Not long ago, a friend in Dakar sent me a video by the comedian Kyle Gordon, “Mr. Jambo.” It features one of Gordon’s musical personae, Barry Bergen, an aging singer-songwriter who travels the world appropriating the music of other cultures. “Mr. Jambo” is a parody of Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” his 1986 collaboration with the South African group Lady Smith Black Mambazo. “Mr. Jambo” went viral soon after its release in July.

It’s a catchy tune. In the video, Bergen wears an earnest expression along with his American nerd uniform: 80s-style wire-rimmed glasses, baseball cap, sports coat, tie, jeans and white Nikes. He bothers an exasperated African man played by Mandla Dlamini.

“Hey there Mr. Jambo,” Bergen sings, “Out there in the African sun; do you ever get tired? Hey there Mr. Jambo; will you share with me the jambalaya living in your soul?”

“Angikhulumi isingisi, Unaye umhumushi? Yeka ukuklabalasa,” Mr. Jambo replies, Zulu for “I don’t speak English; do you have an interpreter? Stop shouting.”

Bergen nods knowingly and in a series of jump-cuts and cross-dissolves, he dances among the giraffes, zebras and grasslands of South Africa and the kingdom of Eswatini and belts out his epiphany:

“I couldn’t speak his language, couldn’t even understand a word; but I knew his meaning was what I decided I had heard. He said, ‘the love you seek, it’s in the valley of the soul; the love you seek, it’s in the wisdom written on the African scrolls.’”

Jambo means “hello” in Zulu, thus Mr. Jambo is Mr. Hello. Bergen, who evokes a more benign version of the Quiet American, has mistaken a greeting for a name. There’s a lot more miscommunication in the song, but you get the idea.

The hilarious performance especially resonated because it took me back to my experience teaching high school students art as well as introductory philosophy in Kuwait from 2011 to 2016. It was for the International Baccalaureate program at the American International School, where students had been trained from kindergarten to call the female teachers “miss” and the male teachers “sir” or “mister.” Sometimes when they couldn’t remember my name, my students called me Mr… Mr… Shisma? Shisma is a kind of hedge that in Kuwaiti and Iraqi Arabic means “whatshisname.” It’s a way to buy time while you think of what to say next, like yani in Levantine or Maghribi Arabic, or “like” and “you know” in American English. Mr. Hello is my brother from a different mother.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma is marketed as the most successful and influential international educational certificate in the world. Of 15,075 international schools worldwide, 6,200 in 160 countries use the IB. IB Diploma holders include former Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o, Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings, and American singer-songwriter and rapper Kesha. Kim Jong-Un, an IB drop out, has managed to do okay as dictator of North Korea. Despite, or because of this success, the program has come under increasing scrutiny and pressure: from within to be less American and Euro-centric, less white, more diverse, more sensitive to local mores, values and traditions; from without to renounce or modify its stated goal to “teach peace.”

Since its inception a half-century ago, the Geneva-based International Baccalaureate Organization has seen steady growth around the world. It counted nearly 2 million students enrolled in its programs in 2022, half in the US. That’s up from a million in 2019. The IB diploma is recognized by universities worldwide. For students with exceptionally high scores, college credit or advanced standing is granted.

Part of the IB mission statement reads, “other people, with their differences can also be right.” In Kuwait, however, mutual incomprehension was often the name of the game, as three different groups of people—Kuwaitis, other Arabs and North American whites (more about that later)—tried to navigate conflicting expectations for discourse, dress, timeliness, personal space, academic honesty and grades.

One of my colleagues once caught a student named Aisha, for example, plagiarizing her essay word for word from Wikipedia (this was pre-AI). Confronted, she protested that Wikipedia had stolen the essay from her. The student persisted in this defense until her mother was called to school, where she berated the principal.

“How dare you accuse my daughter of cheating!” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Aisha’s mother,” the principal replied mildly.

“I’m a world-renowned doctor!” she shouted. “My family owns the Crown Plaza Hotel!”

“I’m sure your family is very proud.”

“You’re insulting my family’s honor!”

“No offense to your family, ma’am, but there is no doubt that your daughter plagiarized her assignment. She’ll be suspended and will have to rewrite the paper in a supervised Saturday detention. Fortunately for her, this was not a final exam or she would be expelled. Look for yourself. Here’s her paper and here’s the Wikipedia article.”

The mother read the screen. Now she turned her fury on her progeny, who had been sitting on a couch in the office observing the exchange with a smirk.

“When we get home,” the mom shouted, “I’m going to gouge out your left eye, cut off your right hand, and this summer, you are getting married!” The smirk vanished. The mother dragged her child out of the office by the ear.

The principal told us this story at a Friday brunch at Le Pain Quotidien, a weekly ritual for the older teachers. Ten of us sat at a long table outside under umbrellas warmed by an ultramarine sky.

As we sipped soup-bowl sized lattes and munched our eggs Benedict, French toast and oatmeal, the parent’s histrionics seemed ridiculous, along the lines of Saddam Hussein’s threatened “Mother of All Battles” ahead of Iraq’s crushing in the 1991 Gulf War. But mubalagha (exaggeration) is core to Arab communication, an expressive tool that adds weight, color and flair to conversation. Pre-Islamic poetry prized grandiose descriptions of nature, love and grief. In modern colloquial speech, volume, gesture and dramatic emphasis signal genuine feeling.

Some scholars divide mubalagha into three degrees. At-tabligh is unlikely (exaggeration). Al-igharaq is improbable (over-exaggeration). Al-gulu is impossible (extreme exaggeration). When Aisha said Wikipedia had copied her essay, that was at-tabligh. When Dr. Crown Plaza Hotel proclaimed her fame was global, that was al-igharaq. When she threatened amputation, enucleation and coerced matrimony, that was al-gulu.

I asked what happened to the student.

“She rewrote the paper and returned from suspension with both hands and both eyes intact,” the principal said. “I don’t know about the marriage plans.”

Incidents like this, of two cultures talking past one another, were weekly (sometimes daily) occurrences at the American International School as our faculty of Barry and Betty Bergens, in alignment with the IB Learner profile, tried to transform students into knowledgeable, caring, balanced, reflective, principled, open-minded, risk-taking and inquiring global citizens.

The concept for the International Baccalaureate started as a booklet written in 1948 by Marie-Thérèse Maurette, the director of the highly respected International School of Geneva, the oldest international school in the world, commonly known as Ecolint. Inspired by the many international peace organizations headquartered in Geneva after World War II, she called it Educational Techniques for Peace. Do They Exist?

Maurette’s pedagogy emphasized respect and openness to others. Her booklet became the foundation for what would become the International Baccalaureate: the IB. The term was coined in Geneva in 1962 at a meeting of international social studies educators. The IB developed with a focus on critical analysis and learning to learn. The first director general of the IB, Alec Peterson, described it as combining “the range of subjects taught in the French baccalaureate…with the depth of knowledge and specialism found in the British A-level system.”

The jewel in the IB crown is the philosophy course Theory of Knowledge, a two-year must-pass introduction to epistemology. I loved teaching the class, in which students learn critical thinking through lectures, games, performances, and written and oral assignments. One of my favorite activities was “Putting Brâncuşi on Trial,” a reenactment of the 1927 Supreme Court fight Brancusi v. United States, which determined our current anything-goes definition of art. Students divided themselves into offensive and defensive teams that developed arguments and presented them before a panel of student judges. They were allowed to put mubalagha to practical use, employing soaring rhetoric to make their cases. Sometimes Brâncuşi won, supporting the status quo. Sometimes America won, changing the course of art history. The winners got chocolate.

The International Baccalaureate Organization was founded in Geneva in 1968 under the auspices of UNESCO. Over the following years, the courses expanded from the two-year Diploma Program to a comprehensive K-12 education. More controversially, the IB also expanded its marketing focus from the children of the international diplomatic and business class, for whom a global perspective is more familiar, to the children of in-country elites such as my students in Kuwait, whose traditional values are typically challenged by an IB education. One could even say undermined. The term du jour is “colonized.”

Today, the IB’s biggest growth area is in American public schools, where the program is appreciated for its focus on academic rigor but also criticized for its connection with the United Nations and teaching of relativistic international mindedness instead of American exceptionalism. The IB’s American footprint is tiny compared to the US-based College Board’s Advanced Placement product: 1,900 American schools to the AP’s 23,000. In our current political climate, however, it’s viewed by some politicians and parents as a threat. It’s an open question whether the United States will continue to tolerate an educational business that ideally turns out critically thinking citizens instead of unthinking patriots. The evidence suggests no.

In 2023, two San Francisco-based educators named Tiago Bittencourt and Gabriel Bustamante Callejas published “International Education and the rise of paleoconservative thought,” an article examining rising resistance to the IB in MAGA country. A decade earlier, parents in a conservative suburb of Pittsburgh had denounced the IB as an “anti-Christian, un-American and Marxist approach to education.” The program was shut down. Also in 2012, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the School Board, in a 5-0 vote, discontinued the IB Primary Years Program. The Board stated the cancellation was due to “mounting parental complaints that the program was underscored by ‘a social-political philosophy that has no place in public schools’ that promoted global citizenship and its embedded values to ‘impressionable young children.’”

