I well remember my personal confirmation the country had fundamentally changed. I was the NPR correspondent in Moscow, returning to Russia from Washington with my family. After disembarking our plane, we’d finally navigated the long, malleable queues to reach Sheremetyevo Airport’s border control, a miserable experience that had remained virtually unchanged since the days of communism 18 years earlier. After my wife and infant son had been cleared through one of the booths ahead of me, I stepped up.

A young female officer in uniform studied my passport, sternly considered my face, consulted her ancient computer, repeated her deliberations—all par for the course, the usual welcome back to the former USSR. Then, without a word, she pushed a button on her desk and two hulking goons materialized, one of them barking that my entry to the country had been barred and I would return to Washington on the next plane, no explanation necessary.

It was the fall of 2007, a little more than a month ahead of parliamentary elections. Although President Vladimir Putin had been dismantling the country’s democratic institutions in his methodical drive to consolidate power since taking office eight years earlier, the atmosphere felt especially tense.

His two-term limit was fast expiring, with a presidential election looming the following spring. Thousands of riot police and soldiers were cracking down on even the tiniest protest that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Earlier in the year, Putin had shocked Western countries at the Munich Security Conference by rejecting what he called the US-dominated “unipolar” world in angry rhetoric that laid bare his appetite for confrontation.

Foreign election observers and journalists were being barred from Russia ahead of the elections and now it was my turn. As my frantic calls to the US Embassy and NPR headquarters steadily drained my phone battery, I tried to work out which of my pieces could have landed me on the persona non grata list, but it was a mug’s game—many would have qualified.

It was my good luck that the US ambassador at the time was Bill Burns, the future CIA director whose measure of Putin’s Russia was as incisive as his diplomatic skills were prodigious. After four hours, I was allowed into the country just before the doors on the return flight to Washington were shut. Russia wasn’t yet fully closed.

Still, the elections in 2007 were the first to be fully, incontrovertibly fixed, with some regions reporting an incredible 90-plus percent of voter turnout and a vast majority of ballots cast for the ruling United Russia Party.

It came as no great surprise. Moscow pundits had expected the opposition’s rout (no independent parties had been allowed to qualify for seats even in the previous elections of 2003). I and many other journalists had been reporting during the campaign about tenacious opposition candidates being harassed, arrested and assaulted. Nevertheless, the results delivered a tremendous shock in the capital.

Until the worst expectations had actually become reality, hope had remained, however fanciful, that the elections would matter to some degree, never mind the heaps of denial about the myriad signs indicating otherwise. Now there was no denying, and in gloomy gatherings of the capital’s liberal intelligentsia, the feeling reigned that it was too late to do anything about it. A veteran pollster and leading commentator named Georgy Satarov announced that there was “no more public opinion in Russia!”

Public opinion still existed, of course. United Russia would have almost certainly dominated in a free and fair vote, thanks to Putin’s popularity. But Satarov’s anger was only partly directed at the electorate; what he really meant was that his job was now superfluous because public opinion no longer mattered to the authorities. Any last remnants of democracy had been snuffed out, Putin’s administrative control was paramount.

Whether or not the president was counting on it, that kind of hopelessness was a crucial factor in his success. He exploited the sense of inevitability to the fullest, relying on his Mafia don’s swagger, crude self-assuredness and blatantly false black-is-white rhetoric carefully calculated to help crush any meaningful public discussion, let alone debate, not to mention dissent.

Putin never looked back. The following year, Russia invaded neighboring Georgia, irrevocably breaking with the West, which had spent a decade and a half trying to integrate Moscow into its multinational organizations, however ham-fistedly.

No one back then could have predicted Putin’s destruction of Ukraine, partly aimed at entrenching his ever-more repressive neo-Stalinist regime at home. But it reflects the logic of dictatorial regimes—they must inexorably ratchet up repression in order to enforce growing impunity for their mounting crimes, and increase confrontation with perceived enemies at home and abroad to justify their illegitimate rule.

My experience in Russia feels like a cautionary tale given the interference already taking place ahead of pivotal elections in leading Western countries. If it’s a prelude to a new era of authoritarianism, it will be important to continue doing everything reasonably possible to resist the demise of liberal democracy and not let demoralization become another tool of tyranny.

Gregory Feifer is executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington. A former NPR Moscow bureau chief and author of Russians: The People Behind the Power, he is writing a book about the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov.

