his special military operation, Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office warned it would check “every case of financial or other help” for signs of treason.
Thousands of Russians were plunged into a legal abyss. “I transferred 100 rubles to a Ukrainian NGO. Is this the end?” read a Q&A card shared on social media by the legal aid group Pervy Otdel.
“The current situation is such that this [treason] article will likely be applied more broadly,” warned Senator Andrei Klimov, head of the defense committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament.
Inventing traitors
Last summer, the law was revised once more to define defectors as traitors as well.
Ivan Pavlov, who oversees Pervy Otdel from exile after being forced to flee Russia for defending Safronov, estimates some 70 treason cases have already been launched since the start of the war — twice the maximum in pre-war years. And the tempo seems to be picking up.
Regional media headlines reporting arrests for treason are becoming almost commonplace. Sometimes they include high-octane video footage of FSB teams storming people’s homes and securing supposed confessions on camera.
Yet from what can be gleaned about the cases from media leaks, their evidence is shaky.
Instead of the usual Investigative Committee, treason cases fall under the remit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB, making them uniquely secretive | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
In December last year, 21-year-old Savely Frolov became the first to be charged with conspiring to defect. Among the reported incriminating evidence is that he attempted to cross into neighboring Georgia with a pair of camouflage trousers in the trunk of his car.
In early April this year, a married couple was arrested in the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil for supposedly collaborating with Ukrainian intelligence. The two worked at a nearby defense plant, but acquaintances cited by independent Russian media Holod deny they had access to secret information.
“It is a reaction to the war: There’s a demand from up top for traitors. And if they can’t find real ones, they’ll make them up, invent them,” said Pavlov.
Although official statistics are only published with a two-year lag time, he has little doubt a flood of guilty verdicts is coming.
“The first and last time a treason suspect was acquitted in Russia was in 1999.”
No sign of slowing
If precedent is anything to go by, Gershkovich will likely eventually be subject to a prisoner swap.
That is what happened with Brittney Griner, a U.S. basketball star jailed for drug smuggling when she entered Russia carrying hashish vape cartridges.
And it is also what happened with the last foreign journalist detained, in 1986 when the American Nicholas Daniloff was supposedly caught “red-handed” spying, like Gershkovich.
Back then, several others were released with him — among them Yury Orlov, a human rights activist sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet activity.”
Some now harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles and suffers from severe health problems.
For ordinary Russians, any glimmers of hope that the traitor push will slow down are even less tangible.
Those POLITICO spoke to say a Soviet-era mass campaign against traitors is unlikely, if only because the Kremlin has a fine line to walk: arrest too many traitors and it risks shattering the image that Russians unanimously support the war.
Some harbor hope that a deal involving Gershkovich could also help Kara-Murza, who is well-known in Washington circles | Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE
And in the era of modern technology, there are easier ways to convey a message to a large audience. “If Stalin had had a television channel, there would’ve likely not been a need for mass repression,” reflected Pavlov.
Yet the repressive state apparatus does seem to have a momentum of its own, as those involved in investigating and prosecuting treason and espionage cases are rewarded with bonuses and promotions.
In a first, the treason case against Kara-Murza was led by the Investigative Committee, opening the door for the FSB to massively increase its work capacity by offloading work on others, says Soldatov.
“If the FSB can’t handle it, the Investigative Committee will jump in.”
In the public sphere, patriotic officials at all levels are clamoring for an even harder line, going so far as to volunteer the names of apparently unpatriotic political rivals and celebrities to be investigated.
There have been calls for “traitors” to be stripped of their citizenship and to reintroduce the death penalty.
And in a telling sign, Kara-Murza’s veteran lawyer Vadim Prokhorov has fled Russia, fearing he might be targeted next.
Аs Orlov, the dissident who was part of the 1986 swap and who went on to become an early critic of Putin, wrote in the early days of Putin’s reign in 2004: “Russia is flying back in time.”
Nearly two decades on, the question in Moscow nowadays is a simple one: how far back?
Moscow took 12 hours to respond after an explosion lit up the dome of the Kremlin complex last Wednesday.
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, the security services needed time to investigate the incident.
But the Kremlin’s spin doctors worked extra hours too, no doubt.
On the eve of Victory Day — which traditionally celebrates the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, but which has become emblematic of Russia’s current war against Ukraine — the Kremlin’s line at home is that the country is battling an enemy as powerful as it is evil.
