The Arctic is now open for business year-round after a large commercial ship sailed the Northern Sea Route from Jiangsu, China, to a Russian gas plant on the Arctic coast, for the first time ever during the month of February, when winter temperatures normally make the icy waterway impassable.
The tanker, owned by Russian maritime shipping company Sovcomflot, was able to make the trip through the Arctic sea ice because it is no longer frozen all winter due to human-induced global warming.
The ability to make this trip 365 days a year opens up vast new possibilities for the shipping industry, which carries 80 percent of the world’s cargo by volume and 70 percent of global trade by value. But it also raises concerns about how the scramble to capitalize on the new route could upend geopolitics.
To get a better understanding of what this new possibility in the Arctic means for the rest of the world, I spoke to Juliette Kayyem, Belfer senior lecturer in international security at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Kayyem served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, where she played a key role in handling major operations, including the administration’s response to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Kayyem reacted on Twitter to the news of the Arctic tanker’s historic trip, writing that the moment was “so consequential you can’t get your head around it.” To find out more about why she thinks this is so monumental, I gave her a call. Our discussion, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Jariel Arvin
What exactly has changed with this news?
Juliette Kayyem
In the past, trade had to work in a north-to-south way, just because the Arctic had never been navigational. Now ships can go from Europe to China on an east-west route. It’s going to put more competition on the north-south passages to retain their commercial activity.
Eighty percent of the world’s goods by volume are shipped by cargo, so this is no joke. For 100 years, cargo has essentially followed the same pathway through the Suez Canal. So, with days cut off transit time, as well as [not having to pay] all the taxes and fees that align with being a port city or canal like the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal — that’s all going to change.
Jariel Arvin
How does this change, for example, how a Chinese cargo ship would have traveled?
Juliette Kayyem
To do Europe alone, China would have gone from the Netherlands through the Suez Canal — south of India, up to China to Dalian, which is their main area. Now if you look at the route, it’s cut off by half. Now, you can go the northern route, east down. It’s mind-boggling.
Jariel Arvin
So, Russia and China are obviously going to be interested in moving goods up through that Northern Sea Route. Which other countries will be vying for a stake?
Juliette Kayyem
Japan, Vietnam, Russia, pretty much every country. Australia is going to want to go through there. I mean, why wouldn’t they, since it’s so much shorter? Now there’s going to be pressure and competition. Now you’ve just [opened up] a huge, huge competitive market.
Jariel Arvin
What about the US?
Juliette Kayyem
The United States, because we don’t really sign treaties anymore, is not signatory to the Law of the Sea. But we are a member of the Arctic Council, which is a sort of ad hoc [international] system to try to deal with everything in the Arctic, from who has access to what minerals to [how to manage] traffic.
Jariel Arvin
What do you think will be the impact of this new competition?
Juliette Kayyem
There are two pieces: the environmental piece and the geopolitical piece. For the environment, this is the equivalent of an ocean opening up. The waters are going to move in ways that they hadn’t moved before. The ice is melting in ways that mean that the water has to go somewhere, and that is going to cause sea level rise, impacting coastal cities throughout the world.
And the role of human activity in accelerating this change is undeniable. Global warming has impacted the Arctic considerably. As I’ve written for the Boston Globe, it was about a decade ago that things began changing up there in the sense that countries were positioning themselves to take over.
You’re going to start seeing cruise lines. It’s beautiful up there. So this is why even 10 years ago, I started to feel — anticipatory nauseousness is how I would describe it — anticipatory because we’ve known the opening of the Arctic to all sorts of traffic was going to happen, and nauseous because there’s no question that human-induced climate change was having a major impact.
Jariel Arvin
So what do you think the future holds for the Arctic in terms of geopolitics?
Juliette Kayyem
You’re going to have a lot of countries with a lot of interest, without a lot of governance, and with a lot of traffic. And that, to me as a security person, spells trouble.
Jariel Arvin
Why is that trouble?
Juliette Kayyem
Well, it sets off a number of questions which bring up national security concerns. One of them is, who gets what routes when? And who gets to drill where? So let’s say a bunch of geologists discover that there’s a massive oil patch much further out so that no country has ownership of the well. So who gets to drill?
Jariel Arvin
As of right now, who is in control of helping manage these international tensions in the Arctic?
Juliette Kayyem
These are the kind of issues that the Arctic Council is going to have to deal with. It is also going to have to enforce things like offshore drilling, mineral ownership, traffic, and who gets to go first, which are all tough issues. Accidents are a huge issue. What if there’s an accident? There are now going to be a lot of issues to address.
Jariel Arvin
Is there anything that can be done about this new reality?
Juliette Kayyem
I think this new reality will mean greater US engagement in the Arctic, so this will be a big test of leadership for the Biden presidency because this is an issue in which we need a counter to Russia and China.
This also will be a big moment for John Kerry, who was pushing for greater Arctic governance against a Republican Senate when he was secretary of state and couldn’t get it through. It’s something Kerry’s been focused on a long time. And now, wearing the environmental hat as Biden’s climate envoy, the potential for him to get it done is much greater.
President Joe Biden has been presented with three broad options for how to prolong or end America’s involvement in the 20-year Afghanistan War — and all three have significant drawbacks for the administration and the Afghan people.
Here’s what Biden’s military and intelligence advisers offered up in recent days, as reported by the New York Times and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, details of which I later confirmed.
The first option is to adhere to former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban, which would require Biden to withdraw all remaining 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan by May 1. The second is to negotiate an extension with the insurgent group, allowing American forces to remain in the country beyond early May. And third is to defy the Trump-Taliban pact altogether and keep fighting in Afghanistan with no stated end date.
Each plan has serious pitfalls, experts and US officials say.
If the US leaves in the next three months, it’s likely the Taliban will overrun the US-backed Afghan government and once again make life worse for millions of Afghans, especially women and children.
Staying in Afghanistan just a little bit longer would likely delay that takeover, but would also expend any diplomatic capital the US has left with the Taliban and keep US troops in harm’s way.
Finally, violating the terms of the agreement and remaining indefinitely will almost certainly lead the Taliban to restart its campaign, put on hold ahead of the May 1 deadline, to kill American service members in the country.
“These are all bad options,” said Asfandyar Mir, a Stanford University expert on the Afghanistan War.
Multiple US officials told me in recent days that the administration’s Afghanistan policy review is nearing its end, with one telling me they expect Biden to make a decision “very soon.”
“I don’t know which way the president will go,” said this official, who like others spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about a sensitive national security deliberation. Another person familiar with the Afghanistan discussions told me it’s clear a full withdrawal by May 1 is “off the table.”
Public statements from the Biden team offer additional clues as to which way Biden will lean.
Biden promised during the presidential campaign to bring home US combat troops from Afghanistan, but gave himself until the end of his first term to do so (though, importantly, this statement came before the Trump-Taliban deal). He also said he would still potentially keep a small US military presence in the country to continue counterterrorism operations against ISIS and al-Qaeda. That meant it was always possible Biden wouldn’t abide by the terms of the Trump-era deal.
Recent statements by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also suggest a full withdrawal may not be on the immediate horizon. A Pentagon summary of his comments during a NATO ministerial last Thursday said Austin had “reassured Allies that the U.S. would not undertake a hasty or disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
In comments to reporters the following day, Austin added, “[W]e are committed to a responsible and sustainable end to this war, while preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorist groups … that threaten the interests of the United States and our allies, and ensuring a just and durable end to the long-running conflict.”
The signal many are getting from Austin and others is that Biden will be the fourth president to prolong America’s engagement in Afghanistan, most likely by pushing for an extension to the deadline.
Biden still hasn’t made a decision, though, so it’s worth taking a look at the three options he has in front of him — and why each is fraught with risk and danger.
Option 1: Withdraw all 2,500 US troops by May 1
Few experts or US officials I spoke to believe Biden will adhere to the timeline laid out in the Trump-Taliban peace deal — either because Biden wants to seek a more lasting diplomatic solution to the war in Afghanistan or because his team fears an intensified civil war on the heels of a US withdrawal would make the administration look bad.
In January, Secretary of State Tony Blinken told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that the US supports diplomatic negotiations between the government and the Taliban. America’s hope is to help “achieve a durable and just political settlement and permanent and comprehensive ceasefire that benefits all Afghans.”
But those talks are barely underway and have little to no chance of ending by the May 1 deadline. Both parties hold opposite positions on key questions — among them, how much power can the Taliban have in Afghanistan’s government? — that likely won’t be reconciled in a few months. What’s more, the Taliban hasn’t stopped killing Afghans or curbed it’s relationship with al-Qaeda.
To ensure those talks proceed instead of stalling out, many experts believe a small American troop presence must remain in the country.
Still, there is a vocal contingent advocating for the US to finally withdraw from Afghanistan after 20 years of war.
“I support leaving by May,” said Adam Weinstein, who served as a Marine in Afghanistan and is now a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, DC. “The Afghanistan talks may fall apart if we leave, but they also will fall apart if we stay.”
Weinstein acknowledges that the Taliban will surely intensify its civil war with the Afghan government once the US departs, further destabilizing an already bad situation. But that’s likely to happen whenever America withdraws its forces, whether in May or later. “Leaving by May frontloads these risks while not risking American lives,” he told me.
Which leads to the second reason observers doubt Biden will stick to the May withdrawal timeline: Images of a renewed, bloody war after America’s withdrawal plastered on the front pages of newspapers would embarrass the Biden administration. Pressure would mount on the president and his team to reenter the fray to quell the violence, just like many pushed Obama to send US forces back into Iraq to defeat ISIS.
It’s therefore possible that leaving prematurely might lead the US to reenter the conflict again — perhaps with an even larger troop presence.
Weinstein told me he knows that’s a risk and hopes Biden would resist such pressure. There will be problems, but all this comes down to the fact that America hasn’t proven its ability to win the war against the Taliban, even with tens of thousands more troops in the country.
Today, the insurgents control more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001 when the US invaded, making it even harder to push for a military victory.
“You could kick the can down the road, or you could accept the limits of US control of ground realities in Afghanistan,” he said.
In other words, leave now and don’t look back.
Option 2: Negotiate an extension with the Taliban, then leave
This is the option most people I spoke with favor and believe Biden will choose.
They argue that withdrawing by May is simply too soon, but that staying indefinitely is also politically and militarily infeasible. Delaying America’s full withdrawal for a few months or even years, then, allows the peace process to play out and for an unhurried US exit from Afghanistan.
“It’s unquestionable that an extension should be negotiated,” said Laurel Miller, who was the acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration.
Simply put, the Afghan government and the Taliban won’t strike a deal by April, but they might if given enough time. Penning an agreement would allow officials in Kabul to lead their country without the major threat of violence, while also giving the Taliban some governing power and global legitimacy.
“There’s reason to believe the Taliban would genuinely negotiate and accept some kind of political settlement [that] satisfies their interests,” said Miller, who’s now at the International Crisis Group.
With such a deal in place, the US and its NATO allies could extricate themselves from Afghanistan without fear their absence would lead to more bloodshed.
This is what Ghani, Afghanistan’s president, and others close to him have been pushing for. After NATO last week said its 5,000 troops wouldn’t leave the country imminently, Ghani said their presence would help provide a “window of opportunity to accelerate the peace process.”
An extension was also the key recommendation in a congressionally mandated report earlier this month from the Afghanistan Study Group, an independent, bipartisan commission of experts co-chaired by retired Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, former Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, and US Institute of Peace President Nancy Lindborg.
But this Goldilocks option has flaws, too.
For example, it’s unclear whether the Taliban would even agree to an extension. Their messaging for America to date, Stanford’s Mir said, is “leave by May 1 or we fight you.” Biden therefore risks adding to the 2,400 dead Americans in Afghanistan if the US overstays its welcome.
And even if it does, staying beyond May 1 would mean Biden chose to prolong America’s engagement despite having a ready-made excuse for withdrawal. That would no doubt anger a lot of people, namely progressives and some on the right, who hoped the Democrat would finally bring the US war effort there to a close.
“What’s worse: Being accused of being too status quo, or being accused of taking risks and having ugly eventualities happen on your watch?” Miller asked, describing the question the Biden team is wrestling with.
There’s also a glaring weakness with this plan: There’s just no guarantee that the Afghan government and the Taliban will actually make a deal. After months or even years of talking, it’s possible neither side will make concessions to the other to hash out a comprehensive peace pact. If that’s the case, US troops will have remained in danger for little to no progress.
Still, experts believe there are ways the US can get the Taliban to agree to an extension and perhaps pave the path toward a negotiated deal. That could include lifting UN and other sanctions on the Taliban, working with Kabul to release some or all of the group’s 7,000 prisoners, and removing the group from the State Department’s terrorist list.
Each of those moves would be politically costly and may end up strengthening the Taliban without eventually striking an agreement.
But for some, taking bold steps to improve the chance of peace after so many years of fighting is worth the risk.
Option 3: Stay in Afghanistan indefinitely
Everyone I spoke with said this is by far the worst option. Continuing the war with no clear end date would keep US troops in harm’s way and further doom any prospects of a negotiated peace, since one of the key reasons the parties are talking is because America said it was leaving soon.
Plus, there’s little popular support in the US for continuing the mission in Afghanistan, as most polling shows Americans prefer a withdrawal sooner rather than later.
More than that, there’s just no clear path to victory in the war.
As mentioned above, the Taliban today controls more territory than it did when the US invaded in 2001. After 20 years of war, trillions of dollars spent, and tens of thousands of deaths, the US has only managed to achieve what Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, humbly described as “a modicum of success” in Afghanistan.
At this point, there’s little reason to expect that the US staying in Afghanistan indefinitely, spending billions more and risking more US lives, will magically improve that outcome. And doing so is just not desirable considering the coronavirus pandemic has killed 500,000 Americans, Iran nears the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, China grows in strength, domestic terrorism threatens the homeland, and more.
So why even discuss this option? It’s not that Biden would pick it, but that he might be forced into it if the limited extension (option 2) fails to actually produce a peace agreement.
Again, few think Biden will withdraw all US troops by May 1, which means he will be keeping US service members in the country with or without the Taliban’s approval. If he does it without their approval, that could lead the insurgents to attack and kill American personnel as they overtake major Afghan cities, perhaps even Kabul.
