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The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late
MCD, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
by Cory Doctorow

Long before artificial intelligence became technology, it was part of the cultural imagination. Greek myths described Hephaestus forging golden automatons that could think and move. Chinese tradition told of the artificer Yan Shi, who presented a mechanical man to his king. Only in the mid-20^th century did that ancient vision become a scientific field. From the 1950s through 2022, researchers pursued AI along different paths. Then ChatGPT arrived.

The chatbot attracted a million users within just five days of its release in November of that year. ChatGPT’s sudden popularity made AI’s rich intellectual history appear to collapse into a single proposition—that large language models (LLMs), as such deep-learning systems are called, would keep improving as long as three factors continue to grow: model size, training data and ability to compute, supported by an ever-expanding infrastructure. Today, frontier laboratories such as OpenAI and Anthropic—and the companies supplying their computational resources, most notably the chip designer Nvidia—don’t merely overshadow all rival approaches to AI. They’re increasingly shaping the global economy.

Nowhere does AI dominate investment markets as heavily as in the United States. American private capital flooded AI with roughly $286 billion in 2025 alone. This year, the Chinese government has pledged a near-identical $295 billion but as a five-year program—not a single year’s private bet.

It’s no secret that despite the record investment, the US companies continue to post losses rather than profits while their infrastructure becomes increasingly debt-financed. The result is an industry built on extraordinary expectations—and exposed to extraordinary risks. Financial watchdogs such as the Bank for International Settlements are warning that soaring valuations, heavy debt and uncertain returns could turn the AI boom into a source of instability for the world’s financial systems, one of the central economic issues of the day.

Whether the current AI boom reflects a genuine technological revolution or a speculative bubble poised to burst—as countless opinion columns debate—is increasingly dividing economists and scientists as well as commentators. The author Cory Doctorow leaves little doubt as to where he stands: His new book is the latest to cast AI as a bubbling—and deeply troubling—sector. Beyond the financial hype, Doctorow is concerned with the burden that integrating AI into corporate workflows places on workers.

To illustrate the problem, he reaches for two metaphors: the centaur and the reverse centaur. A “centaur” is a person whose abilities are amplified by technology, whether through tools as simple as glasses or as familiar as cars. A reverse centaur describes a human compelled to serve machines’ needs. Consider Amazon warehouse workers managed by algorithms or delivery drivers denied bathroom breaks by AI that dictates their tempo and tracks their every move. “The important part isn’t the technical characteristics of the device, it’s the power relationships of the people who use the device,” Doctorow says.

A prolific Canadian science-fiction and non-fiction writer, Doctorow works with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights non-profit based in San Francisco. His new book is a sharp, timely contribution to the AI debate particularly for anyone who hasn’t followed the discussion and wants an accessible, well-informed entry point on the side of AI skeptics. The book may also prove a valuable read for AI enthusiasts willing to engage with counterarguments to prevailing narratives about AI’s inevitable, world-remaking ascent.

The trillion-dollar valuations attached to AI, Doctorow argues, require investors to believe not merely that AI will improve but that it will elementally transform the economy. That belief depends on compelling narratives that OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies have been eager to provide: Every breakthrough is just around the corner, every product launch is globally significant and every objection becomes merely a failure of vision.

Even apocalyptic warnings, Doctorow notes with a raised eyebrow, conveniently flatter the products by framing them as powerful enough to end the world. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s recent bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, is a prime example, lending potentially troubling credibility to the technology’s alleged omnipotence. Ultimately, Doctorow argues, the hype and the doom are two sides of the same sales pitch.

The real threat, he says, is not that new machines are acquiring superpowers or wicked intentions. It’s that corporate executives harbor old motives: slashing costs, weakening organized labor, inflating valuations and dodging accountability for their human and environmental impacts. AI gives them a new vocabulary to present those corporate goals as inevitable technological destiny.

Doctorow urges readers to stop mistaking the development of AI and automation for fate. Tools should be designed to answer to people, he says, people should not have to accommodate tools. That stance will comfort those who, like the majority of Americans surveyed by Pew Research, “are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life.” While most “want more control over how AI is used in their lives,” however, they remain open to letting algorithms assist with day-to-day tasks. In short, they welcome the opportunity to become AI-enhanced centaurs but reject the idea of ending up as reverse centaurs.

Attitudes abroad are more critical. A Pew Research Center survey of 25 countries published in October 2025 found a median 53 percent of respondents trust the European Union to regulate the technology, against 37 percent who trust the United States and 27 percent who trust China—a tepid mandate for the US as the country currently supplying most of the world’s foundational models.

In Brussels, that skepticism has begun hardening into major legislation. The European Commission’s technological sovereignty package, unveiled in June, couples a proposed Cloud and AI Development Act with a successor to the original Chips Act, bound together by the explicit ambition to reduce Europe’s overdependence on foreign countries for chip design and cloud infrastructure.

In much of the Global South, developments in Silicon Valley’s AI race are read through a historical lens. Developing countries that can’t adapt or build their own AI models risk being trapped in a cycle of digital colonialism. Across Africa, Latin America and Asia, foreign tech contractors are assessing model responses and labeling images for AI training. Critics see the old extractive bargain in digital form: human labor and local knowledge drawn from poorer countries, converted into valuable technology and monetized by corporations headquartered thousands of miles away.

But Doctorow focuses his attention on the plight of workers in the United States—an understandable choice, given his familiarity with that terrain. His core claim is that the reverse centaur is a structural feature of how AI is deployed, not a quirk of any single labor market. That makes the lack of a robust international comparison a missed opportunity—one that could have sharpened both his diagnosis and recommendations.

Those prescriptions echo his earlier work: public-interest regulation, antitrust enforcement to break up entrenched corporate power and labor organizing to keep AI in the service of ordinary people. The world offers interesting models here: German works councils, Nordic sectoral bargaining and India’s remarkable Self-Employed Women’s Association all embody forms of worker power that could have lent Doctorow’s recommendations evidentiary force.

Still, no reasonable steps could take place in time to prevent the crash inevitably baked into the sector’s arithmetic, the author warns. Doctorow expects the AI bubble to burst, triggering a major recession that will “destroy a ton of innocent bystanders, including people whose retirement savings are invested in index funds.” But the market collapse will leave behind usable salvage, the author argues. He calls it AI residue: cheap, open models to run on our laptops, quietly doing unglamorous but genuinely helpful work such as transcription.

If there’s a fault in Doctorow’s work, it’s in the expectation his title sets up. As a diagnosis, his book is carefully argued and compelling. He explains how we got here, who profits, what the rhetoric conceals. As a guide, however, the book is thinner. The map for what a reader could actually do on Monday morning is sketched rather than drawn. Those hoping for a step-by-step manual may wonder what to do next.

Many structural critiques share similar gaps: Explicating an emergency isn’t the same as providing exit strategy. Still, this is a complaint about Doctorow’s final chapter, not the book. Read alongside the author’s recent work on platform decay and corporate power, this is the AI installment in his body of work, applying his signature framework: Look past the gadget, look past the hype, ask who benefits and who gets used up.

Few writers do that with as much clarity and—despite the topic’s seriousness—entertainment value. That’s no small achievement amid a larger discourse generally stuck between awe and panic. His refusal to be either dazzled or terrified is exactly why this book is worth your time.

Anna Gielas is a research associate at Oxford University’s Emerging Threats Group. She earned her PhD in the History of Science from the University of St. Andrews, has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed academic articles on special operations forces and the integration of emerging technologies into the armed forces, and held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.

There is a world of difference between Richard Nixon’s history-making trip to China in February 1972 and Donald Trump’s two-day, in-and-out journey in May 2026. One shattered precedent, changing the world by opening a new, promising chapter in US-China relations; the other was routine, Air Force One crowded with tycoons eager, like the president, to strike a “deal,” as if a business deal, however defined, were the only possible outcome of a successful summit.

Fifty-four years ago, when Nixon landed in Beijing, it seemed for a moment as though everything stood still. It was that momentous an event. The United States had kept a cool, snarling distance from Beijing since 1949, when the Marxist leader Mao Zedong rose to power in China. No presidential visits since, no diplomatic representation, very little trade, only an occasional research trip by a scholar or writer, nothing more. China, home to one of every four people on Earth but now under communist control, was off limits.

Although he was an early cheerleader of the “Who Lost China?” crowd, Nixon privately hoped that one day there would be a warming in the icy relationship. After winning deserved plaudits for his handling of the headline-catching kitchen debate in Moscow with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in August 1959, Nixon allowed himself to dream of a possible visit to China and, maybe, a debate with the reclusive Mao, another hot if unrealistic goal for the ambitious American politician.

“If it worked once,” Nixon unabashedly told the columnist George Dixon, “it can work twice and…achieve a breakthrough into the forbidden country.” He wanted to be the US president who opened the door to China; and although ultimately his presidency was badly tarnished by the Watergate scandal, forcing his humiliating resignation from office in August 1974, he nevertheless left behind a lesson in global diplomacy worthy of serious study.

In 1967, when he launched his successful campaign for the presidency (he’d been unsuccessful in 1960), Nixon wrote in Foreign Affairs that “any American policy toward Asia…must come urgently to grips with the reality of China.” At the time, the US was deeply engaged in a costly, unpopular war in Vietnam, a complicating factor that poisoned national politics and frustrated any hope for a change in policy toward Hanoi’s communist backers. Still, following his triumph in the November 1968 elections, Nixon plunged into the fraught political thicket of Washington’s relations with Beijing.

Among his first steps was a long series of late-night conversations with Henry Kissinger, his new national security adviser. The Harvard professor was a serious, well-known student of global affairs but no expert on China. They discussed a range of subjects: How far could Nixon actually go? How could he link the Vietnam War to a change in China policy? When should he start this process? Whom could he trust? Kissinger helped mightily in conceptualizing and implementing the change but it was Nixon himself, step by cautious step, who led the controversial change in America’s relations with China.

From day one, Nixon and Kissinger both appreciated the link between China policy and the Vietnam War. They understood the United States couldn’t open the door to China while fighting a war in neighboring Vietnam. Besides, they already believed the US couldn’t win the war and ought to withdraw. The question was how.

Initiating a broad change in America’s attitude toward all of Asia would be an important first step. The key was a slow, steady demilitarization of the American presence in Southeast Asia, starting with a controversial series of troop withdrawals from Vietnam. Nixon also tried to cool his administration’s hot anti-communist rhetoric. He hinted at a revision of US policy toward Taiwan: what would have been an almost unimaginable diplomatic shift at the time for a country locked into a one-China policy—meaning US recognition of Taiwan, not mainland China. No matter the difficulties, Nixon’s overall strategy, his bottom line, remained fixed on opening a dialogue with his traditional Asian adversary.

Everything, he soon learned, would take time, each step usually accompanied by an anguished denial that improving relations with China had anything to do with gaining leverage over the Kremlin. “We don’t play the game of pitting Russia against China,” Kissinger argued with a straight face. That would be a “very dangerous game.”

Nixon confided his intent to change America’s policy with carefully selected foreign leaders and a few trusted Washington politicians. High among them was Mike Mansfield, the respected Democratic Senate majority leader, who had once been a young Marine on gunboat duty in China. During a one-on-one lunch, Nixon told him that in his judgment it was time for China to begin assuming a greater share of “global responsibility,” if for no other reason than to head off a Sino-Soviet war, a chronic Nixon nightmare. “When the door is open, Mike,” Nixon told Mansfield, “I want you to be the first high-level American to visit China.” The senator was flattered, later admitting to also being stunned when Nixon unexpectedly added, “I’d like to go myself, but that doesn’t seem quite feasible for the moment.”

When he first swung his gaze overseas, Nixon fastened on an unlikely target, France’s stubbornly independent president, Charles de Gaulle. In late February 1969, a mere six weeks after moving into the Oval Office, Nixon flew to Paris, determined, among other things, to enlist de Gaulle’s help. The French leader was deeply suspicious of Nixon’s aims at first, wondering whether he was really serious about changing China policy or playing a mischievous Russia card or both.

Their relationship was raw. A few years earlier, Nixon had been mercilessly critical of de Gaulle’s drive to bring Communist China into the United Nations, replacing Taiwan. But during his Paris visit, Nixon played the role of the patient diplomat, pleading with de Gaulle not only for his help but also his understanding. The past was past, he argued, let’s focus on the future.

Finally, de Gaulle yielded, promising to dispatch Etienne Manac’h, his top China expert, to Beijing to inform the Chinese “at the highest level” of Nixon’s “serious desire” to open a new page in America’s relations with China, including a possible change in Taiwan policy. Manac’h spent most of his time speaking with the premier, Zhou Enlai. The shrewd, experienced Chinese leader seemed interested in the Frenchman’s report but offered no official response.

Months passed. During the summer of ’69, Nixon was again airborne, spreading his China message in places he thought progress was possible. Two stops on his round-the-world journey seemed especially enticing, one in Islamabad, Pakistan, where General Yahya Khan, approving of Nixon’s strategy, promised to talk to the Chinese, and the other in Bucharest, Romania, where the Communist President Nicolae Ceausescu, stuck in a bitter ideological argument with the Soviet Union, happily embraced a middleman role between Nixon and Mao.

With each stop, Nixon’s eagerness to visit China became a hushed topic of conversation even among his closest advisers. H.R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, once whispered to Kissinger that “the boss seemed to have it in his mind that he might be visiting Peking before another year was out.” Kissinger, whose admiration for Haldeman rivaled only the feuding Appalachian Hatfields’ for the McCoys, scoffed at the timetable, predicting Nixon would be lucky to get there by the end of his second term.

But Nixon wanted the Chinese to see he meant business. So:

On July 21, American passports were suddenly validated for travel to China. For scholars, journalists and businessmen, the door was opening.

On August 8, Secretary of State William Rogers, up to that point only peripherally involved in the president’s China diplomacy, officially expressed hope that on-again, off-again US-China talks that had been taking place in Warsaw could soon be resumed on a more regular basis.

On November 7, the United States suspended naval patrols in the Taiwan Straits, ending a military practice dating back 19 years to the Korean War.

On December 15, the US announced it would remove all nuclear weapons from Okinawa by the end of the year, producing a quiet sigh of relief in Beijing.

On December 19, Washington lifted the $100 ceiling on the purchase of Chinese goods, a symbolic but important step toward resuming bilateral trade.

And on February 18, 1970, Nixon changed his China rhetoric. A special report to Congress, called “New Strategy for Peace,” caught the eye of those who followed the twists and turns of diplomacy. Overnight, in official prose, the Chinese people, who had once been routinely ignored, were now suddenly discovered, described as “the great and vital people,” “the gifted and cultured people,” and, one step further, linking the US government to the “historic ties of friendship with the Chinese people.”

Still, despite those unmistakable overtures to China, month after anxious month passed in 1970 without any meaningful Chinese response. Kissinger wondered whether the leaders were so absorbed with their internal political squabbles, so suspicious of Nixon’s intentions, that they refused to agree on an acceptable response, one all factions of the Chinese Communist Party could buy. In Washington, no one really knew.

Then, on October 1, China’s National Day, as tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of cheering people crowded into Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square, the Chinese finally flashed a signal of understanding and possible accommodation. High above the Gate of Heavenly Peace stood a smiling 76-year-old Chairman Mao, and, next to him, grinning from ear to ear, Edgar Snow, the American writer, who’d first met Mao in the mid-1930s during the Chinese Revolution. Snow went on to write his best-selling Red Star Over China, a book on Mao’s eventual triumph.

Official photographers on that day snapped photos of the heroic Chinese leader and visiting American writer. Later, according to official news sources, when the two discussed a wide range of subjects, Mao was described as “not satisfied with the present situation,” presumably China’s tense relations with the USSR, which he considered “irreconcilable.” But when he talked about America, his tone definitely softened. He seemed warm and hopeful. His message was clear: Mao looked kindly on Nixon’s overtures. The question was how to proceed with neither nation looking too eager. Their suspicions of each other persisted, however, even though their official rhetoric softened, with diplomatic doors now left slightly ajar.

In late October, as though in direct response to the Mao-Snow reports, Nixon changed America’s China policy at the United Nations, a significant step. No longer would the US officially recognize Taiwan as the sole representative of China. Now, the United States also began to extend a form of recognition to Communist China “but not at the expense of the expulsion of the Republic of China.” That evolved into a “two-China policy,” and, for the first time in official US handouts, China was referred to as “the People’s Republic of China.” Henceforth, according to Washington, two Chinas would be represented at the UN, an awkward formula Taiwan fought and Beijing reluctantly accepted.

Shortly thereafter, the US and China took another step toward the normalization of relations. Their diplomats had been occasionally meeting in Warsaw, their key point of contact, but one day, the Chinese recommended that next time they should meet in Beijing—and, they proposed, talk more frequently. The White House agreed, then added an intriguing wrinkle of its own: The meetings should be conducted “at a high level.” That phrase was left deliberately vague, leaving several possibilities open. Would the US representative be just another ambassador, a regional assistant secretary, perhaps a deputy secretary, or the actual secretary, or perhaps even the national security adviser, who worked in the White House, or…the president himself?

Much was left for later discussion but the tempo of diplomacy quickened and the tone of their exchanges, Kissinger said, grew “warmer and warmer.” On occasion, Washington was represented by Pakistani and Romanian diplomats who served as secret emissaries.

On one trip in November, Yahya Khan traveled to China but decided to stop in Washington (not exactly en route), where he conferred with Kissinger. When Pakistan’s president finally reached Beijing a day later, with a Kissinger letter to Mao conveniently tucked away in his inner jacket pocket, he was promptly driven to a political hideaway, where Mao welcomed him. A Chinese reply was drafted that night and slipped into the same jacket pocket. Twenty hours later, at a White House stopover, it was handed to Kissinger.

On similar trips to Beijing, Romanian diplomats, sometimes Ceausescu himself, performed the same function, the secret routine rarely changing: a quick stop in Washington, a letter from Kissinger, the flight to Beijing, a meeting with Mao or Zhou, the drafting of a Chinese reply, the return journey home with an intermediate stop in Washington.

After a while during these exchanges, Kissinger risked raising a key question. Would Nixon be welcomed in China—“properly,” he wanted to know. Mao offered a quick and surprising response, according to Snow. “Yes, Nixon could just get on a plane and come,” Mao was quoted as saying. “If he were willing to come,” Snow added, “the chairman would be willing to talk to him…whether he came as a tourist or a president.”

But then, seemingly out of the blue, the bonding came to an abrupt six-week stop, a puzzling disruption caused by what Nixon later explained as “the Laotian operation.” American and South Vietnamese troops had invaded Laos as part of a broader plan to stop North Vietnamese troops from slipping into South Vietnam. Protectively, Chinese troops rushed to their own border with Laos, posing the frightening possibility of a direct conflict between the United States and China.

Finally, on February 19, 1971, Nixon decided enough was enough. He did not want to endanger his diplomatic opening to China. During a quick roundup of White House reporters, he stressed that the “Laotian operation” should not be interpreted as a “threat” to China, adding that he remained “fully committed” to his goal of improving relations with Communist China.

Apparently, news reports of his assurance quickly made their way to Beijing. Mao, although still absorbed with the Soviet military threat on his northern border, decided that diplomacy with America made more sense than war with Russia. He needed a summit with the American president in Beijing.

The diplomatic exchange resumed and whereas its tone had been somewhat fuzzy and non-committal before the diplomatic freeze, now it became quite specific. Kissinger reckoned there was now a “70 percent chance” that some “high-ranking American” would be on his way to Beijing by March 1972.