That narrative is meant to account for the absence of success on the battlefront after 14 months of fighting, while offering Russians a sense of security that for them life will continue as usual.
But a series of mysterious incidents — including Wednesday’s early-morning blast — is revealing cracks in Russia’s facade of strength. The cancellation of some of the Victory Day festivities is another sign that appearances are beginning to slip.
The Kremlin eventually described the 2 a.m. incursion of two drones onto the heavily protected Moscow compound as an assassination attempt on President Putin by the “Kyiv regime.” That was in a statement Wednesday afternoon, which also claimed the right to respond “where and when it sees fit.” Putin wasn’t in the complex at the time. A day later, Moscow added the U.S. to its accusation of blame for the blast.
“We know very well that decisions about such actions, such terrorist attacks, are not made in Kyiv, but in Washington,” Peskov said on Thursday.
Both Kyiv and Washington vehemently deny any involvement.
Playing it down
Wednesday’s drone attack was the latest in a number of unexplained incidents on Russian soil in recent months, including a car bomb attack on an ultranationalist writer on Saturday — the third targeting of pro-war figures since the start of the invasion, resulting in two deaths. There also have been a number of crashed drones, the derailing of freight trains, and at least two fires at fuel depots in Crimea.
In allthose cases, the Kremlin downplayed the news or kept its distance.
The Kremlin is one of the best-protected sites in Russia, and it has been widely assumed that piercing its air defenses was next to impossible | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
So the fact that this time, it chose to publish an official statement and pointed the finger at the U.S., its main enemy, suggests the Kremlin wants people to take note. But to what effect?
Predictably, the Kremlin’s main mouthpieces have clamored for revenge. Former Russian president and current head of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, has called for the “physical elimination” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Maybe now things will start for real?” wrote Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT.
But other than the usual jingoistic saber-rattling, Russia’s main evening news programs did not air the scenes of the drone explosion.
And still, more questions than answers remain.
The Kremlin is one of the best-protected sites in Russia, and it has been widely assumed that piercing its air defenses was next to impossible. Moreover, it is well-known that Putin spends most of his time at other locations.
That has fed speculation that the drone attack was in fact a false-flag operation staged by one of Russia’s own security services.
Possible motives could be an internal power struggle — as much as the security services are seen as a monolith, they are in fact infamously divided — or an attempt to dissuade the West from further weapons deliveries to Ukraine, since the arms would supposedly be used in strikes on Russian territory.
Symbolic space
But an attack on the heart of power carries a large symbolic, if not physical, price. It was in the domed Kremlin Senate that Putin staged the historic meeting with his security advisers that preceded the February 2022 launch of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Its symbolism is undeniable.
Regardless of who is behind the incursion, it is less likely to produce a rally-around-the flag effect than raise eyebrows over the Kremlin’s own defense system.
As yet, the most important military parade, in Moscow — broadcast live on Russian state television — is still on | Olga Maltseva/AFP via Getty Images
Comparisons are being made to when the 19-year-old German Mathias Rust landed a Cessna plane near the Kremlin during the Cold War. The fact that he managed to fly across the border unchallenged was a stark humiliation for Mikhail Gorbachev. Heads rolled among his defense staff as a result.
The timing of last week’s incident does not help either, coming right before the country puts on its usual display of military prowess for Victory Day on May 9.
Even before Wednesday’s strike, the situation was tense. Avoiding the use of the word “war,” which has been banned, dozens of Russian cities have canceled their military parades in order to not “provoke the adversary.” The Immortal Regiment, a hugely popular procession of people carrying photos of their relatives who fought in World War II, has been called off. Some places have even nixed their fireworks shows.
On the one hand, such changes to an important national holiday could drive home the message that Russians are at war with, as the Kremlin puts it, “terrorists.” But the knife cuts both directions.
“In the current context, the cancellation of the parades will be taken as yet another sign that things are going very badly,” Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter turned analyst, told the Echo Moskvy outlet.
While avoiding mass gatherings in cities close to Russia’s border with Ukraine might seem like a logical precaution, that is less obvious for those thousands of kilometers away in Siberia.