At that point, withdrawing from Afghanistan would be harder, experts say, because the administration won’t want to look like it’s running away from the fight. A return to a larger war, then, would likely ensue, leading to more death and woes for the millions of Afghans who’ve already suffered tremendously.
“If a negotiated extension fails, there’s not going to be a withdrawal,” said the Quincy Institute’s Weinstein.
If there were a perfect option, the US would have found it by now. It hasn’t, and that’s left Biden with three paths to take, each full of obstacles and risk. It’s a tough spot to be in, but sometimes the options a president has range from horrible to bad.
Starting in June 2019, the city convulsed with protests over a controversial extradition bill. That expanded into a pro-democracy movement that sought to push back against China’s efforts to further erode the city-state’s already tenuous autonomy, and the freedoms that went with it.
By June 2020, the power of those uprisings brought China’s full might down on Hong Kong, as Beijing implemented a draconian national security law that stifled dissent — or anything that looked even remotely like it in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party.
Do Not Split, an Oscar-nominated short documentary by filmmaker Anders Hammer, charts some of Hong Kong’s most tumultuous months of the pro-democracy uprising and its troubling, unclear end in the face of China’s crackdown. The story is told by the protesters and activists on the front lines, the young people who are trying to protect the freedoms of Hong Kong — freedoms that were supposed to be guaranteed until 2047 under the “one country, two systems” arrangement China agreed to when it took back control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997 — for as long as they can.
Even it’s a battle they know they are losing.
“It was very difficult to understand how this would work. How could this small group of young people fight China?” journalist and filmmaker Anders Hammer, the director of Do Not Split, told me. “At the same time, it was really something unique to watch how they work together. You could really sense that solidarity among the protesters, and a great deal of sacrifice and this communion feeling in the street.”
Do Not Split follows demonstrators to the edges of the protests: where they regrouped to recover from tear gas, where they camped out in a field after a clash with police at the City University of Hong Kong in November 2019.
The film also reveals just how explosive these protests became; frame after frame shows the escalation, from protesters shielding themselves with umbrellas from assaults of tear gas to protesters flinging firebombs at lines of police. (The full documentary is now available from Field of Vision.)
The Hong Kong protests were largely leaderless and anonymous, but the documentary follows a few characters closely, including Joey Siu, a student activist who, in the film, always seems to be hovering around the latest protest, observing and explaining what she’s witnessing, reckoning with what’s happening in Hong Kong in real time.
Siu, who is also a US citizen, decided to use her position as a student activist to try to lobby lawmakers abroad and bring attention to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy struggle, actions that became even riskier under the national security law. This fall, she made the decision to come to the United States and continue fighting for Hong Kong from America.
“It is always a struggle between staying and suffering with the others, or to leave and suffer on your own but to be able to do something. I made the choice,” Siu told me.
I called Siu to talk more about her experiences during the Hong Kong protests; how they have left her generation traumatized; and how the national security law has stifled the city she loves but is not giving up on yet.
Our conversation, edited and condensed, follows.
Jen Kirby
How did you first get involved in the extradition bill protests?
Joey Siu
It was, I would say, an accident. Every university in Hong Kong, we’ve got a student union, which represents the students and participates in all kinds of negotiations with the school and fights for the welfare of the students.
Right before the extradition bill movement broke out in Hong Kong, there was no one standing for the student union executive committee elections at my school. Then one of my friends said he was willing to be nominated as the acting president, and he asked, “Hey, Joey, are you willing to be the vice president?” I was pretty surprised when he approached me, because I never expected myself to be taking up the role.
I actually rejected him several times. I said, “No, I don’t feel like I can be good at this. I don’t feel like I’m a good choice for you.” But he insisted. So he convinced me, and I agreed to that. I was nominated by the Student Union Council right before the first protests on the 9th of June 2019, when the whole extradition bill movement broke out.
Then, when the movement broke out in Hong Kong, we realized that, as student leaders, we had the responsibility and the capacity to stand out and to do something. Alongside other university student unions, we had been organizing and encouraging people to participate in protests. We had been helping to allocate resources like safety goggles, gloves, and other protective gear.
That was how I started my activism. And then very soon, in July 2019, we realized that it is actually a leaderless movement, where we no longer need student leaders, we no longer need politicians, to guide us. We felt like, “Well, what can we do if we are no longer needed to organize protests and assemblies?”
And at that time, we found that the United States Congress was about to discuss the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. We felt like, as student leaders or as ordinary Hong Kong students, we might be able to provide a unique perspective on what was going on in Hong Kong and why it was so important for the international community to do something to help.
Since then, I have been more active in terms of international advocacy for Hong Kong. I had been flying around to different countries during 2019 — US to Canada, Germany, Brussels, the UK — to advocate for international solidarity with Hong Kong.
Jen Kirby
You said you got into it sort of by accident, but obviously you ended up being fully committed. What motivated you to do that?
Joey Siu
Personally, I have always been very candid on social issues, especially Hong Kong politics. I have always paid very close attention to what is going on in Hong Kong, locally and also internationally. That is the fundamental reason why I felt like I should be doing something for the people I care about and for the place I love.
So getting involved in international advocacy for Hong Kong, I felt like that might be the thing that I could do the best for Hong Kong. We all have different roles. Some of us are front-line protesters. Some of us are voluntary first-aid providers. Some of us are citizen journalists.
Every Hongkonger who loves the city, who believes in those values, is trying to find a way to devote ourselves. So I would say this is how I contribute. This is how I devote myself to defend the values that I care for.
Jen Kirby
Did you continue participating in the protests on the front lines?
Joey Siu
I had been starting to go on international advocacy visits ever since September 2019. However, during the time when I was still in Hong Kong, or where I came back to Hong Kong, there were still protests and assemblies, and I would still go to them because I felt like, as I have said, everyone is trying to do our best to devote to the city.
Jen Kirby
You mentioned that you took your first international trip in September 2019. That feels like a really pivotal time for the movement. In early September, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam rescinded the extradition bill, but the protests continued, and the world was really paying attention by that point. How did that affect your activism abroad?
Joey Siu
Well, at the very beginning, of course, we were protesting to take the extradition bill amendment down and to stop the Hong Kong government from again violating the will of the people. However, I think it was in late July 2019 — especially after the Yuen Long attack [Ed. note: A mob, believed to have ties to organized crime, violently attacked protesters] — when I think a lot of Hong Kong people realized and awakened to the unlimited power of the Hong Kong government and also the Chinese government.
From my personal experience, at the very beginning, we had been putting a lot of focus on telling people what the extradition bill amendment was about and why it was so important for us to take it down.
However, as we have realized that we are actually protesting against the Chinese communist regime, we have been shifting our focus in terms of telling people why we are doing that. Why it is so important for all of us to stand in solidarity in terms of containing the rise of the regime in Beijing. Why we have to pay attention to Hong Kong.
Jen Kirby
In the film Do Not Split, you say you had hoped to be a teacher, but you don’t believe it can be a path for you anymore because of your outspokenness. When did you realize that your activism in Hong Kong also meant a change in your future, and your identity?
Joey Siu
Well, I mean, I have always known that I want to be a person who could bring change to society. And that is one of the reasons why I would like to be a teacher, because I felt like by being a teacher, I could actually bring change to society by advocating and teaching my students the correct values, or the values that I believe in. So I felt like I have always been able to understand myself; it’s just that I did not expect myself to be going out to the public or to be changing society or bringing change to other people by becoming an activist.
Actually, the moment when I realized that I can no longer be a teacher is when I first found that my personal information was being posted online, on Facebook and on other social media websites, by the pro-Beijing camps. When I first saw myself being criticized by a lot of mouthpieces in the media who support the Beijing regime, that is when I realized, “Wow, this is going to bring a very big change to my life.” And that what I’d expected to do in the future might not be happening.
Jen Kirby
In the documentary, you also describe yourself as traumatized, and you say it’s a feeling you share with other protesters. Can you talk a little about that?
Joey Siu
I think it’s not only me, but most of those Hong Kong protesters who actually participated in protests, or have been following what is going on in Hong Kong, might have a sense of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] after going through all these experiences.
Especially because when we participate in protests, we very frequently witness police brutality going on and you can often see your fellow protesters, or people you know, getting beaten up by the police force with the batons, with tear gas, with pepper spray — all these kinds of weapons that they use to suppress us.
Participating in the protests is also very traumatizing because of the feeling that you are being chased by a whole bunch of police armed with so many kinds of lethal weapons that they might use and point at you. It’s really, really frightening. The kind of feeling where you have to escape.
The thing that I really couldn’t forget about was the death of the first protester in Hong Kong, which happened in June 2019. His surname was Leung. Mr. Leung jumped, or fell, from a building in [the] Admiralty [district], to protest against the government and to use his death as an awakening to call upon Hongkongers not to give up protesting against the evil regime.
That night, I was in a meeting with other student leaders. During meetings, we put our phones outside of the room so as to avoid any kind of information leakage. Before we put away our phones, we knew that Mr. Leung was on the building in Admiralty. He was standing there, protesting, holding a board. I mean, nobody would expect him to fall. Nobody expected that to happen.
After our meeting, we had a break, and I took my phone and I turned it on. I saw all this news, I saw the live broadcast, and I saw all these videos of him in a yellow raincoat, falling down from the building. I just couldn’t forget about it.
Jen Kirby
That seems really tough, and because this movement was so organic, I get the sense that there was a real sense of connection among all the protesters — it felt as if you all knew each other. I understand how that can weigh on you.
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Joey Siu
In Hong Kong, we describe our fellow protesters, or people who have the same kind of beliefs as we do, as 手足 (sau zuk,) which in English means your arms and your legs. In other words, it means you are brothers and sisters.
A lot of protesters really [feel] that way. Even though I might not know the one who was standing beside me during a protest, I do believe he is actually my family member. I do believe that we have that connection.
I think that is the reason why I also feel very traumatized or have the sense of PTSD, after going through all this. Because when I was witnessing police brutality or arrests, I felt like that is my brother or my sister or a family member of mine. It is not just a random Hongkonger. I actually see the connection with the victim.
Jen Kirby
Given that deep sense of connection, and how powerful the movement was, it’s hard to believe how much has changed now, after China passed the national security law. What is your sense of how the law has changed the pro-democracy movement?
Joey Siu
The situation was deteriorating in a very rapid way, because after the imposition of the national security law, you see a lot of arrests made by not only the Hong Kong Police Force but also by [their] national security agents.
From those arrests, you can actually see how restricted the level of freedom of expression and freedom of speech and freedom of press is in Hong Kong — I mean, not to mention organizing or participating in a face-to-face protest or assembly — that it is not possible under the national security law.
Even when you’re expressing your own political beliefs online, or organizing very, very, absolutely peaceful democratic primaries in Hong Kong, or even when you’re trying to participate in institutionalized elections, they can still find a way to prosecute you under very serious criminal offenses, which could not only lead to 10 years to life in prison but could also allow the Hong Kong government to extradite you to mainland China [for prosecution].
So, yes, after the imposition of the national security law, Hong Kong’s situation just worsened so rapidly, in such a vigorous way, to where you can feel a sense of fear in the city. You can feel how frightened or concerned or worried people are, because we do not know what is going to happen.
We don’t know who is going to be arrested. We don’t know what kind of things that we say could lead us to being arrested. We don’t know, if we’re arrested, how many years are we going to spend in jail? And we don’t even know whether we are going to spend our time in Hong Kong or in mainland China.
Before the national security law, the Hong Kong government was trying to rule by fear through the police force. After the national security law, they have been ruling by fear by arresting everyday protesters in Hong Kong.
Jen Kirby
Were you ever targeted specifically, or arrested at any point?
Joey Siu
I was not arrested; however, I was pretty frequently being followed by — I don’t know if they were national security agents or the Hong Kong Police Force, I simply knew that somebody was following me, but I couldn’t verify their identity.
That was pretty terrifying, because at that time, I was working alongside several friends to help another friend of ours with his democratic primary election campaign. We often worked until pretty late at night, and sometimes I found that I was being followed from the underground station to my home. Usually there would be minibuses; however, when it’s too late, there are no minibuses and the only way for me to get back home would be to walk.
It is pretty terrifying, because you don’t know who they are. You don’t know if they’re Hong Kong police or the national security agents. You don’t know if they’re really coming to get you; you don’t know whether you will be sent to a police station. I mean, it would be the best scenario to be sent to a police station in Hong Kong instead of being sent directly to mainland China. But you just do not know.
Jen Kirby
When did you start to notice someone was tailing you?
Joey Siu
I started being followed ever since June 2019, when I first came out as a student leader, but that was not so frequent, and that was not so frightening because you still felt like, “Oh, they are the Hong Kong police,” and if you’re arrested by them, you would be sent to a police station. You were still certain about the kinds of procedures that would happen if you were really being arrested. However, after the national security law in July 2020, you don’t even know what’s going to happen after an arrest.
Jen Kirby
That’s terrifying. Do you know people who were arrested under the national security law?
Joey Siu
A very close friend of mine, she had been involved pretty actively with a student group that advocated for Hong Kong independence that was suspended after the imposition of the national security law. However, still, she was arrested by national security agents in the Hong Kong Police Force for inciting secession of state.
That was a pretty early arrest under the national security law, and that was pretty terrifying. Because at that point, nobody knew what was going to happen. We didn’t know whether the court or the police force was going to allow them to get bail and then to come back home after being investigated for 48 hours. At that point, everything was so uncertain.
But after I left Hong Kong, things just kept getting worse. Like, every candidate that I met during the democratic primaries was arrested.
Jen Kirby
I can remember when the law was first passed, there was so much confusion about how it would be implemented, and I’m sure that uncertainty was terrifying. Can you give an example now of what happens when someone is arrested — for example, what did happen to your friend who was arrested for secession of state?
Joey Siu
She was arrested before I left Hong Kong. When she was arrested, she was investigated by the National Security Department [the Chinese government’s security agency in Hong Kong, established after the passage of the national security law] and also by the Hong Kong Police Force, for more than 30 hours, if I remember. Then her traveling documents were confiscated; she could not leave Hong Kong, and she has to report to the police station every month. Very recently, the police force returned to her traveling documents, telling her that you no longer have to come and report to us.