Reviewed in this article:

Little Blue Dot: How the Global Positioning System Shaped the Modern World
Bloomsbury, June 2026
by Katherine Dunn

On a clear day in 2019, an A320 Airbus plane was making a final approach to Larnaca airport in Cyprus when its cockpit warned that the ground was dangerously close. The warning was wrong. The Global Positioning System (GPS) data feeding the aircraft placed it far lower than it really was. But the pilot didn’t know.

Taking the plane up to 8,000 feet, he undertook another landing attempt. The second approach progressed without incident—luck held. But the problem of faulty GPS data has since spread. Some 1,500 flights a day experience GPS interference, a 2024 aviation industry report estimated. Most incidents aren’t the result of direct attacks on individual planes but collateral effects of military electronic warfare near conflict zones such as Ukraine and the Eastern Mediterranean.

That is the unsettling reality Katherine Dunn describes in her new book Little Blue Dot, in which the London-based journalist examines GPS, the indispensable but chronically overlooked technology. Air traffic, power grids, stock exchanges, traffic lights, card payments: All depend on GPS signals sent down by satellites from 12,500 miles overhead.

“We have come to rely almost blindly on a tool so useful that we now treat it like a free utility, one cheaper and more available than water,” she writes. Her book tells a riveting story in three acts: how GPS was developed, how it conquered the world and how it now may be becoming a liability. The final part, “Distort,” is where this important book earns its keep.

For most of us, GPS primarily means the little blue dot on a phone screen, pulsing at the center of a map. But the satellites on which the system relies aren’t actually sending locations. Each orbiting satellite carries atomic clocks, and because a receiver—your smartphone, for example—has to work out the exact time in order to work out the place, the system’s defining measurement is timing rather than mapping.

In 2000, GPS time became accurate to within 40 nanoseconds, or 40 billionths of a second. That ability has turned GPS into a metronome of modern life. So much so that the US Department of Homeland Security’s American National Risk Estimate declared the country’s critical infrastructure “increasingly at risk from a growing dependence” on the technology.

Dunn looks beyond America’s GPS to the wider family of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), the umbrella term for different countries’ satellite-based “blue dot” services. She has a practical reason: GPS isn’t as dominant as it used to be and “investment in the system is falling behind its major rivals,” the author writes.

The rivals include Europe’s Galileo and China’s BeiDou. The latter’s capability “should be considered an element of China’s ‘soft power and an element of great power competition,’” Dunn quotes from the US government’s GPS Advisory Board.

She introduces readers to different ways of attacking GPS signals, including “jamming” and “spoofing.” Jamming denies, spoofing deceives. More specifically, jamming prevents a receiver—say, a power grid—from receiving necessary information from a satellite. Spoofing provides information that appears genuine but is actually false.

Russia appears to have been the origin of the most intense jamming and spoofing campaigns to date. Some experts believe both Moscow and Beijing may even be using satellites to jam and spoof rival signals from above.

Dunn documents incidents around the globe in which GPS signals have been either jammed or spoofed, like the A320 incident in Cyprus. Because civilian signals are unencrypted, anyone with sufficient know-how–state and non-state actors alike–can counterfeit them in a spoofing attack. All a motivated person needs is a laptop and “$50 of equipment,” a Stanford researcher tells Dunn.

Jamming can be even cheaper. In 2009, drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike began experiencing mysterious GPS disruptions. It took the authorities two years to find the cause: The culprit turned out to be a driver who kept a small jammer in his work vehicle so his employer couldn’t track his location. He had unintentionally interfered with the navigational system of everyone driving nearby.

A real attack could be far more dire. Brief jamming is usually manageable because backup clocks take over. But after only 30 or 40 minutes without satellite timing, telecommunications stations would begin shutting down services, starting with the fastest 5G connections.

The real danger, Dunn says, is jamming that can last for days, or subtle spoofing that goes unnoticed by humans and machines so that backup systems never switch on. No one is sure how long networks and grids would hold under such attacks.

Most of us tend to imagine that the technology is able to compensate for human fallibility. But Dunn shows that sophisticated systems have their own fallibilities—and we forget to protect ourselves against them all too easily.

The risk of malfunction is greater today because safety nets have been quietly removed. Before GPS, ships and planes relied on a patchwork of alternatives for navigation, including star-sighting with a sextant and the radio-navigation system LORAN. When cheap GPS receivers were able to take over their functions, maintaining the older methods as backups seemed outdated and costly.

Experts have urged reviving the old alternatives but as Dunn shows, with the cost high, public awareness low and responsibility scattered across various agencies, little has happened.