Red Square speech
Some wonder aloud whether certain cities might simply lack the military equipment for a parade. Or whether they might wish to stop people taking to the streets holding photos of their relatives who have died in Ukraine, thereby providing a visual of Russia’s wartime death toll.
As yet, the most important military parade, in Moscow — broadcast live on Russian state television — is still on. But the tension in the capital is palpable.
Red Square has been shut to the public for two weeks and streets have been barricaded.
Following Wednesday’s incident, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin immediately banned the use of drones, and dozens of other regions have since followed suit. Days in advance, Muscovites were already experiencing problems with their GPS signals.
Much will hinge on Putin. His yearly Victory Day speech on Red Square is one of the few moments when his whereabouts are known in advance.
After Wednesday’s security breach, some question whether he might reconsider.
But the optics of his absence would not be good, and chances are slim that the Kremlin would risk the psychological fallout.
And yet, the question of whether it is safe enough for the president to come out in public in central Moscow speaks louder than the sound of 10,000 men marching on Red Square.
LONDON — Britain must engage with China rather than isolate Beijing in a “new Cold War,” the U.K. foreign secretary will say Tuesday in a warning shot to Tory China hawks.
James Cleverly will set out the U.K.’s approach toward China in a long-awaited speech on Tuesday, weeks after the government’s updated Integrated Review of defense and foreign policy described relations with the emerging superpower as an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge.”
Cleverly is expected to set out a three-pronged approach for relations with Beijing — limiting Chinese involvement in sectors deemed critical for national security; strengthening ties with Indo-Pacific allies; and — most controversially — engaging with China directly to promote stable relations.
And in a message to the increasingly outspoken China hawks within his Conservative Party, the foreign secretary will warn against an era of open confrontation with Beijing that might harm the U.K.’s economic interests and limit the West’s ability to engage on shared challenges, including climate change and nuclear proliferation.
“It would be clear and easy — perhaps even satisfying — for me to declare a new Cold War and say that our goal is to isolate China,” Cleverly is expected to say, according to words shared by his department ahead of the speech.
“Clear, easy, satisfying — and wrong. Because it would be a betrayal of our national interest and a wilful misunderstanding of the modern world.”
Under pressure from Tory MPs, Rishi Sunak has toughened his approach toward China since becoming prime minister, ordering the sale last November of a Chinese-owned semiconductor plant in Wales under new national security legislation.
Cleverly has focused on building alliances with countries close to China, returning at the weekend from a tour of the Pacific — the first visit to some areas by a British foreign secretary since the 1970s. Britain recently signed deals to join a Pacific-focused defense pact with Australia and the U.S., and a large free-trade agreement with 11 Pacific rim nations including Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore.
But Britain is yet to join the group of large European countries sending their leaders on official visits to Beijing. French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen both visited China earlier this month.
Cleverly himself is expected to visit China later in 2023, but Downing Street has not floated any travel plans for the prime minister.
Cleverly’s remarks come as some British firms cut their ties with China and move their activity to other countries in preparation for a worsening in relations. The U.K. says it wants to continue helping British companies do business with China — but without entering strategic dependencies.
In his speech to the Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet, Cleverly will call on China to be more open about the intent behind its vast military expansion in order to prevent a “tragic miscalculation,” and say the U.K. and its allies “are prepared to be open about our presence in the Indo-Pacific.”
He will also send a strongly worded message on the need for the Chinese government to respect human rights within its borders, describing China’s repression of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang as an attempt to build “a 21st century version of the gulag archipelago.”
When a Chinese high-altitude balloon suspected of spying was spotted over the United States recently, the US Air Force responded by sending up a high-flying espionage asset of its own: the U-2 reconnaissance jet.
It was the Cold-War era spy plane that took the high-resolution photographs – not to mention its pilot’s selfie – that reportedly convinced Washington the Chinese balloon was gathering intelligence and not, as Beijing continues to insist, studying the weather.
In doing so, the plane played a key role in an event that sent tensions between the world’s two largest economies soaring, and shone an international spotlight on the methods the two governments use to keep tabs on each other.
Until now, most of the media’s focus has been on the balloon – specifically, how a vessel popularly seen as a relic of a bygone era of espionage could possibly remain relevant in the modern spy’s playbook. Yet to many military historians, it is the involvement of that other symbol of a bygone time, the U-2, that is far more telling.
The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.
Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected – and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.
Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.