Between 2024 and 2026, the Leander Independent School District and Houston Independent School District in Texas, Summit School District in Colorado, Richland School District Two in South Carolina, Morris Knolls High School in New Jersey and State College Area School District in Pennsylvania all scaled back or phased out the IB citing budget, low participation, ideological or other reasons, usually replacing the program with the AP.

Educators in the Global South are also unhappy with the IB but for different reasons. Many think the IB has been too Western. They are not wrong. The United States runs the IB at a scale unmatched anywhere else in the world. In May and November 2025, 225,000 students around the world took the IB Diploma final exams. 107,000 of these students were in the US. 90% of those American diploma candidates were in public schools. Most of the rest were in Canada and Europe with a fraction in Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Africa. In short, most IB students studied in the Global North and West with the fewest in the Global South and East. The imbalance is reflected in the seven-year IB review cycle where simply because of their numbers Western/Global North voices—especially American ones—are the loudest and have the most impact on how the program evolves.

Within the IB the dominance of the Global North in curriculum, subject matter and participation is increasingly seen as a bad thing. Since the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and beyond, calls have grown from IB teachers and students to “decolonize” the IB universe.

“We have not been equipped, intellectually or emotionally, to understand this world and its current crises, and more importantly, our position in upholding global racial capitalism,” IB graduate Xoài David complained on Medium in 2020. “Our maps are distorted. Our education makes us complicit. If we want to use the platform of international schools to its full potential, to truly advance justice, equity and global-mindedness, our community needs to recast its long-outdated mold.”

Decolonization advocates have organized panels, workshops, speeches, TED Talks and a decolonization organization. Educational broker businesses that pair teachers with schools, such as International School Services (ISS) and Search Associates (SA), have come in for withering criticism for covert and sometimes overt racism. Historically, white candidates have received preference over Black and brown ones. Teachers with Christian-sounding names have been picked over those with “African” ones. Thus my colleagues and I in Kuwait.

The “this is what parents want” rationale no longer holds water. In 2021, Zuri Stevens, a West African student who grew up in Geneva, wrote an article on Medium titled “I Went to An International School and Didn’t Have a Single Black Teacher.” The Pulitzer Prize-winning Bloomberg journalist Natalie Obiko Pearson’s 2022 article “Elite International Schools Have a Racism Problem” has been widely read and shared. ISS and SA have pledged to do better. So has the Ecolint school in Geneva, the mothership of the IB, where it turns out racism was indeed widespread.

But it is precisely the IB’s Western aspects that have led to its growth and financial success: $271 million in revenue in 2025. As a non-profit, it reinvests this income into operations, program development and global education support. By comparison the Advanced Placement program generates $500 million for the College Board out of total revenues of 1.1 billion.

“The research suggests that it is not the promise of promoting local cultures while educating for international mindedness that makes the DP [Diploma Program] attractive in non-Western contexts,” the scholars Quentin Maire and Joel Windl wrote in Educational Review in 2021. “Rather, it is its inherent Westernness that draws students and their families to it… Studies of why students choose the DP over their local curricula or other non-national franchises, such as the British and American curricula, have found that access to the global market and Western universities are key factors in their decision making.”

Another expert, the University of Manchester’s Alexander Gardener McTaggart, writing in Globalisation, Societies and Education in 2021, points out that the IB Diploma “has been successfully used by socially dominant and academically powerful families to consolidate their academic capital and secure educational advantage, thus contributing to the reproduction of social inequality.”

Ironically, it is DEI, that MAGA bugbear, that has been adopted as the solution to the IB’s problems. Sort of. If you want to be au courant with your acronyms, wrap your tongue around DEIJ: diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. Part of a 2026 IB document, “Building practices for inclusivity within the IB community,” reads, “The IB has intentionally developed commitments to DEIJ at an organizational level…”

That makes sense. Most international schools are communities of teachers and students from many different countries and cultures with wide ranges of abilities, disabilities and genders. Students often live in dorms or boarding houses, far from their families and support networks. To survive, to thrive, everyone needs to feel included. As the Head of School of the American International School of Guangzhou wrote at the beginning of the 2026-27 school year, “Belonging starts on day one.”

DEIJ helps level the playing field, ferrets out bias and provides redress for injustice. Indeed, at some schools, DEIJ has been expanded to Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging: JEDI-B. At Ecolint, the acronym is Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Anti-Racism: I-DEA.

In Kuwait, by contrast, uniformity (of Sunni religious belief), hierarchy (of class, race and gender) and exclusion (of Bedoons and other non-Kuwaitis) are explicit and implicit cultural values. Justice is of “the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must” variety. Belonging means to your family, your tribe, your clique. Those values bleed over into international schools. Students in my classrooms organized themselves by race and confession: Kuwaitis over here divided into Sunni and Shia. Levantines over there divided into Lebanese and Syrians, Sunni, Shia, Orthodox, Catholic and Druze. The occasional Indian or Filipino by themselves at the back. Queer students deep in the closet. Trans students deeper.

Kindness, one of the supreme values in the IB education, is perceived as weakness by Arab parents, who teach their children to be “lions” who fight for family, honor and tribe. When my students told me I was kind, it was not a compliment.

“Where’s Talal?” I asked one day in art class. Talal was a short, quiet, gentle, socially withdrawn Kuwaiti student who usually beavered away on an art project, rarely speaking.

“I think he went to Religion,” Abdullah said.

“But he’s supposed to be in Art,” I said.

“Mohamed has been giving him a hard time all year,” Abdullah said. “Yesterday, Mohamed insulted Talal’s mom. Talal brought some brass knuckles to school today.”

“And you’re telling me this now?”

“It’s not your business, sir.”

Despite school rules forbidding bullying, after-school fights were not uncommon. Someone, usually a boy, would say something to another boy, who would say something back. That had happened in my classroom more than once. Two boys began arguing, stood up and began bumping chests as they shouted into each other’s faces. I separated them.

Once a disagreement escalated to the point of no return, however, both sides called in their relatives. Older brothers and cousins would wait by one of the school gates in the messy throng of family cars and drivers and school buses. Relatives would accompany the two boys across the street to the alley behind the bakala convenience store. Most mornings, a crowd of boys gathered there to smoke their last cigarettes of the school day. Some afternoons, it served as the school’s Thunderdome.

Unlike fights in Kuwait public schools, which could involve weapons, wounds or worse, American International School conflicts rarely ended in serious injury. Like two novice sumo, the students would face off, huff and puff, scuffle, slap one another, possibly land a few blows, maybe tear a shirt or pop a few buttons. Since the altercations typically took place not on school property, administrators usually turned a blind eye.

But this fight was in-school. I had to act. I picked up the classroom phone to warn Reem, the Religion teacher.

“There!” Abdullah said, pointing out the window, “It’s Mohamed.”

I put down the phone. On the other side of the tennis courts, Mohamed, his head bloodied and bandaged like a character in “Les Miserables,” was being led by the assistant principal to the nurse’s office. He was grinning. What would Barry Bergen have made of that?

The next day, on our early morning run, the assistant principal told me what had happened. Talal had walked into Religion with his set of knuckle dusters and bashed Mohamed in the head. It had been a glancing blow that produced a lot of blood but no serious damage. Talal had admitted what he did and why he did it. He was suspended. That evening, Talal’s dad visited Mohamed’s dad. Dates and coffee were served. Bargaining commenced. They settled on 10,000 Kuwaiti dinar—about $30,000—as the price for Mohamed dropping his threat to call the police along with his demand that Talal not graduate. Talal’s dad wrote a check. A year of insulting, a little blood, a satisfying payday, another Kuwait life lesson learned.

Against this worldview, the IB kumbaya philosophy has its work cut out.

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.

It’s known for its Viking-era parliament, Victorian seafront promenades, death-defying motorcycle races and cats without tails. Still, the Isle of Man exudes not schizophrenia but a gentle cohesion as comforting as the tea and cakes served everywhere on the self-governing British island.

A dot of 220 square miles in the Irish Sea between England and Ireland, the Isle of Man has hosted Iron Age Celts, Norsemen, Cistercian monks, Scottish warriors and English nobles. The Manx language has its roots in the early Irish of 5^th-century Christian missionaries.

Man boasts the world’s oldest continuously functioning legislature, established in 979. The three chambers of the Tynwald—Viking for “assembly field”—meet regularly, and the field itself is the site of yearly public meetings during which new legislation is read to the public (in English and Manx Gaelic) and any of its 85,000 residents can bring grievances directly to their political leaders.