For the people that I know who were arrested a few weeks ago, during the massive arrests there, they were being investigated, their traveling documents were being confiscated, they had to report to the police station, they cannot leave Hong Kong.
That is pretty much the procedure. However, there are, of course, other more serious cases in Hong Kong; for example, Jimmy Lai, who was arrested under the national security law, and his bail was revoked.
My sense is the Hong Kong government and Chinese government have been trying to manipulate the law as a way to silence the dissidents in Hong Kong, because after being arrested, people cannot leave Hong Kong.
So their only choice would be to stay in Hong Kong. And to stay in Hong Kong and not to be arrested again, you cannot be so vocal as you used to be. You have to be more careful with things you say, the things you do, and everything.
Jen Kirby
So it sounds like, if I’m understanding you correctly, that many people are being arrested, but they’re in a holding pattern — they have to report to the police, but they can’t leave. Rather than handing down punishment, it sounds as if authorities are trying to just exert control.
Joey Siu
It’s kind of like silencing them. I also feel that it’s kind of a warning from the Chinese communist regime to not only the arrestees themselves, but also to the other voices in the society. They’re trying to use arrests to warn those vocal voices in Hong Kong not to say anything anymore, and also to warn the other ordinary, everyday Hong Kong citizens that, “Hey, we’re now arresting everyone from all of the political spectrum, for anything you say. So you people better mind your words.”
Jen Kirby
When did you decide that you needed to leave? What made you finally say, “I can’t stay in Hong Kong anymore”?
Joey Siu
Well, it’s pretty complicated. I was actually born in the States, and I moved to Hong Kong when I was very young because my parents wanted me to learn Chinese and also the Chinese culture. Ever since my family found out that I was becoming a student activist, they’d been trying to get me to leave Hong Kong because they felt like I might be arrested and that it wasn’t safe for me to stay in Hong Kong. And that if I have the choice of going back to the States, why don’t I?
They’d always planned to move back to the States when I completed my undergraduate degree. We had that plan in the future. But then they felt like there might be a need for me to return to the States earlier.
But I never thought about leaving Hong Kong because I felt that is the place where I grew up, where my friends are, where I really had the connection.
However, in June 2020, when they were talking about imposing the national security law, I began receiving a lot of warnings and advice from people I know, and all the advice I got was like, “It’s better for you to leave Hong Kong because not only are you a student activist, you’re also an American citizen.”
At that time, it was catching everybody’s attention that the Chinese communist regime was making use of “hostage diplomacy” [threatening to detain foreign citizens unless their governments accede to China’s demands] to make the other governments bow down to them. So they felt like, well, it makes it more dangerous, being an American citizen, so you should leave Hong Kong. Perhaps not permanently — but just to leave and see how things are going. If it is safe, you could still come back.
At first I felt like, “Well, nothing has been going on yet.” The national security law had not been imposed yet, and even if it is imposed, we don’t know what is going on; maybe they would not be making active use of it. So I still decided to stay until September 2020.
Because of the position I was in, the national security law stopped or paused my ability to make connections with people from other countries, because I didn’t want to get myself into big trouble for colluding with foreign forces.
But then there was the case of the 12 Hongkongers who tried to flee the city, but were captured by the Chinese authorities and then detained.
After that, I started to reconnect with human rights organizations and foreign politicians that I’ve met in the US, Germany, the UK, and Canada, to ask them to speak out on behalf of the 12 Hongkongers, and to encourage them to implement a “lifeboat scheme” to help Hong Kong protesters to relocate to other countries.
I had been secretly attending virtual meetings, and they’d been trying to persuade me not to. But then I asked them, “If I’m not going to talk to you, who in Hong Kong will?” And then after that, I felt like, “Well, perhaps by leaving Hong Kong, I could be making the best use of my abilities and the connections that I built over 2019.” So I decided to leave.
It is always a struggle between staying in a city and then somehow dying or suffering with the city, or to choose to leave the city and to suffer on your own but to be able to do something. I made the choice.
Jen Kirby
Do you see Hong Kong as dying right now?
Joey Siu
I would say the city itself is dying. You can actually see that Hong Kong is gradually becoming another mainland city of China.
However, I would say that I’m pretty optimistic when it comes to the Hong Kong people, because Hong Kong people are trying to sustain the movement in so many creative ways. The city itself might be dying. However, I would say the spirit of the Hong Kong people will be long-lasting.
Jen Kirby
This is a very tough question, but in talking to protesters, I always got the sense that they understood they might lose to China eventually — in 2047, for example, when the “one country, two systems” agreement was set to end. But the goal was to try to protect Hong Kong’s democratic values until that point, as much as possible. Do you think the success of that movement, in some ways, backfired? That it hastened China’s decision to clamp down on Hong Kong?
Joey Siu
Before the whole pro-democracy struggle started, a lot of Hong Kong people still felt like we might be able to maintain and to live well under the “one country, two systems” structure at least until 2047.
The pro-democracy struggle is an awakening call for a lot of Hong Kong people. I feel like the majority of Hong Kong people, no matter whether you are on the pro-democracy side or pro-Beijing side, we have all realized the fact that Hong Kong is not going to maintain a high degree of autonomy, or the same lifestyle, until 2047. I think this is a thing that all of us can agree on. Everybody can witness the encroachment and change in Hong Kong.
Most of the people in Hong Kong right now do not believe anything the Chinese Communist Party government says anymore. They’re not going to respect any kind of promises. Even if the “one country, two systems” agreement is part of an international treaty, they are not going to respect it.
Jen Kirby
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Capitol attack in January in the US, and how it contrasts with Hong Kong’s fight for democracy. How do you see the erosion of democracy in the US as affecting the struggle in Hong Kong?
Joey Siu
A lot of Hong Kong people have been relying or giving very high hopes on the United States to take action to defend Hong Kong or to stand up to China. However, with all the things going on, politicians in the US will, of course, prioritize those domestic issues.
With our plates being so full with different domestic issues of the transition, with all these kinds of issues in regards to racial justice, to gender equality, to climate change, to the bipartisanship around two parties, it would be understandable that people here in the US might not be paying so much attention to Hong Kong and China issues as they used to do in 2019 or 2020.
However, I always believe that the urgency of tackling the China challenge or the China threat will always be one of the most important issues of American politicians.
I also felt like it is definitely another lesson for Hongkongers to learn, because we have always admired the US for being the world’s greatest and most respected democracy. However, witnessing all the kinds of things to happen in the US in the past month, we have realized that no democracy in the world is a perfect one.
Twelve of the richest European soccer teams came up with an ingenious scheme to make even more money: Instead of taking part in a longstanding tournament with poorer and mostly weaker teams, they would create their own exclusive “Super League” to attract global interest, prestige, and cash.
There was just one problem: Fans hated the idea, and their revolt caused what would’ve been the biggest threat to the game in decades to dissipate after just 48 hours.
On Sunday, 12 of the richest teams from England, Spain, and Italy — the richest, mind you, not necessarily the best — announced they would create the European Super League. It would likely replace a more inclusive, preexisting annual tournament, the Champions League, where the top teams from European countries’ leagues compete to determine the continent’s strongest squad.
Then came the backlash, leading all six British teams and reportedly two Spanish teams to back out of the proposal after just two days of relentless fan pressure. The chair of one of them is on the verge of stepping down. And all clubs plan to discuss abandoning the idea, at least for the time being.
How did such an idea spark so much passion and backlash? After all, who wouldn’t want to see the most prominent clubs play each other regularly? And how did the Super League fall apart so quickly?
Consider this admittedly imperfect analogy: Imagine if the 12 richest NBA teams decided to form their own playoffs, regardless of how they performed during the regular season and without the league’s approval. That wouldn’t be fair to poorer teams who might’ve earned a playoff spot, and also goes against how NBA fans expect things to run.
That’s kind of what happened here. The 12 original teams — AC Milan, Arsenal, Atlético Madrid, Chelsea, FC Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Tottenham Hotspur — wanted to create a top-tier competition they’d all automatically qualify for regardless of their actual on-field performance, and would reap the financial rewards of without having to share any of that revenue with those pesky smaller teams.
The road to the Super League proposal was paved with greed, but also genuine panic caused by declining revenues during the coronavirus pandemic. And other than executives poised to make big bucks, few were happy about the plan. The backlash from fans, current and former players, and football/soccer media was thus fierce.
The idea is “nothing less than the death of football as we know it,” Germany’s leading sports monthly, 11 Freunde, wrote this week. “[It’s] an attempt to turn a sport which millions love, into a weekly circus show in order to squeeze the last shitty cent into the pockets of the superrich.”
That anger — which also came from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron — led Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Tottenham in England, and possibly FC Barcelona and Atlético Madrid in Spain, to back out of the Super League. What’s more, the chair of Manchester United, one of the teams most strongly pushing for the elite tournament, reportedly will resign on Tuesday under pressure.
While fans were angry at the idea in general, what they were really upset about was that the scheme proved that the decades-long ethos of soccer — a game for anyone and everyone, where prestige is won and lost on the pitch, not bought — isn’t really valued by the executives running things.
“I earnestly felt sick when I heard the news” of the Super League proposal, said Nate Scott, editor of USA Today’s For the Win sports website and fan of Fulham, a middling London team. “European soccer relies on the tenet that ‘anything is possible,’ on any given night you have your chance to upset the giants. It seems like those days are ending.”
For the moment, they’re not. Rarely, if ever, do you see a plan hatched by billionaires fail so fast against the will of the people.
The European Super League was all about money
Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper noted that the idea for a Super League has floated around for decades. On Monday, he cited this passage written by journalist Arthur Hopcraft in 1968: “There was a general expectation a little while ago of what was called a Super League, in which all the leading European clubs would play, breaking away from the domestic leagues in their own countries. It has not materialised.”
On Sunday, it materialized.
So why did it happen now? Experts say the answer is money.
Simply put, the Covid-19 pandemic — and the need to keep people from gathering in large groups, like at, say, soccer stadiums, to prevent the virus’s spread — hit the world’s soccer teams hard, but particularly the biggest clubs.
They’re the ones with the highest payrolls since they have the best, most expensive players; and they’re the ones with the largest, costliest stadiums to maintain. Without fans in attendance because of the pandemic, these teams’ balance sheets sank more and more into the red.
The Champions League — the yearly best-of-Europe tournament run by UEFA, the continent’s governing soccer body — attracts tons of cash for teams in normal times. But these aren’t normal times, and so the body’s ability to help teams cover expenses has dwindled.
UEFA told clubs last October that “nearly $600 million has been lost due to the pandemic, and payouts to clubs will be reduced over the next five seasons,” according to ESPN’s Gabrielle Marcotti at the time.
This is hurting Europe’s richest clubs. Consider the plight of my beloved FC Barcelona, one of the 12 “founding members” of the Super League. Most of its troubles are due to its own gross mismanagement, but the coronavirus didn’t help, which is why it considered creating the tournament in the first place.
A former Barcelona board member told the New York Times in March that the pandemic will cost the club around $500 million in revenue. That’s a problem when the team’s annual salary bill hovers around $770 million, equal to about 74 percent of the team’s pre-coronavirus income.
And it gets worse: “In its most recent financial reports, Barcelona announced a loss for the year of $117 million. It estimates that it already has lost $246 million as a result of the pandemic,” the Times reported.
The other teams that wanted the Super League are in similar situations. So instead of relying on the hard-hit Champions League for cash, they decided to create their own league to try to recoup costs as quickly as possible.
The thinking was that a tournament composed of Europe’s top teams will attract more TV contracts and sponsorships, and those teams wouldn’t have to share revenues with UEFA or other smaller clubs who make it into any given year’s Champions League tournament. Within a few years, the goal was to have the Super League replace the Champions League altogether.
That smacked of a plot to make money at the expense of others, a common move by the game’s elite. JPMorgan Chase even committed around $4 billion to get the Super League up and running.
The league’s proponents didn’t exactly hide that that was their true motivation, either. “Here at Real Madrid we’ve lost a lot of money, we are all going through a very bad situation,” the team’s president and Super League chair Florentino Pérez said this week. “When there is no profit, the only way is to play more competitive games during the week. The Super League will save clubs financially.”
The Super League clubs also argued that it would be more fun for fans to watch two famous teams play each other during every round instead of, say, a team from Stockholm, Sweden, against a team from Budapest, Hungary, in the Champions League.
It seems they didn’t actually bother to run that idea past the fans first, though. If they had, they might have avoided the massive public outcry their proposal sparked.
After news of the Super League proposal broke, UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin threatened that any player who participates in the new competition wouldn’t be allowed to represent their national team in tournaments like the World Cup. “UEFA and the footballing world stand united against the disgraceful self-serving proposal we have seen in the last 24 hours from a select few clubs in Europe that are fueled purely by greed above all else,” he said.
It’s unclear if he actually wields such power, experts say. But the threat alone seemed to have been effective. Ander Herrera, a Spanish national team member who previously played for Manchester United, denounced the move as “the rich stealing what the people created.” And Mesut Ozil, who used to play for Arsenal and Germany’s squad, tweeted “Kids grow up dreaming to win the World Cup and the Champions League — not any Super League.”
What is clear is that current and former players, and most importantly the fans, hated that the Super League could become a reality.
Soccer isn’t supposed to be about the money. It’s supposed to be about the game.
While professional soccer started off in the 1800s as a game for the elite, it fairly quickly became a popular game. By popular, I don’t mean famous or trendy, I mean “popular” in the sense that the game was meant for anyone to play and watch.
“The history of these clubs is that they were local, and plumbers would play and fans would support their town,” said USA Today’s Scott. “It was almost a point of civic pride.“
That’s no longer the case. Soccer in recent years has become big business, which is to be expected as it’s the world’s most popular game. Its players, such as Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Juventus’ Cristiano Ronaldo, are some of the most recognizable and bankable figures in sports. The game’s rise has led to massive endorsement deals, TV contracts, major sponsorships, and multimillion-dollar profits for well-managed clubs.
Europe’s strongest leagues thus attracted billionaire investors, many of whom became owners and turned local clubs into ultra-rich international franchises and brands.