Dunn discusses ways to safeguard critical infrastructure. They include a combination of land-based clocks and fiber-optic cables that would transfer time readings with the same precision as GPS. But none of the measures provides a universally feasible substitute. The author suggests redundancy as another solution: several imperfect systems overseen by people who would know what to do if one of the systems were to go wrong.

Dunn’s book has notable gaps. Attending overwhelmingly to Russian electronic warfare, it provides only thin coverage of other threats, including China’s. Risks associated with space weather interference get only a passing mention, and there is no sustained discussion of anti-satellite weapons and attacks on satellite ground control.

Alternatives such as eLoran, a long-range radio system using land-based towers, get only a brief survey. Signal authentication is barely examined, although it offers a direct defense against spoofing because it lets a receiver verify that a signal comes from a trusted source.

Even so, this is an important book. It leaves readers with an unnerving question that lingers long after the last page: What happens when the little blue dot stops telling the truth?

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.

In 1953, the US Atomic Energy Commission opened an inquiry against the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, accusing him of being a Communist sympathizer and probably an agent of the Soviet Union.

One of the allegations laid out against the father of the bomb in a December 23, 1953, commission letter was that he had “attended a house-warming party at the home of Kenneth and Ruth May on September 20, 1941, for which there was an admission charge for the benefit of The People’s World,” the pro-Communist newspaper.

Kenneth May was a gifted mathematician who had been a teaching assistant at the University of California, Berkeley while finishing work on his doctorate, until he was fired in October 1940 because of his ties to the local branch of the Communist Party.

He was also in the orbit of the New York-based Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA), which tried in the late 1930s to arrange a long-term fellowship to study centralized economic planning in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Instead, he was pulverized between the millstones of mounting geopolitical tension, the US Red Scare and a bitter personal conflict with his father, Samuel May, a prominent Berkeley political scientist, that made national headlines.

Although Kenneth May’s time in the Soviet Union was cut short, his relationship with the institute’s director, Walter Rogers, helped him navigate a period of American history in which, like today, civil liberties were being squeezed by a nativist movement that saw spreading fear as a path to political dominance.

While he was awaiting permission to go to Moscow, the institute funded May to study in London, where his research led him away from the Soviet economy and back to math. He would go on to become a celebrated mathematician, best known for his work establishing the study of mathematics history and for devising May’s Theorem.

‘A time of crisis and tension’

Rogers, ICWA’s founding executive director and a champion of press freedom, first spotted the promising young Berkeley math student in 1936. Letters of recommendation characterized May as “one of the ablest young men in the country,” “very much alive to political and social questions” and “an exceptional young man.” May was also concerned about the inequalities of capitalism. Many English people, he noted in December 1937 from London, “avoided indigestion by simply not having the money to spend on Christmas dinner.”

Then as now, ICWA sent promising young fellows abroad for research, writing and deep cultural immersion with the aim of producing leading experts on global societies. Fascist and communist dictatorships across the continent were offering alternatives to the crisis-ridden capitalist economies mired in the Great Depression, and Rogers and May discussed an ambitious four-year fellowship in the Soviet Union to examine the centralized economy that had emerged in the 20 years since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

May was not entirely unaware of Stalin’s crimes, noting about a lecture at Berkeley he attended in August 1937 that the speaker described the Soviet Union as “a largely disorganized country for the time being” as a “result of the recent executions.” He was almost certainly referring to the results of show trials of top Communist Party leaders and not the imprisonment and execution of millions of Soviet citizens. Of the forced starvation in large swaths of the USSR, especially Ukraine, much of it during the collectivization of agriculture, little was reported by the Western press; what information did get through was often treated with skepticism by left-leaning intellectuals.

The institute’s interest in the Soviet Union had grown out of its founder Charles Crane’s extensive involvement with pre-Revolutionary Russia. The diplomat and philanthropist was a sponsor of leading liberal figures including the historian Pavel Miliukov, who became foreign minister in the provisional government overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Crane had earlier established the first academic Russian area studies in the United States at the University of Chicago, sponsoring its first scholar Samuel Harper, a longtime institute associate.

Harper had helped ICWA send fellows to the Soviet Union since shortly after the institute’s founding in 1925, including a young political scientist named Bruce Hopper, who would later become a Harvard professor. Shortly after, a Harvard Law School graduate named John Hazard spent six years in the USSR as an ICWA fellow in the 1930s studying Soviet law at Moscow State University. He would go on to become one of the leading Western experts on the subject and help found Columbia University’s preeminent Russian Institute, later the Harriman Institute.