That independence is important to Manx natives, who seem none too keen to be associated with England. The island has been under Scottish or English control since the end of Norse rule in 1265. But although British monarchs have carried the title Lord or Lady of Mann since the early 16^th century, the island isn’t part of the United Kingdom and elects its own president. Proud of being the first nation to give women the vote (1881), it continues to stress its differences from Britain. (For their part, mainland Brits tend to look askance at the island they know mainly as a tax haven. Man adopted a special tax regime in 1960.)

On my first visit to Man, I had the sensation of stepping into the 1950s musical “Brigadoon,” about a mysterious village that appears through the mist for a day every 100 years.

Glens with fern forests and dark streams feel like discoveries—there’s fairy (or faerie) lore here and I was even given a handful of tiny tin fairies by an old man. Higher up, rugged terrain covered in heather gives a purple hue to the mountain sides. Rolling hillsides divvied up by hedges or stone walls make a green counterpane dotted with sheep and the occasional farmhouse. All encircled by rocky coastlines.

Even in the cities, there’s a feeling of stepping back in time, in the quarters of fishermen’s row houses or on the grand Victorian boulevards with names like Queen’s Promenade, where it’s easy to imagine the island’s heyday with its hordes of 1880s holiday makers.

Today, the biggest public gatherings are for motorcycle races, the TT (Tourist Trophy) and the Manx Grand Prix. Since they began in 1907, the island has been a Mecca for bikers and racing enthusiasts. Coursing through villages and mountain hairpins is famously dangerous (two racers died last month) but the island is in festival mode, with parish churches selling tea and cakes to race watchers.

Perhaps the most famous residents are the most elusive. Manx cats are an indigenous breed known for a mutation creating a tailless feline—a kayt Manninagh.

Two-legged Manx residents seem happy to stay just as hard to find. A bill before the House of Keys (the island’s House of Commons, or parliamentary lower chamber) would consider “application by the Isle of Man for full and independent entry into the European Union.” It’s been sitting unattended to on the lawmakers’ debating table for years.

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

From his nonprofit office in Kinshasha, Emmanuel Umpula is observing a proliferation of development projects in the global race for the minerals central to the green transition from fossil fuels.

He’s the executive director of African Natural Resources Watch (AFREWATCH) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where major deposits of copper, cobalt and coltan are being mined for use in electric cars, wind turbines and artificial intelligence data centers. Most of the critical raw materials are exported to China as well as the United States and European Union.

The exports travel along some 1,430 miles, starting from Zambia’s copper mines to the DRC’s Katanga cobalt and coltan mining region, across Angola to the country’s port of Lobito on the Atlantic Ocean. But the supply chain along the so-called Lobito Corridor relies on infrastructure that includes a railway line that’s more than 100 years old.

With European politicians calling for economic security on the continent by reducing dependence on China—which obtains the lion’s share of critical raw materials today—the megaproject to renovate the route and create economic development is set to bring major changes to the area. It’s far from clear how they will affect local communities.

“There are more questions than answers,” Umpala told me. The environmental effects on the region’s forest and inevitable displacement of local people top his concerns. “Some communities are already impacted, and we are trying to represent them,” he said.

The next phase in the project is renovating Angola’s aging rail line. First built under Portuguese rule in the early 20^th century, the 800-mile-long Benguela railroad has transported valuable raw materials destined for Europe and the United States. The Lobito Atlantic Railway Project has different proposed uses beyond shipping raw ores, including the parallel DRC-Zambia battery enrichment project.

Expanding and rebranding the entire rail corridor across Southern Africa will provide a major test case of whether mineral-rich countries can partner globally to use their mineral endowments to the benefit of all their citizens. Can American and European investment this time contribute to sustainable local development as well as a just, long-term energy transition in Africa? The outcome is far from certain.

Major investment

The Lobito Atlantic Railway Project launched with a landmark investors’ conference in Washington, DC in December. In addition to the signing of a US–DRC strategic partnership agreement, a US-Congo minerals-for-security deal, and the DRC–Rwanda “Washington Accords” peace deal, the meetings also promoted the refurbishment of a reliable railway connection to Angola’s coast for the critical minerals mined in the DRC and Zambia.

The international investment agreement came after the Lobito Atlantic Railway company—a joint venture between the commodities supply chain firm Trafigura, civil construction firm Mota-Engil and railway operator Vecturis—obtained a 30-year concession to run the route in 2023, with an additional 20 years if they get other companies to invest.

The project’s total value is now approaching $7 billion, with approximately $2.3 billion coming from the EU effort, which involves the European Commission, European Investment Bank, EU member states and their development agencies, along with private-sector investment.

Despite the White House’s break from its closest allies, the EU has managed to find rare consensus with the United States over the Lobito Corridor. The US International Development Finance Corporation pledged $553 million. And more than $4 billion will come from the United States in “blended finance” instruments from public-private partnerships between government and mining businesses.

Banks and companies working through the African Development Bank and the Africa Finance Corporation are also investing, with EU guarantees. The Development Bank of Southern Africa, owned by the South African government, committed $200 million.

Just transition?

When South Africa concluded its G20 presidency in 2025, it championed financial support for the Lobito project as part of a “just energy transition.” President Cyril Ramaphosa urged for the export of critical raw materials to be an engine of inclusive growth and sustainable development.

“As minerals extraction accelerates to match the needs of the energy transition, it is crucial to ensure that the countries and local communities endowed with these resources are the ones to benefit the most,” he told a summit of G20 leaders in Johannesburg.

But rhetoric about the geopolitical competition for critical raw materials often remains abstract. For people living around the Lobito Corridor, it doesn’t necessarily mean the project will help provide what they need most: jobs, food for families and education.

Developments like the railway can boost local economies by providing training and work and strengthening local institutions, but they can just as easily reinforce existing inequalities and prompt conflict. The project will have huge ripple effects, inevitably stoking local tensions over new economic opportunities, together with the risk of armed conflict in a fragile state.

Lobito Corridor geopolitics

The original Benguela Railway began construction in 1902 with British financial backing, Portuguese land concessions and Belgian mining interests along a path in neighboring Congo Free State, then the private property of Belgium’s King Leopold II. It created a highly profitable extraction pipeline directly to Western industry but fell into ruin during the 27-year Angolan civil war following independence in 1975.

In 2006, China launched a project to extensively renovate the railway in exchange for $2 billion of Angolan crude oil. Almost 20 years later, the railway again needs repairs and upgrades to compete with other such corridors to the East, such as a new Chinese transport corridor from the DRC and Zambia to Tanzania and the Indian Ocean, which reduces China’s reliance on Atlantic-facing routes like Lobito.

Beijing’s continued dominance of mineral extraction in the region seriously worries Western governments: Some 80 percent of the DRC’s copper mines are Chinese-owned, while China mines 85 percent of the DRC’s cobalt and other rare earth minerals. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called the Lobito Corridor critical for transporting “essential raw materials that are vital for our strategic industries,” saying the project would be “a strategic investment for both Europe and our African partners.”

EU officials have also touted “secondary effects” for local residents, including “strengthening key agricultural value chains” and logistics platforms along the corridor. Umpula and other civil society activists remain worried about the lack of any clear plans, however. “They say they need Congo to make more value at the local level,” he said, “but at the same time, the railway is taking minerals out of the country.”

Still, he believes there’s room to engage EU policymakers about local needs because they may be listening more closely to African voices than officials under Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. “Now the good news is that we can work with the European Union to get answers, not just the Chinese and the USA.”

Economic security?

The EU is backing the Lobito Corridor as one of the biggest projects under its “Global Gateway” initiative, which aims to mobilize a total of more than 400 billion euros of investment from EU countries by 2027, and financing from development agencies and banks.

After the Trump Administration’s destruction of USAID helped usher in a new era of donor cutbacks and transactionalism for international development, the EU also began to pivot away from the traditional disbursement of grants to building new financial partnerships with the private sector while still vowing to promote good governance.

The railway initiative promises to create “links, not dependencies” and strengthen “the competitiveness and security of global supply chains” while prioritizing sectors central to European plans for so-called strategic autonomy: transport, energy, digital infrastructure and raw materials.

Although Europe’s infrastructure investment is aimed at exerting geopolitical influence as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the EU says its Lobito Corridor financing also reflects its support for democracy, sustainability, good governance and transparency in Africa.

But European civil society groups worry that such transactional arrangements advancing the EU’s competitive agenda may be prioritized over fairer and more equal partnerships with non-European countries. CONCORD, a confederation of more than 2,600 European development NGOs, has questioned the local benefits the project will bring. And the public finance watchdog Counter-Balance published a report about the Lobito Corridor it titled “Europe’s neocolonial vision for plundering Africa.”

Local concerns

On top of the exploitation of resources, local concerns focus on land degradation and destruction of traditional livelihoods. Many critical minerals come from the Miombo woodlands, a vast forested area spanning central Africa from Angola to Tanzania, reaching as far south as Mozambique. The forest is home to 34 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves and 10 percent of its copper, AFREWATCH says.