Many of these investors didn’t come from the club’s local fanbase, or even the countries where the clubs were located, but rather from places like the US, Russia, and the Middle East. Generally speaking, their main goal was less to give local fans something to be proud of, and more to fund win-at-all-cost machines with global reach and revenue streams.
That’s long been a source of conflict. Gary Neville, once Manchester United’s captain and now a commentator for Sky Sports in the UK, railed against this trend during a television hit. “It’s pure greed. They’re impostors,” he said about foreign owners caring only for big bucks. “They’re nothing to do with football in this country … The fans need protecting.”
This has also long angered local fans, due to an increased gap between the game’s richer and poorer clubs. When the Champions League came around, it was typically the wealthiest clubs competing for the title, because they could buy the best players and managers, while teams with smaller coffers typically failed to go deep in the tournament.
And that, experts note, is why the Super League bothers fans so much. “I know these clubs are always going to be in the Champions League competing for the title anyway,” Scott said. “The deck is already stacked so much in these mega clubs’ favor, so [the Super League] just feels gratuitous, it feels piggish.”
Think about a team like Atalanta from Bergamo, Italy — one of the regions hardest hit early in the pandemic. The club is by no means destitute, but it’s not among the wealthiest, especially compared to those trying to form the Super League. And yet the team made it all the way to the Champion League’s quarterfinals during the 2019-20 season, nearly defeating a superstar-filled side from Paris.
Atalanta’s success became a global story, with the New York Times even covering how the team’s performance gave Bergamo’s faithful something to cheer about. “The suffering of the people mourning for their families cannot be relieved,” Maria Beatrice Stasi, the director general of the Pope John XXIII hospital, told the Times. “Sport cannot overcome that grief. But for the city as a whole, a city that has suffered a lot, it offers hope.”
The creation of a Super League would make a story like Atalanta’s less likely. While the tournament would allow for some non-founding European teams to play in the league, the number of spots for them would sharply decline. In essence, the chance for a dream run — like when a low seed makes it to the Final Four in college basketball — would basically go away.
That strips out what many fans love about the game: that any team on any given day has the chance to beat the big clubs. “That’s what’s leading to my heartbreak,” said Scott. “I should be an adult about this, but I still believe in the fairytale.” His Fulham, after all, once beat mighty Juventus in an international competition, a game that continues to live on in team lore.
Scott clearly wasn’t the only one heartbroken. Even fans of the teams creating the Super League railed against the decision. Outside Anfield, Liverpool’s stadium, fans put up a banner reading “LFC Fans Against Super League.” Current and retired players, including former Manchester United and England national team captain Rio Ferdinand, also decried the move. “It’s a disgrace, it’s a war on football,” he said on British television this week.
And Trent Alexander-Arnold, a star player for Liverpool right now, posted his displeasure with the Super League on Twitter, saying he and others were speaking out “For the fans. For the city.”
That backlash caused the six British teams to decide that the trouble of a Super League wasn’t worth the rancor. Chelsea’s fans, after all, blocked the team’s bus as it approached its home stadium ahead of a Tuesday game. It took a club legend, former goalkeeper Petr Cech, to get the crowd to let the bus through.
It seems like the Super League may be dead for now, but there’s always the chance that it could come back. If it does, the defining feature of the sport will die as a new elite league forms — but not if the fans have any say in the matter.
President Joe Biden’s pick to be the third-highest civilian leader at the Pentagon is already facing a tough confirmation challenge a week before his hearing — and it’s mostly because he staunchly supports the Iran nuclear deal.
A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me the lawmaker is concerned about Colin Kahl assuming the position of undersecretary of defense for policy. The person in that job oversees and develops how the Defense Department handles military threats from China, Russia, terrorist groups, and, yes, Iran.
However, the spokesperson added that “it’s still early in the process and there are still many steps before Sen. Inhofe makes a final decision.” When I asked if the senator would vote “no” if the confirmation vote were held today, the spokesperson reiterated that it’s “too early to say.” Politico was first to report Inhofe’s stance.
This whole situation is bigger than a lawmaker standing against the president’s nominee, though in a 50-50 Senate, any Republican opposition — especially from a prominent senator — spells trouble.
It’s really about how the 2015 Iran deal will be a perpetual source of tension between Republicans, some Democrats, and the White House for the next four years.
Political fights over the Iran deal have already begun
Congressional sources say Inhofe is following through on his threat, made in a Foreign Policy op-ed this month, to make Biden nominees favorable to the Iran deal sweat their confirmations.
The president should “reconsider his nomination to senior national security positions of former Obama administration officials who were directly involved in negotiating the original Iran deal, as well as those who promoted it,” the senator wrote.
Kahl is the exact kind of person Inhofe was talking about.
As a top Middle East official at the Pentagon and Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration, Kahl helped shape the nuclear pact known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal, simply put, had the US lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe curbs on Tehran’s nuclear work.
Out of government, Kahl spent time blasting the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the agreement in pursuit of a maximum pressure policy toward Iran.
“This a dangerous delusion,” Kahl wrote in a 2018 Foreign Affairs article. The Trump administration believed they could “force Iran to accept a better deal—one that eliminates the JCPOA’s sunset clauses, dismantles a significant portion of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, ends Iranian support for terrorism and regional militancy, and addresses the regime’s systematic violation of human rights at home.”
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“It won’t,” Kahl continued. “Trump may hope to isolate Tehran, but it is Washington that finds itself largely alone.”
Kahl’s advocacy, and general Democratic support for the nuclear accord, has rankled Republicans for the past six years. Their overall view is that the Iran deal made Tehran stronger after sanctions were lifted, and that it did nothing to curtail the regime’s support for terrorist groups or its missile program.
In myriad conversations I’ve had, congressional Republicans cite these and other reasons for why they’re skeptical of Kahl’s nomination. (They also note Kahl was at the Pentagon serving in a key Middle East policy position when ISIS surged in Iraq in 2015, shortly after US troops left the country.)
But Democrats, including top members of the Biden administration, say the JCPOA was a targeted accord that put Iran’s nuclear work “in a box.” Only then, with the threat of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon off the table, could the US begin to try to convince Tehran to end the other aggressive aspects of its foreign policy.
The general belief was that the Biden administration would work quickly to rejoin the deal, especially since the president promised America’s reentry on his watch. But so far the US has been cagey in the process, holding firm that it won’t lift sanctions Trump reimposed until Iran stops enriching uranium beyond the pact’s caps.
Experts say that’s for two reasons. One is a clear-eyed assessment by Biden’s team that it can’t just lift financial penalties and hope Iran comes back into compliance with the accord, though they’re willing to talk to Tehran about a way forward. The other is that holding firm signals to Republicans that the Democrats in charge aren’t too eager to rejoin the agreement.
That underscores just how rancorous the policy debate over that issue remains and how the yawning gap between the two parties will continue to color America’s Iran policy in the years to come.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the Senate Armed Services Committee chair, told reporters on Wednesday that he’s “hopeful” Kahl can get through the confirmation process. “The committee hearing will be absolutely critical and crucial because he’ll have an opportunity to explain his positions, and then my colleagues will make a judgment.”
But that judgment won’t be about Kahl personally or his experience to do the job. It’ll be about what he represents.
This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook.Explore all the stories here.
DAEGU, South Korea — Jo Hye-min stepped off the train and into a situation she had only seen in movies: a completely, and eerily, empty station.
It was February 2020, when the threat posed by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was only starting to become clear in much of the world. But the situation in Daegu was already dire: Hospitals were overwhelmed and on the brink of collapsing. Hundreds of people believed to have been exposed to the virus were being isolated in private rooms. A nurse’s association in Daegu issued a plea for volunteers to help.
“It felt like war had broken out,” Jo says, and the 28-year-old nurse enlisted. The national disease control agency called her at 10 pm, asking if she could be in Daegu by 9 am the next morning. She dropped off her cat with a friend and made the 60-mile trip from her home in Busan. When she arrived at the isolation facility, she was told it would be at least a month before she could leave.
Jo was joining a frantic, all-out effort by South Korean officials to contain a burgeoning epidemic.
A woman in her 60s, who would later become known as Patient 31, had tested positive for Covid-19. Public health authorities learned she was a member of a secretive religious movement and attended services in the days before being diagnosed, potentially exposing more than 1,000 people.
South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the infected and the potentially exposed — to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading any further.
It was a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate. And it worked. Within a week of Patient 31’s diagnosis, the country was performing the most Covid-19 tests in the world; it implemented perhaps the most elaborate contact tracing program anywhere; and it set up isolation centers so thousands of patients could quarantine.
As other countries saw their outbreaks spiral out of control, measures like these helped South Korea keep Covid-19 in check. On March 1, South Korea had about 3,700 confirmed cases; Italy, the first hot spot in Europe, had 1,700 and the US had just 32 cases, though its dismal testing meant the virus was likely spreading unsurveilled. By the end of April, Italy had topped 200,000 cases; confirmed cases in the US were already above 1 million. South Korea still had fewer than 11,000. Adjusted for population, South Korea’s first wave of coronavirus cases was about one-tenth as big as that in the United States.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the US was considered better prepared than any country in the world to stop an infectious disease outbreak. But the first months of the pandemic response in the US were marked by now-familiar stumbles. The virus escaped containment. While South Korea tested, traced, and isolated, the US struggled, a critical early failure that cost lives.
No country had a perfect response to the pandemic. Every approach came with trade-offs and caveats, and even success stories can go awry in the face of global, exponential growth. But around the world, nations took successful steps to limit the pandemic’s damage. We talked to Jo and other South Koreans as part of Vox’s Pandemic Playbook series, which will explore the successes — and setbacks — in six nations as they fought the virus.
South Korea’s early, decisive action was crucial. South Korea was one of the first countries where Covid-19 was seen outside of China, before much was known about the virus at all. It seemed at high risk for an unstoppable outbreak — and instead, it staved off disaster. To date, the US ranks 10th in its total cases per capita; South Korea ranks 145th. Though it has been slower to vaccinate its population than world leaders like the US, South Korea is still seeing fewer than 700 new cases per day on average; the United States, meanwhile, is averaging more than 70,000.
“South Korea was able to flatten the epidemic curve quickly,” researchers from Harvard and Seoul National University wrote in a review of the country’s response. Among the top reasons for its success: “conducting comprehensive testing and contact tracing and supporting people in quarantine to make compliance easier.”
Testing capacity quickly expanded. Contact tracing began. And at the isolation center, Jo settled into a new routine, calling up to 50 patients a day to check on them. If they fell sick, she had no treatment to offer. Nobody knew what would work. They had one option: test, trace, and isolate.
Patients lapsed into depression. They had nothing to do but watch TV and eat out of their lunchboxes; some people would vomit when they took their daily Covid-19 tests, administered through the nose. In the most extreme cases, a patient would stop responding to the nurses’ calls. A nurse in protective gear would enter the room and try to provide the person with more direct emotional support.
“I could see the patients started to lose it mentally and emotionally,” Jo said. “I was always on alert, and the emotional care was really difficult for me.”
The strategy was not without its costs, and not all of its components may be universally applicable; Americans especially already have a deep distrust of the government and government surveillance. And South Korea has made mistakes. In some cases, public officials leaked patients’ personal information. Civil rights advocates say the government unconstitutionally overreached to track people’s locations. Clusters continue to pop up, and businesses still operate at limited capacity.
But the country’s response saved lives. Thousands of health care workers and millions of everyday South Koreans made the sacrifices necessary to prevent the kind of mass death seen in much of the Western world. To date, fewer than 2,000 South Koreans have died from Covid-19. The country has never issued an official stay-at-home order; subway trains and buses have been mostly packed with commuters, and people have been working in their offices as usual since last spring. Masks are commonplace, but otherwise, Covid-19 has not altered the fabric of everyday life in South Korea the way it has in much of the Western world.
Five years earlier, an outbreak of the MERS virus, which appeared to be even more lethal than Covid-19, led to strict social distancing protocols. The country took action after that crisis so it would be better prepared for the next outbreak.
“I think back then, Koreans didn’t realize that new infectious diseases can be a threat to all of us,” Park Young-joon, a top official at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), says. “These experiences led to a change in attitude.”
They were determined never to be caught off guard again.
After a deadly failure, South Korea reformed its public health system
In December 2019, about two dozen of South Korea’s top epidemiologists and health officials gathered at the KDCA for a training exercise. The scenario: A hypothetical coronavirus had originated in China, and a family of four was bringing the new respiratory virus into South Korea from Hong Kong.
After the exercise, an internal review singled out the importance of using GPS and credit card data to track contacts with the infected patients. Another idea proposed during the simulation would also prove prescient: The country should develop testing materials that could be quickly adapted to any new coronavirus.
The country committed to running these pandemic war games after it was threatened by two of the most frightening respiratory pathogens to appear in the 21st century.
During SARS-1, in 2003, South Korea was considered a model for its decisive response. Just three people died.
Then came MERS, an even deadlier coronavirus, in 2015.
A man in his late 60s visited several Seoul-area hospitals and health clinics before he was diagnosed with MERS. He was likely the country’s patient zero, and he infected other patients and medical workers over a 10-day period. The outbreak, the largest outside the Middle East, led to 186 confirmed cases and 38 deaths, and highlighted weaknesses in the country’s contact tracing and quarantine programs.
A year earlier, a very different disaster — the sinking of the Sewol ferry that killed more than 300 people — sparked outrage at government incompetence. South Koreans were losing faith in the government’s ability to handle a crisis. In the wake of MERS, public officials were criticized for failing to apply the lessons of SARS-1. People wanted something done.
“People freaked out,” Kelly Kim, general counsel at Open Net Korea, a civil rights group, says. “If something bad happens, they always blame the government and ask the government to do something about it. The easiest thing is making a law.”
The government passed a total of 48 reforms after MERS, all toward the goal of being better prepared for the next pandemic. The country committed to a playbook: test, trace, and isolate. Crucial changes were made to the system for contact tracing — the process where health workers talk to infected people and get a list of those they were in recent contact with, and then work outward, asking those contacts to get tested and isolate themselves.