Late one night in the spring of 1971, the Pakistani ambassador to Washington, a skilled diplomat named Agha Hilaly, handed Kissinger a note. It was an odd message, containing no signature, no salutation but a specific invitation for an “American envoy” to come to Beijing for “high level talks” with Chinese leaders. It suggested two names—Rogers and Kissinger.

Kissinger was in heaven, assuming correctly that Nixon would choose him. From the beginning of the effort with China, he had always been the one who worked most closely with the president and Rogers, who had been kept at arm’s length. Kissinger had also heard from Snow that Zhou had once whispered to an Indian ambassador that he looked forward to “crossing verbal swords with such a worthy adversary.”

The prospect tickled Kissinger’s already monumental ego: Imagine a verbal duel with Zhou! In that regard, Nixon’s temperament was also helpful. He was unpredictable in many ways but not in his effort to resume relations with China. He depended on Kissinger, and, without much thought, selected him for the special assignment.

“Richard Nixon sends me alone, cut off from communications,” Kissinger later joked. “For all he knew, I was going to sell Alaska!”

As it turned out, Kissinger was to visit China twice, his first trip in early July, his second planned for fall, depending on events. Both sides wanted to be sure everything was properly planned for a presidential journey to China designed to advance Nixon’s diplomatic and political interests and at the same time strengthen Mao’s position in his ideological struggle with Moscow. It was a journey both sides needed and had to be globally acknowledged as a roaring success.

On April 6, a news story broke like a thunderstorm over the White House, delivered not by some mysterious emissary but a ping pong tournament in Nagoya, Japan. The American team had been invited to tour China! Nixon was stunned—and delighted. It was, TIME magazine proclaimed, “the ping heard round the world.”

Allowing for no possibility of a change of mind, the US government immediately issued China visas to nine American ping pong players, four officials, two wives and three journalists. Three days later, they crossed the Lo Wu bridge from Hong Kong into mainland China, representing the first American delegation to enter the country since the communist victory in 1949.

On April 14, proving China’s top leaders wanted a breakthrough in relations as much as Nixon, Zhou himself hosted a dinner party for the visiting ping pong delegation in the Great Hall of the People, where he boldly pronounced the “opening of a new page in the relations of the Chinese and American peoples.”

A strange, uncomfortable pause followed his comment. Puzzled, Zhou asked, “Don’t you agree with me?”

The Americans laughed, bursting into loud applause, and extended a reciprocal invitation to the Chinese ping pong team to tour the United States, which it promptly accepted.

At the White House, Nixon was amazed by the speed of ping pong diplomacy. He immediately liberalized many restrictive anti-Chinese measures in trade, travel, commerce and sports. “What we have done,” he boasted to reporters, “has broken the ice.” Then he dropped a tantalizing hint the reporters should have picked up but didn’t. “I hope, and as a matter of fact,” he said, “I expect to visit mainland China sometime and in some capacity.” The suggestion was left dangling, unexplored by the press, waiting for history to clarify his goal, which it did a few months down the road.

Once again, Nixon and Kissinger retreated late in the day to a quiet corner of the Lincoln Sitting Room, where they meticulously reviewed their political and diplomatic options, knowing the critical importance of Kissinger’s upcoming trip to China. If it were to fail for whatever reason, so too, most likely, would Nixon’s goal of opening a new chapter in US-China relations. Possible, too, would have been a serious worsening of the military situation along the Chinese-Soviet border, where there had been clashes between the two sides for many months. Nixon’s opening to China proved to be a profitable example of “triangular diplomacy,” which helped advance US interests toward both the USSR and China.

So very little was left to chance. The two men went so far as to draft a version of the opening statement Kissinger would read to Zhou, then redrafted it several times. They also wrote 10 hypothetical communiqués, any one of which could have been the final summation of their first meeting, depending of course on what would transpire. Those various versions served as guardrails for Kissinger’s negotiation—how far he could go, what latitude he would enjoy.

Kissinger’s preparation included an exhaustive boning up on Chinese history, as though he were again a graduate student all-nighting for his PhD oral exams. For his files—no other reason, he explained to the CIA—he also needed a detailed biography of both Zhou and Mao. He wanted even US intelligence to be kept in the dark about his upcoming trip. He had focused for much of his life on Europe and such historical statesmen as Metternich and Bismarck, but now he had to know about Chinese leaders, too. In any case, if the CIA librarian happened to wonder why Kissinger suddenly needed all that information about China, he knew better than to ask.

On July 1, Kissinger took off in a presidential jet from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington on his most important trip as a government official; indeed, it would soon be regarded as historic. He was to make several stops before reaching China. He first flew to Saigon, where he hurriedly conferred with President Nguyen Van Thieu and US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. The press corps, large and eager, stalked Kissinger’s every move. The war was raging on endlessly, it seemed, and his negotiation with Thieu was a frontpage story in the Times and led CBS’s Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

On July 4, Kissinger stopped in nearby Bangkok, where there were fewer reporters and the story was less meaningful. Privately, he was pleased, although he usually adored coverage. On July 6, New Delhi provided a moment of press excitement when anti-war protesters trapped him, wanting to know if he was going to meet Hanoi’s Le Duc Tho in Paris. Kissinger fibbed, replying “No,” resulting in a slight four-paragraph AP story. On July 8, Kissinger flew on to Islamabad, where he was essentially ignored by the press. Although reporters there expected nothing of moment, they were soon to be unwitting participants in the greatest disappearing act in modern diplomatic history.

In the role of lead actor, Kissinger paid a 90-minute courtesy call on Pakistani President Yahya Khan, who was part of the deception from the start. Very few reporters covered the meeting. Shortly thereafter, Khan let it be known that Kissinger, “exhausted,” suffering from “Delhi belly,” as it was called, could not attend the state dinner that evening. He was being taken to Nathia Gali, a cluster of suburban hilltop bungalows, where he would rest. How long? No one knew, a few days certainly. The cover story seemed credible—people did get sick visiting India’s capital—although no one remembered the well-traveled Kissinger getting sick anywhere.

He never visited Nathia Gali. After his meeting with Yahya Khan, Kissinger was whisked off to a guest house, where he had a few hours to review Nixon’s marching orders with the three aides traveling with him—Winston Lord, John Holdridge and Richard Smyser, all Asia specialists. At 2:30 a.m., through quiet, deserted streets, they were driven to Islamabad International Airport, where they boarded a Pakistani passenger jet. No one saw them except M.F.H. Beg, a stringer for The Daily Telegraph in London. Why he was at the airport in the dead of night, no one knew, but he happened to spot Kissinger and was burning with journalistic curiosity.

“Isn’t that Kissinger?” he asked an informed Pakistani official standing nearby.

“Yes,” the man replied mindlessly, not realizing he was to say nothing about Kissinger, a state secret.

“Where’s he going?”

“China,” the official replied.

“Why’s he going there?”

“I don’t know.”

Beg quickly returned to his office and filed an urgent story to London saying Kissinger was on his way to China. His editor read Beg’s story, read it a second time, then a third before deciding to spike it.

“Damn fool Beg,” he mumbled, according to Fleet Street legend. “That bloke must be drunk. Really, Kissinger going to China. Ridiculous!”

Ridiculous or not, shortly after 3 a.m. Islamabad time, wheels up! Kissinger was on his way to China. His secret remained a secret.

At high noon July 9, Nixon’s national security adviser and his three aides landed, unobserved, at a deserted military airfield near Beijing, where he was greeted by Marshal Ye Jianying, who had fought in the revolution, and Huang Hua, an English-speaking diplomat soon to be dispatched as ambassador to Canada. In long black limousines with veiled windows (Kissinger could look out but no one look in), they were driven to a suburban guesthouse. He was now on his own, unable to communicate with Nixon. He was excited but totally self-confident. The secrecy around him was absolute.

At 4 p.m., Zhou arrived, shattering protocol. He was both prime minister and foreign minister. But there he was, paying an official visit to a foreigner with no rank in state-to-state protocol.

Very casually, Zhou and Kissinger sat down on opposite sides of a long rectangular table in the guesthouse as they opened a historic attempt at diplomatic reconciliation. They spoke for eight hours, through dinner, well into the night. There was no fixed agenda. Zhou started by beckoning for Kissinger to start, and he did, reading the formal opening statement co-authored with Nixon, outlining the president’s reasons for wanting to improve relations with China. It took 10 minutes to read but more than six hours for him and Nixon to compose it, ending with a word that caught Zhou’s attention.

“So, here we are,” Kissinger said, wrapping up, “after 22 years of separation, in this, for us, mysterious land.”

“Mysterious?” Zhou interrupted. “Why mysterious?”

The question triggered an exchange of impromptu impressions—why Kissinger (and Nixon) thought China was “mysterious,” and why Zhou considered America to be, he implied, restless and naïve. In their fascinating negotiating exchange, they ranged easily over reflections about their own histories, leaders they knew and political systems they studied—and the differences between the Chinese and American revolutions. They chose for the moment not to delve into specifics such as the Vietnam War or America’s Taiwan policy but rather to limit themselves to gentle probing into areas of possible understanding. After midnight, Zhou suggested they take a break and resume the next day, July 10, again at 4 p.m. The location would change, Zhou said, from Kissinger’s suburban guesthouse to Zhou’s downtown office in the Great Hall of the People.

In the morning, the American delegation toured the Forbidden City, where Chinese emperors once lived, and at 4 p.m., after a sumptuous 12-course lunch at the guesthouse, Kissinger and his three associates were taken to Zhou’s office for another eight-hour negotiating session. Although no formal agreements could be reached (only Nixon and Mao could make final decisions), they did elegantly settle on three “principles,” as they called them, which absorbed most of their time together.

The first concerned Taiwan, where the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek had retreated in defeat after the victorious Mao brought communism to China in 1949. Washington’s diplomatic relations with the island, as if it were a substitute for all of China, were obviously unacceptable to Beijing. Zhou made it clear that few issues were more important to Mao—Taiwan, he stressed, was part of China and it had to be returned, preferably without violence. Kissinger accepted Chinese ownership of Taiwan during his talks with Zhou but argued that this major concession should be kept secret for the time being.

The second principle focused on Vietnam. Reflecting Nixon’s latest proposal to North Vietnam, still secret, the United States and China would both agree that South Vietnam’s political future would be solved by North and South Vietnam alone, no one else, meaning Washington would be excluded from the negotiation. Both Vietnams should first agree on a ceasefire, a return of political prisoners and the withdrawal of all American troops. These, too, were significant US concessions that both sides agreed to keep secret for the time being.

And, finally, the third principle was the general proposition that all Asian disputes, hostilities or wars should be settled by peaceful means, a Chinese way of saying that America should stay out of Asia and mind its own business. Kissinger accepted that principle too, although reluctantly, not wishing to disrupt the easy flow of his negotiation with Zhou. His mandate was to arrange a Nixon visit to China in early 1972, a presidential election year. He was to go no further.

Kissinger and Zhou reassembled after a dinner break, and Zhou, having safely pocketed Kissinger’s concessions, was now able to formally invite Nixon to visit China. It was what Kissinger had anticipated, and Zhou delivered. Kissinger happily accepted on Nixon’s behalf but stressed the importance of careful preparation, meaning clarity of agenda, newspaper and television coverage and, if necessary, additional advance trips by government officials and television technicians to make sure everything would proceed smoothly.

Kissinger and Zhou met for two additional hours on Sunday morning, July 11, and agreed that communication between the two countries henceforth would be conducted directly through their embassies. No longer was there a need for secret third party go-betweens. And they settled on the wording of the final communiqué, which was to be released simultaneously in the US and China at 10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 15, giving Kissinger just enough time to return to Islamabad (fully recovered, the press was told, from “Delhi belly”), fly to Paris for a quick negotiating session with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho before proceeding to San Clemente for a jubilant report to an ecstatic Nixon. Mission accomplished!

But not quite!

Although agreement had been reached about a Nixon visit to Communist China, his diplomatic dream soon to be realized, there was still a key question awaiting resolution, and it prompted anxiety. When exactly would Nixon visit China? Early in 1972, yes; but when? The answer required a second Kissinger journey to China, which provided him the opportunity to play a game of diplomatic signals.

The trip was announced on October 5, coincidentally (or was it?) during the buildup to an important UN vote on China. The trip was to last “a maximum of four days” so both sides would have enough time “to make concrete arrangements” for the Nixon visit. Kissinger arrived in Beijing on October 20; he was to stay until October 23 or 24. He actually stayed until October 26, a day after the highly anticipated China vote at the UN, when, by an overwhelming majority, Communist China replaced Taiwan as the legitimate representative of China at the UN.

The signal, clear for all to see, was Kissinger’s concluding a crucial agreement in Beijing at the same time as Secretary Rogers was arguing Taiwan’s losing cause at the UN, introducing everyone to America’s new two-China policy. “The ultimate relationship of Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China,” Rogers stated, “should be settled by direct negotiations between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China.” Word for word, what Rogers was arguing at the UN mirrored Kissinger’s agreement with Zhou reached during his secret visit to China in July. All that was left was the official announcement by China and the United States on November 30 that Nixon would be visiting China from February 21 to 28, “the week,” as Nixon would later describe his trip, “that changed the world.”

With Kissinger’s skillful negotiating, Nixon accomplished a dramatic and historic change in American policy toward China. The price was high. On occasion, the concessions were considerable, also duplicitous and unprincipled; but the president had a vision in mind—a new relationship with China, beneficial to America, he believed—and he achieved a diplomatic breakthrough that might not have changed the world but certainly altered Washington’s relationship with Beijing and Moscow, giving the nuclear-armed troika time to contain national ambitions and try to negotiate a better tomorrow for themselves and the world, if possible.

Marvin Kalb is Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard University, once on Nixon’s “enemies list,” former network diplomatic correspondent at CBS and NBC and author of 18 books, including The Year I Was Peter the Great, Kissinger, and, most recently, A Different Russia.

Waking up every morning for the past two weeks, I’ve checked the news to see if Iranian missiles have hit Jordan. The wail of air raid sirens has echoed over the capital Amman’s rooftops several times, although I’m not sure what kind of action I’m supposed to take when they go off; no specific places are designated as shelters and everyone just ignores them.

Listening out my window during one of those moments, I could still hear the blaring of car horns and snatches of Arabic pop music from traffic on the road below, the sounds of a normal summer afternoon. The military has intercepted most of the missiles but every now and then they hit their targets—US military installations in the east and south of the country.

I landed in Amman earlier this month to begin my two-year Institute of Current World Affairs fellowship examining grassroots solutions to economic collapse, environmental degradation and other intertwined crises. The breakout of the US-Israeli war on Iran in February and subsequent Israeli attacks on Lebanon forced me to pivot from my original plan to be based in Beirut. Despite Jordan’s proximity to the regional conflict, this country maintains relatively good relationships with its neighbors, threading a tight needle between the United States, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The airstrikes began a week after I arrived. Despite a June 2026 “memorandum of understanding” and ongoing peace talks, the US and Iran disagreed on a major point: who would control shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran attempted to direct oil tankers into a pre-approved route and targeted them with drones when they did not comply. Washington declared the MOU “over” and began bombing Iranian cities and military sites, killing 55 people since July 7, at least some of whom were civilians. In response, Iran has again begun targeting US military assets around the Middle East, including in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq.

Jordan hosts roughly 4,000 US troops, along with planes and weapons, at several military bases in the desert. The Iranians had also targeted those sites in March and June but July represented a significant escalation. Three US soldiers died last week in an attack on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in the eastern desert; video circulated online afterward, showing a massive fireball shooting into the night sky. Two days later, a ballistic missile attack targeted the international airport in the southern Red Sea port city of Aqaba, where Iran said US military planes are based.

The US government has been vague about what any of this means. On July 9, as air raid sirens sounded during the middle of the day, an email from the State Department announcing that “missiles, drones, or rockets are in Jordanian airspace” directed me to “seek overhead cover and shelter in place immediately.” (Later, videos of Jordanian air defenses intercepting the missiles spread on social media.) However, subsequent attacks haven’t elicited similar warnings.

In the meantime, Jordanians are going ahead with life as usual, assuming by now that civilian infrastructure will not be targeted after previous outbreaks of war in the last few years. My Arabic tutor, who is Syrian, told me she gets panicked calls from relatives in Syria asking her what’s going on and whether she’s okay. She shrugged. “I tell them everything is fine, there’s nothing to worry about.” It’s a reversal of the situation just a few years ago, when she feared for the lives of her family members in Syria during the country’s 14-year civil war.

Jordan insists it does not host US military bases but simply allows American soldiers to use its territory for joint operations. “US forces in Jordan are present under a defense cooperation agreement that fully respects Jordanian sovereignty and operates within the framework of joint efforts to combat terrorism,” Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said at the Aspen Security Forum last week. The distinction is mostly semantic. The government hasn’t openly spoken out against the United States for starting the war but it has criticized Iran for the strikes on its territory, while emphasizing its commitment to a “strategic alliance” with Washington.

But in a country where public dissent against the monarchy is tightly restricted, it’s hard to get a handle on how ordinary people actually feel. Iran has directly appealed to the Jordanian people, saying it does not view the country with hostility and urging its citizens to demand the removal of US military forces from its territory. And on Wednesday, more than 100 prominent public figures released a statement urging the same, warning that the country risks being dragged into a larger regional conflict. “Jordan is not a party to this war,” they said. The statement was signed by former ministers, members of parliament, scholars, lawyers, writers, trade unionists, retired military officers and tribal leaders.

What’s clear is that the document reflects an undercurrent of developing resentment, even though no one I spoke to actually expects it to result in any disentanglement from the US military. An economist told me that despite the illusion of autonomy, Jordan has no choice but to follow America’s lead. The economy heavily relies on support from US-based financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank as well as direct US aid to the tune of $1.4 billion per year. “Money is a weapon the US uses to pressure Jordan,” the economist told me, asking that I not attribute his name to any statements that might appear critical of the military. (Others have written about how those policies uphold autocracy in Jordan.)

The general outward nonchalance I’ve seen among many Jordanians might also mask a deeper sense of unease. The war has led to the loss of thousands of jobs, particularly in the tourism sector and among those working in the Gulf who have been forced to return home. The cost of food and fuel is rising, and without government subsidies for bread and other staples, people would take to the streets, the economist assured me.

“People are afraid for the future,” he said. “We are in a period of war.”

Journalist and ICWA fellow Diana Kruzman is based in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, where she’s investigating how communities are adapting to crisis, and reporting on wider developments in the Middle East.

Ann Mische is interim director of the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, where she’s an associate professor of sociology and peace studies. Known for her contributions to the field of political and cultural sociology, she examines processes of civic deliberation, social justice and political change, with a focus on social movements and democratic politics.

Ann has been editor and served on the editorial boards of numerous sociology journals. Her 2008 work Partisan Publics: Communication and Contention across Brazilian Youth Activist Networks received an honorable mention for the Best Book Award in Political Sociology from the American Sociological Association.

After she received her bachelor’s degree from Yale, Ann’s ICWA fellowship examined youth and education in Brazil from 1987 to 1990. In the April 1989 dispatch from which this excerpt is taken, she finds the roots of the environmental movement in the Amazon in the land reform and labor movements of Indigenous people.

RIO BRANCO, Brazil (April 1989) — Seu Miguel invited me to take the knife and make a cut in the tall and ancient seringueira. The bark of the rubber tree was crisscrossed by a matrix of parallel slashes, the scars of over 60 years of continuous tapping. “Won’t it hurt the tree?” I asked rather timidly. Seu Miguel laughed at my reticence, and, gaining courage, I took the knife and slowly and firmly cut a shallow, parallel line immediately below the cut Seu Miguel had just made.