Using satellite images and field observations across the copper belt of Congo’s Katanga Province’s and DRC-portion of the Lobito Corridor, the group estimates that some 123,000 acres of Miombo forest disappeared between 2000 and 2024 from a total of 290,300 acres in the study zone. That represents 58 percent of the forest cover within the 12 largest mining companies’ concessions.

Emmanuel Umpula, the AFREWATCH director, worries Congolese communities affected by the project simply won’t be consulted. “Will the EU make sure companies handle or manage cases when people need to be relocated and compensated for loss of land?” he said. “What if there are some who say no to the project? How will the company react? Kick them out?”

Transparency is key

Besides the prominent European and Singapore-based logistics companies overseeing the project, Umpala wants Congo’s private sector to have access to lucrative contracts. But without more accountability on the part of governments and companies involved, he says, the economic gains will be captured by Western countries along with Congo’s elites.

The EU must be willing to check corporate and government actors who break promises of good governance, transparency and bringing benefits to locals. That will depend on greater transparency and the effectiveness of civil society in both Europe and Africa working together to help guarantee channels for local people to give feedback and participate meaningfully in decisions about the implementation of the Lobito Corridor.

Casey Kelso is a senior advocacy and policy adviser for international civil society organizations in Europe. He was an ICWA fellow in Southern Africa from 1991 to 1994. Read AFREWATCH’s latest report on the Lobito Corridor here.

MANILA — Luzviminda Siapo was working overseas in Kuwait in 2017 when her son Raymart was killed in their neighborhood of Navotas City, part of this sprawling capital. He was a victim of the country’s “war on drugs” that resulted in thousands of deaths in urban poor communities across the Philippines.

Plain-faced and dressed in a simple white shift dress, she was describing Raymart’s murder in testimony before the Philippines Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the Pope Pius Center, a religious facility in Manila. Flanked by Cardinal Pablo David and a nun named Sister May Cano, she sat in the center of the hall’s wide atrium, with sunshine from a large skylight illuminating her and a crowd of widows and mothers of more victims sitting behind her.

Affectionately called Nanay Luz (Mother Luz) by the commission’s panel members, she was sometimes overcome by emotion and would sob through her words. But her voice remained clear and unrelenting over two hours. Behind her, Raymart’s younger siblings, Isabela and Cyrus, alternately cried and excused themselves from the room as their mother recounted the pain of hearing about Raymart’s death.

It was August 14 and Siapo’s testimony marked the first of many scheduled Truth and Reconciliation Commission “truth-telling” sessions that would present the stories of families of extrajudicial killing victims, corroborated with forensic and other documentary evidence, as part of the commission’s goal to construct a comprehensive record of the war on drugs.

Truth commissions have been organized by both government and non-governmental groups in a number of post-conflict and post-colonial societies, including South Africa, Canada, Uganda, Argentina, Norway, Chile, Nepal and Ireland. They’ve operated with varying degrees of success; South Africa’s post-apartheid commission and Argentina’s post-junta commission (which eventually led to prosecution of documented war crimes) were prime examples that contributed to repairing and reckoning in their societies.

Multiple attempts have been made in the Philippines to form state-sanctioned truth commissions that would address past abuses, one struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional (Biraogo v. Truth Commission, 2010). But this latest iteration would be the first non-government attempt at addressing the crimes committed during the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte and his war on drugs from 2016 to 2022.

With the historical context within the Philippines, and global patterns of post-conflict truth commissions in regions like Latin America in mind, I wanted to discover just how the commission would seek to achieve its highly ambitious goal of publicly presenting hundreds of testimonies of both victims and perpetrators over the next two years—a major challenge given the fact that many victims still live in fear for their lives while the perpetrators, many of them active duty police, roam free. The outcome is far from certain.

Formed in May 2026, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is primarily organized by the Catholic Church, with Cardinal Pablo David—one of the Church’s most outspoken critics of Duterte’s drug war—presiding. Other organizing members include the commission’s chair, Raul Pangalangan, a former judge of the International Criminal Court, and Raquel Fortun, one of only two forensic pathologists in all the Philippines, a doctor who’s autopsied and analyzed the bodies of numerous victims of the war on drugs.

In preparation for the first hearing with Nanay Luz, Fortun, Pangalangan and other commissioners exhumed Raymart’s remains from his burial site in a private cemetery for examination. The day before the exhumation, I met Pangalangan at the University of the Philippines, entering his office through a large wooden door atop which “Dean Raul Pangalangan” is still labeled in gold lettering, a relic of his six-year tenure as the head of the law school.

Years before becoming an ICC judge and a law school dean, Pangalangan was a student activist at the university, the main seat of progressivism in the Philippines. “I was raised in the student-run anti-Marcos movement,” he told me of the period of martial law under President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. “At that time, if you held a public rally, you would surely be attacked by the riot police. There was no way there would be a peaceful dispersal.”

As a law student, Pangalangan became interested in international justice, a niche field at a time when the subject, along with human rights, wasn’t taken seriously by the local legal community. “It was seen as all political, all about politics between states and an open-ended debate about ideology,” he said. But Pangalangan found it useful and relevant to address the unrest in his own country when it was recovering from dictatorship under a new constitution in 1987.

Now, as a former judge of an international tribunal, Pangalangan brings a legal perspective to the commission’s implementation, even as it works outside the government and any formal judicial proceedings. It is important that Pangalangan has been able to help contour the boundaries of what the commission might attempt or accomplish with reference to the principles that bind the ICC at its seat in The Hague, where Duterte is now on trial.

The ICC is ruled by the principle of complementarity, which limits the court’s jurisdiction by dictating that it can only prosecute crimes not already being sufficiently investigated and prosecuted by national governments. If the current commission were to be organized by the Philippine government rather than civil society, it would call into question the propriety and legality of the parallel ICC trial against Duterte. Furthermore, if the commission had any “teeth” or prosecutorial powers, it would give Duterte substantial grounds to have his case dismissed under the rule of ne bis in idem, or double jeopardy (the rule against prosecuting a defendant for the same crime twice).

But the lack of enforcement power has presented its own challenges for justifying and legitimizing the commission’s objectives as well as getting public support. “As Filipinos, we’re a very practical people,” Pangalangan said. “So people ask, ‘Can the commission punish anyone? Can you give reparations to the victims?’” The answer is no, and the commission’s focus on giving victims a public platform for sharing their stories is also not always a satisfying alternative. “People would say ‘Malayo sa bituka’ (It’s far from your intestines),” Pangalangan said. That’s to say the harm to victims since the drug war isn’t such a big deal, so why all the fuss around a public hearing?

Crucially, the formal practice of truth-telling—the opportunity to fully recount the murders of relatives and the ongoing, painful aftermath—is central to the commission and also informed by Pangalangan’s experiences as an ICC judge. Under the Rome Statute, which governs the court, victim participation in the legal proceedings is an important part of the court’s mission and vision of justice, along with providing reparations for victims.

The Rome Statute outlines that victims have an explicit legal right to share their “views and concerns” through their own lawyers in the proceedings and, when defendants are found guilty, receive compensation and rehabilitation. “At the ICC, victims take an active part in proceedings, they take ownership of it,” Pangalangan said. “They are not passive recipients of justice passed down by the court.” The commission’s victim-centric framework is meant to emulate that.

Over the course of the August 14 hearing, I witnessed the impact of that approach. As Nanay Luz told her story, those in the semicircle of seats behind her nodded and murmured: families, mothers, children and old women, all victims who experienced their own losses during the war on drugs. When she cried, they wiped their own tears or consoled her two children.

The hours of Nanay Luz’s truth-telling were both deeply personal and a collective experience. The others actively participated through their presence and the solidarity it built with Luz, their community and any victims watching the public broadcast who might be emboldened to come forward and participate in future sessions.

“This country is so divided,” Pangalangan said. “Even as accounts of drug war killings have made the news, many look the other way. It’s time we confront it.” With enough engagement, he told me, the commission could help restore a sense of nationhood and a “shared moral universe” for the country healing from the wounds of a decade of violence.

“I forewent my retirement for this,” Carlos Conde said jokingly as we discussed the commission over Zoom one rainy morning. A veteran journalist and former Manila correspondent for The New York Times, he has investigated extrajudicial killings and human rights violations in the Philippines for decades.

Now he oversees the commission’s documentation and fact-finding work, drawing on his 14-year background at Human Rights Watch reporting on the drug war, its impact on children and the patterns of early extrajudicial killings in Davao City, where Duterte was mayor, on the island of Mindanao. The crackdown later served as the notorious “Davao model” Duterte eventually expanded nationwide.

“I joined the commission because it felt like a good complement to what the ICC is doing,” Conde told me. The court is also limited by its temporal jurisdiction (it can only prosecute crimes committed from November 2011 to March 2019) and by the number of victims it can realistically engage. “The ICC trial alone will not be enough to address the need of thousands of victims to speak out and share their stories,” he said. Conde, too, hopes the commission will ultimately help legitimize the ICC’s proceedings in the eyes of the wider Filipino public.