That the CIA would be tight-lipped over what these American-built spy planes were doing is hardly surprising.
But the agency’s continued silence more than 50 years later – it did not respond to a CNN request for comment on this article – speaks volumes about just how sensitive the issue was both at the time and remains today.
The US government has a general rule of 25 years for automatic declassification of sensitive material. However, one of its often-cited reasons for ignoring this rule is in those cases where revealing the information would “cause serious harm to relations between the US and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the US.”
Contemporary accounts of what the planes were doing – by the Taiwan pilots who were shot down, retired US Air Force officersand military historians among them – leave little doubt as to why it would have caused a stir.
The planes – according to accounts by the pilots in a Taiwan-madedocumentary film and histories published on US government websites – had been transferred to Taiwan as part of a top-secret mission to snoop on Communist China’s growing military capabilities, including its nascent nuclear program, which was receiving help from the Soviet Union.
The newly developed U-2, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, appeared to offer the perfect vessel. The US had already used it to spy on the Soviet’s domestic nuclear program as its high-altitude capabilities – it was designed in the 1950s to reach “a staggering and unprecedented altitude of 70,000 feet,” in the words of its developer Lockheed – put it out of the range of antiaircraft missiles.
Or so the US had thought. In 1960, the Soviets shot down a CIA-operated U-2 and put its pilot Gary Powers on trial. Washington was forced to abandon its cover story (that Powers had been on a weather reconnaissance mission and had drifted into Soviet airspace after blacking out from oxygen depletion), admit the spy plane program, and barter for Powers to be returned in a prisoner swap.
“Since America didn’t want to have its own pilots shot down in a U-2 the way Gary Powers had been over the Soviet Union in 1960, which caused a major diplomatic incident, they turned to Taiwan, and Taiwan was all too willing to allow its pilots to be trained and to do a long series of overflights over mainland China,” Chris Pocock, author of “50 Years of the U-2,”explained in the 2018 documentary film “Lost Black Cats 35th Squadron.”
Like the U-2, Taiwan – also known as the Republic of China (ROC) – seemed a perfect choice for the mission. The self-governing island to the east of the Chinese mainland was at odds with the Communist leadership in Beijing – as it remains today – and at that time in history had a mutual defense treaty with Washington.
That treaty has long since lapsed, but Taiwan remains a point of major tensions between China and the United States, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping vowing to bring it under the Communist Party’s control and Washington still obligated to provide it with the means to defend itself.
Today, the US sells F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as part of that obligation. In the 1960s, Taiwan got the US-made U-2s.
The island’s military set up a squadron that would officially be known as the “Weather Reconnaissance and Research Section.”
But its members – pilots from Taiwan who had been trained in the US to fly U-2s – knew it by a different name: the “Black Cats.”
The author Pocock and Gary Powers Jr., the son of the pilot shot down by the Soviets and the co-founder of the Cold War Museum in Washington, DC, explained the thinking behind the squadron and its mission in the 2018 documentary film.
The other CIA unit in Taiwan
Coinciding with the Black Cat Squadron, the Black Bat Squadron was formed under the cooperation of the Central Intelligence Agency and Taiwan’s air force, according to a Taiwan Defense Ministry website.
While the Black Cats were in charge of high-altitude reconnaissance missions, the Black Bats conducted low-altitude reconnaissance and electronic intelligence gathering missions over mainland China from May 1956. It also operated in Vietnam in tandem with the US during the Vietnam War.
Between 1952 to 1972, the Black Bats lost 15 aircraft and 148 lives, according to the website.
“The Black Cats program was implemented because the American government needed to find out information over mainland China – what were their strengths and weaknesses, where were their military installations located, where were their submarine bases, what type of aircraft were they developing,” said Powers Jr.
Lloyd Leavitt, a retired US Air Force lieutenant general, described the mission as “a joint intelligence operation by the United States and the Republic of China.”
“American U-2s were painted with ROC insignia, ROC pilots were under the command of a ROC (Air Force) colonel, overflight missions were planned by Washington, and both countries were recipients of the intelligence gathered over the mainland,” Leavitt wrote in a 2010 personal history of the Cold War published by the Air Force Research Institute in Alabama.
One of the first men to fly the U-2 for Taiwan was Mike Hua, who was there when the first of the planes arrived at Taoyuan Air Base in Taiwan in early 1961.