Within seconds, milky drops were forming, and as I and the other gringos watched in awe, the latex began to drip down into the tin cup Seu Miguel had fastened to the tree. We felt almost religious as we gathered around the tree, surrounded by dripping green forest, spattered with mud from the path the March rains had made nearly impassable.

To arrive at this seringueira, we had walked 40 minutes through the forest after having driven for three hours dodging floods and potholes on the only road (if it can be called that) that connects Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre in western Amazonia, to the rest of Brazil. With me were a Dutch couple, a young German journalist, an Italian union consultant and our guide, Sebastião, a young leader of the Union of Rural Workers of Rio Branco. A parcel of youngsters danced around us, grandchildren of Seu Miguel, whose family had tapped those rubber trees for over 30 years. The children were as fascinated by us as we were by the dripping latex, which turned into course, elastic grains as we rubbed it between our fingers. I would have thought our reverence was nothing more than gringo romanticism had I not heard the identical emotion expressed in a poem written by a local rubber tapper, a variation on the Our Father:

Seringueira, who is in the jungle,
Multiplied be your days.
Let your milk come,
Let our rubber be made,
Here on the press, as in the cashbox.
Give us this day and every day
For the sustenance of our children
Pardon our ingratitude,
As we confront the evils of the boss.
Help us to liberate ourselves
From the claws of the middleman. Amen.

In this prayer, one finds not only the devotion of the seringueiros (rubber tappers) to the trees they tap, but also the difficulties they face in the production and sale of their rubber. A discussion of the growing resistance of the seringueiros to the exploitation of themselves and of the forest had brought us to the woods that day. Our goal was to understand the “reality” (as outsiders say rather presumptuously) of what we had heard so much talk about during the past week of discussions between rubber tappers, Indigenous communities, agricultural workers, union leaders and observers from over a hundred governmental, national and international organizations.

The events that had united such a mixed crew in that corner of Amazonia were two simultaneous conferences in Rio Branco from March 25 to 31, the II National Encounter of Seringueiros and the I Encounter of Peoples of the Forest.

The person who had attracted such a heavy turnout of outsiders to the encounter was significantly not there. An empty chair was placed on the platform during the opening ceremonies to invoke the presence of Francisco Mendes Filho, union leader and ecologist whose assassination last December aroused international attention. Chico Mendes, as he is known here, would have presided over the encounter had he survived three months longer.

Although Chico himself was a seringueiro of simple origins, he was internationally recognized for his charismatic leadership in organizing local forest workers to prevent deforestation by the latifundiarios (large landholders) who are buying up Amazonia. He had served as a consultant to the World Bank and the US Senate on investment in the Amazon, and was developing a project with the Inter-American Development Bank for the non-destructive exploitation of forest resources by the local population. In 1987, he received the Global 500 award from the United Nations, as well as the environmental medal of the Better World Society.

But in Brazil, he was little known outside environmental and labor circles until his assassination on December 22, 1988, in the town of Xapuri, in Acre, where he was the president of the Union of Rural Workers. His probable assassin was a family of local farmers whose land had been expropriated to create a rubber-tapping reserve. Suddenly Chico Mendes became headline news in Brazil and the world, arriving as far as the front page and a leading editorial of The New York Times.

The disconcerting result of the hoopla about Chico Mendes was that at this encounter of seringueiros and Indigenous groups, there were more outside observers (274) than seringueiros (169) and Indigenous people (67). The contrast at times was comical. The floor of the covered gymnasium of Rio Branco was occupied by rows of rustic delegates from the seringals and roçadas (subsistence farms) of five states in the Amazon region. Many of them had traveled days on foot and by boat to arrive, somewhat abashed, in the capital city. One of the delegates told me in tones of awe that he had never ridden in a bus before.

The bleachers above them were filled with eager and mostly pale-faced observers, representing environmental groups, labor unions, political parties, government agencies, research organizations, student associations, newspapers and television. They were armed with cameras and notebooks and could be distinguished by the clothes they wore and often the languages they spoke from those they had come to observe. Among the international organizations represented were OXFAM, the Better World Society, Greenpeace International and numerous European environmental leagues. And the biggest star presence of international journalism was Alexander Cokburn of The Wall Street Journal.

Some of the delegates expressed irritation at all the attention. After all, the observation was rather one-sided, a bit like being in a zoo: “They come here and ask us all these questions but we don’t know anything about them!” The observers were asked to withdraw during the small group discussions about the living and working conditions in the forest, so as not to embarrass the often poorly educated delegates from saying what was on their minds. And the delegates had important work to do: discuss strategies to prevent deforestation, pressure the government to establish Indigenous and extractive reserves, strengthen the unification of seringueiros and Indigenous communities through the newly formed Alliance of Peoples of the Forest, and elect the new leadership of the National Council of Seringueiros.

But why was there so much interest in an encounter of rural workers in a corner of Amazonia? Chico Mendes aside, what one saw in Rio Branco was a convergence of some of the hottest themes on the world scene. Where else would one hear debated in one place the questions of ecology, of land control, of Indigenous peoples, of rural violence, of agro-business and Third World debt?

Where else would one find such a good story for the “tropical chic” that is sweeping Europe and the United States, where George Bush joins hands with Sting, the Grateful Dead and TIME magazine to protest the destruction of the Amazon? And where else would one find in real life all the drama of a good Western: Local hero mobilizes population to confront the bulldozers and is shot down by a gang of pistoleiros who terrorize a small rural town? The script is so good that the current competitors for rights to a film about the life of Chico Mendes include Robert Redford, Costa-Gavras and Ted Turner.

But behind the glitter, one finds a serious and unresolved question. The development of Amazonia has begun (and has, in fact, been going on since the 1850s.) Who, now, will control that development, using what technologies, and for the benefit of whom? This is a social and political question as well as an ecological one and involves high stakes for various opposing interests.

In its customary shortsightedness, the Brazilian and international press has sought to turn Chico Mendes into an ecologist. Chico himself was accustomed to saying that he became an ecologist by necessity; he began his fight as a labor organizer who sought to combat the century-long system of exploitation that had kept the seringueiros in a state of near slavery and that he himself had personally experienced from the age of nine.

But when he gained the political maturity to begin the struggle for the “liberation” of the seringueiros, the entire Amazonian region was in a process of violent transformation. The traditional system of the rubber barons was in decline and the government was financing the rapid development (read: devastation) of the forest by the newly arriving latifundiarios. The scope of the struggle expanded before the eyes of the seringueiros; suddenly it was not simply their own livelihood and right to autonomous production they needed to protect, but the forest itself.

From the labor disputes of poor and mostly illiterate forest workers has developed one of the current moment’s most innovative and politically defiant proposals for land reform and for ecologically sound economic development. It is so politically defiant that its principal articulator did not survive to see its implementation.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in European studies at Yale in 1943, Richard H. Nolte served as a US Navy pilot in World War II. He then returned to Yale and earned a master’s in international relations, followed by a Rhodes scholarship. At Oxford, he began studying Arabic, Arab history and Islamic law. Dick’s ICWA fellowship sent him to Beirut in 1951, where he and his wife lived four years. He followed his fellowship with a turn as Middle East specialist for ICWA’s sister organization, the American Universities Field Staff.

Dick became ICWA’s second executive director in 1959, remaining with the institute until 1978. He expanded ICWA’s traditional field of study in diplomacy and journalism to award fellowships in music, health and other disciplines. His interest in the Middle East remained active, leading to publishing his 1963 book The Modern Middle East.

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Dick to be US ambassador in Egypt. He reached Cairo in May, but two hours before he was to present his diplomatic credentials to President Gamal Nasser, the Six-Day War broke out. Nasser refused to approve his accreditation, so Dick’s first and only job in Cairo was to help evacuate American citizens stranded in Egypt before he himself was expelled from the country on June 10. In a September 1967 article, The Washington Post described Dick’s tenure as “one of the shortest and most hectic diplomatic careers on record.” (The Americans Dick helped evacuate from Egypt were shipped onward to Greece, where fellow ICWA alumnus Phillips Talbot received them as US ambassador.)

Dick served as chairman of the American Geographical Society from 1988 to 1996, and was a member of the Near East Foundation, the World Academy of Art and Science and the Council on Foreign Relations.

In this action-packed nailbiter of a dispatch from Suk-al-Gharb in Lebanon, Dick describes the surprising role the US military came to play during the 1952 Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.

Lebanon (September 1952) — To Muhammad, the Prophet of Allah, it was commanded: “And proclaim unto mankind the pilgrimage. They will come unto thee on foot and on every land camel; they will come from every deep ravine, that they may witness things that are of benefit to them, and mention the name of Allah on appointed days… That (is the command). And who so magnifieth the sacred things of Allah, it will be well for him in the sight of his Lord...” (Qur’an, II, 27–0).

This and related Qur’anic passages, together with many detailed reports of how the Prophet himself performed the pilgrimage, form the basis upon which rests the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage.

In time past, pilgrims from north and east used to go down in great Hajj caravans from Damascus and Baghdad; but with the completion of the Hejazi railway to Medina from Damascus, the caravans had had their day.

About two months ago, the acting director of civil aviation in Lebanon and the manager of Beirut’s big new international airport realized that they were faced with a number of problems raised by the imminence of this year’s Hajj. There would be the problem of accommodating the pilgrims at the still incomplete new airport. With great energy, the acting director, Edouard Debbas (he has four US degrees in engineering, an American accent and the American enthusiasm for doing challenging things quickly and well), and his airport manager converted a hangar to house the pilgrims and provide for their needs.

Toward the middle of August, the tide of pilgrims intending to fly began to rise. And for the first two or three days, all was well.

But then suddenly, Beirut was full of pilgrims. They were camped along the sidewalks. Mosques were packed with them, and the airport was a camping ground for additional thousands. Instead of a thousand or so pilgrims, 7,000 had poured into Beirut, all of them expecting to fly to Jedda and most of them with tickets in hand.

Mr. Debbas then went to the minister of foreign affairs with the suggestion that he appeal to the American minister, Harold B. Minor.

To his lasting credit, the latter seized on the idea and straightaway called the State Department, describing the situation, recommending in strong terms that help be sent, but realizing that it would probably be impossible.

At the airport on Sunday, Debbas was again confronted with anxious pilgrims; only three days remained before the noon deadline on 27 August, by which time all intending pilgrims were required to be in Jedda. “Shall we go home?” was the question.

And then in the afternoon, 13 big C-54 transports materialized out of the western sky and the Beirut airport was suddenly full of American pilots and aircrews. Seven of the planes came down from Germany, the rest from Wheelus Field near Tripoli, Libya. Later, another C-54, a maintenance plane, arrived from Orly Field near Paris.

After some initial confusion, the big airlift ran like clockwork. Every hour, a C-54 took off and swung southward for the 10-hour round trip… Besides the maintenance men, 25 operations and traffic control men came down to Beirut, and 26 flight crews of seven men each. During the first 36 hours, while the originally contemplated 1,500 were being taken out, the crews were getting seven-hour rests between flights; later, in the interests of maintenance requirements and flight safety, the respite time was raised to 12 hours.

The last American flight got off at 5:22 a.m. Friday… In four days and a bit, American planes had carried 3,763 pilgrims in 75 flights. The three local airlines, in something over two weeks of operation, had carried a roughly similar figure—in about 170 flights. Every person holding a ticket for Jedda got his ride; thanks to the last-minute intervention of MATS men and planes, many hundreds of people were spared a crushing disappointment.

After the disastrous blow to Arab respect and liking for America delivered in the form of US support for Israel in 1948 and since, “Operation Hajj” has succeeded more than all our loans and Point IVs and protestations of friendship put together in helping to reverse the tide of Arab ill-will. It was a gesture that seemed to proceed from a human concern for people in difficulty who were considered worthy of concern for no other reason than that they were people in difficulty. Arabs and Muslims have lived too long as the implied inferiors of Westerners not to appreciate the change. It was a gesture that (in contrast to Point IV or governmental loans) could not easily be misinterpreted as conscience money for the wrong done in Palestine or as part of an imperialist plot against Arab independence.

No doubt the gesture of Kashani, the militant anti-Western leader of the Iranian Parliament, in kissing the cheeks of pilot Al Beasley and his copilot in gratitude for the trip to Jedda is not to be given very much weight in the scale of US-Persian relations; and the statement of the mufti of Lebanon no doubt exaggerated the case when he called the American effort a “turning point in American relations with the Arab world.” Nor can the view of a Turkish newspaper correspondent, a pilgrim, be taken to herald the millennium in US-Muslim relations. His cable to the president and the prime minister of Turkey read, in part: “The Beirut-Jedda air-bridge constitutes real international cooperation. At no time in history has so much help been offered from so far away and for such a large number of people and in such a noble cause. Muslims the whole world over, and this year’s pilgrims in particular, will not forget this gesture.”

When the lights suddenly go out in Havana’s middle-class Vedado district, no one reacts. In a neighborhood bar, a couple keeps chatting in the dark around a white plastic table. The bartender continues serving beers to the few remaining customers by the light of a rechargeable lantern.

Darkness has become routine here.

The country has been grappling with the worst energy crisis in its history since the beginning of the year, exacerbated by a US oil blockade and tightening economic sanctions. Power outages sometimes lasting days at a time are making life increasingly difficult for those trying to carry on.

Tropical nights with no fans mean sleeping well is nearly impossible. Food spoils. Water delivery is faltering. Public transport has largely collapsed, forcing many to get around on foot as gasoline prices climb to $10 per liter ($38 a gallon).

Amid the extreme hardship, some believe the country is approaching a turning point.

“I feel I am living through a transcendent moment in the history of my country,” said a young journalist named Frangel de la Torre Núñez in the darkened bar under a canopy of palms casting even deeper shade.

“Many of my friends have left to look for a better future elsewhere,” he added. “My determination to stay comes from my belief that something profound is happening here and I wouldn’t be able to tell the story if I didn’t live through it myself.”

More Cubans are leaving than at any other point in their country’s history.

The scale of the exodus is difficult to determine, not least because the government has released no official figures. According to a recent study, however, nearly 2 million Cubans have left since 2021.

In the early 2010s, the population stood at 11.3 million people. Thanks to multiple crises—from failed economic reforms that eroded already meager salaries to worsening medicine shortages and a collapsing health care system—that number has fallen to under 9 million.

The decline isn’t being driven by emigration alone. Cuba is also undergoing a demographic shift with deaths now outnumbering births. Those leaving are disproportionately young—and increasingly female—accounting for 56 percent of migrants. The departure of many women of reproductive age is quickening falling birth rates.

Even Cuba’s National Office of Statistics acknowledged the island is experiencing accelerated aging, with over 25 percent of the population now over 60.

Many elderly stay because they lack opportunities to leave or feel overwhelmed by the prospect of beginning a new life abroad. But Elvia, who’s in her 70s and asked that her real name be withheld, has another reason.

“Cuba is too charismatic a place to leave,” she said, sitting in a wooden rocking chair in her kitchen, where the white paint is peeling and images of Cuba’s saints look down from the walls.

Elvia is a Santería priest and has a daughter in Italy who has tried to persuade her to join her. “I feel I manage well with the money my daughter sends from abroad,” she said. “It is enough for me and allows me to devote myself to my calling as a spiritual practitioner.”

Santería is a syncretic religion that blends African beliefs with Roman Catholicism. It was developed in Cuba in the 19^th century.

Living in a small apartment in central Havana, Elvia says she helps support her elderly neighbors by donating chickens used in religious ceremonies.

Núñez, the journalist, who writes for OnCuba News and whose reporting focuses on marginalized communities, says those hardest hit by Cuba’s deepening crises are pensioners with no relatives abroad.

“The number of elderly people begging on the streets has skyrocketed,” he said. “Every day when I walk through the city, around 30 people stop me to ask for money. It feels deeply sad and reflects a complete failure of government policy.”

Although criticism of the authorities is tightly controlled and can carry serious consequences, Núñez says he’s not afraid to speak out.

Political repression has grown along with deteriorating living conditions. The crackdown intensified after July 2021, when large crowds took to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations demanding improved living conditions.

The authorities suppressed the protests with force, and hundreds of participants remain in prison. Cuba currently holds a record number of political prisoners—1,207 in total—according to the Spanish organization Prisoners Defenders. People have been imprisoned even over critical social media posts.

Journalists have been especially singled out, with independent media outlets and critical voices forced to leave the island. “Journalism inside and outside Cuba is deeply polarized,” Núñez said, adding that he hasn’t been targeted so far. “In my reporting, I always try to tell the truth by navigating somewhere in between.”

Juan Carlos Sáenz de Calahorra, a literary editor and cinematographer, has had a different experience.

He previously worked as an editor of an independent media outlet whose editorial team was forced to leave last year after receiving funding from abroad.

Sáenz de Calahorra decided to stay because of a passion outside his former profession—the conservation of Cuba’s native plants. “During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time walking around the city, and I started asking myself where the plants growing here came from,” he said.

Cuba is listed among the world’s islands with the richest biodiversity, with endemic flora and fauna accounting for nearly half of native species. But some 50 percent of the country’s native flora is threatened today, according to the most recent figures from Cuba’s National Botanic Garden in 2016.

The country’s colonial elite introduced many foreign plant species in the late 19^th century because they were considered more fashionable than the native flora, Sáenz de Calahorra says. “That has harmed the city because native trees and plants are better adapted to the Caribbean climate,” he said. “They have developed resistance to hurricanes, provide shade and can help reduce flooding.”

Sáenz de Calahorra helped found the Nativa micro-nursery network, dedicated to cultivating native species and contributing to climate resilience. Volunteers collect seeds and establish small community nurseries across the city. They also visit schools, teaching planting techniques and the importance of preserving native species.

“The government has no real interest in doing this work, or the incentives fail. And the few specialists we had have left,” Sáenz de Calahorra said. “My idea is to inspire children so that they learn to value and celebrate the diversity of flora and fauna we have in Cuba.”

With no end in sight to the US oil embargo, speculation about the future is intensifying.

The latest oil shipment from Russia now exhausted, fuel reserves are running out. The tourism sector—long the country’s key source of foreign currency—has collapsed.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested the island could become the next target of US intervention.

Neither Núñez nor Elvia believe that will happen, however. “Trump will not come to Cuba,” Elvia said. “We don’t have anything that interests him, like oil in Venezuela.”

But Núñez believes any meaningful change can come only from inside the country’s power structure. After the last crackdown against protests, “there won’t be a social uprising,” he said.

“It is sad to say but I believe the transition will only come from within the Communist Party itself.”

This article has been partially supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Anna Heikkinen is a Finnish journalist and researcher specializing in climate and environmental issues, extractive industries and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her reporting has appeared in major Finnish newspapers and magazines, as well as in international media outlets such as The Guardian and Ojo-Público.

Jill Winder is senior editor at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the national center for international contemporary arts in Berlin. As an ICWA fellow in the country from 2004 to 2006, she wrote about post-reunification Germany through the work of its artists. She has worked with the Berlin Biennales and Bergen Assembly and art agenda, and holds a master’s degree in art curation from Bard College.

In her July 2006 dispatch, Jill explores Germans’ complicated relationship with their national flag, and what flags mean to all of us.