The commission has ambitious plans to complete the truth-telling sessions within two years of its launch in May 2026. “We don’t want to be saddled with ‘mission creep,’” Conde said. Many of the victims have been waiting for some kind of resolution or closure since 2016. The expedited timeline has another reason: the likelihood that Sara Duterte, the current vice president and daughter of the imprisoned president, will run for and win the next presidential election in 2028. “We’re expecting a vengeful presidency,” Conde said.

The public truth-telling sessions also serve analytical purposes. Conde plans to coordinate the data collected from the thousands of cases and the hundreds of testimonies in order to address the lack of a single standardized number of victims extrajudicially killed during Duterte’s drug war. The hope is that the data will also help the ICC or Philippine agencies provide reparations for those who come forward.

The commissioners have examined the successes and failures of previous truth and reconciliation processes in Guatemala, South Africa and other countries, hoping to glean lessons. “It’s fueled our conscious effort to manage expectations regarding what the Philippine commission can accomplish,” Conde said. Although limited in some ways as a non-governmental body, the commission is also unrestricted by statute or legal procedure, which helps build trust and legitimacy and encourages victims to share their accounts. “For this population to be able to speak publicly about the violence they faced from police and vigilantes, it’s unprecedented,” Conde told me. “So we consider it a success by our own standards.”

Civil society groups also have high hopes the commission will deliver on many of its promises and disrupt over a decade of impunity and stigmatization. Some are providing documented cases and consulting with the commissioners to help ensure the process remains victim-centered. I met Ansheline Bacudio, a lawyer working for one of the groups—a legal services organization named IDEALS—in Quezon City in August, when floodwaters covering Manila’s roads had receded after Typhoon Maymay. We stopped for drinks at Silingan Coffee, a cafe run by a collective of people affected by extrajudicial killings that showcases art and writing protesting the drug war and supporting the ICC investigation.

IDEALS has been working on the frontlines of the drug war, providing legal aid to victims’ families and documenting over 900 cases since 2016. Bacudio and other lawyers often responded to reports of extrajudicial killings within hours in order to secure documents, evidence and witness testimonies. Previously, she explained, IDEALS had partnered with the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, an official body, in order to provide documented cases, clients and data for further government action. None was taken.

Now working with a civil society-led commission, Bacudio is more optimistic, especially about the truth-telling aspect and its potential to humanize the families of extrajudicial killing victims. “It’s not really about the drug war, there was no drug war itself,” she told me. “It was a campaign against the most poor, and those people—normal human people—are at the heart of it.” Now, she added, “there is no justice without truth, just as there is no justice without accountability.”

Part of the commission’s work is to analyze the systematic nature of the violence, identifying patterns and commonalities in the killings. Bacudio hopes that evidence will prompt the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute mid- and low-level perpetrators, especially among the ranks of the Philippine National Police.

But there are concerns about exactly how a non-governmental body can guarantee the safety of victim participants in the public hearings. “When a witness testifies at the commission, listing names or identifying specific perpetrators, they could be subject to libel, cyber libel and other criminal charges,” Bacudio told me. “Not to mention retaliation by online troll armies watching the broadcasts.” Without protection that would come with direct government involvement, the commission will have to step carefully and mitigate the risks faced by victims who are vulnerable to legal challenges, harassment and retaliatory violence.

When he talks, Al Fuertes moves with his entire body, gesticulating and commanding the room with a resonant, preacher-like voice. He is one of the commissioners whom I first met at a workshop before the first truth-telling hearing. Starting at 8 a.m., the all-day event was aimed at helping civil society advocates engage victims of human rights violations with cultural and trauma-informed sensitivity. As I watched Fuertes lead the collaborative session, I eyed the canteen of coffee provided for the breakfast, wondering how many cups it would take me, a night owl, to match his natural exuberance.

A professor at George Mason University in Virginia, Fuertes specializes in conflict analysis, resolution and peacebuilding, working with post-conflict groups around the world to support healing from the trauma inflicted by military and civil conflicts. For almost 20 years, he has worked with former perpetrators and survivors of the Rwandan genocide as well as Karen refugee communities along the Thailand-Myanmar border.

“Any attempt to establish a truth and reconciliation commission is reflective of the culture of the society or people involved,” Fuertes told me. “There must first be an acknowledgement of a harm or disruption, they have to confess, as a nation, that they have been fragmented by conflict.” Only then, he explained, can the pathway for collective healing open.

Trained as a theologian, Fuertes draws on the Philippines’ theology of struggle—similar but distinct from the popularized Latin American liberation theology—which posits that clergy should actively work with the public to resist colonialism and other forms of oppression. The explicitly anti-colonial lens guides Fuertes in integrating victim-centric practices into the commission’s hearings and procedures.

“Part of my approach to trauma healing focuses on helping victims of human rights violations become the authors and narrators of their stories, rather than have human rights advocates act as outside experts telling the victims about what happened to them,” he said. Otherwise the commission would become simply an exercise in extracting stories from victims for its own ends, he added.

The commission will also call on former members of law enforcement to testify. “While they may be perpetrators of the killings, and directly pulled the trigger, they also have their own stories to share,” Conde said.

The South African process, which facilitated face-to-face dialogue between state agents of apartheid and its victims, has provided a prime model. “If meeting the other, confronting the other, is part of the victims’ healing,” Fuertes said, “then the commission wants to facilitate that kind of restorative justice.” Meetings called “victim-offender conferencing” may also benefit the wider public by advancing understanding about why and how the drug war killings were perpetrated.

Whether such confrontations are appropriate will be decided case by case. Families of extrajudicial killing victims have expressed different ideas about what they view as appropriate reparations and “justice” in their consultations with the commission. “Healing is subjective,” Fuertes told me. “What is healing for you and your family might be different from another family of victims.”

When the commission was announced in May, the Philippine National Police said it would cooperate with the effort to publish a report about the testimonies and corroborating evidence, providing government documents and police reports. The National Police Commission, which supervises the force, has also expressed public support for the commission.

The presentation of “truth” coming from the perpetrators highlights the commission’s dual role of seeking both truth and reconciliation. Reconciliation is distinct from forgiveness, Fuertes emphasized. “There are prerequisites to reconciliation: confession, repentance, commitment to non-repetition and reparations,” he told me. The process requires that the other side be present and active in the process. “Reconciliation doesn’t require forgiveness,” Fuertes said. “But it may certainly help.”

In her August 14 testimony, Nanay Luz mentioned her need for forgiveness, moving on and putting faith in God that justice would be served, particularly now that Duterte was on trial. Her narrative was steeped in the sense that Raymart’s murder was a sort of betrayal: Both she and her son had voted for Duterte in the 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2017, a few months after Raymart was killed, Nanay Luz spoke to reporters about the grief and anger with which she was grappling while mourning her son. She described thoughts of avenging the murder by entering the police station with bombs strapped to her chest.

That was absent from her public testimony on August 14. Perhaps the omission was intentional. In the current political climate, especially under the anti-terrorism law Duterte enacted in 2020, publicly expressing that kind of sentiment about the state agents who killed her son could do more harm than good. Nevertheless, her raw, gripping earlier admission of anger and desire for revenge illustrates just how deeply the war on drugs has ruptured the social fabric—and just how hard the commission will have to work to achieve true societal reconciliation.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved fictionalizes the historical account of Margaret Garner, a formerly enslaved woman who, upon the imminent capture of her family by slave-hunters, kills her own daughter rather than consign her to return to a life of slavery. Many of Morrison’s works engage with the legacy of slavery in America to show how the generational trauma of experiencing enslavement and, later, structural racism is passed down like living memories through the suffering of the Black community.

To date, neither the US federal government nor any state has ever created anything like a truth commission to comprehensively document and confront the centuries-long impact of slavery and Jim Crow on the descendants of slaves.

After Beloved was published, an interviewer asked Morrison whether she thought it possible for someone to forgive her or himself even after doing “something absolutely terrible.”

Morrison responded:

Yes, it’s called grace… But you have to go through the fire first. You have to experience the full fall, and the complete self-loathing, in order to come around to something like the forgiving of oneself. It’s when you skip responsibility, when you use a substitute emotion like guilt—which is of no use to anyone—but if you feel the real thing which is shame, hatred, humiliation and self-loathing: that is the door. And if you get through that, then you can forgive yourself.

It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge one’s own failures, both for an individual person and an entire nation. Once revealed, truth can be devastating. There’s a risk that, under a precarious “peace,” opening decades-old wounds will inflame political tensions rather than heal them.

Several attempts at establishing truth commissions have already failed in the Philippines. To confront the war on drugs, as I’ve indicated, significant barriers must be overcome in order to realize the possibility of reconciling victims and perpetrators. Not least, those who testify must step into the spotlight and the historical record at great personal risk.

There are clear limitations to what civil society can accomplish to help achieve long-term change without state involvement and amid a background of widespread support for the former president. But in the absence of any serious alternative, the Philippine Truth and Reconciliation Commission will now attempt to go through the fire.