“The cover story was that the ROC (air force) had purchased the aircraft, that bore the (Taiwanese) national insignia. … To avoid being confused with other air force organizations stationed in Taoyuan, the section became the 35th Squadron with the Black Cat as its insignia,” Hua wrote in a 2002 history of the unit for the magazine Air Force Historical Foundation.
At the Taiwan airbase, Americans worked with the Taiwan pilots, helping to maintain the aircraft and process the information. They were know as Detachment H, according to Hua.
“All US personnel were ostensibly employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Company,” Hua wrote.
The ROC air force and US representatives inked an agreement on the operation, giving it the code name “Razor,” Hua wrote.
He described the intelligence gained by the flights as “tremendous” and said it was shared between Taipei and Washington.
“The missions covered the vast interior of the Chinese mainland, where almost no aerial photographs had ever been taken,” he wrote. “Each mission brought back an aerial photographic map of roughly 100 miles wide by 2,000 miles long, which revealed not only the precise location of a target, but also the activities on the ground.”
Other sensors on the spy planes gathered information on Chinese radar capabilities and more, he said.
Between January 1962 and May 1974, according to a history on Taiwan’s Defense Ministry’s website, the Black Cats flew 220 reconnaissance missions covering “more than 10 million square kilometers over 30 provinces in the Chinese mainland.”
When asked for further comment on the Black Cats, the ministry referred CNN to the published materials.
“The idea was that black cats go out at night, and the U-2 would usually launch in the darkness. Their cameras were the eyes, and it was very stealthy, quiet, and hard to get. And so combining the two stories, they became known as the Black Cats,” the author Pocock said in the documentary.
The squadron even had its own patch, reputedly drawn by one of its members, Lt. Col. Chen Huai-sheng, and inspired by a local establishment frequented by the pilots.
But the Black Cats, like Powers Sr. two years before, were about to find out their U-2s were not impervious to antiaircraft fire.
On September 9, 1962, Chen became the first U-2 pilot to be shot down by a People’s Liberation Army antiaircraft missile. His plane went down while on a mission over Nanchang, China.
See photos showing US Navy recovering spy balloon from water
In the following years, three more Black Cat U-2 pilots were killed on missions over China as the PLA figured out how to counter the U-2 missions.
“The mainland Chinese learned from their radars where these flights were going, what their targets were, and they began to build sites for the missiles but move them around,” Pocock said.
“So they would build a site here, occupy that site for a while but if they thought the next flight would be going over here, they would move the missiles. It was a cat-and-mouse game, literally a black cat and mouse game between the routines from the flights from Taiwan and those air defense troops of the (Chinese) mainland, working out where the next flight would go.”
In July 1964, Lt. Col. Lee Nan-ping’s U-2 was shot down by a PLA SA-2 missile over Chenghai, China. According to the Taiwan Defense Ministry he was flying out of a US naval air station in the Philippines and trying to gain information on China’s supply routes to North Vietnam.
In September 1967, a PLA missile hit the U-2 being flown by Capt. Hwang Rung-pei over Jiaxin, China, and in May 1969, Maj. Chang Hsieh suffered a “flight control failure” over the Yellow Sea while reconnoitering the coast of Hebei province, China. No trace of his U-2 was ever found, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
Two other Taiwanese U-2 pilots were shot down but survived, only to spend years in Communist captivity.
Maj. Robin Yeh was shot down in November 1963 over Jiujiang, Jiangxi province.
“The plane lost control when the explosion of the missile took out part of the left wing. The plane spiraled down. Lots of shrapnel flew into the plane and hit both of my legs,” Yeh, who died in 2016, recalled in “The Brave in the Upper Air: An Oral History of The Black Cat Squadron” published by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.
He said that following his capture Chinese doctors removed 59 pieces of shrapnel from his legs, but couldn’t take it all out.
“It didn’t really affect my daily life, but during winter my legs would hurt, which affected my mobility. I guess this would be my lifelong memory,” Yeh said.
Maj. Jack Chang’s U-2 was hit by a missile over Inner Mongolia in 1965. He, too, suffered dozens of shrapnel injuries and bailed out, landing on a snowy landscape.