Berlin (July 2006) — When I first moved to Berlin in July 2002, the FIFA World Cup championship was in progress. My friends took me to a bar to watch a match, South Korea vs. Turkey. The Turkish national team was competing for the first time since 1954 and had been doing well (they ended up finishing in third place). I was living in Kreuzberg, a neighborhood with a significant Turkish immigrant population, and the Turkish fans were loud, proud and thrilled with their team’s progress. Turkish flags were everywhere—flying from cars, hanging off balconies and displayed in shop windows.

The German team, meanwhile, advanced to the final, ultimately losing the title to Brazil. Again, I walked through Kreuzberg with my friends, heading to a bar to watch the game. Turkish flags were still everywhere. Our little group turned a corner and saw a German flag hanging from a balcony. My three friends stopped in their tracks and stared at it. Their discomfort was palpable, yet no one said anything. I remember finding it odd, and later I asked my friend and roommate Tina Holmes what the matter was. Although I was aware of German history and why German nationalism was a difficult, even volatile subject, I was surprised by what seemed to be a taboo against a citizen flying the flag. “The Turks have their flag on everything in the neighborhood—why did seeing one German flag make you guys so uncomfortable?” I asked.

She looked at me and said simply and matter-of-factly, “We don’t fly flags. It’s just not done. The only people I’ve seen walking around with German flags in the last ten years are neo-Nazis.”

Flash-forward to 2006. Germany hosted this year’s World Cup.

I arrived back in Berlin on the day of the final match between France and Italy. The infectious energy was hard to ignore, especially because the young German national team was doing so well (they finished in third place.) It was striking to see how many German flags were on display as I rode into the city center. The sudden, dramatic increase in Germans proudly displaying the flag became the topic of the day in both the national and international media. In the feuillton section of left-leaning newspapers, intellectuals decried this “resurgence of national symbolism” and went so far as to lament that Germans “have not learned from their history.” Other publications quoted politicians, such as President Horst Köhler, saying that the return of the flag and the general good cheer that Germans felt during the World Cup were positive signs of further “normalization” in the country.

I thought about my own relationship with the American flag and the difference between the ritual gesture of flying a flag and the meaning or symbolism behind it. The first time in my life when I felt truly patriotic, moved and proud to see a flag flown was in New York after the attacks on September 11, 2001. It was the first time I felt that the display of the flag was more than a ritual gesture emptied of meaning by habit or holiday etiquette but was flown to communicate everything from pride and solidarity to commitment to the freedoms the flag represents.

The majority of Germans, I’m sure, flew the flag and donned its colors as a ritual gesture, or perhaps just because they were excited about a football team. For the older generation of Germans, it is probably a relief to see the German flag flown because of a sporting event. This represents an enormous change in German attitudes. Until recently, only conservatives or right-wing extremists dared to use the flag as a national symbol, and they did so as a conscious political act. Even in 1990, when nearly a million people gathered in Berlin to celebrate the one-year anniversary of German reunification, only a scattered group of skinheads and neo-Nazis were holding German flags.

This summer the flag made its reappearance as the de facto mascot of the German national football team, unmoored from its traditional use as a symbol of national identity and even nationalism. And for the younger generation, many of whom resent that Germany is not allowed (or does not allow itself) to leave history in the past, the return of the German flag was seen as something utterly normal and uncontroversial: a long-overdue display that allows them to finally be proud of their country. Even Gregor Gysi, the charismatic intellectual leader of the PDS, the successor party to East Germany’s former communist party, and no friend of the German flag, admitted that these youths represent “a new generation that, when it comes to the German nation, is not as handicapped as my generation.”

Germany still has many challenges to face, not least the shockingly high number of jobless, especially in the former East Germany, but the World Cup presented an opportunity to cast a hopeful eye to the future and to celebrate the achievements of the country, especially since 1989. As Marc Young wrote, “The growing pains of a reunited Germany shouldn’t overshadow the positive and instructive lesson the World Cup has taught us: namely that, in the New Germany, waving the black, red and gold flag in no way suggests any kind of return to a troublesome past.”

“Fuck you, Ruby,” David said.

“Cut!” said Khalid, squinting at the monitor. “That’s better, sir. Let’s try it again, with more hostility.”

“Landlord,” Omar said, “scene eight, take five.”

“Annnnnd… Action!”

“Fuck You, Ruby!” David said, glowering into the lens.

“Cut!”

“Can I get some water?” David asked. “We’ve been at this for hours. I had a full day of teaching, you know.”

“Sorry sir, we’re out of water. Just one more time. We’ve almost got it.”

David sighed.

“Landlord, scene eight, take six.”

“Again, but with more menace. And… action!”

“Fuck. You. Ruby.”

“Good, good. Perfect, in fact. That’s a wrap for today.”

David was the high school drama teacher at American International School Kuwait. Khalid, an Egyptian, and Omar, a Kuwaiti, were freshly minted AIS graduates and the country’s wannabe Coen Brothers. Or to be more precise, since Khalid and Omar were interested in horror, the Duplass Brothers. Or considering their nonstop insult banter and Keystone Cops antics, perhaps the Marx Brothers. Khalid was tall, thin and dark, with wavy, movie-star hair. Omar was also tall, also thin, with Irish-light skin and hair cropped close to the scalp. They had been home movie-making pals since elementary school. They were obsessed with American films. Both spoke English with eerily American accents and slang.

“Landlord,” written by Khalid, was their first feature effort, being made with a professional suite of equipment courtesy of Farouq, Khalid’s dad, a TV celebrity and documentary filmmaker. The film was set in his family’s former apartment building, now empty of residents and awaiting demolition to make way for a bigger, taller apartment building.

It was the story of Ruby, a washed-up children’s book illustrator and crumbling tenement manager who single-handedly defeats a coven of vampires. Ruby was to be played by Sharon, a middle school drama teacher. David played one of the apartment dwellers, late on his rent. I was another apartment deadbeat. So was Amber, another middle school teacher, of Individuals and Societies, the International Baccalaureate version of social studies. Khalid’s older brother (who, confusingly for the purposes of this story, is also named Omar) played the vampire king. He and his followers take over the building, step one in their plan for world conquest. Ruby defeats them in a battle royal, saving civilization, then goes back to being a washed-up children’s book illustrator. Or would have, if, on the day following our long series of fuck-you-Ruby takes, a demolition company hadn’t cut the electricity and begun smashing our set into a pile of rebar and rubble. Khalid saw it as a bad sign and shelved the production. “Landlord” never got much beyond David’s three-word rant.

For four of my five years teaching art in Kuwait, 2011-16, Khalid and Omar struggled to make a feature film using AIS teaching staff meeting after school in the last few weeks of each school year. The year following the shuttering of “Landlord,” Khalid wrote a second vampire movie, “Sidney Bloom Lives,” this one set in a fictional Great Lakes town, starring me as a washed-up writer sent to interview the mayor, a vampire king, again played by Khalid’s older brother. After months of fruitless negotiations with Kuwait’s media bureaucracy to secure locations, Khalid found an unrented apartment in his new building, where he and Omar managed to shoot a few scenes before the building manager shut us down. The next year, Omar wrote his own film, “In Bloom,” about the same washed-up writer, now a washed-up talk show host, again in vampire town. We shot several scenes of circular dialog in Omar’s apartment living room against a makeshift green screen before he declared himself in over his head and ended the project. By this time, all the teachers in my cohort had left Kuwait. Their replacements were uninterested in volunteer acting.

Khalid and Omar’s false starts weren’t emblematic of Kuwait’s professional film industry. Indeed, the country is the beating heart of Arab movies and television and boasts one of the most prominent and influential live theatrical traditions in the Gulf. Legitimate theater provides a deep pool of talent from which screen productions have benefited. Khalid and Omar had been marinating in one of the Arab world’s richest performing art traditions.

Filmmaking in Kuwait goes back to 1932, when a tourist named Allen Flood shot film of the Kuwait City seaport. In 1939, an Australian, Alan Flippers, produced “Sons of Sinbad,” a documentary about Kuwait’s pearling industry. In 1946, after the discovery of oil, the Kuwait Oil Company produced “Oil in Kuwait,” followed in 1959 by the much-anticipated sequel, “Oil and Life in Kuwait.” By 1950, the government had started a cinema department. It produced 60 films for the public’s edification about health, marriage and other subjects. The Public Affairs Ministry established a film unit that produced 25 films about the arts. The government also invested in theatrical films. In all, between 1971 and the mid-1980s, Kuwait directors made over 40 of them.

The best-known Kuwaiti director from that period was Khalid Al-Sediq. His 1971 film “Bas ya Bahar” (“The Cruel Sea”) won awards in the Chicago, Venice and Tehran film festivals, followed by “Ers Al-Zein” (“Zein’s Wedding”) in 1976 and “Shaheen” (“Falcon”) in 1984.

In keeping with Kuwait’s conservative public culture, the government has strict movie censorship rules about the depiction of gender, romance and religion. No gays. No kissing. No Jews. Some movies are banned to “protect public ethics and social traditions.” That was the reasoning behind the prohibition of “Barbie” in 2023.

Some movies are trimmed to appease the censors. Others are cut so that theaters can schedule more screenings per day. In 2014, at the Avenues Imax Cinema, I watched “Pompei 3D.” In the final scene, seconds before Kit Harrington and Emily Browning are burned to cinders by the Vesuvian pyroclastic flow, they embrace. As the credits roll and ashes float across the screen like Korean snow, the camera pans up their pumiced corpses until just before the credits reach their ossified heads. Jump cut. Even in death, smooching was forbidden.

By the mid 1980s, government cinema funding began to dry up and in the year 2000, the Information Ministry disbanded its cinema division. That may have been because of two big films Kuwait helped bankroll: Moustapha Akkad’s 1976 epic, “Ar-Risalah” (“The Message”) about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and “Lion of the Desert,” a 1981 epic about the Libyan tribal leader Omar Mukhtar. Although hugely popular in Libya (where both movies were shot), internationally they rank as two of film history’s biggest box office flops.

Kuwait’s interest now turned to television as the country developed its musalsalat industry. Today, some 90 percent of all Gulf Arab television drama programming originates in Kuwait. Musalsalat means “chained” or “continuous” in Arabic. These are television dramas, similar in style to American daytime soap operas. Ramadan musalsalat are unique to the Islamic soap opera genre: a 30-episode dramatic arc, broadcast one per night during the Muslim fasting month, meant for family viewing after the iftar fast-breaking meal. Because satellite viewing is now nearly universal in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the audience for musalsalat is enormous and competition between musalsalat-producing countries fierce. They include Kuwait, Syria and Egypt, and more recently the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Audiences also have access to dubbed Indian serials, Korean K-dramas and Latin American telenovelas. With a few exceptions, Iranian seriyal have not found a wide Arab audience. Turkish dizileri (“series”), however, dubbed into Arabic, are hugely popular. “Muhteşem Yüzyılis” (“Magnificent Century”) is a lavish historical drama about the life and reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. “Diriliş: Ertuğrul” (“Resurrection: Ertuğrul”) is a historical and action series about the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. I watched every episode.

In Kuwait, the signing of big-name actors is important for attracting advertisers. Kuwaiti stars are among the highest-paid in the Gulf and their lives are followed with intense interest. The 2026 death of Hayat Al-Fahad, whose nearly 60-year career made her “The Lady of the Gulf Screen” and “The Dean of Gulf Drama,” was mourned across the MENA region.

Kuwait goes to great lengths to keep musalsalat viewers’ attention. Sets are lavish. Character growth and change are crucial. Long scenes spread across eight or more interwoven narratives are common, to ensure stars get continuing exposure as another way of maintaining audience interest. Betrayal, amnesia, hidden lineages, family secrets and dark pasts are common tropes. But because Kuwait’s Information Ministry sees musalsalat as vehicles for reinforcing and improving public morality, censorship regulations forbid the kind of evil characters and immoral behavior that are the bedrock of American network soap operas. In musalsalat, adulterous male protagonists are allowed but only if their womanizing leads to a second or third marriage. Married female protagonists are forbidden from philandering. In this way, musasalat serve the state’s Islamic identity, which allows polygamy but not polyandry.

The Egyptian film critic Joseph Fahim doesn’t think much of those regulations. He calls Kuwait “a society and culture that has been isolated for more than 30 years… Any critical thinking, any spark that could stir social or political debate, has been instantly extinguished.” He warns about the “hermeticism of a society enveloping further unto itself: a society that is no longer tolerant of criticism or capable of self-reflection.”

To support his contention, Fahim points to government intolerance of the depiction of hot-button issues in musasalat. “Saq Al Bamboo” (a serial about the illegitimate child of a mixed Kuwaiti-Filipino coupling) and “Oum Haroun” (another serial, about Kuwait’s former Jewish community), were both subjects of intense criticism.

Satellite television gives viewers occasional glimpses of alternatives. In reruns of Egyptian movies from the 1930s, actors like the revered Egyptian chanteuse Oum Kalthoum sometimes dress in drag. Contemporary Lebanese television offers the antics of Majdi and Wajdi, two flamboyantly gay characters on the popular Beirut MTV show “Ma Fi Metlo” (“There’s No One Like Him”). Majdi and Wajdi are played by Adel Karam and Abbas Chahine, both straight. Actual queer Arabs bemoan those absurd caricatures, which feed the region’s notorious homophobia.

As with so many things in Kuwait, however, all is not as it seems. Khalid and Omar introduced me to Cinemagic, Kuwait’s free indie movie club, located on the rooftop of an electronics shop in Salmiya’s Salem Al-Mubarak Street, a dusty thoroughfare referred to in tourist brochures, without irony, as the Champs-Elysées of Kuwait. (The only similarity I could discern is that both roads are paved, both lined with shops and both have trees). Cinemagic is a film production company located on the top floor, reached by a discreet elevator. Twice a week, the company would inflate a large screen, set out rows of blow-up chairs and couches and show a free movie, often accompanied by free drinks, kebabs and other fare. Anyone and everyone were welcome. The genders mixed freely. Abayas and dishdashas squeezed onto couches side by side with ripped jeans and shorts.

Rumor was that the Cinemagicians had serious wasta, protection from a high-ranking member of the royal family, which allowed them to skirt censorship rules. They were serious cinephiles and screened serious French, Italian and Chinese films: Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty,” Wang Kar-Wai’s “Chungking Express.” They screened “Tiny Furniture,” Lena Dunham’s steamy 2010 film that was the inspiration for the HBO series “Girls.” More shockingly, they screened Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 sci-fi thriller “Pi,” in which an unemployed mathematician discovers a 216-digit number that can predict patterns in both the stock market and the Torah. He spends much of the film being pursued by Wall Street agents and Hasidic Jews.

Below, at street level, a censorious public world of black abayas and nikabs. Above, on the rooftop, Sex and the Hasidim. Few do cognitive dissonance like the Kuwaitis.

Farouq, Khalid’s dad, provided me entrée to pro-level Kuwaiti filmmaking. A balding bespeckled man of many connections, he invited me to write copy for the Kuwait Oil Company website and the script for a company safety film. Through him I met Wael, a TV director and moonlighting advertising and documentary filmmaker.

Wael was big and tall, with strong Semitic features, formidable eyebrows, a penetrating gaze, a full, jet-black beard and a shaggy head of graying hair. He spoke impeccable English with a strong Kuwaiti accent. He favored frayed jeans and rumpled, open shirts that showed off his chest hair. Wael asked me to write the script for the narration of a promotional film. He liked what I wrote and suggested I be the narrator. So, a week after our first meeting, he picked me up in his black, tinted-window SUV and drove me to a neighborhood I’d never visited, to a building I’d never seen and an apartment I’d never entered. After several hours of coffee drinking, storytelling and admiring his astonishing collection of American comic book action figures—including a life-size statue of Superman—he invited me into a foam-padded soundproof closet to voice my script. When the US Embassy advised Americans to avoid strangers and strange situations, this probably wasn’t the envisioned scenario.

Wael’s magnum opus was to be a 13-part documentary about one of Kuwait’s many efforts to earn a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, in this case, the construction of the largest sand sculpture on earth. The project was called the “Remal International Sand and Light Festival,” a money-making scheme hatched in 2013 by two Palestinian impresarios and the founder of Proud to Be Kuwaiti (P2BK), a sort of Junior Chamber of Commerce.

“Remal” would cover six football fields. The artists would try to set the record for a sculpture using the greatest amount (by weight) of sand, 30,000 tons. The Kuwaiti-Palestinian team contracted the renowned American sand sculptors Ted Seibert and Damon Langlois. Langlois already held the Guinness Book record for the world’s tallest sandcastle. They assembled a team of 73 top sand artists from around the world, mostly Europe and North America. For the unifying theme, the team agreed on “Elf Layla wa Layla” (“One Thousand Nights and a Night”) aka “The Arabian Nights.” They chose a compilation of greatest hits, 32 stories including “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and all seven voyages of Sinbad, plus lesser-known tales. The stories would flow, one into the next into the next, and include a walk-on, walk-through “Scheherazade” sandcastle.

The “Elf Layla wa Layla” sculptures depicted living people, animals, jinn and zombies in a variety of styles, from Disney to Cubist. Such images were offensive to conservative Kuwaitis, who view human and animal imagery as idolatry. Almost as soon as the carving started, so did the death and bomb threats. Even members of parliament began criticizing the project. It took a statement by the emir himself to stop the vandalizing chatter. When a freak three-day rainstorm washed away much of the sculpture, including faces of the most provocative images, critics opined that it was God’s judgement on artistic blasphemy. In a heroic effort worthy of the Arabian Nights, the team managed to repair the damage and open the show on time. In all, they spent 20,000 hours creating and repairing the world’s greatest sand sculpture park.

Instead of the planned-for 30,000 people a day, however, the average attendance was a disappointing 800. The producers lost about a million dinar (over $3 million). To cut their losses, they refused to pay the team its final fees. And, since the producers had not completed the paperwork with Guinness, no record-breaking effort was recorded. Plans for subsequent sand sculpture festivals were shelved.

Wael had documented the entire story arc, from conception to betrayal, with time-lapse capture of the construction and interviews with the artists and promoters. Now he was torn. He was reluctant to complete the film, which could only add to Kuwait’s already awful reputation when it came to the treatment of foreign workers. But being an artist himself, his natural sympathies were with the sculptors. Undecided, he has yet to finish his magnum opus. Langlois, by contrast, produced a handsome coffee table book about the misadventure.

But back to Khalid and Omar. In the final weeks of my final year at AIS, they finally found their cinematic groove, this time without vampires. Instead of an epic feature, Khalid wrote a nine-minute short starring me as an aging, washed-up Bruce Wayne. My career as Batman now an alcoholic memory, I battle to maintain my sanity as the ghost of the Joker, played by Khalid’s ever-obliging brother, drags me to Hell. Khalid’s parents donated their spare room for the set, kept us supplied with food and drink for the multi-day shoot, and expressed concern that all those blood-curdling screams might be overtaxing the old, overacting American. This time, we persevered, day after day, scene after scene, finally reaching the martini shot. A year later, after meticulous editing and post-production, Khalid uploaded “The Batman Kills” to YouTube.

They were launched.

Bryn Barnard is an artist, teacher and former ICWA fellow. He has worked with Far Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek, National Geographic and NASA, and also with schools and universities in Kuwait, Korea, Singapore, the US, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His books include Dangerous Planet: Natural Disasters That Changed History, Outbreak: Plagues That Changed History, The Genius of Islam: How Muslims Made the Modern World and The New Ocean: The Fate of Life in a Changing Sea.

July 4, 1776: Delegates from 13 colonies to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia unanimously vote to declare independence from Great Britain. Among the members is Charles Carroll, a 38-year-old from Maryland who spent much of his life abroad. The only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, he was a leading voice for the cause.