But that system only works if the patients are forthcoming. During the MERS outbreak, one man had reportedly lied to health workers about his presence at a conference attended by 1,000 other people.
“It put the whole country into this crisis,” Park Kyung-sin, a professor at Korea University Law School, says. “The lesson was clear: Location tracking has to be done on a mandatory basis.”
The post-MERS changes passed by the national legislature authorized federal agencies to access credit card transactions, cellphone location data, even CCTV footage if needed. People could be fined for breaking quarantine. The number of infection control staff and isolation units was increased.
There was a culture change, too. Public health officials started running the periodic outbreak simulations to test their readiness. And Park Young-joon read daily status updates on emerging diseases.
A few weeks after the pandemic simulation, one of those reports came from Wuhan, China, noting an outbreak of aggressive pneumonia. At first, he didn’t take the reports of an unknown respiratory virus too seriously. But then he learned the Chinese government was locking down the entire city. That was when he first believed it would spread to South Korea.
“I realized this disease was different,” he says. “We felt it was just a matter of time.”
When Covid-19 hit, South Korea put its new protocols in action
There were still only four confirmed Covid-19 cases in South Korea on January 27, 2020, when government health officials gathered representatives from more than 20 medical companies in a conference room in Seoul’s biggest train station.
The message was simple: We need tests for this dangerous new virus, as soon as humanly possible, and we will approve yours quickly if it works.
After the MERS scare, the government budget for infectious diseases nearly tripled in five years, spurring a boom in the biotech sector. Some of that new funding was spent on research and development for testing kits.
A week after the train station meeting, on February 4, South Korea approved its first Covid-19 test. The same day, in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration okayed a testing kit designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US test would prove unreliable, setting efforts back by weeks. South Korea’s was swiftly validated at more than 100 laboratories. Companies were soon shipping thousands of test kits to labs and hospitals across the country.
By March 1, South Korea was performing more than 10,000 tests every day. The US couldn’t even manage 100. When adjusting for population, it wouldn’t be until mid-April — when South Korea’s outbreak was under control — that the US would finally overtake Korea in total tests performed.
The surge in testing capacity came just in time. Patient 31 was about to figure into the country’s first known superspreader event, which would stretch Korea’s ability to rapidly test for Covid-19, trace the contacts of infected people, and isolate them.
On February 17, the patient, a woman in her 60s, tested positive for Covid-19 and was interviewed about her recent movements. Korean officials quickly realized they had a crisis in the making.
The woman had traveled between Seoul and Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city, in the days before testing positive. She also attended services at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, an insular Christian group based in Daegu.
Park Young-joon, as the head of epidemiological investigations at the KDCA, was quickly dispatched to Daegu. The government set up testing centers all across the area, including drive-through sites that could perform three times as many tests as regular clinics. After public pressure, the church group handed over a list of its members for contact tracing. Conscripted military personnel were called in to help.
Within days, hundreds of church members had tested positive. Park Young-joon decided the best way to contain the outbreak was to isolate everyone who may have been exposed. Thousands of people, tracked down through security footage and phone data, were urged to self-quarantine. The government struck a deal with Samsung and LG to transform their training dormitories into isolation centers for people deemed at higher risk. Noncompliance came with a hefty fine: more than $8,000 US.
The call went out to nurses like Jo Hye-min, pleading for volunteers to staff the isolation centers. More than 3,000 patients would enter the facilities during the month of March.
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The country’s outbreak quickly leveled off. After averaging more than 500 new cases every day during the first week of March, the rate of daily new cases slowed dramatically. Over the first week of April, South Korea saw about 500 new cases total.
“We did an impossible task,” Jo says. “It was as though we built the Great Wall in a week.”
But Covid-19 wasn’t gone.
The next big scare arrived a month later, in early May: a cluster of infections linked to the Itaewon nightclub district. The clubs had reopened on April 30 — and by May 6, several cases were confirmed among people who had partied at one of them.
Jang Hanaram, a member of the military doing contact tracing work in Seoul, was put on the case. Jang says he was soon working 24 hours a day while sleeping in the bunk bed in his office. His days were a blur of phone interviews: He estimates that at the height of the effort, he was making more than 200 calls without a break.
Tracing contacts from the Itaewon outbreak added an extra degree of difficulty: Some of the nightclubs were favored by the LGBTQ community. There is still a lot of discrimination against LGBTQ people in South Korea, and people were not always forthcoming about where they’d been and whom they’d been in close contact with for fear of being outed or outing others.
One man, Jang says, lied to him during a contact tracing interview. But he and his team had other options. He could pull the man’s credit card and GPS data instead.
“Even when people weren’t so cooperative, we can find out where this person went and when,” Jang says.
By the end of May, using cellphone location data, South Korean authorities had identified nearly 60,000 people who had spent at least 30 minutes in the vicinity of the Itaewon nightclubs between April 30 and May 6.
Those people were simply urged to get tested. But another 1,200 deemed to be at higher risk of exposure were required to self-quarantine while being monitored by the government. Those patients checked in with health workers over a smartphone app; the government also sent them groceries and toiletries, and offered them psychological counseling.
Ultimately, the Itaewon cluster was linked to just 246 cases, and overall caseloads stayed well below what was seen in Daegu. The country didn’t see a second significant wave until late August, ignited by the protests of another church group.
But the extraordinary phone surveillance required to identify the 60,000 possible contacts in Itaewon has come under scrutiny from civil rights advocates, who saw some of their fears about the powers granted to the government in 2015 coming true.
“This was not the use envisioned by the people who passed the law after the MERS outbreak,” Park Kyung-sin says.
Privacy advocates worry about how much information the government can get — but it’s a “lonely fight”
South Korea’s epidemic response is distinct from that of the US and almost every other country in the world in one important way.
In the US, disease investigators must rely on interviews and, in theory, opt-in phone tracking apps, though those have struggled to attract enough users to be effective. In South Korea, cooperating with contact tracing isn’t done out of altruism, though everybody we spoke to stressed that South Koreans do feel a strong sense of civic responsibility. It’s the law — and if you refuse to comply, the authorities can get your financial or location data anyway. No such legal obligation exists in the US.
“The right to collect and use very personal information was an essential part of the [2015] legislation,” Park Young-joon says.
South Korea’s government has stretched that authority as far as it can go during the current emergency — beyond what is legally permissible, according to some civil rights lawyers we spoke with.
During the Itaewon outbreak, for example, the public health authorities didn’t just notify the people who had come into close contact with the patients who later tested positive. They used phone location data to alert anybody who was in the area of their potential exposure, which South Koreans focused on privacy rights saw as a serious overreach.
Park Kyung-sin explains the difference with an analogy about how police might investigate a crime: Normally, investigators get a warrant to follow specific people, targeting specific phone numbers.
But what South Korea did in Itaewon, he says, was more comparable to the National Security Agency surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden. Anybody who was within a certain area, no matter the individual risk of exposure, had their location data scooped up by the government.
“When that’s done against your consent, that is a problem,” Park Kyung-sin says. “We are not really fighting the law but the use of the law.”
One man who lied to contact tracers after the Itaewon outbreak was a teacher who worried about the consequences if people found out he was gay. Because he misled investigators, he was arrested and sentenced to six months in jail.
A couple of months after the Itaewon outbreak, Park Kyung-sin and his colleagues at Open Net Korea filed a constitutional challenge against the government’s use of the 2015 laws, asking for restrictions on mandatory location tracking and clear commitments from the government about deleting information.
And yet, broadly speaking, the public has accepted the measures. About nine in 10 South Koreans said in May 2020 that they supported disclosing patient location information. Attitudes may be changing as the pandemic drags on — Park Young-joon said he and his colleagues have noticed a decline in support — but most people continue to comply.
“Most Koreans are willing to compromise their privacy for their life,” Kelly Kim at Open Net Korea, the civil rights group, says. For privacy advocates, “it’s been a really hard fight, a kind of lonely fight.”
South Korea’s system worked because it acted early
South Korea’s citizens don’t regard the country’s response as perfect. They have endured their share of strife.
Park Jeong-uk, a pub owner in Seongnam, saw his monthly revenue drop by 50 percent during a small wave of cases in August. A winter surge that necessitated more social distancing measures was even harder. He had to let two part-time workers go, and has taken out bank loans he’ll have to start paying back soon. He lost a lot of sleep.
But he’s feeling pretty optimistic these days.
“Despite the shortcomings, I agree the Korean government did their best, given the circumstances,” Park Jeong-uk says. “And Koreans did an excellent job cooperating with the government. Most people trusted the government and followed the protocols.”
In some ways, South Korea simply may have lucked out. It is almost like an island, sharing only a militarized land border with North Korea, making it easier to isolate and monitor incoming travelers. Its people were better acquainted than most with social distancing measures, having lived through MERS. There is generally a lot of government surveillance that may have inured people to their private actions being fodder for public health monitoring.
Contact tracing alone isn’t a panacea. The US struggled on the first step in the test-trace-isolate process, when the first CDC testing kit failed, and that allowed the virus to spread undetected. By the time testing was closer to adequate levels, infections were so widespread it would have been extremely difficult to conduct comprehensive contact tracing, especially without the extraordinary tools available in South Korea.
Testing, tracing, and isolating is a good way to put out small fires, as the preferred metaphor among epidemiologists goes. Once the whole forest is ablaze, it loses its utility.
But that is also the point. South Korea saw a small fire spring up in Daegu in February 2020 and focused the full power of the government on stamping it out — then watched to ensure no new sparks would create a conflagration. Those efforts succeeded.
“We’ve been training for this,” Jang Hanaram says. “We are in this together; our community comes first. Koreans have really stepped up.”
Jun Micheal Parkis a documentary photographer and filmmaker from Seoul. He has extensively covered South Korea’s Covid-19 response.
This project was supported by the Commonwealth Fund, a national private foundation based in New York City that supports independent research on health care issues and makes grants to improve health care practice and policy.
For decades, South Africa was under apartheid: A series of laws divided people by race. Then, in the 1990s, those laws were dismantled. But many of the barriers they created continue to divide South Africans by skin color — determining their quality of life, access to jobs, and wealth. Racial division was built into the fabric of cities throughout South Africa, and it still hasn’t been uprooted.
That’s partly because while apartheid was the culmination of South Africa’s racial divisions, it wasn’t the beginning of them. That story starts closer to the 1800s, when the British built a network of railroads that transformed the region’s economy into one that excluded most Black people — and then made that exclusion the law.
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To understand how this long history still impacts South Africans around the country today, watch the video above. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on our YouTube channel.
The United States has an aggressive new commitment for fighting climate change: cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels in less than a decade.
The announcement came at the White House’s Earth Day summit on Thursday, where 40 world leaders met virtually to discuss and announce their new ambitions for curbing greenhouse gases.
“The United States isn’t waiting; we are resolving to take action,” said President Joe Biden on Thursday, highlighting his plans for investing in agriculture to store carbon in soil, making electric vehicles, capping pipelines that leak methane, and building green hydrogen plants. “By maintaining those investments and putting these people to work, the United States sets out on the road to cut greenhouse gases in half by the end of this decade.”
The new target is a step forward for the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after China. And it’s meant to signal to the rest of the world that the US is jumping back into the 2015 Paris climate accord with both feet after withdrawing in late 2020.
Some climate change activists and analysts are arguing that it’s not enough. And there are already some misleading claims about the target that have taken root.
To put it in context, here are some key things to know.
What is an NDC? And what makes the new US climate target so special?
Under the 2015 Paris agreement, countries agreed to limit warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to average global temperatures before the industrial revolution in the 1800s. The agreement also has a secondary target of limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees C.
To achieve that goal, every signatory to the accord (nearly every country in the world) is required to act. But it’s voluntary, and every country gets to set their own targets.
Those self-imposed targets are known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. From the outset, it was clear that the first round of NDCs that countries came up with wouldn’t be enough to meet the Paris goals. But the idea was that over time, as technology improved and as urgency mounted, countries would become more ambitious.
The United States plays an outsize role in the process as the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, but also as the country that played a dominant role in shaping the Paris agreement to begin with. Previous attempts at organizing international climate agreements fell apart for many reasons, but a major hurdle was US objections to setting binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. The US also opposed letting some countries, particularly developing countries, off the hook for their emissions. Hence why every country has to produce an NDC but gets to set its own target.
But when the US officially exited the Paris climate agreement in November, it became the only country to back out, which was particularly frustrating for countries that joined and came up with targets at the US’s behest. So the new, more ambitious commitment from the US (following Biden’s reentry into the agreement in January) is an important way to rebuild trust.
The US issued its first NDC back in 2015. It aimed to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below the level of emissions produced in the year 2005. The new target aims to bring the US 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
According to the White House, these new goals are in line with keeping average warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“As we look at the trajectory, the question for us very much has been: How can you make it consistent with getting on track to hold a temperature increase to less than 2, well less than 2, and to try to keep 1.5 degrees in sight alive? And that looks like it is consistent,” said a senior administration official on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
Beyond the impact on warming, the goal could spur countries that don’t already have comparable goals to step up their own ambitions.
“That is an extraordinary step that should be commended, and emulated by everyone,” said Christiana Figueres, one of the main negotiators of the Paris climate agreement, in a statement on Thursday.
US officials, however, were vague about exactly how the country is mapping its route to its new climate goals. But a key component is going to be Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan. The proposal aims to ramp up clean energy and electric vehicles, and facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels, but it still needs to become bills that can be approved by Congress.
The US’s new climate target is not a doubling of ambition or halving of current emissions
While Biden framed the new commitment as cutting US emissions in half, there are some critical caveats.
Again, this is not the first US commitment to curb greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris agreement. The initial pledge made under President Obama was aimed at 2025. The new NDC is aimed at 2030.
If the US were to simply meet its previous commitment, it would be on track to reduce emissions roughly 38 percent by 2030. So the new target is actually a 12 to 14 percent increase from the previous goal, not a doubling. And, to be clear, the US is currently not on track to meet its previous NDC, let alone the new one.
The other thing to keep in mind is the baseline. The US target is pegged to 2005, a year when annual US greenhouse gas emissions peaked above 6 gigatonnes. By 2020, emissions had fallen by roughly 21 percent compared to 2005, to 5.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, although the Covid-19 pandemic fueled the unprecedented drop in emissions last year.