Editor’s note: This is a version of a dispatch for the Institute of Current World Affairs published here.

Sabrina Ochoa is a lawyer and Institute of Current World Affairs fellow specializing in international law and human rights. Based in the Philippines and The Hague, she is investigating the impact of the International Criminal Court’s prosecution of crimes against humanity committed during the Philippines’ “war on drugs,” with a focus on the victims of atrocity crimes and their communities.

Verónica Romero works as a home-cleaner, sharing a crowded apartment in suburban Washington, DC with extended family from her native village near Sololá, on Guatemala’s scenic Lake Atitlán. Many residents on her block are also Guatemalans from that same corner of Sololá, and still others live in similar apartment compounds nearby.

Which gives a young man thousands of miles away a ready-made clientele for his thriving business. Miguel Chavez Xitamul makes food deliveries from Sololá to former neighbors now living in the United States. Chavez, who goes by the nickname Myke (pronounced “Mike”), launched Myke Express to join hundreds of such courier services that have sprung up between the two countries serving an expatriate US population demographers estimate now surpasses 3 million.

On a recent afternoon, Romero was taking delivery of a 20-pound load of Sololá delicacies her mother had packed just the day before—three roasted roosters wrapped in tinfoil along with plastic bags filled with moist corn dough she would mold into chicken-stuffed tamales. It’s enough for a family fiesta that, even with Myke’s fee ($240 in cash), would be cheaper than splurging for her entire brood at a restaurant.

But it’s not about cost. It’s about taste. “This is from my mother,” she said, a catch in her voice as her eyes welled up with emotion. “My mother, who chose the chickens and plucked each bird and cooked them for me!”

For Myke, it was business as usual. Taking a red-eye flight from Guatemala’s capital to Dulles International Airport, he arrived the same morning bearing packages of food and other gifts for 45 Guatemalan customers. He would take packages from some of them back to Guatemala City on his return flight later that evening: power tools, electronics, video games and auto parts.

Archipelagos of transplanted villages often pop up wherever there’s an uptick in immigration, drawing newcomers toward a particular city or industry or simply a neighborhood where older family members and former neighbors have relocated.

Sociologists and anthropologists in Guatemala call the phenomenon “comunidades de Espejo” (“mirror communities”)—clusters of barrios in the US that “mirror” the proximity residents shared with each other in their original “sender” villages.

Migration specialist Pedro Pablo Solares has identified dozens of such places through interviews with over 25,000 immigrant Guatemalans since 2009. His research focuses on American towns with poultry processing facilities. One is Seymour, Indiana, an egg-processing center that draws its workforce from the municipality of San Sebastián Coatán in Huehuetenango. Another is Georgetown, Delaware, where most Perdue Farms workers hail from Tacaná, near the Mexican border.

If you know where to look, it’s fairly easy to locate both the sender towns in Guatemala and the mirror communities they’re feeding in the US. Start with signs like this one in Joyabaj del Quiché in Central Guatemala’s Mayan highlands:

In bustling towns like Joyabaj del Quiché, pharmacies and freight expediters list the US towns occupied by the region’s migrants. Dozens of destinations are listed everywhere—on paper flyers, painted on adobe walls and taped to lamp posts. Some shops employ touts to walk the streets with microphones and bullhorns, advertising their services in Spanish and several Mayan dialects.

In San Miguel Ixtahuacán, near Guatemala’s border with México, a business calls itself El Correo (literally “the Post Office”) and specializes, as advertised, in “urgent” direct-to-the-US shipments of documents, clothing, food, medicine and “mucho mas…” Regular delivery can take up to a week, the sign indicates, although El Correo offers rush orders within two to three days.

Such family-owned shops have catered to the growing demand for fresh-cooked meals for years. Most charge $30 for the first pound of cargo and $10 for each additional pound. Besides food, shipments often include baby pictures, replacement drivers’ licenses, school diplomas, over-the-counter antibiotics and traditional Mayan clothing worn for religious and civic fiestas.

Eduardo Ponce, a retired Guatemalan army sergeant, opened his Encomiendas San Marcos shop in 2020. He’s noticed that his neighbors frequently send parcels to Lynn, Massachusetts and Georgetown, Delaware. “We’re basically consolidators for DHL,” he said. The global carrier picks up his neighbors’ offerings weekly for processing and shipping to Miami. After clearing US customs, DHL moves them to their US destination.

Several years ago, DHL reported it was shipping around 100 of these “family-to-family” packages daily, adding that 90 percent weighed less than five pounds. Each package is inspected to avoid contraband; customers are warned not to send narcotics.

Some Guatemalan couriers such as Palex Express manage their own US distribution, relying on circuit drivers to sort parcels by city or neighborhood, often leaving them for clients to retrieve at grocery stores or restaurants frequented by expats. Palex general manager Pablo Argueta says he averages some 300 packages a week.

The Covid pandemic seems to have turbocharged this business: as fewer people traveled, fewer food packages were arriving in suitcases. Families started switching to consolidators who booked space with commercial cargo handlers.

Manuel Orozco, an economist at the Washington, DC think-tank InterAmerican Dialogue, estimates what he terms “nostalgic” trade to Latino emigrés now tops $4 billion annually. He calls the spread of family-to-family shipment services a “lagging indicator” tracking a stealth migration from Guatemala that continues despite Washington’s current immigration policies.

Still, the crackdown on unauthorized immigrants has made it harder for bespoke couriers like Myke Chavez. He’s stopped flying into several US airports where he previously reached customers on his 24-hour visits. US Customs inspectors also reject some foods now, he says. This year, he expects to complete half the more than 40 delivery trips he made in 2024.

On a recent market day in Joyabaj, Guatemala, a line of grandmothers in traditional Mayan clothing stretched past the entrance of the Envios Xolabaj 2 shop near the central bus terminal.

They brought freshly baked bread and blocks of homemade cheese wrapped in green banana leaves, which they packed in clear plastic containers provided by the shipper to allow inspection by US Customs.

One woman was sending her care package to her sons in Dodge City, Kansas. Her bread wouldn’t taste fresh after the 72-hour trip north, she conceded, but she wasn’t deterred. “It’s what they miss,” she said softly.

August’s arrival marks the start of tamale season, when villagers harvest corn from backyard plots. Children and spouses working in the United States eagerly wait for an aroma that traces back generations, if not centuries, from lands worked by families who now depend on someone earning a living abroad.

Hector Orozco, a Palex driver in the US, knows that scent well from eager hands ripping open packages. “They’re willing to pay for that authentic taste,” he said. “It’s the taste of home.”

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.

Russia accused Britain last week of “opting for escalation” over its continuing support for Ukraine, threatening “inevitable consequences.” In an apparent bid to underline the threat, Moscow withdrew its ambassador from the UK. The Kremlin may be notorious for diplomatic bluster, but this latest ratcheting up of bilateral tensions can’t be easily dismissed, especially when Russia appears to be intensifying its hybrid war against Kyiv’s European partners.

Amid the mounting alarm over Moscow’s increasingly bold actions, US officials now believe Russian President Vladimir Putin could launch an attack on a NATO member within a matter of months. According to new intelligence assessments quoted by The Wall Street Journal and other media, they estimate the time frame for a potential Russian move against the Western military alliance to be between this fall and 2029.

Some skeptics dismiss the threat. As the Russian military has been unable to defeat Ukraine since launching its full-scale invasion more than four years ago, they argue, Moscow is in no position to start a new war against the far more powerful NATO alliance. But that analysis misreads the nature of the Russian threat, failing to account for the likely goals of a potential Kremlin operation against a NATO member. If Putin does choose to attack, his aim would almost certainly be to discredit NATO rather than achieve a military victory.

The kind of attack scenario the latest US intelligence assessments envisage involves a limited Russian cross-border incursion into NATO territory, possibly by thinly disguised proxies. Once a symbolic Russian presence is established, alliance members would have to decide whether they’d be ready to risk a potentially devastating if ultimately victorious war with Moscow.

If NATO members were unable to agree on a robust response, the alliance’s core commitment to collective security would be undermined, prompting a major security crisis that would leave the whole of Europe feeling dangerously exposed. In such a deteriorating security environment of geopolitical uncertainty, public support for Ukraine would likely plummet. Russia would then aim to convince politically vulnerable European leaders to abandon Kyiv.

Would Putin really dare to take such a huge risk? With the Russian army struggling to advance on Ukrainian battlefields and economic pressure mounting inside Russia, there’s good reason to believe he would consider radical new approaches to reviving his faltering invasion. He may also feel the current climate of Western disunity is creating uniquely favorable circumstances for action.

Russian territorial gains in Ukraine have dropped to multi-year lows over the past six months. In parallel, Ukraine’s long-range bombing campaign inside Russia has dramatically expanded, causing fuel shortages across the country and extensive damage to its leading e-commerce retailer Wildberries.