Charles’s grandfather, the Irish-born Charles Carroll I, had earlier established the family motto, Ubicumque cum libertate (“Anywhere so long as there be freedom”). In 1748, the family sent Charles, only 11 years old, to France, to attend a small Jesuit school in the town of Saint Omer, 30 miles south of Calais. He was expected to become a learned, reasoning gentleman equipped to contribute to society.

He was not alone. From 1730 to 1762, more than a hundred American boys made the journey to the College of St. Omer, where many spent up to a decade far from their families. Their parents wanted them to have the grounding in the values and philosophy that came with a Jesuit education.

Founded in the 16^th century as a school for Catholic boys from England to avoid violent religious persecution at home during the reign of Elizabeth I, St. Omer later also took on Catholic boys from the colonies, where they were safer but also deprived of civil rights and denied participation in public life.

St. Omer graduates who would go on to leave their marks on American politics and culture included Aedanus Burke, judge and United States representative from South Carolina; James White, delegate from North Carolina; and Maryland Governor Philip Calvert.

Charles Carroll was perhaps the most emblematic. A signatory of the Declaration of Independence, he wasn’t the only member of his Maryland family to influence the future of the United States. His cousin and St. Omer schoolmate ​​Daniel Carroll was one of only five men to sign both the Articles of Confederation and US Constitution. George Washington tasked him to oversee the construction of Washington, DC. Daniel’s brother John would become the first American Catholic bishop and founder of Georgetown University, whose first five presidents were St. Omer alumni.

At St. Omer, those future American leaders imbibed the Enlightenment ideals of humanism, freedom and human rights, drawing inspiration from Greek and Roman political thinkers and their modern successors. Cicero, Tacitus, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Locke and Burke were the diet at the school, which emphasized the humanities, literature, history, philosophy and theology. It also gave the boys lessons in music, dance and theater.

Life at St. Omer wasn’t easy so far from home. “I hope to accomplish my Studies to your greatest satisfaction,” the young Charles Carroll, an only child, wrote his parents in 1750. Learning of his mother’s death while he was still away at school, he pleaded, “I wish you would permit me to return to Maryland in the next fleet.”

After St. Omer, Carroll was enrolled at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and later studied law in Britain, returning in 1765 to Maryland, where his family owned sprawling agricultural estates and some 300 slaves. He was at one point considered the colonies’ wealthiest man. But it was his debating skills and even temper for which he became widely known and even admired.

St. Omer students were taught that society should be focused on providing for the common good. Carroll adopted Cicero’s concept of natural law, that justice is inherent in nature, and laws should reflect moral principles.

Montesquieu—who epitomized the Enlightenment’s ideas about the separation of powers, central to the establishment of the US Constitution—was also key.

Like other Founding Fathers, he lost confidence in Britain’s ability to govern according to its own constitutional principles, common law and rights. Signing his name to the Declaration of Independence put his wealth at especially great risk due to anti-Catholic sentiment among Americans. And after independence, with the task of designing a new constitution, Carroll warned against “a slippage of natural law leading to unbridled individualism harmful to the common good” and resulting in the “tyranny of parties.”

He was wary of Thomas Jefferson’s more radical populism, saying true liberty requires a virtuous, duty-bound citizenry. He called for a “responsible” freedom, governed not just by “a political union but a union of sentiment and interest.”

Carroll’s part helping to develop the Senate was an important contribution; he later served as the first US senator from Maryland. And he helped write Maryland’s Constitution of 1776, successfully fighting to include religious liberty for all Christians, including Catholics.

He was a key proponent of states’ rights as part of the struggle, and championed the separation of church and state. The new country should have “multiple, overlapping government sovereignties, embodied with the principle of hierarchy and subsidiarity,” he wrote. “The flip side of hierarchy being subsidiarity.”

The United States was a bold experiment in balancing ambition with humanistic ideals, he believed, more than just a nation-state. “It was an idea, inseparably connected with the concepts of representative government, religious liberty, free inquiry and the spread of knowledge…extended to the whole family of man.”

Today, when those ideals are under serious threat and America’s policies oppose the country’s founding philosophy, we must help its return to the Enlightenment values that have long united both sides of the Atlantic. The St. Omer Foundation for Transatlantic Values is dedicated to helping preserve our largely forgotten transatlantic bridge and the ideas that formed it in the hope of helping to revive a democracy in danger and advance the deep roots of Franco-American friendship.

Charles Carroll was the last remaining signer of the Declaration of Independence when he died in 1832 at the age of 95. A few days before his death, he received a visit from Alexis de Tocqueville, who reported that “all his mannerisms and his turn of mind make him completely resemble a European gentleman. This breed of man disappeared after having provided America with the greatest men. With them the tradition of high morals is lost. The people become enlightened, knowledge expands, average ability becomes common. Outstanding talents and great characters are rarer.”

Edouard-François de Lencquesaing is the founder of the St. Omer Foundation for Transatlantic Values. In addition to sponsoring historical research, civic dialogue and transatlantic exchanges, it continues to bring American students to St. Omer, where the school is now called Lyceé Ribot. The foundation welcomes donations.

In 1875, a French chemist named Paul-Émile Lecoq discovered a fragile metal, silvery in color, with a faint blue tinge. In its liquid state, it becomes silvery white. He named it gallium in honor of his native country, from the Latin for the area including modern-day France.

Today, the rare chemical element is used in pacemakers, MRI devices, semiconductors and nuclear weapons.

In the first decade of this century, 30 percent of its production was in Europe, while its presence in China was entirely marginal. Then things changed.

Beijing invested heavily in gallium as a strategic resource, while weak industrial policies in Europe compounded the effects of widespread disdain for mining: The last continental plants, in Germany and Hungary, were closed between 2013 and 2015.

Today, almost all of the element known as Ga, atomic number 31, is processed and sold in the Land of the Dragon.

Now it’s clear that abandoning gallium was a strategic blunder, the consequence of a gross lack of vision, although perhaps unsurprising given the similar history with the element germanium (Ge, atomic number 32), revealed to the world in 1886 by Clemens Winkler, a German, of course. (He was not to be outdone by his French and Swedish predecessors: Scandium—Sc, atomic number 21—was discovered in Stockholm in 1879.)

Those strategically critical rare elements are now almost exclusively exploited by the Chinese. The former Celestial Empire controls over 70 percent of the global refining of 17 essential defense and technology resources. For the European Union’s 27 member states, that presents an immediate economic challenge and may be a matter of survival in a possible not-too-distant future.

The only good news is that we’re now aware of the self-inflicted setback. The EU has committed itself to stimulating domestic production of “critical” rare materials in an effort to ensure security of supply. Better late than never.

In 2024, the bloc enacted a measure called the Critical Raw Materials (CRM) Act, which set benchmarks for domestic capacities of extraction, processing and recycling along the strategic raw material supply chain. By 2030, the EU Commission warned, “no more than 65 percent of the EU’s annual needs of each strategic raw material at any relevant stage of processing should come from a single third country.”

More evidence came in a report last May by the Paris-based European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), which exhorted the EU’s member countries to address China’s dominance “before these dependencies deepen further and cause even greater economic damage.” Titled “Beijing’s critical raw material weapon—And how to dismantle it,” the document prescribes “urgent steps to diversify supply, strengthen deterrence and regain leverage.”

Among others, Mario Draghi—former president of the European Central Bank, Italian prime minister and savior of the euro—has also urged reducing strategic dependence and decreasing external exposure, reminding that “we are alone, but together.”

There’s been movement on that front. Greece’s Interministerial Committee for Strategic Investments last month approved a 340-million-euro investment in Metlen, a global industrial and energy company in Athens engaged in critical raw material production. Its work “will enable Greece to produce enough gallium to meet 100 percent of the European Union’s needs,” the government said. But the ambitious task will need more investment in addition to time and patience.

Norway, not an EU member but part of the European Economic Area (EEA) and fully integrated in the single market, is on track, too. Oslo has announced a project to create an underground mine at the edge of the Arctic Repparfjord, below a reindeer calving ground. The site, called Nussir, also contains Norway’s largest known copper deposit, home to a 1970s open pit mine. The new project, mostly owned by Blue Moon Metals, a Canadian company, was granted an operating license in 2019.

Other member states are stepping up, too. Hungary announced a “National Exploration Program” in March to prospect for minerals, saying the number of elements considered critical has nearly doubled from 20 sought-after elements in the 1990s.

Still, the EUISS says, it will take up to 25 years to achieve adequate extraction flows on the continent and will have to include outsourcing. “An approach based solely on Europe is impossible,” its report says.

Forming coalitions with other countries also keen to balance Beijing’s power—such as Brazil, India, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Congo—could be part of a solution. They should form alliances for joint purchases and protection from below-cost selling, possibly with a smart tariff plan. At June’s G7 summit in France, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi proposed a joint initiative to stockpile critical minerals.

Overall, achieving Europe’s goals will take a collectively funded drive for competitiveness that fosters research, business and employment with joint agreements and projects. For now, however, the EU’s actions remain a prime example of a promising industrial policy in need of significant development.

As the world is undergoing rapid transformation, individual European countries are forcing the EU to pace itself. That’s evident in the approach to another leading priority, collective defense. Efforts are underway but the estimated necessary investment has risen in the last two years from 800 billion euros to 1.2 trillion euros, a figure most governments are still having trouble digesting.

So far, we have been too slow and focused on the present, not the future, and slaves to old dogmas. When it comes to critical rare elements, Europe still needs a wake-up call.

Marco Zatterin spent 30 years at La Stampa as Brussels correspondent, head of the economic and financial editorial team, European editor and then deputy director. He is currently a columnist for the six newspapers of the Nem Group. He has covered and analyzed macro and monetary economics, banks, new technologies and the European integration process. He is the author of several books, including Trafalgar (Rizzoli, 2005) and Il Gigante del Nilo (Mondadori, 2019).

Erik Guyot is the founder and managing partner of Cross Pacific Partners, a financial research firm based in Taiwan, and a director at the Asian Technology Absolute Return Fund, managed by RAYS Capital Partners in Hong Kong. He previously worked as a financial journalist covering Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, including as lead reporter on Hong Kong business for The Wall Street Journal. He was an ICWA fellow from 1987 to 1989, reporting on US economic and security assistance to the Philippines and Thailand.

In 1987, Erik was planning a trip north of Manila to interview a Filipino colonel named Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan, when he learned the officer was actually in the Philippine capital, there to help lead a planned coup against President Corazon Aquino—the country’s first female leader who had toppled the longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the famed People Power Revolution the previous year. Honasan was later granted amnesty by President Fidel Ramos and successfully ran for the Senate in 1995. He was re-elected in 2001 and 2007.

Manila (September 1987) — I was going to report to you about the military training program for Philippine officers in the US and how, according to the US manual, it “encourages military professionalism.” But events took another twist last Friday.

Earlier, I learned from Americans how their part of the program worked. I had also set up a trip north to the Philippine Military Academy, and later to the army training center at Fort Magsaysay, to see, among others, Colonel Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan. Instead, he brought 800 men down to Manila for a coup. And when I arrived at Camp Aguinaldo, military headquarters, for an appointment with the chief of personnel, his office and the entire headquarters building were engulfed in the fire set by Colonel Honasan’s mutinous troops.

Rumors of a coup attempt had drifted around for a while, and I had brushed off hints from an officer that my interviews on Friday might not occur. So I was still startled when I was awoken before dawn by what seemed like every radio in the neighborhood blaring the government’s assurance that everything was okay. I hopped in a cab and rushed out to the government TV station, Channel 4. Arriving at the station in a quiet residential neighborhood, I found large crowds of spectators clustered around the compound. Occasional shots were a reminder that earlier in the day, a New Zealand correspondent had been killed. This was one coup not worth dying for, so I decided against following others into the sprawling compound.

It wasn’t surprising that the coup seemed to follow the script from February 1986 [People Power Revolution]: Grab the television stations, attempt to wrest airpower and take Camp Aguinaldo as main base. Both military revolts were spearheaded by Colonel Honasan and his classmates from the Philippine Military Academy. (Their patron, former Defense Minister [Ponce] Enrile, remained silent and out of sight.) On one television station, a young spokesman for the rebels read their statement that they were willing to give up their lives in this moment of service to the people. Their bottom line was that “the military structure is ineffective in dealing with the communist menace,” and they called for General Ramos [the future president who was then military chief of staff] to step down.

It was “not a war of bullets, but a psychological war,” one Philippine officer, who was deciding which side to join, told me. As the afternoon wore on, the rebels still seemed to be winning. Senators and congressmen made statements denouncing the coup from the presidential palace; their congressional offices had earlier been captured. Conspicuously absent from the airwaves were the president, [or] Ramos, or any military officer from the government’s side.

Finally at 3:30, President Aquino went on the air. Speaking in what seemed a relatively calm voice, she said, “There will be no terms. I have nothing to say to those traitors.” In Tagalog [Filipino], she added that rebel troops had fired upon her only son, wounding him and killing his three bodyguards, and later sprayed innocent civilians with automatic rifle fire.

I arrived at Camp Aguinaldo during the final offensive to retake the camp at 5:30, but not in time for my interview with the head of personnel. The old wood and plaster general headquarters building was an inferno after the rebels had set it afire to flush out loyal troops in the building. Moments later, vintage T-28 “Tora Tora” propeller airplanes fired rockets at the rebels attacking general headquarters. Impressive as the combined artillery and rocket fire was, it produced relatively few rebel casualties—five dead and two wounded out of the force of about 800. Many government soldiers tended to fire up in the air. Yet, it was significant that, unlike in previous coup attempts, the military was willing to fire upon renegade soldiers.

Despite the clatter of machine guns, crowds of spectators surged toward the action, only to flee when the firing was too intense. Many who lived near the camp said they liked Gringo Honasan; those who came from further away cheered the government tanks when they rumbled past.

After the firing had died down, I joined most of the foreign press corps near one of the front gates along the highway. A Marine amphibious tracked vehicle had broken down a gate in leading part of the assault on the camp. It was now just a matter of time: Many rebels had surrendered, and television stations had also been retaken. I asked a Marine sergeant what he thought of Honasan. Instead of condemning his opponent, he replied that Honasan was “magaling,” or skillful. As evening fell, the firing slacked off and small groups of Marines further infiltrated the camp.

By Saturday morning, it was all over. Colonel Honasan had escaped by helicopter, the rebels had surrendered, and General Ramos led a walking tour of the camp. It was a time for kudos all around. Ramos pointed to his charred office in general headquarters where [Deputy Chief of Staff] General [Eduardo] Ermita had fought off the rebels, noted the small craters where the six rockets fired by the planes had struck, and recommended the Marine colonel who led the operation for promotion to general. In one afternoon, Ramos had laid to rest months of criticism of weak and vacillating leadership.

Ramos had sharp words for Honasan, calling him a “traitor” and a “big liar” and saying that he might be shot if he resisted arrest. Yet, despite the tough stance, it seems unlikely that the military really wants to throw the book at the hero of the February revolution.

Until now, the government has been reluctant to put the squeeze on mutinous, corrupt or incompetent soldiers for fear of further widening the rift between the military and civilian government as well as within the military itself. But it can be done. After some hesitation, Aquino has unsheathed the sword of war against the insurgents. One hopes that the coup and the wounding of her son will provide the will to take a rolling pin to the reprobates in the ranks.

On a perfect spring Saturday in Georgetown, Delaware, the heart of poultry country, Jenifer Marilú Méndez is preparing to receive hundreds of families lining up for a weekend social at the Old Paths Church of Christ. It’s a half-mile from Georgetown’s “center,” a Norman Rockwell-like town of 6,500 residents.

For all its old-timey Americana charm, a majority of its residents are from an equally tiny village called Tacaná in Guatemala’s western highlands. As many as two-thirds of Georgetown’s inhabitants today are Spanish speakers, almost all Guatemalans. An estimated 30,000 of them live and work within a 30-mile radius.

Most of the labor is raising (then slaughtering) millions of chicks hatched for the area’s biggest employer, Perdue Farms, or as the Guatemalans call it, “La Per-DOO-AY.” Others work in construction, landscaping or agriculture. It’s safe to say most of these workers arrived here without valid entry visas in their passports—or even passports—and lack proper employment authorization. Despite being “undocumented,” their 60-to-80-hour workweeks can last decades.

Although the government deems such workers fit for expulsion, Méndez is here to help her fellow Guatemalans navigate life in America as “illegals.”

She is not a member of a religious order, but a fully credentialed diplomat assigned to Guatemala’s Philadelphia consulate as deputy consul, having recently served as her country’s ambassador to Cuba. Much of her work now includes monthly consulados moviles, or mobile consulates, held on weekends wherever paisanos living far from major US cities require attention.

A team of 19 consulate staff arrived here on a recent Friday night, rising early Saturday to fill the church’s social hall with workstations where Guatemalans fill out forms, have their photos taken and pay for documents they’re seeking. Most want Guatemalan passports, sold here for $65; others bring US-born children whose births they wish to register on Guatemala’s official rolls as they pursue dual citizenship.

Guatemalan passports serve as identification papers they can display if, say, they’re rushing an injured child to a hospital emergency room. They’re also required as a form of ID when cashing a paycheck or to show a landlord when renting an apartment.

“In the US, even to get cable TV you need some form of official ID,” one man waiting his turn outside said. Nowadays, another explained, it’s good to have a valid Guatemalan passport in case of deportation, easier to access services from Guatemala’s authorities at the end of a flight home.

Mobile consulates are not new. They rose in popularity after the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks, when travel around the United States suddenly required meeting more stringent ID standards. I attended my first mobile consulate session in 2006, joining diplomats from El Salvador in Kodiak, Alaska, serving paisanos employed in salmon canneries.

Renewing passports and securing other documents was an expensive proposition for those working families, who would have had to spend hundreds of dollars flying to one of El Salvador’s consulates in California. Instead, the consulates came to them.

On any given weekend you can find mobile consulates serving migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and other “sender” countries whose US residents now number in the tens of millions.

Hundreds of diplomats each year travel to places far from any major city. A consul based in Los Angeles, for instance, may send a team to Hawaii each year to attend to pineapple plantation workers. Midwestern consulate staff fan out to meat-packing centers across Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.

Other consulates practice a hyper-local strategy: In New York, the Dominican Republic’s mid-town Manhattan consulate sends “mobile” teams up to Washington Heights or the Bronx, saving their fellow citizens the hassle of a subway ride downtown.

Honduras runs its mobile consulates like traveling convenience stores: selling passports but also notarizing documents paisanos might later mail home to close a purchase of farmland or settle an inheritance dispute. Registering marriages and divorces with the Honduran authorities also may be attended to.

Hugo Hun Archila, the senior diplomat in Guatemala’s Philadelphia consulate, conducted 10 mobile assignments last year, including venturing deep into Pennsylvania’s vast hinterland: to mushroom country outside Kennett Square and the bustling warehouse district near Chambersburg, where two busy interstate highways intersect—locations where acute labor shortages have drawn growing Guatemalan colonies.

Besides the usual logistical challenges of sending caravans on the road, Hun Archila has lately had to deal with a new impediment: Guatemalans’ fear of gathering in public. “I get calls,” he said. “People ask: ‘Can you guarantee there won’t be an ICE raid?’ And of course we can’t. People are afraid.”

An immigration raid on an official consular location would be almost unheard of, a true diplomatic incident. But that almost happened in Minneapolis this past winter, when ICE agents attempted to apprehend people entering Ecuador’s consulate. Hun Archila says he and other Guatemalan consuls in the US routinely alert State Department counterparts about their weekend itineraries whenever they send staff on official business beyond consular grounds.