Emissions are expected to rise again in 2021 as the economy recovers. All of this is to say that the 50 to 52 percent reduction target is relative to where the US was 16 years ago, not where it is today, when emissions are lower. The new target is closer to a 42 percent reduction from 2021.
It’s the biggest US commitment yet, but it still may not be big enough
On one hand, if the US were to meet these new goals, it would still likely be the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter by the end of the decade. On the other hand, the new target represents an enormous reduction in emissions, about 2.1 gigatonnes in nine years. This is almost the entire output of India in a given year. It’s a vast financial, technological, and political challenge.
While meeting this goal will help bring the world closer to limiting global warming this century, it doesn’t fully match the US contribution to the problem. The US currently produces about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions but is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions.
Climate change is a cumulative problem; if one were to add up all the greenhouse gases the US has emitted, the US would top every other country. The largest share of human-produced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now came from the US.
The energy that created those emissions helped the US become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The US also continues to have some of the highest per capita emissions of any country. Now the impacts of climate change are here, raising sea levels, fueling extreme weather, and wreaking havoc across economies, and the countries that contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most.
That’s why some activists are arguing that the new NDC doesn’t go far enough. “As the world’s biggest historical emitter, the US has a responsibility to the most vulnerable nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, in a statement. He added that a fairer US target would be closer to a 70 percent cut in emissions, coupled with financial support to developing countries suffering under climate change.
US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry envoy acknowledged on Thursday that there is still more the country could do to limit warming beyond the new NDC. “Is it enough? No. But it’s the best we can do today and prove we can begin to move,” Kerry said.
The US could pull this off, but it won’t be easy or cheap
The US has already seen a general decline in its greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade, but that came largely from replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas, which produces about half of the emissions per unit of energy. And before the Covid-19 pandemic, US emissions were beginning to creep up again.
President Biden, however, has set a target of making the entire US economy carbon neutral by 2050. In the meantime, he wants an entirely carbon-free power grid by 2035. That means even the natural gas plants will have to go, or will have to add carbon dioxide scrubbers. And to curb emissions by 50 percent relative to 2005 by 2030, the US would have to start taking drastic action right away.
A number of researchers and environmental groups have already analyzed whether such a target is feasible (see this Twitter thread highlighting the various papers out there looking at the new target). Almost all of them show that it is possible with our current technologies.
For example, an analysis by Energy Innovation found that the US would have to phase out all of its remaining coal power plants and halve its natural gas use over the next decade. The country would also have to dramatically increase its energy efficiency and electrify vehicles. The analysis doesn’t lay out a figure for the outlay but estimates that these changes would add $570 billion per year to the US economy via creating new jobs and avoiding pollution and health problems associated with fossil fuels.
According to a December study by researchers at Princeton University, the US is poised to spend $9.4 trillion over the next decade on energy infrastructure on its current trajectory. But getting on a path of net-zero emissions would just add an additional $300 billion to the price tag, raising it by 3 percent.
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Other research has shown that the health benefits alone from getting off of fossil fuels are massive and would more than pay for the transition toward clean energy.
However, while there are massive health and economic benefits in switching toward clean energy, those benefits are dispersed over the whole population and spread out over years. To start on the journey toward the new 2030 target, the US would have to start making major investments and changes now — phasing out coal, building electric vehicle chargers, restoring ecosystems that can sequester carbon, pricing carbon, funding research and development to solve thorny technology problems, and setting new efficiency standards. That’s a political challenge, and it remains to be seen whether Biden has enough political capital to start this process.
The United States is not the only game in town
To limit climate change, the whole world needs to act not only to zero out greenhouse emissions but also to begin withdrawing them from the air by the middle of the century.
At the Earth Day summit, other world leaders highlighted their own new targets. Canada is now aiming to reduce its emissions 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Japan is aiming for 44 percent under the same benchmarks. And China is expecting that its emissions will continue to rise over the next decade but will peak before 2030 and decline thereafter, reaching net-zero emissions by 2060.
These new commitments will be formalized at the next major international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, later this year. In total, about 59 countries have set some sort of benchmark for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
But the total global commitments to date are still not enough to reach the 1.5-degree target, and that target is slipping further out of reach every day. That’s going to be even more challenging as lower-income parts of the world develop. About 13 percent of the planet’s population, 940 million people, still don’t have access to electricity. They desperately need energy, and fossil fuels are often the only sources available to them.
And many of these targets are set decades in the future. It’s the interim targets where the rubber will meet the road and more tangible results will be visible, yet many countries are reluctant to commit to specific climate benchmarks over the next five to 10 years.
So a fresh round of more ambitious targets for limiting emissions has to be met with real-world action and meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is intense global momentum for action on climate change, but that has yet to bear out in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have now crossed 420 parts per million, the highest levels in human history. The planet has already warmed by at least 1 degree Celsius, and those effects are already visible in the ice caps, torrential rainfall, and wildfires. Some countries are certainly more responsible for climate change than others, but as Biden said, “no nation can solve this crisis on their own.”
This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook.Explore all the stories here.
Every January or February, Le The Linh and his wife pack their children into their car and drive 80 miles to visit family in Haiphong, a port city east of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, for Lunar New Year. But this time, as they reached the last stretch of the Hanoi-Haiphong Highway, a police officer approached and pointed them toward a group of guards in face masks under a makeshift tent. It was one of 16 checkpoints erected around Haiphong to control travel into and out of the city ahead of the Tet Festival holiday.
They joined a lineup of other travelers, nervously waiting for their turn in the rain. When they reached the front, the officials asked for proof of their travel plans, residency, and Covid-19 status.
“Don’t worry!” Linh exclaimed tensely. He could show, with his identity card, that they lived in an area that had no coronavirus cases recently.
The family was among the lucky ones let through. Travelers from areas near Haiphong that had recently recorded Covid-19 cases got turned away; a group of young people on motorbikes who tried to circumvent the checkpoint were arrested; still others chose not to travel at all, opting to meet family over FaceTime or Zalo (Vietnam’s answer to WhatsApp).
As the pandemic took hold last year, travel restrictions quickly proliferated — they were the second-most-common policy governments adopted to combat Covid-19. According to one review, never in recorded history has global travel been curbed in “such an extreme manner”: a reduction of approximately 65 percent in the first half of 2020. More than a year later, as countries experiment with vaccine passports, travel bubbles, and a new round of measures to keep virus variants at bay, a maze of confusing, ever-changing restrictions remains firmly in place.
But few countries have gone as far as Vietnam, a one-party communist state with a GDP per capita of $2,700. The Haiphong checkpoints timed for Tet were the equivalent of closing off Los Angeles to Americans ahead of Thanksgiving — within a country that was already nearly hermetically sealed. Last March, the government canceled all inbound commercial flights for months on end, making it almost impossible to fly in, even for Vietnamese residents.
Today, flights are limited to select groups, like businesspeople or experts, from a few low-risk countries. Everybody who enters needs special government permission and must complete up to 21 days of state-monitored quarantine with PCR tests. (Positive cases are immediately isolated in hospitals, regardless of disease severity.)
This strict approach to travel, global health experts say, is directly connected to Vietnam’s seeming defeat of Covid-19. Thirty-five people have reportedly died in total, and a little more than 2,700 have been infected with the virus during three small waves that have all been quickly quashed. Even on the worst days of the pandemic, the country of 97 million has never recorded more than 110 new cases — a tiny fraction of the 68,000 daily case high in the United Kingdom, which has a population one-third smaller than Vietnam, or the record 300,000-plus cases per day only the US and India managed to tally.
Last year, Vietnam’s economy even grew 2.9 percent, defying economists’ predictions and beating China to become the top performer in Asia.
In this series, the Pandemic Playbook, Vox is exploring the Covid-19 strategies used by six nations. Vietnam’s travel restrictions — supported by other measures, including enforced quarantining and contact tracing — help explain the country’s apparent mastery over the virus. And while the political leverage of a single-party government might have helped Vietnam respond faster and more unilaterally than others, “I don’t think this is simply about totalitarianism versus Western democracies,” said Kelley Lee, a Simon Fraser University global health professor who has been studying the impact of travel restrictions.
That’s why Vietnam is now among a few countries upending the global health community’s “almost religious belief that travel restrictions are bad,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health law professor who helped write the international law governing how countries should deal with outbreaks.
“I have now realized,” Gostin added, “that our belief about travel restrictions was just that — a belief. It was evidence-free.”
Covid-19 changed the thinking about travel restrictions in a pandemic
At a time when people still thought diseases originated with imbalances in the “four humors” and doctors routinely used treatments like bloodletting, governments tried to manage travel to prevent outbreaks. In 1377, quarantine measures were introduced in Dubrovnik, on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast, to keep out sailors potentially carrying the bubonic plague.
The law stipulated that anyone from “plague-infested areas shall not enter [Dubrovnik] or its district unless they spend a month on the islet of Mrkan … for the purpose of disinfection.” For land travelers, the disinfection period lasted even longer — 40 days.
But in the age of mass travel and globalization, it seemed virtually impossible — counterproductive, even — for cities or countries to isolate themselves. The mantra in global health became “diseases know no borders.” Just before the pandemic, 2019 was a record year for tourist arrivals. The travel and tourism sector had generated a tenth, or US $8.9 trillion, of global GDP. “It [was like] the cat’s out of the bag,” Gostin said.
Many of the measures countries tried in recent years, after the first SARS virus emerged in 2002 — including banning flights or visas for particular cities or countries, and screening for disease at airports — didn’t seem to deliver much protection.
Research on SARS, Ebola, and the seasonal flu found these targeted restrictions merely delayed infections and carried a slew of social and economic costs. They unfairly punished the economies of places that were unlucky enough to be plagued by disease, interfered with the global flows of people and goods, drove infections underground, and made it hard for aid workers and supplies to reach those who urgently needed them.
I knew these costs intimately. I grew up in Toronto, where a rare travel advisory imposed on the city by the World Health Organization in the wake of the first SARS outbreak cratered tourism to the entire province — so much so that the Rolling Stones eventually intervened with a charity concert (dubbed “SARSStock”). The measures also failed to avert outbreaks. According to a Canadian government report, putting arriving passengers through health assessments and thermal scanners didn’t root out a single case.
During the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic and early in the Covid-19 pandemic, I co-wrote popular stories detailing this evidence and arguing against the use of such restrictions. And I wasn’t alone.
Bill Gates pointed out that then-President Donald Trump’s approach to Covid-19 travel bans probably made the US epidemic worse. The WHO’s International Health Regulations, an international law governing 196 countries’ responses to outbreaks, says countries should “avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade” and follow the WHO’s expert advice. With every global health emergency declared after SARS, the WHO has not recommended travel restrictions.
At the same time, speaking out against travel bans had become synonymous with opposing nationalism and wall-building, said Lee. “There were these progressive, human rights values that were upheld by not using travel measures.”
But it’s now clear that the well-meaning advice and previous research findings didn’t match up with the situation the world was facing in early 2020. The new virus was different — more contagious and harder to stop. SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted prior to the onset of symptoms, if they ever occur — while with SARS and Ebola, for example, people are only contagious when they are very ill or symptomatic.
The new coronavirus contagion inspired drastic measures. After China locked down Wuhan in January 2020, a move many called “draconian,” countries around the world scrambled and experimented with their own travel restrictions.
Only a few, though, did something that “seemed unfathomable” prior to the pandemic, said University of Hong Kong public health professor Karen Grépin: They completely closed their borders. It was an approach experts had no evidence for. “No one [had] modeled out a scenario in which borders would be shut,” she said, and stay shut.
Yet that’s essentially what happened in Vietnam — and in a few states or regions, mostly islands including Taiwan and New Zealand, that have virtually eliminated the virus.
Vietnam started building a “wall” to the world in January
Early last year, when the US and European countries still focused on keeping out travelers from places with known Covid-19 cases, Vietnam closed its borders to the world.
It was the culmination of months of escalating travel restrictions. On January 3, the same day China reported a mysterious cluster of viral pneumonia cases to the WHO, Vietnam’s Ministry of Health issued a directive to increase disease control measures on the border with China. By the end of January, Vietnam’s then-Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc banned all flights to and from Wuhan and other areas where the virus was spreading in China and shut off every transport link between the two countries, making it the first place in Southeast Asia to close out Chinese travelers.
By mid-March, Vietnam suspended visas for all foreigners and then stopped all commercial flights. Only diplomats, citizens, and other officials could get in or out on repatriation flights, and they needed authorization from the government to enter.
Limited air travel has now resumed with other low-risk neighbors — such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan — but only for Vietnamese people and foreign businesspeople and experts. And while Vietnamese nationals can cross land borders from Laos or Cambodia, everybody who does get into the country — by air, land, or sea — has to submit to PCR tests and wait out a mandatory 14- to 21-day quarantine period under state supervision in a military-run facility or designated hotel.
So where Western countries introduced travel restrictions late, targeted their measures at countries with confirmed Covid-19 cases (or variants now), made quarantine optional or didn’t enforce it, and allowed loopholes (like excluding certain groups from travel restrictions, or letting people arriving over land avoid quarantine), Vietnam walled itself in. While Western countries continue to roll measures back whenever case counts come down, Vietnam has kept its wall up — even during periods when the country recorded zero new coronavirus cases.
“This is the lesson about border measures that’s changed,” Grépin said. “The value of border restrictions goes up the fewer cases you have.”
The restrictions also appear to work best if they’re implemented when they most seem like overkill, said London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine epidemiologist Mark Jit. That is, before (or after) community transmission takes place, he added.
“The natural thing is to think, ‘When we have a big problem, there are many Covid cases, that’s the point when we need to start doing a lot of things.’ But for travel restrictions — these are the solution to stop the problem from happening in the first place,” Jit explained. “It seems obvious in retrospect, but it’s very paradoxical.”
Vietnam saw China’s epidemic as a threat right away
So why did Vietnam take this early and comprehensive approach when so many other countries didn’t? The short answer: The country’s fraught relationship and porous border with China — which put it at higher risk for outbreaks — may have been its savior.