At sea, Ukrainian airstrikes have significantly reduced Russia’s exports of oil and other key commodities. While Ukraine is currently suffering far worse hardship from Moscow’s daily bombardments, that’s surely of little comfort to the Russian population, accustomed to the idea it will be shielded from the war’s negative consequences.

To finally break Ukrainian resistance, Putin must cut off the European aid lifeline funding the country’s economy and war effort. If he had hoped the 2024 re-election of US President Donald Trump would lead to the collapse of international support for Ukraine, that has not happened. Instead, a number of European countries have stepped in to help fill the gap. Exploiting divisions within the NATO alliance in order to intimidate them and isolate Ukraine may now be seen as Russia’s best option.

Moscow has already been intensifying its campaign of “gray zone” aggression against NATO members across Europe. Russian drones have penetrated NATO airspace on multiple occasions in recent months, and a cruise missile struck deep inside Poland. The latest escalation came in early August, when a suspected Russian drone armed with explosives was discovered at a German airbase used by NATO and the Ukrainian military. Each incident has tested alliance members’ reactions. So far, they have been remarkably reluctant to impose any additional costs on the Kremlin.

If Putin does decide on a more direct confrontation, he would be counting on another weak response. Based on his own experience, that would be a reasonable expectation. Western leaders have loudly and consistently condemned Russian aggression throughout Putin’s quarter century in power, but have often done little to oppose him, while also facilitating lucrative business deals with Russian entities.

Crucially, the West’s collective reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been shaped by a crippling fear of escalation that has consistently left the Ukrainians short of weapons and faced with restrictions on their ability to defend themselves. Ukraine is not a NATO member, of course, but it would be easy to believe that many in Moscow might anticipate a similarly indecisive response from the alliance if confronted by the prospect of imminent war with Russia.

Putin may feel the transatlantic rift between Trump and his European counterparts represents an unprecedented window of opportunity. The US leader has never made a secret of his unwillingness to take the lead on European security, and has been left deeply frustrated by the continent’s response to America’s military campaign against Iran. NATO has never looked less united or more susceptible to outside pressure.

None of that makes a Russian attack on an alliance member inevitable, of course. Putin may well prefer to continue exploring other avenues of escalation that stop short of direct military confrontation. He has a range of options, including attacks on infrastructure that would disrupt daily life while remaining below the threshold for a collective NATO response. But given the current trajectory, it would be reckless to dismiss the possibility of a more serious Russian attack.

The stakes could hardly be higher for Putin. Any negotiated settlement based on current battlefield realities would likely be viewed in Russia as a historic defeat that would raise questions about the future stability of his regime. Putin’s immediate priority, therefore, may be to maintain the current climate of geopolitical confrontation in order to safeguard his authoritarian rule. Ultimately, however, he wants to win.

At present, Putin has no obvious pathway to victory in Ukraine and is unlikely to prevail in a prolonged conflict while Kyiv retains strong European backing. Although even a limited attack on NATO would represent an enormous gamble, he could decide it’s the best way to secure victory in a war he’s sold as existential for Russia itself.

Peter Dickinson is publisher of Business Ukraine magazine.

Carol Rose is a leading advocate for human rights and social justice. She has been executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU since 2003, expanding the organization and tackling many issues and legal cases of national importance. She began her career as a reporter, working for United Press International, The Des Moines Register and The New York Times, with stints in Washington, DC, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Northern Ireland and Japan. Carol was an ICWA fellow from 1989 to 1993 based in Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. She went on to attend Harvard Law School—where she was co-editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal—clerked for Federal District Court Judge Patti Saris, and worked as a First Amendment, intellectual property and civil rights lawyer at the Boston law firm Hill & Barlow. She earned her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and master’s at the London School of Economics.

In this July 1992 dispatch, Carol describes refugee camps emptying in the Pakistani border town of Torkham as Afghans return home in droves following the collapse of the Communist government in Kabul that year. Soon after, a second Afghan civil war broke out, and the Islamist Taliban eventually seized control of the country until its ouster in 2001 by American forces following the attacks of September 11. With the Taliban now back in power after four decades of conflict and instability, the UNHCR estimates that 6.4 million Afghan refugees remain outside the country.

Pakistan (July 1992) — An endless caravan of heavily laden buses, lorries and donkeys moves past the black iron gates that divide Afghanistan and Pakistan in the border town of Torkham.

Bearded moneychangers sit alongside the road, haggling with turban-clad men over fluctuations in the value of the Afghan currency. Veiled women and children wait in crowded minivans as their fathers, husbands and brothers make last-minute financial transactions before crossing the border. Nearby, garishly painted Bedford trucks are piled 20 feet high with the remnants of life in the Afghan refugee camps: beds, blankets, pots, window frames, doors, bricks, wooden roof beams, chickens and the occasional water buffalo.

After 13 years of war, the Afghans are going home.

Since the collapse of the Communist government in Kabul last April, the trickle of people crossing the border has become a human tidal wave. As many as 15,000 people return each day to Afghanistan—more than 600,000 since the beginning of the year. At the present rate, more than 1 million Afghans will go home by the end of August—making this the largest voluntary repatriation movement since World War II.

Amid the rubble of abandoned houses of the Surkhaps refugee camp stands a single mud-wall compound. I have come to this distant camp in the middle of the Balochistan desert to see what has become of my friend, Somargul, the eldest sister in an Afghan family with whom I lived in purdah—seclusion—one year ago.

As before, I have come here in disguise: wearing an all-encompassing body veil (burqa) to avoid detection by Pakistani police. Because of frequent tribal clashes, foreigners are not allowed into this camp.

As a taxi ferries me through the five-mile-long central bazaar of the camp, I peer through the lace eye-covering of my burqa at the deserted shops and homes. It appears that the refugees left in waves: Some stretches of the camp are completely abandoned while others remain full of people. As we near Somargul’s house, I see that her family compound is the only one still standing in the neighborhood.

When I enter the inner courtyard, Somargul and her sisters embrace me and usher me to the central salon. As before, children gather around to see my face as I lift my veil. I distribute gifts—coloring books, scarves, chocolates—while Somargul tells me of her life since the fall of Kabul.

“Everyone has left the camp,” she says. “Our neighbors were all from the same village, so they left together. We are the only people left in this area so we must travel [three hours] to Quetta to buy meat or vegetables. It’s a big problem because it is almost impossible to find taxis to come here anymore, so the men have to walk a long way just to get transportation.”

“It also has become dangerous for us to stay here,” she continues. “But we went back to see our home in Kandahar [Afghanistan] and it is completely destroyed and our fields are mined. There is no place for us to live if we return there. We also looked for a house in Quetta, but it is too expensive for us to move there.”

Somargul says her family has two ration cards but that when they tried to cash them, they were turned away because of the crowds. Since it costs money to go to the encashment center in the nearest town, they gave up trying.

Instead, Somargul asks if I can help one of her brothers find a job with a Western aid agency. With cutbacks in international assistance programs, however, jobs for Afghans are becoming more scarce even as the need increases.

“Please, won’t you help us?” she says. “It is not safe for us to stay here, but we cannot afford to leave.”

The same plea is made by a refugee family with whom I meet in the Khorasan refugee camp, north of Peshawar. As I tour the nearly empty camp, a man invites me inside to have tea with the women in his family. Inside the purdah compound, beds and blankets are stacked in preparation for imminent departure.

“The water has gone bad here so we will have to leave soon,” says one of the women as she offers me a cup of sweetened green tea. “What are we to do? Our house in Afghanistan has been bombed and we haven’t enough money to transport roof beams on a truck to Afghanistan. But it is too dangerous for us to stay here. There are only five or six families left, and the thieves come in the night.”

Reviewed in this article:

The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris
Knopf, June 2026
by Andrea Wulf

Picture the crew that circled the globe with Captain James Cook. A 17-year-old German boy with a face pitted by smallpox probably isn’t the image that springs to mind. But in the summer of 1772, that boy joined the British explorer’s second circumnavigation of the globe. The young George Forster served as assistant to his father, the expedition’s naturalist Johann Reinhold. He had no formal education and no obvious claim on the world’s attention. On the ship’s return three years later, however, he became one of Europe’s most renowned travelers and, before long, among its most celebrated minds.

The historian Andrea Wulf’s new book The Traveler is a spirited bid to restore Forster to his since-vanished fame. She’s well-suited to the task: Few writers make historical recovery feel so much like revelation. Her earlier books resurrected intellectual worlds modern readers tend to know only in fragments. Among them, Alexander von Humboldt’s ecological vision in The Invention of Nature and the unruly early movement of German Romanticism in Magnificent Rebels.

Forster belongs to both stories. He invited Humboldt—15 years his junior—to see nature not as a collection of separate parts but a single living web, and he helped prepare the ground for Romanticism’s distrust of cold reason. But Forster is difficult to pin down. Wulf introduces him as a naturalist, ethnographer, humanist, travel writer, translator, teacher, political journalist and revolutionary—as if less a single neglected intellectual than an entire shelf of them. Wulf seeks to make the various callings cohere in one man and leave the reader wondering how the world ever managed to forget him.