“We don’t think they [ICE] would dare” obstruct the visits, the consul said. “But you never know these days.”

While hundreds waited for passports at the Georgetown church, a Latino shopping mall 14 miles away in Laurel, Delaware, was practically empty. “It’s been this way for more than a year,” said Concepcion De Leon, owner of the mall’s Tienda Tacaná store. “Customers are afraid to leave their homes except to work.”

In fact, there has been almost no reported ICE activity around Georgetown beyond a few traffic stops leading to document checks and detention. Perdue Farms, where many of the folks attending the mobile consulate work, does not appear to be under scrutiny for hiring undocumented migrants.

While waiting, paisanos spoke freely about the economics of coming to the United States illegally and working without permission. As long as their names were withheld, they were happy to reveal how much it costs to hire smugglers to get from Tacaná to Georgetown ($15,000 per person) and what it costs to buy a birth certificate attesting the bearer was born in Puerto Rico and therefore a US citizen ($1,200-$1,500).

Once they get here, the work is plentiful. A roofer named “Pedro” said he earns $20 per hour and seldom works fewer than 11 hours a day. Two men who told me they work as agarraderos de pollo (literally, chicken rustlers—grabbing live birds and shoving them into cages for transport to processing plants) said they earned $19 an hour to start, adding they could quickly get up to $25 if they stay in this high-turnover workforce.

I met members of two families who told me they had traveled together from Guatemala to Delaware, each in a party of four, paying $15,000 per person to smugglers who brought them into the United States via Arizona. I wasn’t shocked by the amount each family paid—$60,000 for three weeks’ travel—as much as the speed with which each was able to retire its smuggling debt.

“A year and a half,” one husband told me; “just over a year,” the other said.

Both families were in line at the church to obtain papers for a US-born child. The mothers praised the local schools in which their older children were enrolled. The dads reported being satisfied with prevailing local wages.

It made me ponder: If there really are 30,000 Guatemalans in this corner of Delaware and each paid $15,000 to get here, that’s almost half-a-billion dollars’ worth of smuggling proceeds just from this one district.

Which begs a question: Why are we allowing smugglers to earn such enormous riches? The workers are desperately needed for jobs employers still can’t adequately fill. Wouldn’t it make more sense to sell authorization permits allowing migrants to work legally and put the proceeds toward local communities’ needs?

And another: Why do we claim undocumented workers are undermining American prosperity when they’re so evidently essential to the American economy?

At the end of the first day of the consulate’s weekend visit, Deputy Consul Méndez told me her team had seen 500 people, the largest number of whom bought $65 passports. While the next day’s session would run only until 1 p.m., she speculated she would see even more.

“Sunday is the one day they don’t work,” she said. “So maybe they’ll come here.”

Joel Millman is a journalist and community organizer based in Philadelphia. He covered immigration and Latin America for almost 30 years, mainly for The Wall Street Journal, before working as a press officer for the UN’s International Organization for Migration in Geneva. His interests include refugee protection and resettlement and assisting US communities as they pursue successful integration of migrants in their midst. He was a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Central America from 1987 to 1989.

When you take the ferry from Istanbul’s Eminönü waterfront at the base of the Bosphorus up the Golden Horn inlet, it’s impossible to miss the Phanar Greek Orthodox College high up on your left. Known officially as the Özel Fener Rum Ortaokulu ve Lisesi, nicknamed the “Red Castle” by the Turks and “Great School of the Nation” by the Greeks, the neo-Gothic high school overlooks the hills of the traditionally Greek Fener neighborhood, one of the city’s most historic.

But the building has been empty since last fall, forced to close to undergo seismic renovations. Because the school foundation lacks the over 10 million euros ($11.5 million) needed to fund the work amid declining enrollment, the landmark structure’s fate is unclear.

I took the boat on a recent morning when the school was still open. From the dock at the base of the hill, I walked up a steep, stone-paved alley.

The building’s fortress-like architecture attracts visitors from around the world, although most were only able to admire from the outside. Its red bricks, which earned its Turkish nickname, were imported from Marseille, and its large dome once housed an astronomical observatory with a telescope.

The school opened in another building in 1454, just a year after the fall of Constantinople, established by Ecumenical Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios, who appointed the Thessalonian scholar Mathaios Kamariotis as its first director. It served as the premier academy for the city’s Greek elite for centuries. Changing locations several times, it moved to its current home, designed by the Greek architect Konstantinos Dimadis, in 1882.

The school celebrated its 570^th anniversary in November 2024, the oldest surviving and most prominent Greek educational institution still in operation, kept alive by the Rūm, or Istanbul Greeks.

The principal Dimitris Zotos was waiting for me at his desk, surrounded by books. On one side stood the Turkish flag, on the other, the school’s flag. Behind him hung a panoramic photograph of the building with a portrait of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, above.

Besides serving as principal, Zotos has also taught mathematics for nearly 30 years. He was born and raised in the city.

“We Greeks are privileged; we are people with a rich heritage,” he said. “The concepts of democracy, philosophy, science: We must be proud to have them and the many people who carried them all the way to the present day.”

Classes were already out for summer when I visited, which allowed me to wander the airy hallways and empty classrooms. Some 450 to 500 students had attended in the early 1950s. But only 38 children between the ages of 11 and 18 celebrated the end of the 2024 school year. Eight graduated.

Today, the aging Rūm community numbers no more than 2,000, having steadily shrunk due to emigration and declining birth rates, from some 110,000 Greeks in the 1920s. The city’s other remaining Greek schools are now also almost empty.

“What will happen next, I really don’t know,” Zotos told me. “What can a school principal do about demographics?”

The Turkish Education Ministry ordered the Red Castle’s temporary closure in September after earthquake resistance testing revealed the building needs structural reinforcement and maintenance work to meet seismic safety standards. Classes have moved to a Greek primary school near central Taksim Square until the work is completed.

It’s not clear when the historic building will be able to reopen.

Demetrios Ioannou is an independent journalist and documentary photographer. He is based between Istanbul and his native city of Athens. He covers a wide range of stories in the region, including travel, culture, food, social issues and breaking news. His work has appeared in local and international publications including The New York Times, National Geographic, The Economist, BBC Travel, NPR, Politico Europe and The Daily Beast.

Reviewed in this article:

The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness under Putin
Bloomsbury Continuum, April 2026
by Marc Bennetts

The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin’s Ideology Took the Nation Hostage
Polity Press, April 2026
by Andrei Kolesnikov

On May 12, 80-year-old Nina Litvinova committed suicide in Moscow. A tireless dissident and human rights activist, she was the younger sister of Pavel Litvinov, one of eight protesters who famously demonstrated on Red Square in 1968 against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia under a banner reading “For your freedom and ours!” Both are grandchildren of Stalin-era Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov.

Litvinova left a note saying that life had become “unbearable” since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. She had worked unceasingly to help political prisoners detained in Russia for opposing the war. “I tried to help them,” she wrote, “but I’m exhausted, and I am tormented day and night by helplessness. I’m ashamed, but I gave up. Please forgive me.”

The tragedy of Nina Litvinova is just one small, heartrending moment in the history of Russia’s devolution from a flawed but aspirational young democracy in 1999 into an ugly, aggressive and ultimately self-destructive hybrid dictatorship under Putin. For many Russians and foreign Russophiles, wrestling to understand that process has produced similar results, to varying degrees, that it did for Litvinova—exhaustion, torment, helplessness and shame.

Two new books have appeared to shed light on what has been done to Russia—and what Russians did to themselves—over the last quarter century: The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral into Madness Under Putin by Marc Bennetts, former Moscow correspondent for The Times (London), and The Closing of the Russian Mind: How Putin’s Ideology Took the Nation Hostage by the veteran Russian journalist and political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov.

The breathless subtitles already begin to convey the tragic urgency of what has happened. Both merit attention not only for what they tell us about Putin’s horrific war of choice against Ukraine and its broad popular support but also for the warnings they’re flashing to Western societies, some of which also seem to be decivilizing at an appalling rate.

Possessed by a demon

Bennetts spent nearly 25 years in Russia, leaving shortly after the Kremlin launched its 2022 attack on Ukraine. By then, he writes, “the power of Putin’s propaganda machine was truly frightening. It was like nothing I had ever experienced or had ever expected to. Russians had already relinquished many of their democratic rights to Putin in exchange for his promise of economic stability—now millions appeared to be surrendering their sanity as well.” Shortly before he left, Bennetts stopped by a neighbor’s flat to say farewell, but when the subject of Ukraine came up, she “growled” at him “as if she was possessed by a demon.”

“This kind of craziness, I feared, was infectious,” he adds. “If we stayed much longer, would we also succumb?”

Both Bennetts and Kolesnikov marvel at the power of the Kremlin’s propaganda, which they see as the keystone of Russia’s transformation. It may be a cliché of sociology that a political leader can get a small number of people to do horrendous things by offering rewards, but to get a large number to do so requires some kind of ideology. The demons Bennetts describes are conjured up by emotionally driven creeds like communism, fascism or religion, as history has demonstrated.

But getting at precisely how the Kremlin’s malevolent propaganda has worked so effectively in Russia—a country where millions of people still had relatively fresh memories of repudiated state-driven political repression and where as recently as the mid-1990s people would stand in line for copies of formerly banned books by figures such as Vladimir Nabokov, Marina Tsvetayeva and Alexander Solzhenitsyn that were sold alongside bottles of vodka at metro station kiosks—is no easy riddle.

Still, well before Putin began stoking the flames of nationalism and anti-Westernism when he took power in the year 2000, Bennetts notes, Russians were already well-practiced at ignoring human rights abuses and eye-opening corruption scandals.

“Most people cared about little beyond their immediate families and the everyday business of living,” he writes. “Sometimes, they didn’t even care that much about those things. It was so easy for Putin to fill this vacuum with his own violent compulsions.”

‘Mental, intellectual, spiritual violence’

Kolesnikov—a longtime fellow of the Carnegie Endowment’s Russia Eurasia Center who still lives and works in Moscow—takes a more academic approach, broadly grounded in the literature of sociology and political science. But his conclusions jibe remarkably with Bennetts’s. He points to the direct relationship between the state’s ratcheting up of literal physical violence against Russians and what he calls “the mental, intellectual and spiritual violence” by the Kremlin’s ideological machinery.

“The state’s monopoly on violence is supplemented by a monopoly on the formulation, production, and implementation of ideology,” Kolesnikov argues. “The invention, production, and implementation of a systematized and de facto state ideology is becoming a distinct industry involving schools and universities; teachers and professors; television, press, and the internet; the education and science ministries; the Russian Orthodox Church; and the Culture Ministry. All these agencies offer serious support to Russia’s security agencies—and vice versa.”

Many Russians, he adds, were particularly susceptible because of their deep-seated “learned indifference” and “passive conformism.” They fell for the key illusions of “all totalitarian ideologies,” which, as described by the prominent Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov, include “an archaic and idealized idea of a lost original collective integrity…; an image of an enemy, which is presented as a metaphysical evil; and a utopia of revived collectivity projected into the future.”

Both authors identify key turning points in Putinist Russia’s history, the most important of which were the last major pro-democracy protests in 2011 and 2012 (triggered by Putin’s equally key decision to return to the Kremlin for—so far—a third, fourth and fifth term as president) and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine a decade later. The failed protests clearly signaled that Russian society could be corralled into going along with whatever vision of the future Putin would concoct, they both argue.

The Ukraine invasion signaled the end of the period when apathy and passivity on the public’s part were sufficient in the Kremlin’s eyes, and the beginning of its demand for active complicity. That came in the form of denunciations (Kolesnikov describes them as “a new social norm”), participation in the war as needed, support for the military-industrial complex and much more. “A young person taking an exam in the humanities can no longer enter adulthood without expressing public loyalty to the state,” he points out.

The speed at which Putin has pressed his advantage is also remarkable. “It is amazing that a contemporary, modernized and urbanized society can degenerate at such a staggering rate, especially in terms of morality and psychology,” Kolesnikov marvels. But for those with any official authority, from police to judges to teachers to petty bureaucrats, the post-invasion system demands the “public demonstration of super-obedience.” As conformity increases and becomes the norm, tiny nonconformist acts or omissions become more noticeable and thereby easier to persecute.

Of the two books, Bennetts’s is the easier read, full of colorful stories and pithy quotations from emblematic figures of the period including Alexander Gabyshev, an Indigenous Sakha shaman from Russia’s far east who was thrown into a psychiatric hospital for declaiming that “Putin is a demon…the antichrist” and a washed-up American mixed martial arts fighter named Jeff Monson, who converted his vocal admiration for Putin into a Russian passport and a political position in the Moscow suburb of Krasnogorsk.

The Descent tells the story of Russia’s deterioration through a mélange of small stories that, somewhat surprisingly, form a coherent and devastating whole. It lacks the power and immediacy of Bennetts’s excellent 2016 book about Putin’s dismantling of his political opponents, I’m Going To Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition, but it effectively conveys the author’s personal pain from losing friends, relatives and one cultural touchstone after another as Russia’s “madness” spreads. Although that suffering may be small compared to that of Ukrainians enduring atrocities and noble Russians like Nina Litvinova, it’s immediate and relatable.

Despite Kolesnikov’s more scholarly detachment, the story of democratic Russia’s demise touches him closely, too. A prominent liberal journalist throughout his country’s Westernizing 1990s, he now finds himself a lonely voice inside Putin’s whirlwind. He writes tersely about his mother, the daughter of a Stalinist “enemy of the people” who didn’t live to see her son branded a “foreign agent” under the new wave of dictatorship.

During the less restrictive earlier days of Putin’s rise, a prominent fellow journalist named Sergei Parkhomenko initiated a project to place small plaques on buildings where innocent victims of Stalin’s political terror had lived before their murders. One such sign honored Kolesnikov’s grandfather, but like many of the memorials across Russia, it disappeared as the Kremlin renewed the practice of rewriting its past myths.

“Russia is heading once more towards totalitarianism,” Bennetts quotes Parkhomenko as saying. “The aggressive nationalism that we are seeing now leads directly to the idea that the individual’s life is worth nothing and that only the state’s interests are important.”

Neither author offers saccharine predictions about where Putin may ultimately lead Russia or whether it will recover from its authoritarian ethos, although Bennetts is unable to surrender the hope he might someday return to Moscow. “I am not hopeful about [Russia’s] future,” he writes in conclusion. “Change may come, eventually, but I fear that much of Russian society has been hollowed out of the qualities necessary to build a freer and fairer country.”

“Evil and madness have the upper hand,” he adds, “and the road to normality, or something resembling it, has been rendered almost impassable by bullet-ridden corpses and the charred ruins of Ukrainian towns and cities.”

Robert Coalson is a retired journalist who spent more than 20 years reporting on Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the former Soviet bloc for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The World Cup has descended on North America. In New York, it’s the talk of the town. But those with a team to cheer for the first time ever may be among the most excited.

The tournament’s expansion from 32 to 48 squads has opened the door for countries that rarely appear, and some, like Uzbekistan, are making their debut. Its team will play its first World Cup match on June 17.

Nowhere on the continent will the former Soviet republic’s entrance make more waves than here. Nearly half the country’s 60,000 global immigrants live in the New York metro area. Some will watch matches in person, many others in the city’s restaurants and bars.

Abdulla Kwaja, president of the Turkestan American Association who left Uzbekistan’s lush Fergana Valley in 1974, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, greeted the national team on its arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport.

“We are so excited!” he said. “Uzbekistan, now an independent country, will be in the World Cup!” He’ll travel with the team to Mexico, Houston and Atlanta for each of the group stage matches. “I will wear my Uzbek hat and carry our flag into the stadium.”

Before independence following the Soviet collapse in 1991, players had to compete under the Soviet Union’s flag. Later, the national team, called the White Wolves, just missed qualifying for three World Cup championships. But last year in Abu Dhabi, its hard work paid off with a victory over the United Arab Emirates. Uzbekistan is the first Central Asian country to participate.

It has only recently begun opening to the world. Former President Islam Karimov, the country’s onetime Communist boss who retained power after independence in 1991 until his death in 2016, was said to be paranoid on top of highly repressive. He saw enemies everywhere, not least in those who emigrated, whom he called “lazy people” who “disgrace all of us.”

New York’s Uzbekistani diaspora is very far from a single community, however. It’s split across religions, language, class and migration waves. Many Jews whose ancestors lived in the once powerful Silk Road city Bukhara arrived during the late Soviet period and built lives in Queens. Newer Muslim migrants concentrated in southern Brooklyn, many working long hours in the city’s service economy.

The borough’s Coney Island Avenue hums late into the night, sustained by delivery workers, rideshare drivers and recent arrivals finishing long shifts. The 24-hour kebab joint Urgut Osh Markazi is full of cantankerous taxi drivers and delivery workers switching between Uzbek, Tajik and Russian amid the beeping sounds of delivery apps as they wait to pick up mixed grill platters and large portions of plov, Uzbekistan’s national dish: rice often cooked with lamb, onions, carrots and cumin seeds.

Mirshod Rashidob, tall, slender and bespectacled, handed me a samsa, a flaky turnover baked in tandoor oven. Only 18 years old, he moved to the United States last year with plans to study mechanical engineering in the fall. “I’ve been so busy” since relocating to New York, he said. “Everyone here is so busy.”

Still, he hopes to catch his home team’s matches as well as the tournament’s championship at one of the FIFA fan zones near Rockefeller Center.

In leafy Rego Park, off Queens Boulevard in the eponymous borough, life is quieter. Mezuzahs line jewelry stores, groceries and real estate offices tucked beneath glass office towers and faded shopping arcades. Ilya Schumilkhay, a Bukharan Jew, moved from his native Samarkand—another storied Silk Road city—in 1994 to study fashion in Manhattan and now makes costumes for Broadway and films.

“They aren’t necessarily my favorite team,” he confessed of Uzbekistan’s team. (That would be Argentina, especially during the Maradona years.) “But I am proud of them.”

Separate migration waves reshaped the diaspora over decades. Some Muslim refugees arrived during the final Soviet years, but the largest post-independence influx came in the 2000s. They were aided by the United States Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, a lottery launched in 1995 to facilitate immigration from places underrepresented in the US.

“I hire them at my shop,” Schumilkhay said of newer immigrants from Uzbekistan. “They work in restaurants, drive trucks, take care of our parents. They work very hard,” he said. But other older Bukharan Jews remain wary and insular decades after arriving in New York, their attitudes shaped by memories of antisemitism and upheaval.

Bukharan Jews tend to associate more with the Soviet Union or with their religion than any feelings of Uzbekistani nationalism, says Central Asia expert Alexander Cooley, a professor of political science at Barnard College, especially after Karimov was replaced by the current leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev in 2016.

As Uzbekistan prepares for its inaugural World Cup appearance, several stars have aligned for the country, Cooley said. It is opening under Mirziyoyev, who’s leveraging tourism, technology and stronger ties with the diaspora to help make it a leader in Central Asia.

“Uzbekistan has become a national, regional and now a global player,” he said, adding that the tournament may have a galvanizing effect.

Diaspora communities are indeed rallying around the national team. After years suffering the agonizingly close chances, many Uzbekistani soccer fans in New York feel they’re finally being rewarded for their resilience.

But the going will be difficult. Currently ranked 50^th, the team will face stiff competition in the group stage, first playing Colombia, ranked 13^th, on June 17, and then Portugal, ranked fifth.