“[The] two countries taking the quickest action are Taiwan and Vietnam — they shared the same reasons: geographical proximity to and distrust in China,” explained Nguyen Xuan Thanh, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Group, which is composed of experts who counsel the government on economic development strategy and policy. (Vietnam may have had information that other countries didn’t early on: A cybersecurity firm, FireEye, has said that since at least January, Vietnamese hackers spied on the Chinese government to collect intelligence about Covid-19 — reports the government has denied.)
Whatever the reason, officials in Vietnam didn’t entertain the possibility that the coronavirus was just like the seasonal flu, nor did they consider herd immunity. When China locked down Wuhan last January and bought other countries time to react, Vietnam was one of only a handful of countries that used that time wisely.
“Outside of the Asia-Pacific region, most of the world did very little to prepare for the real possibility that this virus was about to spread globally,” Grépin said. In January, the Vietnamese government set up a national task force specialized in handling Covid-19, headed by the deputy prime minister, and defined a “double goal” of combating the virus and growing the economy.
The country’s officials and Communist Party made battling Covid-19 a patriotic act. “Fighting this epidemic is like fighting the enemy,” the prime minister said in a government meeting last January.
They transmitted health messages to the public using creative tactics, like texts to mobile phones or a viral pop song about hand-washing. They ramped up testing (starting in January 2020) and shortly thereafter began checking even asymptomatic people for the virus. By the end of last year, Vietnam was processing 1,000 tests per Covid-19 case, compared to 12.8 in the US or 21.7 in the UK.
Contact tracing became so widespread that the population now speaks the language of epidemiologists: It’s not unusual to hear Vietnamese people refer to the “F1” through “F5” system — how contact tracers denote a person’s proximity to an “F0,” or index case. (And, yes, where Western governments largely abandoned contact tracing or didn’t even seriously attempt it, Vietnam continues to ferret out potential cases by testing all F1s — a patient zero’s immediate contacts — and quarantining them in a state facility, while also asking F2s to quarantine at home.)
When a single person tests positive, it can trigger a targeted lockdown, “isolating a large area when the fire is big, isolating a small area when the fire is small,” Mai Tien Dung, the chair of the Office of the Government, said.
In practice, this meant that last February, just as Lunar New Year travel and Vietnam’s third wave was picking up, a Hanoi apartment block, where more than 1,000 people live, closed down one evening after a woman tested positive for the virus. The entrances were barricaded and guarded by police as hundreds of residents spilled out, masked and social distancing, waiting for a free Covid-19 test.
Only those who tested negative were allowed to leave, and results took at least six hours to come in — a fact that frustrated those who weren’t prepared to spend the night, like gym staff members. By the next morning, everyone who had been tested got a negative result, and the barricades were removed — but everybody living on the two floors around the index patient was asked to quarantine for two weeks.
Vietnam also bet that the early overreaction, including closing down international borders, might save the domestic economy and prevent the health system from becoming overwhelmed, Thanh said. Just before SARS-CoV-2 started spreading in China, Vietnam ranked 73 out of 195 countries on epidemic response and mitigation, according to the Global Health Security Index from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (The US, meanwhile, ranked No. 2 after the UK; the top 10 included the Netherlands and Brazil.)
Vietnam had another vulnerability to contend with. “The reality [is] that Vietnam does not have enough budget to sacrifice the economy and support businesses and individuals who had to cease operation,” Thanh said.
More than a year later, Vietnam’s success with keeping case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths low laid bare the arrogance and faulty assumptions that went into determining which countries would win or lose in their battles with the virus. With the exception of short-lived, targeted lockdowns, life in Vietnam today largely resembles the Before Times in a way many Westerners can only envy. People go to bars, share drinks with friends, and enjoy live music. Restaurants and cafes are open. Children attend school and see their grandparents in person.
The population never experienced the disorientation, economic pain, and mental health toll of rolling national lockdowns. Hospitals never buckled under the strain of masses of coronavirus patients. Kids didn’t miss a year of school. (There was a brief nationwide social distancing order last April when all schools were shut for three weeks.)
Vietnam is also one of a handful of countries whose economies grew in 2020 — the same year the country introduced three trade deals and saw per capita income rise. “At the beginning of the crisis, if you asked an economist what would happen here, most of us were pessimistic because of the [cutting off of] connections to the rest of the world,” said Jacques Morisset, the World Bank’s lead economist for Vietnam.
But because the virus was quickly contained internally, the domestic economy rebounded, just as Thanh and his colleagues had hoped. Manufacturing continued, and exports grew by 6.5 percent — not far off from the usual export turnover increase of 8 percent, according to Thanh.
That growth more than made up for losses in the shrinking tourism and transport sectors. The successes also helped foster public support for the anti-virus measures. Whenever the tourism or travel industries lobbied for open borders, the economic pressure didn’t crack the borders open. According to a survey released in December by the UN Development Program and the Mekong Development Research Institute, 89 percent of Vietnamese respondents said they supported the government’s approach — higher than the global average of 67 percent.
“Politicians make decisions based on the pressure from the society and inner political system,” Thanh said. “Vietnam had no such pressure. Vietnamese people supported the government to continue having strict measures.”
Vietnam’s state security apparatus bolstered its public health response
In a one-party system like Vietnam’s, there are few avenues to voice opposition. This political context has arguably strengthened certain anti-virus measures, like the country’s extensive contact tracing program. The Communist Party has for decades employed “surveillance, physical monitoring, and censorship to manage the population,” Foreign Policy reported in May last year. These “tools of Communist Party control … have now been repurposed in the service of health protection.”
Local officials and busybody neighbors also exert social pressure on others to conform, said Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia specialist and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales. “Vietnam has block wardens, village wardens, household registration, and inquisitive locals that intrude on people’s lives. They have a society where people report people.”
The government can and does share details with the public about positive cases (including the age, gender, and neighborhood where the person lives, as well as a flight number for travelers), sometimes leaking additional information for use as cautionary tales.
Perhaps the most infamous example: Vietnam’s case number 17, a socialite who traveled to Italy without disclosing it at the border and faced severe public shaming. Her Covid-19 experience was the subject of government press conferences, and social media users tracked her down. Her story scared people who didn’t want to be responsible for others’ infections, said Hanoi-based American health economist Sarah Bales. “Everybody knows her,” she said. “She was notorious, and people hated her.”
This heavy-handedness would not be tolerated in many Western countries, where concerns about personal freedom and privacy have often trumped public health throughout the pandemic, Thayer said. The Foreign Policy authors also pointed out that the country’s human rights violations have repeatedly been overlooked in examinations of Vietnam’s Covid-19 response: “While the international community has criticized Vietnam’s security apparatus in the past for violating its citizens’ rights, the country has received near-unanimous praise for its successful handling of the current pandemic. But the tools used are the same.”
Yet to reduce Vietnam’s Covid-19 success to its system of authoritarian governance is a mistake, Lee said, pointing out that democracies, like South Korea, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have employed similar tactics as Vietnam. And analysts have repeatedly struggled to link a country’s political system to its Covid-19 success.
Vietnam’s is “a very scientific approach and has merit on its own no matter which regime chooses to apply these types of measures,” said Bales, who has lived and worked in Vietnam since 1992. “They did extensive contact tracing. … They did massive testing. They closed down the provinces so if there was transmission, it would stay local. Most people are living a normal life, and the few people who have been exposed or infected have to bear the brunt of quarantine, testing, and isolation.”
Watching the pandemic unfold in the US and Europe, Bales was among several Vietnam-based Westerners who told Vox they believe the privacy and personal liberty costs during the pandemic were worth the benefits of living a relatively free life.
“You don’t have to worry and be afraid like you do in the West — where every time you go out, it must be stressful [wondering] about if you’re exposed, and if you’re exposed, will you have long Covid or die,” Bales said. “On a day-to-day basis, I don’t worry.”
When Vietnam’s wall comes down
One morning in early March, a taxicab pulled up to the international terminal at Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport. The last time the driver took someone there was half a year ago, he said, when a Vietnamese customer wanted to fly to Taiwan for work. Today, though, a repatriation flight had just landed — one of 16 arriving in Vietnam so far this year.
Inside, the airport is a skeleton of its former self. There are no crowds waiting to greet friends and family. Cafes and restaurants are closed, and the terminal halls are quiet and dark. A group of the newly arrived passengers waiting at the luggage conveyer belt look distinctly like they’ve come from a biosafety hazard lab: wearing blue full-body protection suits and masks, provided by Vietnam Airlines staff when they boarded their flight in Paris.
The only loud noise echoing across the terminal is a voice broadcasting instructions for what the passengers need to do next: Everybody will be transported to state-supervised quarantine facilities. One by one, their names and year of birth are called out before they walk to buses to be ferried off. When they arrive, they’ll be tested for Covid-19 — and, if positive, forwarded directly to the hospital for isolation and treatment.
“We will try our best to organize so that families, parents, and children can stay together,” the voice on the speaker says, “but with friends, we may not be able to do so. We are sorry for that.”
This scene feels unimaginable in Western cities like New York or Paris — but so did ubiquitous mask-wearing and lockdowns over a year ago. With travel set to boom as the pandemic eases, and the next outbreaks on the horizon, I wondered what the rest of the world should take away from Vietnam.
Lee — and the other global health researchers I spoke to — advised caution. This pandemic showed travel restrictions can be helpful, but we should not make the same mistake we did in the past and assume what worked for the coronavirus will work for other health threats. “We don’t want countries to automatically control borders whenever a cluster of atypical pneumonia occurs,” Lee said. “Not all outbreaks require borders to be closed.”
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Shutting borders comes with costs — all the people who lost travel and tourism jobs in Vietnam over the past year, or those who have been stranded far from home. Because of the very limited access to repatriation flights, thousands are waiting for their applications to get approved, and a black market for repatriation flight access sprang up. The wealthy agree to pay as much as $10,000 US for seats, while some have been scammed.
“Even if we conclude that travel restrictions and trade restrictions and migration restrictions — under certain targeted circumstances — can be an effective part of the package,” Gostin said, “we still have to take into account the fact that by implementing [them], you’re causing harms in other regards.”
Grépin also warned that the border closures countries like Vietnam put in place were “very extreme,” and pointed out that less intensive measures might prevent cases and carry fewer costs. Places like South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, for example, have shown that “if you quarantine incoming travelers you can limit public health risk without border closure,” she said. But she also noted the approach isn’t foolproof. Hong Kong, for example, is currently struggling with the virus because of its travel links with India: A single April 4 flight from New Delhi has led to more than 50 Covid-19 cases.
This raises another challenge: Travel restrictions are difficult to calibrate correctly, said Steven Hoffman, a global health professor and the director of York University’s Global Strategy Lab. “If we are going to make use of [total border closures,] we need to [acknowledge] the fact that it might be implemented for events that don’t go pandemic,” he said. “And there’s something like 200 events every year that could go pandemic.”
For now, as Vietnam weighs the benefits of Covid-19 vaccine passports and how to resume international travel, one thing is certain: The walls the country has built up will come down. People will hop on trains, planes, and buses, bringing their germs with them. The world will get smaller again, and proximity will be “more determined on the basis of the quantity of travel connections than kilometers,” Hoffman added.
Vietnam’s early, quick response to Covid-19 was inspired, in part, by the country’s shared border with China. But what other countries need to learn is that, in a globalized world, they share borders with China, too.
The greatest challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule is a man whose name the dictator won’t say and whom he has tried to kill: Alexei Navalny.
Having defiantly returned to Russia after surviving a brazen assassination attempt only to be immediately detained and thrown in jail upon arrival, the opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has rallied tens of thousands of supporters to his cause like never before — a real sign of trouble for Putin’s hold on power.
Alexei Navalny has spent over a decade trying to overthrow Putin. Through slick videos, public mobilization, and even an ill-fated presidential run against the autocrat, Navalny has aimed to expose Kremlin corruption and malfeasance.
While Navalny’s ultimate goal seems to be to take Putin’s place, not just depose him, few believe he will actually succeed. Still, his campaign has inspired tens of thousands across the country to take to the streets to express their frustration with the regime — many for the first time — posing an existential threat to Putin.
The problem for the president is, try as he might, he can’t keep the 44-year-old dissident quiet.
Last year, Kremlin operatives tried to assassinate the opposition leader with a highly toxic nerve agent planted in his underwear, a bold operation that most experts say likely would have required Putin’s approval to launch.
Navalny lived, but he spent five months recuperating from a coma in Germany. Yet despite being threatened with immediate arrest upon arrival back in Russia, he vowed to return to his homeland to continue the fight against Putin. Navalny met that fate on January 17 shortly after his flight from Berlin landed in Moscow, and he’s now imprisoned for at least 2.5 years.
But even that attempt to silence Navalny hasn’t worked so far: Navalny has remained in the headlines even while in custody.
He started a hunger strike on March 31, protesting the lack of medical care he said he’d received while in prison, and his lawyers continued to publicize his plight throughout his ordeal.
His condition had gotten so bad that not even Russian authorities could ignore it. They transferred Navalny to a hospital earlier this week for treatment, though questions remained about the quality of care he’d get. Navalny’s aides were concerned that the pro-democracy leader was on death’s door.
“Alexei is dying … it’s a question of days,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on Facebook this week.
Physicians close to Navalny made the same case, leading the dissident to end his hunger strike on Friday. But Navalny claimed victory in an Instagram post, saying pressure his supporters placed on the regime led independent doctors to check on his condition.
“Doctors, whom I fully trust, published a statement yesterday stating that you and I had achieved enough for me to end the hunger strike. And I will say frankly — their words that the tests show that ‘in a minimum time there will be no one to treat…’ seem to me worthy of attention,” he wrote. However, he added that he’s “losing sensitivity” in sections of his arm and legs and still wants to know “what it is and how to treat it.”
What happens to Navalny going forward is a serious matter of international concern, with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently promising “there will be consequences” if the Putin opponent dies in prison.
Putin is now on the defensive. He’s receiving calls from President Joe Biden and other leaders to release Navalny, even as Russian authorities round up members of the dissident’s team and family. He’s also under pressure at home from Russians who support Navalny.