“It was dark at the time, preventing me from seeking help anyway, so I had to wrap myself up tightly with the parachute to keep myself warm … After ten hours when dawn broke, I saw a village of yurts afar, so I dragged myself and sought help there. I collapsed as soon as I reached a bed,” he recalled in the oral history.
Neither Yeh nor Chang, who were assumed killed in action, would see Taiwan again for decades. The pilots were eventually released in 1982 into Hong Kong, which at the time was still a British colony.
However, the world into which they emerged had changed greatly in the intervening years. The US no longer had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and had formally switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Though the Cold War US-Taiwan alliance was no longer, the CIA brought the two pilots to the US to live until they were finally allowed to return to Taiwan in 1990.
Indeed, by the time of their release CIA control of the U-2 program had long since ceased. It had turned the planes over to the US Air Force in 1974, according to a US Air Force history.
Two years later, the Air Force’s 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron and its U-2s moved into Osan Air Base in South Korea. Commander Lt. Col. David Young gave the location the “Black Cat” moniker.
Today, the unit is known as the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron.
But US U-2s continue to be involved in what might be characterized as “cat-and-mouse” activities and their activities continue to make waves occasionally in China. In 2020, Beijing accused the US of sending a U-2 into a no-fly zone to “trespass” on live-fire exercises being conducted by China below.
The US Pacific Air Forces confirmed to CNN at the time that the flight had taken place, but said it did not violate any rules.
Meanwhile, for those involved in the original Black Cats, there are few regrets – even for those who were captured.
Yeh told the documentary makers he had fond memories of life at 70,000 feet.
“We were literally up in the air. The view we had was also different; we had the bird’s eye view. Everything we saw was vast,” he said.
Chang too felt no bitterness.
“I love flying,” he said. “I didn’t die, so I have no regrets.”
MOSCOW — Every year, during the anniversary of the battle that turned back the Nazi assault on the Soviet Union, the city of Volgograd is briefly renamed Stalingrad, its Soviet-era name.
During this year’s commemoration, however, authorities went further. They unveiled a bust of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and paraded soldiers dressed as secret police in a bid to emphasize the parallels between Russia’s past and its present.
“It’s unbelievable but true: we are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who traveled to Volgograd to deliver a speech on February 2. “Again and again, we have to repel the aggression of the collective West.”
Putin’s statement was full of factual inaccuracies: Russia is fighting not the West but Ukraine, because it invaded the country; the German Leopards being delivered to Kyiv date back only to the 1960s; there’s no plan for them to enter Russian territory.
But the Russian president’s evocation of former victories was telling — it was a distillation of his approach to justifying an invasion that hasn’t gone to plan. These days in Russia, if the present is hard to explain, appeal to the past.
“The language of history has replaced the language of politics,” said Ivan Kurilla, a historian at the European University at St. Petersburg. “It is used to explain what is happening in a simple way that Russians understand.”
Putin has long harkened back to World War II — known in the country as The Great Patriotic War, in which more than 20 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died.
Invoking the fight against Adolf Hitler simultaneously taps into Russian trauma and frames the country as being on the right side of history. “It has been turned into a master narrative through which [Putin] communicates the basic ideas of what is good and bad; who is friend and who foe,” said Kurilla.
Putin’s announcement of his full-scale assault on Ukraine was no exception. On February 24, 2022, Russians awoke to a televised speech announcing the start of “a special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine.
“The official narrative was: ‘there are fascists in Ukraine, and we want to help people there. We are fighting for the sake of a great cause,’” said Tamara Eidelman, an expert in Russian propaganda.
On the streets, however, Russians seemed confused.
Asked in the early days of the war what “denazification” meant by the Russian website 7×7, one man suggested: “Respect for people of different ethnicities, respect for different languages, equality before the law and freedom of the press.”
Russia’s laws punish those seen as discrediting the Russian Armed Forces or spreading fake news by using the word “war” | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
Another interviewee ventured a different definition: “Destroy everyone who is not for a normal, peaceful life.”
The term “special military operation” at least was somewhat clearer. It suggested a speedy, professional, targeted offensive.
“There is a certain mundaneness to it — ‘yes, this is going to be unpleasant, but we’ll take care of it quickly,’” said Eidelman, the propaganda expert.
А week after the invasion, Russia’s laws were amended to punish those seen as discrediting the Russian armed forces or spreading fake news, including by using the word “war.”