The voyage dominates the first of the book’s four parts, a central formative experience. Cook’s ship Resolution sailed from Antarctic ice to Pacific islands. Wulf traveled in Forster’s wake researching the book, giving her passages the patina of firsthand reporting. She paints vivid scenes: rigging stiffened by ice, blue glaciers rising above the mast, Easter Island’s statues suggesting a history the Europeans couldn’t read.

Forster sketched birds and plants, learned words from islanders, studied their clothing, music, communities. He witnessed social arrangements that made Europe’s hierarchies appear neither natural nor inevitable. The German’s moral journey was even more important, however. While Cook’s expedition carried instruments, specimen jars and imperial ambition, the boy noticed what the official language of discovery concealed. He saw sailors treat their hosts’ hospitality as a sign of submission and trade in ways that destabilized island communities. The people receiving the British, Forster believed, had every right to regard them as invaders.

In his book about the journey, A Voyage Round the World, published in 1777, he condemns brutality toward Indigenous people, invoking the “general rights of mankind”—a phrase whose breadth was startling in a Europe busy arranging humanity into racial ladders.

It’s tempting to make Forster seem a man from the future, and Wulf often succumbs. He opposed slavery, attacked empire, admired educated women and insisted that practical observation mattered more than inherited theory. When Immanuel Kant constructed racial categories from Königsberg, Forster answered with the authority of someone who had met the people under discussion. In Wulf’s take on Forster, his global perspective made European Enlightenment philosophy look provincial. But his achievement wasn’t in holding 21^st-century opinions ahead of time, the author says. It was that as his experiences repeatedly unsettled him, he allowed himself to be changed.

Why was Forster able to escape prejudices that informed more famous thinkers? Wulf offers possibilities. His travels began early: At age 10, he accompanied his father across Russia and saw German settlers under corrupt tsarist rule along the Volga. That early sight of the gulf between a ruler’s promises and his subjects’ misery may have left him with a durable distrust of political power. His scant formal schooling may have spared him from intellectual conformity. He belonged to no nation and grew up with a domineering father. Perhaps that sharpened his sympathy for outsiders and the oppressed. Although such explanations are plausible, they describe a collection of influences rather than present a fully drawn portrait of character formation.

The weakness is easy to miss, however, because Wulf propels the book’s remaining three parts with the same headlong energy as in her account of Cook’s voyage. Forster’s Voyage made his name across Europe and honors followed—a fellowship with the Royal Society in London in 1777, a chair in natural history in Kassel back in Germany, and another at the university in Vilnius on the far edge of the Polish-Lithuanian world. But the man who had crossed the Pacific chafed in lecture halls. He moved from post to post until, in 1788, he came to rest as a librarian in the German town of Mainz. Then the French Revolution arrived at his door.

When French troops took Mainz in 1792, Forster gave himself to it entirely, becoming the vice president of the provisional French government. In that role, he helped found the Republic of Mainz, the first democratic state on German soil. Energized by the events, he traveled as a delegate to Paris—and deeper into the Revolution.

In the political upheaval, the German saw a new world in which no king stood above the law and inherited privilege gave way to universal freedom. Even as the Revolution turned on its own and thousands were sent to the guillotine once reserved for aristocrats, Forster’s faith in the cause did not waver. Wulf presents his loyalty during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror as the tragic excess of an otherwise noble constancy. Protagonist and biographer both avert their eyes from the possibility that steadfastness may have been complicity by another name.

Ultimately, Wulf misses a chance to probe Forster’s character more deeply. The seeming contradiction between his reverence for human life and readiness to condone killing in the name of liberty makes him complex and compelling. Her biography would have been stronger had it examined the fracture more deeply.

After Forster died in Paris in January 1794, not yet 40, his reputation faded in the English-speaking world. The Traveler makes a case that the omission has impoverished our picture of the Enlightenment. Forster understood that travel could be conquest but also correction: a way of discovering that the real world exceeds the theories about it. Although Wulf’s portrait occasionally veers into too much veneration, she’s recovered a figure whose main conviction speaks to the present, seeing difference not as a limit of our common humanity but evidence of its breadth.

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.

A writer and editor, David Hapgood was the author of seven books about a remarkable range of topics, from Africa from Independence to Tomorrow to The Murder of Napoleon. He also wrote the definitive biography of ICWA’s founder: Charles R. Crane: The Man Who Bet on People. David served as the editor of Washington Monthly and Focus, the magazine of the American Geographical Society. He was an evaluator for the Peace Corps of its programs in West Africa, India and Costa Rica. His father, the writer and editor Norman Hapgood, was a close associate of Institute of Current World Affairs founder Charles Crane and an early institute adviser.

David was a fellow in West Africa from 1961 to 1963, chronicling events in newly independent Senegal such as early problems with governance and the emergence of labor unions. In the country David knew as Portuguese Guinea, which later became Guinea-Bissau, he witnessed the last stages of colonial power. In this 1962 dispatch, he joins Portuguese colonists in musing about the legacy they will leave this part of the continent. However, independence didn’t take place for another decade.

Portuguese Guinea (March 1962) — “If only they would give us a little more time,” a Portuguese official said wistfully of the rising tide of nationalism in his nation’s African colonies. The Portuguese have been in Portuguese Guinea for five centuries, which is quite a while, but now time is running out.

What sort of heritage will the Portuguese leave here? This is the essential background information about Portuguese Guinea: area, 13,944 square miles; population, about 550,000. The people are divided into 17 tribes, none of them constituting anywhere near a majority; 40 percent are Moslem. The country is ruled by 10,000 Portuguese and Cape Verdians. Now they are in an ambiguous position: they are instruments of Portuguese rule, but some of them have been touched by African nationalism. The land is in African hands; there are virtually no European settlers. The economy is almost entirely agricultural; the country is self-sufficient in food; peanuts are the major export.

Guinea is now under what amounts to military rule.

But everyone I talked to who was not committed to [Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira] Salazar—Africans, missionaries and other foreign residents—agreed that there has been a great spread of nationalist feeling, a sudden awareness of the world outside in the past decade.

Nationalism has spread from the two adjoining countries, Senegal and ex-French Guinea, that became independent in recent years. Each country shelters one or more Portuguese Guinean and Cape Verdian nationalist organization, evanescent groups that are constantly forming new “fronts” for unity. Both the Dakar and the Conakry radios beam daily radio programs to Portuguese Guinea. Thanks to the cheap transistor, there has been a great increase in the number of radios in the bush.

The Cold War, of course, is in the background. The resistance leader Amílcar Cabral’s group in Conakry is said in Dakar and in Bissau to be getting Russian money. Last fall the United States Embassy in Dakar achieved what it considered a coup. It rescued a young Guinean named Gil Fernandes from the possible clutches of Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow. Fernandes had been offered a full scholarship to Lumumba U.; the embassy produced a counter-offer from an American university that Fernandes chose. Then the embassy quickly got him on a plane before his fellow students at the University of Dakar could talk him out of his decision.

In politics, the saving grace of the Salazar police at least in Guinea is its inefficiency. Everyone talked about the secret police—but they talked. One man I went to see, having been told he was not entirely sympathetic to the regime, said with rare sharpness after I had introduced myself: “What I want to know is who sent you to this building and more particularly who sent you to my office?” He excused himself and phoned a government official and said: “There’s an American here asking questions. What should I tell him?” Yet after a while this man talked freely: It was he who told me about his phone call.

At first the Portuguese must quote the official line, though I did not hear its most extreme form more than once. In that case a young civilian told me: “We are Portuguese. We will stay here until we are all dead. If we had had an airbase between Lisbon and India, we would not have lost Goa.” Of course, this is pure opera. The Portuguese did not fight to the last man in Goa, and there is no reason to think they will here either. Most administrators I talked to dropped sooner or later a remark that showed they did not take seriously Salazar’s view that this corner of Africa must remain forever Portugal.

I strolled around both downtown Bissau and the African quarter; nobody gave me more than a glance, and nothing seemed to be happening. Meanwhile, Governor Peixoto Correia went on performing his extraordinary evening rite. From nine to 11 or midnight, he strolled alone in front of his palace, talking with anyone who approached him. No guards were visible when I went up to him, and in his resplendent white uniform the governor made an excellent target.

There is of course a world of difference between nationalist opinions and active rebellion. In the British and French colonies in West Africa, independence was granted rather than won. The colonial power simply left when nationalism became a nuisance. So far, the Portuguese have shown that they are willing to use their military strength to stay in Guinea, and it seems unlikely that any armed rebellion can succeed in this tiny country. Everyone in Bissau seemed to be waiting. “We are waiting,” an African said, “for independence to drop like a ripe fruit from a tree.” Salazar will not rule forever and, if Portuguese attitudes in Bissau are any criterion, it seems fair to guess that independence will come rapidly after the dictator is off the scene.

Reviewed in this article:

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.