“Putin was an untouchable, a god above everything else. But that’s no longer the case,” Maria Snegovaya, an expert on Russian politics at George Washington University, told me.
Putin broke an implicit promise to Russians. Activists pounced.
Little initially bothered Putin after he became president for the first time in 2000. The economy doubled and living standards rose during his first decade in charge, muting critiques from dissidents of the regime’s repression of free speech and civil rights.
Experts say Russians implicitly understood there was a grand bargain: If Putin could keep the money flowing and not act in an openly corrupt way, then the citizenry would abide by his iron-fisted leadership.
But two events in 2011 ended the fragile deal.
First, Putin that September announced he would reassume the presidency after serving one term as Russia’s prime minister, the No. 2 role. Simply put, Putin was still in charge of the country, but he accepted a technically inferior position to keep up democratic appearances. The president, Dmitri Medvedev, was viewed as little more than a puppet.
By effectively stating “I will be president again” — without giving Russians any real say in the matter — Putin defied the unspoken “don’t be openly corrupt” rule.
Second, Putin’s party, United Russia, got caught rigging the December 2011 legislative elections. Fraud in Russian elections was normal, and there wasn’t more than usual during that particular vote, “but examples of fraud were spread quickly on the internet for the first time,” said Timothy Frye, a Columbia University professor and author of the forthcoming Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia.
That provided ammunition to a growing cadre of opposition activists looking for a catalyzing cause — Alexei Navalny among them.
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Navalny, who grew up about 60 miles southwest of Moscow, made his name in 2008 as a blogger. His earliest posts centered on corruption at state-owned companies, and sometimes he’d get extraordinary access by becoming a minority shareholder in the company in order to ask probing questions.
His readership grew, and his platform turned him into one of the main leaders of the 2011 protests in Moscow. Featuring roughly 50,000 people, they were the biggest in the capital city since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I’d like to thank Alexei Navalny,” a young activist shouted in a room of organizers the day before demonstrations began. “Thanks to him, specifically because of the efforts of this concrete person, tomorrow thousands of people will come out to the square. It was he who united us with the idea: all against ‘the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.’”
Navalny rode that wave of popularity to a run for Moscow’s mayor in 2013. It’s more than a prestigious municipal job; whoever runs the capital is viewed by many in Russia as a future top federal official. To win the election, then, would mean more than just getting to lead a global city. It’d mean Navalny was clawing his way into Russia’s inner circle of power.
Navalny ran on an unapologetically nationalist platform, most notably calling for restrictive immigration policies to keep Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia out of the country and supporting Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia. Duke University’s Irina Soboleva told me that the candidate’s hardline stances during the campaign alienated members of Navalny’s young, urban base.
“I consider Aleksei Navalny the most dangerous man in Russia,” Engelina Tareyeva, who worked with Navalny in a Russian liberal party until he was expelled from it in 2007, wrote of him. “You don’t have to be a genius to understand that the most horrific thing that could happen in our country would be the nationalists coming to power.”
Navalny didn’t win the mayoral race, finishing second with 27 percent of the vote behind incumbent and Putin ally Sergei Sobyanin, who won with over half the votes (four other candidates split the remaining count). But Navalny’s strong showing — despite very long odds — gave him the legitimacy and standing to seek more power.
“His ambitions were greater than just being the leader of the urban middle class,” Soboleva said.
Putin regained popularity. Navalny organized against him.
In 2014, Putin sent forces to invade the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. He then annexed the territory because he wanted it returned to Russia’s fold and because Kyiv was on the verge of an economic pact with the European Union. For Putin, such a deal meant Ukraine — long in Russia’s sphere of influence — was tilting away from Moscow. The incursion, then, was both punishment and raw geopolitics.
But there was an added benefit for the autocrat: Russians celebrated the risky invasion. They rewarded Putin with record approval ratings, numbers he desperately needed to muddle through a brutal economic downturn wracking his country.
“Crimea bought the regime four years of wiggle room,” Columbia’s Frye told me.
That period was mostly a quiet one for Russia’s opposition. Just like in the 2000s, it was hard to find a receptive audience for the anti-Putin cause when most people were happy with the leader.
Navalny, then, used the lull to organize against his chief rival. Part of his animus turned personal after Russian law enforcement charged him in 2013 and 2014 with embezzlement, which most experts say was meant to discredit him. After the second charge, Navalny was placed under house arrest and only given permission to speak with his family.
But the opposition leader wasn’t discouraged. Instead, experts told me he developed a three-pronged strategy to prepare for whenever Putin was vulnerable again.
The first part was straightforward: He had to make his politics more appealing to a wider Russian audience. The Islamophobia and hardline nationalism might garner support from ethnic Russians, but certainly not the masses. Without disavowing his previous views, Navalny zeroed in on one core message: corruption.
“It was a sound political strategy,” said Angela Stent, who directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European studies at Georgetown University. After all, Russia was (and remains) one of the world’s most corrupt countries, and the problems this corruption has wrought have impacted nearly every Russian’s life. No other issue, the thinking went, would be as universally understood and enraging.
Getting his message out there would be difficult, though, as the Kremlin held a tight grip over the media. To get around that problem, Navalny made building a large social media presence the second pillar of his plan. “He saw the political utility of YouTube before other opposition leaders,” said George Washington University’s Snegovaya.
The opposition leader has posted video after embarrassing video exposing the corruption of Russia’s elites on his YouTube channel, which today has 6.25 million subscribers. One particularly famous upload from 2017 alleged that former President Medvedev took bribes from oligarchs disguised as charitable donations, a charge he denies.
When the Russian government succeeds in blocking access to the exposés, Navalny and his team place the videos elsewhere — including on pornography sites — so anyone can see them.
The success of his YouTube channel bolstered Navalny’s reputation as an anti-corruption crusader, and his audience grew. “He sensed that corruption would be accessible enough to build a large following on the internet,” Snegovaya noted.
That allowed him to undertake the third part of his strategy: forming a national network of opposition politicians. Instead of focusing all of his efforts in major cities like Moscow, Navalny opened offices around the country to help local politicians defeat members of Putin’s United Russia party. Providing candidates with financing and know-how, Navalny’s team has helped dissidents take power away from Putin cronies in regional elections across the country.
“There’s no opposition figure in Russia that has the network that Navalny does,” said Columbia’s Frye.
The main goal, of course, was to weaken the president’s party nationwide. But experts told me the side effect — Russians suddenly being able to see politicians without ties to Putin actually working in citizens’ interests — was equally important for Navalny’s movement.
Putin fought back. Navalny withstood the onslaught.
Navalny didn’t get to do all of that without pushback, especially after he announced in 2016 that he would run for president in two years.
In 2017, the opposition leader was attacked with an antiseptic known as “brilliant green” outside his Moscow office, covering half of his face in what looked like paint. “It looks funny but it hurts like hell,” he tweeted at the time, adding that he lost 80 percent of the vision in his right eye.
Reports later confirmed he suffered a chemical burn. It’s still unclear who was responsible, but Navalny, unsurprisingly, blamed the Kremlin.
Later that year, 12 of Russia’s 13 election commissioners voted to bar Navalny from standing against Putin in the presidential race, citing his embezzlement charges from years prior. Navalny was never likely to win — the vote was already rigged in Putin’s favor, and reliable polls showed the dissident failed to attract much support — but the decision once again ended the pretense of a functioning democracy in Russia.
The government’s interest in Navalny didn’t end there. Moscow’s police force detained him in the summer of 2019 for planning what authorities said was an unauthorized protest. While in jail, he suffered a severe skin reaction that required him to seek medical attention at a hospital. He went back behind bars after his recovery, but he claimed the skin reaction was the result of having been poisoned.
The increased harassment made clear that Navalny was a prime Putin target. The worst, though, was yet to come.
Putin got scared. Navalny paid the price.
Navalny boarded a flight from Siberia to Moscow last August. He became ill on the aircraft; a video shows him moaning and needing immediate medical attention.
The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, near Kazakhstan, where an ambulance waited to take him to a local hospital. But Navalny’s condition worsened, and he fell into a coma before he arrived at the facility.
Russia’s Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, where Navalny was first treated, became the site of a frustrating standoff between Navalny’s family and supporters and the doctors overseeing his care. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and team alleged the doctors were controlled by the Kremlin and tried to cover up the poisoning attack instead of properly treating their patient.
The physicians at the time said Navalny wasn’t poisoned but instead suffered from a “metabolic disorder” that led to low blood sugar. “Poisons or traces of their presence in the body have not been identified,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the Omsk emergency hospital, told reporters at the time. “The diagnosis of ‘poisoning’ remains somewhere in the back of our minds, but we do not believe that the patient suffered poisoning.”
But Navalny’s team — including Navalnaya, who was barred from seeing her husband in the hospital — suspected foul play. They had good reason to believe that: The Kremlin has a long, sordid history of poisoning political dissidents, defectors, and other enemies of the state.
“The medics are being totally commanded by the FSB and hardly release anything,” Vladimir Milov, a close Navalny associate, told me while Navalny was in the Russian hospital, using the acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB responsible for internal security.
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“We of course cannot trust this hospital and we demand for Alexei to be given to us, so that we could have him treated in an independent hospital whose doctors we trust,” Navalnaya said in another press conference on August 21.
A medical plane sent by the Berlin-based humanitarian group Cinema for Peace Foundation later arrived in Omsk to take Navalny to Germany for treatment. The Russian doctors initially blocked the transfer, saying Navalny wasn’t stable enough to travel, before finally allowing the German physicians to take a look at the patient’s condition.
Luckily, doctors in Berlin successfully treated Navalny, leading to his release from the hospital on September 23 after a full recovery.
The next month, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog — concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, a highly lethal nerve agent. It was developed by the Soviet Union, leading many to conclude that the Kremlin was behind the attack on its longtime adversary.
Navalny confirmed that himself while he remained in Germany. Working with CNN last December, Navalny tricked a Russian agent — part of an elite FSB toxin team that had trailed him for three years — to reveal secret aspects of the operation to kill him. The operative, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, told Navalny during a phone call that Novichok had been placed on “the insides, the crotch” of the dissident’s underpants.
When asked about the Kremlin’s involvement in the assassination attempt, Putin denied it, claiming instead that Navalny was getting help from US intelligence services to make a big fuss out of nothing. If Russian agents had really wanted to finish the job of killing Navalny, Putin told reporters during his annual press conference in December, “they would’ve probably finished it.”
There are no concrete answers as to why the regime would want Navalny dead now after all this time, but experts have two main theories.
The first is that United Russia’s supermajority in the nation’s legislature — the Duma — is under threat in September’s elections. Navalny’s organizing and Putin’s unpopularity due to a flatlining economy and worsening pandemic could lead some Putin-allied lawmakers to lose. If that’s the case, Putin would no longer be able to ram whatever he wants through the governing body.
Putin could try to rig the election, of course, but George Washington University’s Snegovaya told me that “it’s impossible to rig the election completely.” Fewer people actually support the president right now, she said, and international observers watch the vote closely. The dictator’s brutal calculation therefore might have been that killing Navalny would hurt the opposition’s chances ahead of the crucial election.
The other possibility experts floated was that Putin is worried about the revolution in neighboring Belarus. A strong opposition formed against Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest-serving dictator and a staunch Putin ally, and revolts started last year after an election many believe he rigged. Demonstrations haven’t stopped, and Putin, who is notoriously concerned about being toppled in a revolution, might fear a similar phenomenon in his country.
“Putin definitely follows what’s going on in Belarus closely, and he takes what’s happening very personally,” Duke’s Soboleva told me. Putin might be thinking “if you don’t eliminate your political opponents and rivals early, they might be a big problem for you later,” she said.
But instead of eliminating Navalny, Putin made him stronger.
Putin tried to silence his rival. Navalny just gained a larger audience.
After Navalny recovered from the poisoning, the Kremlin did everything possible to try to dissuade him from returning to Russia.
Late last year, the Kremlin placed him on the government’s federal wanted list, claiming he avoided Russian federal authorities while abroad. As part of a probation sentence from the 2014 embezzlement case, Navalny had to check in with inspectors regularly — but that’s hard to do while you’re in a coma.
Even with the threat of arrest hanging over him, Navalny flew to Moscow on January 17 while downplaying widespread fears that he’d be detained upon arrival. “It’s impossible,” he told people aboard his flight. “I feel like a citizen of Russia who has every right to return to my home.”
But, of course, it proved completely possible: Video showed an official approaching Navalny at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport near passport control. Navalny then kissed his wife, Yulia, before going with the official and other guards. He’s been held by the federal prison service ever since as he awaits his February trial.
But Navalny and his team have fought back. They released the “Putin Palace” video — alleging that the Russian leader has used bribe money to build an estate on land 39 times larger than the principality of Monaco — which had the president answering questions raised by the man he wants silenced.
“Nothing that is listed there as my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and never did,” Putin said during a video call at the time, as always refusing to say Navalny’s name. But many people didn’t buy his denial.
Russians erupted in protest after the video’s release and Navalny’s detention. The nation’s citizens, suffering an economic downturn and an unrelenting coronavirus outbreak, occupied the streets of more than 100 Russian cities on January 23, some braving temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Demonstrators tussled with law enforcement more than they had in the past — ranging from snowball fights to physical violence — culminating in the arrest of nearly 4,000 people.
“It’s probably the most nervous he’s been in his 21 years in power,” Georgetown’s Stent, who served as the US national intelligence officer for Russia from 2004 to 2006, said of Putin at the time.
Moscow police’s responded forcefully. They arrested Navalny’s brother and harassed multiple members of Navalny’s team. In one stunning video, Navalny’s doctor was seen playing the piano as law enforcement searched her home. The goal, experts said, is to stop the opposition from inciting more protests and continuing their leader’s work while he remains in custody.
So far that plan hasn’t worked, and Navalny’s hunger strike kept him in the global spotlight even as Putin has tried to push him out of it.
The hunger strike may be over, but it’s still possible that Navalny dies in Russian custody. If that happens, it’s possible the pro-democracy movement he built will suffer. At that point, Putin may have won his long game with Navalny in the cruelest fashion possible. Or, ironically, turned Navalny into a powerful martyr, potentially threatening his rule long after the dissident is gone.