“We have tough teams to play,” Amir Huseini acknowledged standing below the bright white lights of his restaurant Afsona in Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood. “But we have tough players, too, and we have a great coach.”

Sharing plates of shashlyk and round flatbread, flanked by geometric and floral motifs, fans at Afsona spoke about the White Wolves coach Fabio Cannavaro in almost mythical terms. The Italian national, nicknamed “The Berlin Wall,” led Italy to victory in the 2006 World Cup.

The national team would rely on a disciplined defense, they said, with its back line including the team’s star, Abdukodir Khusanov, the first Uzbekistani national to play in the English Premier League. The plan will be to rely on the strong fullbacks and make quick counterattacks.

“All we can do is hope,” said Ashraf Zakirov, drinking green tea from a small bowl in his office nearby off Ditmas Avenue. He moved here in 2001 from Samarkand, like many in the area. He now works as a lawyer, realtor and head of the Central Asian Foundation.

Uzbekistan’s participation in the World Cup will raise the country’s profile regardless of the results, he said, adding that many people have trouble placing the country on a map, often confusing it with Pakistan.

But Zakirov told me he’s frustrated by the tough travel restrictions around the tournament. “Everyone got the ticket but most did not get visas,” he said, adding that family and friends won’t be reunited to join the World Cup festivities.

Nevertheless, he hopes to go to the game in Houston—where the team will play Portugal on June 23—or watch from down the road at Emir Palace, a dazzlingly white marble hall owned by another friend from Samarkand. The restaurant will show the first two games on a big screen but has scheduled a private party for the team’s third game against the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Steven Benjamin left Uzbekistan in 1992 as part of the mass Jewish exodus. Now he manages a barbershop near Brooklyn’s tony Prospect Park—far from other, more insular Uzbek enclaves—and still closely follows the national team.

“I couldn’t believe they made it that far,” he said of the squad. Working in a neighborhood shaped much more by West Indian families and young professionals than post-Soviet immigrants, Benjamin said the team’s World Cup appearance has unexpectedly become a source of pride not only for older members of the community but also his own American-born children.

“My kids understand everything,” he said about his ability to speak Russian, Uzbek and Tajik, “but they always answer in English.”

Joshua Levkowitz was an ICWA fellow from 2021-2023 in Turkey, where he wrote about issues related to migration and identity.

TROMSØ, Norway — “Have you heard Alex Karp has come to town?”

It was a sunny afternoon in April. I was sitting in a café called Tøllefsen with a Sámi politician named Anton Petter Hauan. He was in town for the weekend for an arts festival, and would soon be headed back to Kautokeino, the eastern city close to the Finnish border where he lives, populated mainly by members of the Sámi Indigenous people. We were deep in conversation about high north energy projects when a lanky older man approached our table and patted him on the back. Hauan quickly introduced us; this was Magne Amundsen, head of economic development for Tromsø municipality.

“An American journalist?” Amundsen said, raising his eyebrows. Then he asked the question that opened this piece.

Clocking my alarm, Amundsen quickly supplied the details: Alex Karp, controversial billionaire CEO of the American AI-powered data analytics company Palantir, had bought property in our city. Amundsen pulled out his phone to show me the article in Nordlys, the regional paper. In 2024, a mysterious company called Hohenems AB completed one of the city’s biggest residential sales, paying $3.2 million for a modern five-bedroom home with stunning fjord views. Intrigued by both the scale and secrecy of the sale, the paper had traced the company’s ownership back to Karp.

As it turns out, he has purchased several properties in Norway through Hohehems AB. But, Amundsen told me, he had reason to believe this one was more than a mere real estate investment. One of Amundsen’s friends lives just down the road from the property and this past winter had often spotted Karp’s unmistakable wild graying mane entering or leaving the home. On more than one occasion, an ever-present coterie of super-fit Norwegian security guards had frightened this man’s young child.

Karp is an avid cross-country skier, according to reports, and his rigorous training routine involves splitting time between ski destinations around the world. But for a man outspoken about his commitment to mass surveillance of civilians—one of Palantir’s stocks-in-trade—his sudden interest in these particular ski trails has raised suspicion.

At the center of Tromsø island, seven miles of carefully maintained ski tracks loop around the long north-to-south ridge. One of the most-trafficked loops passes an eerie and unmissable installation: a large field dotted with more than 30 white satellite dishes, many encased in protective domes and some as tall as a telephone pole. It is the global headquarters of Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT). The satellite arm of Kongsberg, a joint state-commercial defense company and major weapons manufacturer, it, like Palantir, has considerably profited from US contracts throughout the US-Israel war against Iran.

Palantir has also been rapidly expanding its space footprint, moving beyond defense contracts to building core operating systems for orbital and stratospheric operations. For many in Norway, Karp’s geographical proximity to the state’s satellite operations feels too close for comfort. And well-timed: last year, the European Space Agency announced it would build its new Arctic Space Center in Tromsø.

Nordlys had published an investigation in September 2025 and there was good reason for Amundsen to alert me about it now. On April 18—not long before our cafe introduction—Karp published a 22-point “mini-manifesto” on X outlining his vision for the future of the West. Among other points, he endorsed state mass surveillance of civilians, extolled American military might and called on Silicon Valley to prioritize AI-powered weaponry.

“The question is not whether AI weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose,” Karp wrote.

From the United Kingdom to France to Spain, state contracts with Palantir have drawn sharp criticism. In the UK, which has nearly $700 million in AI-powered big-data software contracts spanning the National Health Services, the military and various ministries, Karp’s April manifesto brought the controversy to a head. Thousands of protestors took to the streets and more than 200,000 people signed a petition calling to end the contracts. Parliament members have also raised concerns, according to The Guardian, with one calling the manifesto “the ramblings of a supervillain.”

Norway doesn’t currently employ Palantir. But it tried. The Norwegian state police adopted the company’s Gotham surveillance technology in 2016 until it terminated the contract in 2020, citing, among other concerns, the firm’s non-compliance with Norway’s strict data protection laws. (In December 2025, Switzerland’s armed forces also cancelled a contract after an audit detected data leaks to US intelligence.)

Still, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund remains one of Palantir’s largest European investors. That has attracted criticism at a time the fund has significantly downsized its Israeli defense investments. Palantir has longstanding contracts with the Israeli Defense Forces, providing the predictive systems that supported civilian surveillance and genocide in Gaza as well as operations in the West Bank. An Amnesty International report last year found that Palantir had also contributed to human rights violations by facilitating the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s unlawful arrests.

Over my nearly two years living in Tromsø, it’s happened a handful of times: a sudden vertigo-like sensation when my high north small-town bubble seems to suddenly pop. I felt it last year when our port police detained an alleged Russian shadow fleet vessel. I felt it in January, when Thomas Dans, the Trump-appointed chair of US Arctic research, arrived directly from Mar-a-Lago to attend a conference that saw the United States abandon its longstanding interests and partnerships. At a small cocktail reception, he told me, unflinchingly, that US Arctic research would turn its focus from “climate change and Indigenous-peoples-DEI stuff,” to focus on “the economic opportunities of the North.” (I wrote about those conversations for The Atlantic here.)

Any sense of isolation is an illusion, of course. Not just because Tromsø is a growing global tourism hub and geopolitical center. But also because, much like in most of the world, American AI companies are already infiltrating the fabric of many peoples’ personal and professional lives, prompting ethical debates.

The Arctic University in Norway, for example, has a contract with OpenAI to run its own internal, data-protected large language model, ChatUiT. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman entered an agreement with the US Defense Department in March, it raised alarm. Tromsø is a sister city with Gaza and pro-Palestine activism here is widespread and strong. Many students have expressed outrage that their work is helping train algorithms that are powering the US-Israel defense apparatus.

Among my friends at the university, I’ve heard debates questioning the very existence of an academic “GPT.” It raises all kinds of knotty questions: Whose knowledge was mined and repackaged to produce its answers, often without credit and always without compensation? How are such models trained and how might they be invisibly guiding avenues of critical thinking? What data are we revealing about ourselves from the content and sequence of our own queries?

As word of Karp’s purchase spread, I heard critical conversations among locals as well. There’s another layer of self-questioning behind them: In our countless daily acts of digital permissiveness, what’s the point of being so alarmed by Karp’s mere physical intrusion anyway? Do we need the embodied presence of an easily hate-able figurehead like him to question the inevitability-narrative of power brokers who have everything to gain from our accepting their terms?

Back at Tøllefsen, Amundsen departed, and my conversation with Hauan, the Sámi politician, turned to his own recent explorations with AI. He’d been talking with Claude, the chatbot created by Anthropic. Founded by former OpenAI employees, that company trained its bot on human rights principles and is considered a moral (and more accurate) alternative to ChatGPT. Lately, Hauan has been teaching Claude to speak northern Sámi. It’s an extremely quick learner, he said.

Hauan didn’t grow up with the Sámi language. He wasn’t raised as a Sámi at all. Thanks to more than a century of successful fornorskning, or Norwegianization, policies, his parents were “fully Norwegian” and didn’t talk about their cultural heritage. Hauan’s ancestors were sea Sámi, coastal fishers whose culture was systemically erased by a state eager to exploit fish-rich northern waters. Hauan has spent much of his adulthood rediscovering their silenced history. Integral to the process was learning northern Sámi.

Could large language models help preserve, and even spread, Indigenous languages? As it happened, that question had come up in another recent conversation. For nearly two years now, I’ve been meeting Risten Turi Aleksandersen, director of language, education and health at the Sámi Parliament, the representative body with which the government must consult on issues concerning Sámi culture and land. She recently told me that the Sámi University of Applied Sciences is developing a large language model of its own.

For the Sámi, language, education and health all go hand in hand, Risten said. Nearly 40 years after Norway ratified the International Labor Organization Tribal and Indigenous Peoples Convention (ILO 169) and abolished its assimilation policies, language revitalization is ongoing work. In many cases, there simply aren’t enough teachers to staff the region’s constellation of small and geographically distant communities. The subsequent language gap isn’t just a cultural loss affecting future generations. It can also magnify health risks for those who are native speakers.

Few doctors in Norway speak Sámi, let alone understand the lifestyle, values and worldviews that should inform consultation and diagnosis. If AI could at the very least help more doctors translate the basics, she told me, it could be transformative.

Risten also sees potential to help level a legal playing field as the state systemically expropriates traditional lands. She cited a landmark 2021 case in which the Supreme Court ruled the state’s permitting of the Fosen wind park unconstitutional because it violated the rights of Sámi reindeer herders. But it took two decades of legal battles to reach that decision. By the time the ruling came down, the park had already been built. Because the damage was done, the state was allowed to keep the windmills and merely pay a fine.

Risten, herself a reindeer herder, has spent a decade fighting a state-permitted wind park in her herding areas just an hour from Tromsø. Much of that fight has also been a sort of linguistic study, as she and her husband attempted to translate cryptic bureaucratic processes and legalese. Theoretically, Sámi-trained AI could help future herders quickly learn permit and approval processes and better defend their lands. Or a tool grounded in Sámi worldviews and trained in international human rights law might in turn be able to communicate those to states and corporations that have historically dismissed Sámi authority.

But even potentially helpful uses must be weighed against one glaring consequence: AI’s devastating environmental costs, and ever-growing demand for energy, water and space. Those, too, are swiftly coming to northern Norway. Just a few hours south of Tromsø lies the fjordside city Narvik, known for the World War II battle that marked Hitler’s first decisive defeat. On its outskirts, Microsoft will soon build a $6.2 billion, 230-megawatt AI data center promising to “deliver sustainable AI infrastructure to all of Europe.” Already, this Narvik center is raising concerns in the local reindeer herding district.

Indeed, northern Norway is quickly emerging as a leader in future European data center infrastructure. Not only is it among Europe’s least-populated regions but the Arctic climate also naturally reduces the energy required to keep the centers cool. Much like the many new energy projects crisscrossing the land, these centers will inevitably encroach on already-fragmented traditional Sámi herding grounds.

On that April afternoon in Tøllefsen, Hauan and I were in agreement: Karp’s arrival was alarming but his technologies had likely long since infiltrated our lives. His presence was merely an uncomfortable reminder of the far-flung, deep-burrowing global influence of a disturbingly small group of American men. Absent larger regulations, civilians now bear the weight of often queasy-making ethics. But rather than restricting those firms’ access to sensitive civilian data, many democratic states are still paying them for the privilege of being mined.

For now, we could hold out hope that Karp is interested in Tromsø only for the quality of its fresh powder. Perhaps, we mused, he may even notice the snow cover’s growing unpredictability, its rapid seasonal changes. Maybe in some future winter, as he wades through gummy slush, he’ll consider his own disproportionate contributions to the high north’s accelerating transformations and have a change of heart.

We laughed at the image of Karp suddenly growing a climate conscience. It felt about as absurd as state leaders expecting that his company, or any powerful technology firm, could be trusted to set its own ethical guardrails, let alone follow them.

Institute of Current World Affairs Fellow Brett Simpson is a journalist based 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in Tromsø, Norway—from where she’s investigating intersecting environmental, societal and political challenges across the Arctic, one of the earth’s fastest-changing environments. An alumna of Princeton and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she’s written for National Geographic, The Atlantic, The New York Times and other publications.

The March on Washington in 1963 remains one of the most iconic moments in modern American history. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the event’s highlight, continues to inspire people around the world. The protest helped build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the end of the Jim Crow era.

Activists around the world still see the March on Washington as a model. Because it was followed by the greatest victories of the civil rights movement, they assume the march caused those triumphs. In fact, that’s a dangerous misconception.

The civil rights movement didn’t become powerful because of the March on Washington; the event took place because the civil rights movement had become powerful. The march was part of a larger strategy, it didn’t create change by itself.

By 1963, activists were employing a wide variety of tactics, including lawsuits, boycotts, sit-ins, “Freedom Rides” and other campaigns. Each targeted specific institutions: courts, legislatures, corporations, unions, religious institutions and, of course, political leaders like President John F. Kennedy. It was Kennedy who introduced the civil rights bill to Congress and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, pushed the legislation through.

The march was successful because it was aimed at that specific target. On its own, it would almost certainly have fizzled. That’s what usually happens when people march on Washington. There have been more than 300 such marches. If you consider that the famous one was arguably the only such event to have had a historic impact, you begin to understand the challenge.

The odds appear even worse for activists on closer examination. The first march on Washington, the Woman Suffrage Procession in 1913, for instance, was a full-blown disaster. Disrupted by hooligans, it turned into a large-scale riot that greatly discredited the suffrage movement and particularly its leader Alice Paul. The campaign would take years to recover—and a shift to smaller, more controllable protests—before it was able to help finally win women’s right to vote with the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920.

Gene Sharp, the legendary scholar of nonviolent resistance, identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. Marches are only one, and certainly not the most effective.

So if marches don’t topple dictators, what does? To understand that, let’s leave the civil rights movement and move forward more than 30 years, to a small cafe in Belgrade in 1998.

How five kids in a Belgrade cafe brought down a strongman

One day in 1998, a group of five friends met in a cafe in Belgrade. Although still in their 20s, they were already experienced activists, and most of what they had seen was failure. They had taken part in student protests against the war in Bosnia in 1992, as well as in larger uprisings in response to election fraud in 1996. Neither achieved much.

Having had time to reflect on their successes and failures, they hatched a new plan. They knew from their earlier efforts that they could mobilize people and get them to the polls for a presidential election in 2000. They also knew that if he were to lose, President Slobodan Milošević, who ruled the country with an iron fist, would try to steal the election just as he did in 1996.

So that’s what they planned for.

The next day, six friends joined the five and together formed the original 11 members of Otpor, the movement that would go on to topple the Milošević regime. They began slowly at first, performing pranks and street theater. But within two years, the organization grew to over 70,000 members, with chapters across Serbia. They mobilized people, got them to the polls and helped win the election for the opposition leader Vojislav Koštunica.

Right on cue, Milošević tried to steal it. That’s what triggered the Bulldozer Revolution that brought him down in 2000. He would die in his prison cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2006. His downfall shocked the world because no one had dreamed his brutal authoritarian regime could be taken down by nonviolent action.

But it didn’t stop there.

Members of Otpor followed by training activists in Georgia who brought down the former Soviet republic’s own leader in the Rose Revolution of 2003. Otpor also helped Ukrainians the following year in the Orange Revolution, where I was running a major news organization and witnessed the power of their work firsthand. Collectively, these became known as the “Color Revolutions” that changed the face of Eastern Europe and the course of history.

But it still didn’t stop there.

Then came the Arab Spring, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, the Maldives and so many more revolutions. To date, the same Serbians have been active in over 50 countries, helping countless others resist authoritarian regimes and build better lives for themselves. Many of the popular movements have since seen reversals but the fact remains that they were able to unseat powerful autocrats with the real promise of change.

At this point, we have to ask the obvious question: How did a bunch of kids work to bring down a seemingly all-powerful dictator? Not once, not twice but repeatedly over a period of decades?

The answer lies in a basic truth they learned from Gene Sharp: Every regime depends on sources of power to carry out its will, and those sources have an institutional basis. Authoritarians like Milošević, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s recent ruler Victor Orbán have been able to wield power not because of their special personal characteristics but their capacity to control and influence institutions. Take that away and the regime will fall.

The simple principle became the basis for the Otpor movement. Its members would identify institutions and develop strategies to influence them. Your targets determine your tactics, they would go on to teach others, not the other way around. That’s why you should never get tied down to any particular tactic. You want to preserve strategic flexibility so you can design strategies and tactics fit for each purpose.

Here’s how that looked in Serbia.

Designing an institutional battle plan

Otpor may have become well-known for its brilliant street theater and creative pranks but underneath them all was a strategy for everything. In Serbia, its leaders identified eight key institutional groups and built sophisticated strategies to influence each one.

Consider the police, a key institutional support for the regime. Control of law enforcement enabled Milošević to order arrests at whim. That struck fear into the general population, making it harder to recruit activists. If Otpor were to succeed, it would need to at least mitigate the effect of police action. But the group’s members did better than that. They actually turned arrests to their advantage.

It started with training. All Otpor activists were taught exactly what to expect when they were arrested, and how they should act and engage with police. Arrests were to be seen as opportunities for infiltration and to win officers to their side. Activists who were arrested were also given a cool “Otpor” t-shirt on their release, which they could wear to school the next day. The more arrests, the better the t-shirt they got.

Perhaps the most sophisticated aspect of the police strategy was something called Plan B. As soon as an activist was arrested, not only were lawyers immediately called to push for release but a secondary protest would be launched outside the police station, where a large crowd would gather. NGOs would be notified. Auxiliary groups such as “Mothers of Otpor” would show up to demand why the police were arresting harmless kids.

Soon arrests became less of a tool of intimidation and more of a liability. Arresting an activist meant lawyers and unflattering media coverage, not to mention growing protests outside your station. The added paperwork burden alone was a deterrent. You’d get nothing else done all day. It just wasn’t worth it.

Otpor developed similarly effective strategies for every institutional group they targeted, identifying their vulnerabilities and pressures that would be most likely to shift their behavior. In 1998, when the movement began, this is what the institutional environment looked like.

Two key institutions, the military and police, staunchly supported the regime. The education system and international institutions were seen as allies of the activists, and the civil service, Church, businesses and labor were all on the fence, with no love for Milošević necessarily but wary of change and the disruption it might bring.

Then events completely out of Otpor’s control produced a setback. After failed peace talks over Milošević’s incursions into Kosovo, NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign from March to June 1999. It prompted a “rally around the flag” effect among Serbs and the movement lost ground.