Historical parallels
As the special military operation turned into a protracted conflict, and the facts on the ground refused to bend to Putin’s narrative, the Kremlin has gradually been forced to change its story.
Images of a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol or corpses littering the streets of Bucha were dismissed by state propaganda as fake or a provocation — and yet by spring the terms “demilitarization” and “denazification” had practically disappeared from the public sphere.
New justifications for the invasion were inserted into speeches and broadcasts, such as a claim that the United States had been developing biological weapons in Ukraine. In October, Putin declared that one of the main goals of the war had been to provide Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, with a stable water supply.
But the appeal to history has remained central to Putin’s communication effort.
While World War II remains his favorite leitmotif, the Russian president has been expansive in his historical comparisons. In June, he referenced Peter the Great’s campaign to “return what was Russia’s.” And during an October ceremony to lay claim to four regions in Ukraine, it was Catherine the Great who got a mention.
“Every so many months, another story is put forward as if they’re studying the reaction, looking to see what resonates,” said Kurilla.
The search for historical parallels has also bubbled up from below, as even supporters of the war search for justification. “Especially in spring and early summer, there was an attempt to Sovietize the war, with people waving red flags, trying to make sense of it through that lens.”
In the city of Syzran, students were filmed late last year pushing dummy tanks around in a sports hall in a re-enactment of the World War II Battle of Kursk. More recently, law students in St. Petersburg took part in a supposed restaging of the Nuremberg trials, which the region’s governor praised as “timely” in light of Russia’s current struggle against Nazism.
More recent statement by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Vladimir Putin himself have made the idea of “war” less taboo | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Throughout, the Kremlin has sought to depict the conflict as a battle against powerful Western interests bent on using Ukraine to undermine Russia — a narrative that has become increasingly important as the Kremlin demands bigger sacrifices from the Russian population, most notably with a mobilization campaign in September.
“Long before February last year, people were already telling us: We are being dragged into a war by the West which we don’t want but there is no retreating from,” said Denis Volkov, director of the independent pollster Levada Center.
The sentiment, he added, has been widespread since the nineties, fed by disappointment over Russia’s diminished standing after the Cold War. “What we observe today is the culmination of that feeling of resentment, of unrealized illusions, especially among those over 50,” he said.
Long haul
With the war approaching the one-year mark, the narrative is once again having to adapt.
Even as hundreds in Russia are being prosecuted under wartime censorship laws, slips of the tongue by top officials such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and even Putin himself in December have made the idea of “war” less taboo.
“We are moving away from a special military operation towards a holy war … against 50 countries united by Satanism,” the veteran propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said on his program in January.
According to Levada, Russians are now expecting the war to last another six months or longer. “The majority keep to the sidelines, and passively support the war, as long as it doesn’t affect them directly,” said Volkov, the pollster.
Meanwhile, reports of Western weapons deliveries have been used to reinforce the argument that Russia is battling the West under the umbrella of NATO — no longer in an ideological sense, but in a literal one.
“A year of war has changed not the words that are said themselves but what they stand for in real life,” said Kurilla, the historian. “What started out as a historic metaphor is being fueled by actual spilled blood.”
In newspaper stands, Russians will find magazines such as “The Historian,” full of detailed spreads arguing that the Soviet Union’s Western allies in World War II were, in fact, Nazi sympathizers all along — another recycled trope from Russian history.
“During the Cold War, you would find caricatures depicting Western leaders such as President Eisenhower in fascist dress and a NATO helmet,” said Eidelman, the expert in Russian propaganda.
“This level of hatred and aggressive nationalism has not been seen since the late Stalin period,” she added.
The anti-West sentiment in Russia has been fed by disappointment over the country’s diminished standing after the Cold War | Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
On Tuesday, three days before the one-year anniversary of the invasion, Putin is scheduled to give another speech. He is expected to distract from Russia’s failure to capture any new large settlements in Ukraine by rehearsing old themes such as his gripes with the West and Russia’s past and present heroism.
There may be a limit, however, to how much the Russian president can infuse his subjects with enthusiasm for his country’s past glories.
In Volgograd, proposals to have the city permanently renamed to Stalingrad have been unsuccessful, with polls showing a large majority of the population is against such an initiative.
When it comes to embracing the past, Russians are still one step behind their leaders.