When the conflict ended, the Otpor activists got back to work to win support. They continued mobilizing in the streets but always stayed focused on their institutional targets. By the winter of 2000, they were making progress again and had made up the lost ground.

By spring 2000, the momentum had begun to really shift. Two key institutions, the military and civil service, began to defect. Labor, once reticent to take a side, now moved firmly into the resistance camp.

By the eve of the election, Milošević had already lost power; he just didn’t know it yet. All the major institutions had shifted away from the regime. Even the once fiercely loyal police were taking a more neutral stance. Once the Bulldozer Revolution broke out and they were ordered to shoot protesters, they refused.

It was over. The regime had fallen.

Power ultimately rests on legitimacy. Once enough institutions stop believing a regime deserves obedience, its apparent strength can evaporate very quickly.

It’s the institutions, stupid

Today, a global battle is taking place between autocracies and the forces of liberal democracy. It is not a war about ideology, religion or even politics, strictly speaking. It’s about something far bigger and more consequential: control of institutions.

Autocrats work to undermine the independence of institutions. Some are political institutions, such as legislatures and courts, but many—corporations, unions, media, universities and civic organizations—are not. It is by gaining control over institutions that authoritarian leaders can replace competence with loyalty as the coin of the realm, making truth less a matter of facts or evidence than a test of fealty among subordinates.

It is on institutional ground that the most important battles are being fought. Is there equal protection under the law? Do businesses have the right to operate without fear of being shaken down by government officials and the agents of oligarchs? Do people have the right to feel safe in their homes and their communities?

It is the institutions that ultimately hold the answers to each of those basic questions. To build and maintain a free, strong society, you need free, strong institutions. That’s where every strategy for positive change must start: working to influence institutions to rebuild, reform and serve societies more competently and faithfully. That takes more than simply going out into the streets. It requires institutional knowledge, creativity and discipline.

That’s why so many recent movements that have successfully mobilized and brought impressive numbers of people into the streets also fail to achieve meaningful objectives. Unless your actions are aimed at specific strategic institutional targets, you’re just making noise.

Free societies do not survive because people occasionally flood the streets. They survive because citizens are able to build institutions over time worthy of public trust and strong enough to resist those who would capture them.

That’s why the last thing we need now is the belief that bigger marches will produce more change. What we need are strategies that identify specific targets and design viable ways to influence them. That’s how we can bring about a more just and prosperous world.

Greg Satell is co-founder of ChangeOS, a transformation and change advisory, a lecturer at Wharton, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, watch his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

Neil Silberman is an archaeologist and historian who was president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation and a member of the ICOMOS International Advisory Committee and Scientific Council. He was a founder of the Center for Heritage and Society at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. On his ICWA fellowship (1984–1986), Neil examined the political and cultural impact of archaeological research in the Middle East. He went on to write and co-author a dozen books, including The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Archaeology and Society in the 21st Century, The Hidden Scrolls, and Digging for God and Country.

The year 1985 was a banner one for historical research in Israel, Neil reports in this October excerpt, with dozens of international expeditions excavating some of the country’s most important ancient sites. The period was also marked by a struggle over the country’s future direction, with Prime Minister Shimon Peres battling an economic crisis and confrontation abroad, including the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian militants. The excavations in Jerusalem met with strong opposition from religious leaders. The stakes were high, Neil writes, because the “struggle was for political and spiritual power within modern Israel.”

Jerusalem (October 1985) — Four summers ago, chanting crowds of bearded, black-coated protesters tried everything in their power, including violence, to shut the City of David excavations down. Their contention was that the area was the site of a medieval Jewish cemetery and that the digging there was nothing less than the callous desecration of ancient Jewish graves. In response, a panel of the country’s most prominent archaeologists and historians proved convincingly that there was never a cemetery at the site of the excavations, but their opponents refused to accept the evidence. The Sephardi and Ashkenazi chief rabbis issued a demand for an immediate end to the excavations and even threatened to excommunicate the minister of education if he refused to carry out the order.

Naturally, the real issue at stake was more than just the few bone chips that the protesters claimed they found in the piles of earth dumped down the slope by the excavation team. The struggle was for political and spiritual power within modern Israel, for the exclusive religious prerogative to interpret Jewish history and the significance of the Biblical text. For centuries the rabbinical authorities had reserved for themselves the right to speak definitively about kings David and Solomon and about their glorious ancient city. But now they found themselves face-to-face with competing scholars trained in the subtleties of ancient pottery and architecture, not religious texts. And what was worse, the impious curiosity of the archaeologists was defended by barricades and riot police.

Professor Yigal Shiloh, the director of the excavations, emerged from the confrontation as the spokesman for academic freedom in the face of a religious attack. He and his colleagues at the Israel Exploration Society and the Hebrew University, having failed at their attempts at reason, obtained a Supreme Court ruling that overturned the initial rabbinical ban on the dig. In the atmosphere of an impending government crisis, Israel’s attorney general arranged a compromise between the opposing parties that permitted a resumption of work at the site. And even though not a single medieval Jewish grave was uncovered in the subsequent seasons of digging, the leaders of the protest—the ultra-orthodox faction that calls itself Neturei Karta, “The Guardians of the City”—were not satisfied. Their continuing vandalism, even now, at the City of David Archaeological Garden, serves as clear warning that they see the archaeologists as their spiritual enemies.

The conflict between religious fundamentalism and archaeology is underway in many Middle Eastern countries, but in Israel it has taken an uncharacteristic form. Throughout the Muslim world, religious opposition to excavations has been directed mainly against investigations of the Jahiliya, or pre-Islamic period; the excavation of Islamic remains (with the exception of cemeteries) is seen as commendable validation for the ancient splendor of the Faith.

In Israel, the problem is different, for the excavation of remains of the Biblical periods is seen as an insidious challenge to traditional religious authority. And in a sense, there is some logic to that viewpoint, for the City of David excavations, among many others, have subtly changed the historical scheme of things. By placing the remains from the time of David and Solomon in a continuum that extends from the Chalcolithic period to the present, they have robbed the Biblical period of its previous chronological sanctity.

Every visitor to the City of David Archaeological Garden can see the continuum clearly as he or she wanders through the carefully landscaped and labeled building remains. The ruins of every period of Jerusalem’s long history rise from those of their predecessors and form the foundations for the ruins above them. Taken together, these layers forge the separate cultures and historical periods into a single monument to the city’s continuity. Maybe there is good reason for the fundamentalists’ battle with archaeologists in Jerusalem. The impact of archaeology is to break down the barriers of sectarian interpretation and to link the country’s cultural development with ancient civilization everywhere else in the world.

Each of the excavations I visited this summer represented a unique perspective on some of the most pressing problems facing Israeli archaeology—and society—today. Each excavation attacked more than a specific historical problem; its approach to the interpretation of artifacts and settlement levels reflected the new archaeological concern with understanding the mechanics of ancient societies rather than just historical events. The fact that the same problems of economics, military conquest, and ethnic interaction are facing the State of Israel holds out at least the possibility that archaeologists may be able to play a role in understanding the mechanics of modern society as well.

I don’t mean to say that archaeology can be a miraculous cure-all for a modern society’s problems. It’s just that there seemed to me to be the discussion of new ideas in at least some of the excavations in Israel this summer that contrasted with the general political atmosphere. The attempt at finding new solutions and understandings to age-old questions may not transfer easily from the Bronze or Iron Age to the present, but I think that it would be worthwhile for archaeologists in Israel—as elsewhere—to apply themselves to the practical application of their work. Otherwise, archaeology is in danger of becoming increasingly insulated and irrelevant, and the summer of 1985, like all the recent summers, will be remembered as just another season of digging in the ruins without having accomplished any lasting changes at all.

In France’s Aisne region, bounded by the rivers Marne, Oise and Aisne some 60 miles northeast of Paris, memories of World War I are kept alive through geography—each river gave its name to famous and terrible battles—and in cemeteries and ceremonies. On Monday, Memorial Day commemorations showed that despite the current transatlantic rift, Franco-American solidarity remains strong and still prompts warm exchanges.

Far from the Washington-Paris disputes over NATO and failing alliances, the relationship is lovingly and intentionally maintained. At the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, local volunteers and students place French and American flags next to 6,013 headstones each year just before Memorial Day. Mayors of the surrounding villages convene to place bouquets at the cemetery chapel.

Twenty miles away, more flags, and French gardeners lovingly tend to 2,300 soldiers’ graves at the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, near the site of the US Marine engagement in the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, and just outside the city of Château-Thierry, where General John Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force fought during the Second Battle of the Marne.

Today, the Maison de l’Amitié France-Amérique in the heart of Château-Thierry keeps those stories alive with exhibitions and, because “fraternity is cultivated at the youngest age,” it offers children English lessons.

On Friday night, Château-Thierry hosted a US Marine band from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina for a concert in a city park. Some 300 residents turned out to cheer the Marines and take selfies with them after the concert. One Marine said this annual visit is so important “for the younger Marines to be here, where it happened.”

In addition to the 12 American military cemeteries and 13 monuments maintained in France by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), private citizens have maintained sites here, too.

A monument to the 42^nd “Rainbow Division” is carefully tended on a nearby farm where ferocious fighting took place in July 1918.

The tiny hamlet of Chaméry looks after the site where Quentin Roosevelt, a 20-year-old pilot and son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, was shot down by a German plane only days after arriving in France.

Villagers here tended his grave for decades until he was moved to Normandy to lie beside his brother Theodore Jr. in the World War II American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. (All four Roosevelt sons served in one or both world wars, and Theodore Jr. played a decisive role in the Normandy landings on D-Day.) The Normandy cemetery draws thousands of French tourists, as on this Memorial Day weekend.

Even though Quentin Roosevelt is no longer in Chaméry, he remains an integral part of the village. To thank them for their care, Quentin’s mother Edith Roosevelt gave the villagers a lovely fountain, from which neighbors still use water daily, and hikers fill their water bottles.

Back in Château-Thierry, French parishioners maintain the American Memorial Church, built in 1924 to honor the fallen and designed by Paul-Philippe Cret, the architect of the US Federal Reserve building in Washington, DC. The church’s largest stained-glass window celebrates Franco-American friendship with a time-bending fantasy meeting of General Pershing and the French hero of the American Revolution, Lafayette. “Lafayette, nous voilà,” the American supposedly said in 1917 on visiting Lafayette’s tomb—the tale is probably apocryphal but hugely popular.

In this region of France, the transatlantic friendship remains strong.

Elizabeth Wise is a former correspondent for The Associated Press and The Economist Group.

Ten years ago this month, I stood beneath the US Capitol dome listening to a Cameroonian activist describe the high personal cost of being visibly gay in the capital Yaoundé. The event was part of a daylong conference on the geopolitics of LGBTQ+ rights convened by the Institute of Current World Affairs to mark the return of its fellow Robbie Corey-Boulet. Currently the Reuters bureau chief for West and Central Africa, he had just finished two years based in Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire studying how sexual orientation and gender identity were lived and contested in West Africa. He’d asked me to moderate a panel on Africa, my first engagement with the institute whose board I now have the privilege of chairing.

I remember the day in fragments. Photographer Misha Friedman’s images, commissioned by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit that supports breakthrough journalism, hung behind the speakers: a Russian couple in a sparse apartment, a Jamaican activist in profile, the brutal arithmetic of queer life rendered in light and shadow. Voices from Jamaica, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Russia, India, China, Colombia and Cameroon traded notes on what strategies had worked and what didn’t. At lunch, we ate outside with activists and diplomats from the Danish embassy, and I remember thinking with a clarity that now feels almost embarrassing that things would only get better, everywhere.

There were reasons to be more circumspect, however, for anyone willing to hear them. Some activists at the conference warned of hidden risks in a US-led approach to promoting LGBTQ+ rights. Ten years later, those dangers have materialized. What comes next will require a fundamentally different geopolitical imagination to help build a transnational movement that will be less dependent on a single patron.

In 2016, US political will had coalesced behind the movement. The Democrats were in power and determined to make LGBTQ+ rights both a wedge issue in domestic politics and a signature element of American soft power. Barack Obama was in his final months in the White House. Ambassador Randy Berry, who delivered the keynote that day, was serving as the first US special envoy for the human rights of LGBTI persons, traveling the world to push back against the criminalization of same-sex relationships.

The combination of a Democratic administration treating the advancement of queer rights as a moral signature and the institutional weight of the United Nations, where I had just started working, opened a window for fast-paced, coordinated global advancements. A month after the conference, the UN Human Rights Council established the mandate of its first-ever independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity. Ban Ki-moon, a strong ally, was the UN Secretary-General. Samantha Power, a champion of the issue, was US ambassador to the UN, effectively running the UN LGBTI Core Group, a coalition of member states that had pledged to support LGBTQ and intersex rights.

Multinational corporations were moving in parallel. Encouraged by the White House and the United Nations, they had leaned on Uganda over its 2014 anti-homosexuality bill, and in April 2016, 180 CEOs mobilized against North Carolina’s HB2 law, which barred transgender people from using public bathrooms corresponding to their gender identities. A year later, I would help launch the UN Standards of Conduct for Business, urging the private sector to fulfill its responsibilities but also “act in the public sphere.” Money, multilateral institutions and human rights language all seemed to be moving in the same direction.

But the day had its dissenting notes, and they have aged better than the optimism of the time.

Robbie himself—whose fellowship would inform his book Love Falls on Us: A Story of American Ideas and African LGBT Lives—warned against the disruptive force of Western templates imposed on existing communities. The Indian activist Tushar Malik echoed the same concern. The American narrative, he said, too often amounted to: “You must change your laws, you are regressive and you need to come to the better side of the world.” That’s why, he added, “it is seen as neocolonialism.” Andras Simonyi, Hungary’s former ambassador to Washington and a forceful ally, was still blunter. Affirming LGBTQ+ rights, he said, “should not be seen as an American endeavor because the United States cannot and should not do it alone.” If the movement were seen as US-led, he warned, it could become tangled in anti-American sentiment.

The scholar Amy Lind described that dynamic in a 2010 paper, “Development, Global Governance and Sexual Subjectivities.” The globalized backlash against sexual and gender rights, she wrote, was inseparable from “ongoing struggles concerning post-colonial nation-building” and “critiques of the US as empire and the accompanying notion of our world as unipolar.” In other words, the more emancipatory politics would travel under an American flag, the more reliably they would summon opposition.

In retrospect, the structural risk was even greater than the conference acknowledged. LGBTQ+ progress had come to rest on a narrow coalition—the international human rights framework, the US Democratic Party and a cohort of multinational corporations—an arrangement that was hard to question at the time because it came with cash, access and political weight. The 2021–2022 Global Resources Report documented roughly $1 billion in resources flowing to LGBTQ+ organizations and causes worldwide; most of it traced back, directly or indirectly, to the same handful of Western governments and foundations. Seventeen of the top 20 foundation funders were based in the United States.

The backlash of the past decade—from Uganda and Senegal to Hungary, Russia and dozens of American statehouses—demonstrated how fragile that progress became whenever it could be framed as foreign pressure or tied to the electoral fortunes of one American party. Uganda’s 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, Russia’s 2023 designation of the international LGBTQ+ movement as an extremist organization and Hungary’s 2025 constitutional amendment effectively banning Pride were all defended at home in those terms.

Ten years after the ICWA conference, the model came to a screeching halt.

In 2025, after American LGBTQ+ leaders had largely aligned with candidate Donald Trump’s opponent during the presidential campaign, his second administration abruptly disengaged from international LGBTQ+ work. The Global Equality Fund, a public-private vehicle that had bankrolled local activists in some of the world’s toughest places, was effectively dismantled. USAID evaporated. The UN Free & Equal campaign saw its budget reduced to a vestige. The State Department’s special envoy position was eliminated. The United States left the UN LGBTI Core Group. The corporate sector—the same one that had once threatened to pull jobs out of North Carolina—read the political winds and went silent, retreating from Pride sponsorships and rolling back internal diversity programs at speed hoping to secure seats at Mar-a-Lago. Within months, the funding and political architecture that had sustained a generation of global queer organizing were either gone or unrecognizable.

Edric Huang, ICWA’s David Mixner LGBTQ+ fellow in Taiwan from 2023 to 2025—who examined queer communities on the island and in Singapore, Nepal and Japan—reported that Trump’s halt to foreign aid assistance was instantly felt by LGBTQ+ groups across the region, and part of a larger wave of overseas development cuts by conservative governments.

Now the conversation among movement leaders is no longer about whether the old model can be repaired. The harder question is what will replace it.

What is emerging, slowly, is a different geopolitical map for queer liberation, adapted to a multipolar world in which the United States will no longer dominate the international order or reliably champion human rights abroad. The United Nations and other multilateral institutions now speak more softly on those issues. Corporations increasingly insist their only obligation is shareholder value. The old assumption that progress naturally flows from liberal democracy and Western institutions no longer holds.

But what the movement has left behind to date is also new. After several decades of growth, LGBTQ+ communities in some parts of the world possess greater numbers, wealth, visibility and political experience than at any earlier point in their history. Homosexuality was officially and permanently decriminalized in India in 2018. Mexico completed nationwide marriage equality in 2022. Thailand’s marriage equality law took effect in January 2025, the first such measure in Southeast Asia. Constitutional challenges to recognition are advancing in Japan. The center of the movement’s demographic and political weight has been shifting south and east for years; the events of 2025, as Edric’s fellowship demonstrated, made the shift visible.

That redistribution has begun to reshape the language of LGBTQ+ politics. Although the rhetoric of human rights remains indispensable, it has lost much of its persuasive force in many parts of the world. Anti-LGBTQ+ movements have spent a decade caricaturing it as a Western dialect, and the characterization has stuck. Where progress is being made, activists are increasingly making the case for inclusion in the vocabularies their own societies already use: constitutional dignity in India, family stability and economic productivity in much of Latin America, religious mercy and decolonization in parts of Africa and the Muslim world. Western pressure is no longer central to those arguments; in many places, it is now simply counterproductive.

The case is also being made by a wider cast of actors than the human rights pipeline used to recognize. Anti-LGBTQ+ movements understood years ago that they operate most effectively as a disciplined transnational network, exporting legislation (Uganda’s 2023 statute explicitly drew from Russian and American templates), narratives and culture war strategies across borders. Outside a handful of Western countries, the LGBTQ+ side has rarely matched that coordination. But the early outlines of a response are visible in newer formations: investor coalitions, regional philanthropic networks emerging across Latin America and Africa, and a generation of LGBTQ+ writers, showrunners and digital creators in Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo and Bangkok whose reach now rivals that of any state broadcaster. A television drama in India, a Brazilian telenovela or an AI chatbot’s default tone on a question about gender now shape public attitudes with a speed no diplomatic communiqué could match.

If the past decade marked the high-water mark of a Western-led model of global LGBTQ+ advocacy, what is taking shape now may prove more durable: a movement that no longer waits for a political or geopolitical patron, no longer borrows its legitimacy from outside powers and no longer assumes history naturally bends in its favor. The pace will be slower, the alliances more complex and the leading voices less familiar. But the promise is long-lasting, context-specific LGBTQ+ power.

Fabrice Houdart is board chair of the Institute of Current World Affairs. From 2016 to 2019, he served as a human rights officer at the United Nations, where he co-authored the UN Standards of Conduct for Business in Tackling Discrimination Against LGBTI People. In 2022, he founded PRISM: the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors, and in 2024, he co-founded Koppa, the LGBTI+ economic power lab. He writes a weekly Wednesday Substack on LGBTQ+ geopolitics.