But by the late 1930s, Rogers was unable to secure permission for May to live in Stalin’s USSR. His diplomatic contacts advised that all requests had to go through the Soviet Interior Ministry, where suspicions about foreigners ran especially high.

May was able to spend a few weeks in Leningrad and Moscow in October and November 1937—the height of the Great Terror—capped by attending the celebration of the 20^th anniversary of the Revolution on Red Square. In his letters, he waxed enthusiastic about the energy of the Soviets, describing “a tremendous mass of people struggling fiercely but without haste to improve their standard of living.”

“Everywhere they seem to be tearing down the old or building the new,” he wrote from Moscow. But he was soon back in London, writing to Rogers that “all foreign students had left [the Soviet Union] or had little hope of staying long.”

Aside from a brief trip to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov in August 1939, days before the signing of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it was May’s only direct experience in the USSR.

‘Outside the range of the institute’s interests’

May continued his studies in London, attending lectures at the London School of Economics and elsewhere. But later that spring, he announced to Rogers his plans to finish his PhD in mathematics by studying in Paris. He also wrote that he intended to marry, and expressed hope ICWA would continue funding his research.

But in August, Rogers asked May to submit his resignation. “You have placed yourself outside the range of the Institute’s interests,” he wrote. He did not elaborate.

May concluded, almost certainly incorrectly, that his marriage had prompted his dismissal. Rogers had written that his decision came after a “lengthy conversation” with May’s father, who, he later wrote, didn’t approve of his son’s union with “an American school teacher eight years his senior.”

Writing to the US ambassador in Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, however, Rogers blamed May’s intellectual attention wandering from the fellowship’s aims.

Despite the formal break, May continued corresponding with Rogers, who maintained his interest in him. The former fellow wrote a detailed report about his visit to Kharkov that autumn, after which he returned to Berkeley.

It was then that May began his activism with the Communist Party, prompting his father to publicly disown his “Communist son” in September 1940. In response, Kenneth May said his experience in Europe “convinced me that the Communist Party is the greatest force for good in the world and that only through Socialism can the people of the United States solve the problem of unemployment, poverty, oppression and war.”

Not everyone disapproved. ICWA Trustee Victor Clarke, economic adviser to the Library of Congress at the time, expressed admiration for May’s “independence and courage.”

“It at least separates him from the political herd of emasculate rabbits that constitutes so much of our electorate,” he said.

The scandal made a splash nationally, with editorials calling for May’s dismissal from his teaching post and one asking, “How many other university and State college instructors have similar records? What are we going to do about it?”

Berkeley fired May in October 1940.

‘I hope to be in the first wave’

A week after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, and the US entry into World War II, May asked Rogers for help finding “a place where I can be most effective in the war effort.”

Rogers wrote Hazard, the USSR fellow, who went on to help negotiate the Lend-Lease Administration’s agreement with the Soviet Union. If he could “without the slightest embarrassment” ask his superiors if they had anything to offer May, would he forward a memo on May’s behalf?

In his note, Rogers characterized May’s father as “the scheming, wire-pulling type of academic official” who was upset by his son’s marriage to “the daughter of a fellow professor with whom Sam May had a feud.”

“The generally held opinion,” Rogers concluded, “is that the father made an ass of himself” because of the perceived threat to “his own ambitions.”

May was finally accepted into the US Army alpine troops only in January 1943. “[I] hope to be in the first wave of our combat team when we land on some now unknown beach,” he wrote Rogers in June.

Instead, he was assigned menial work in his company’s map room until a visiting general spotted his organizational work and promoted him, although only to corporal. He was promoted again the same month to communications sergeant.

Nevertheless, May reveled in his wartime experience. “I have got better acquainted with a section of America to which I was entirely a stranger—workers of farm and wood,” the communist champion wrote. “The experience convinces me that for the (near) time we are a great nation.”

He soon took part in the Allied forces’ landings in the Aleutian Islands, an experience that led him to examine frontline Army morale, his writing catching the attention of leading psychiatrists in the War Department and helping prompt his social rehabilitation. He later landed in Italy, where he was reported to have distinguished himself with bravery.

Sam and Kenneth May reconciled in 1944, and Kenneth reestablished his connections at Berkeley at the same time, completing his doctorate in 1946 and going on to become a distinguished mathematician and historian of mathematics.

He secured a position at Charlton College, where ICWA Trustee Laurence Gould was president, teaching there until 1964. In 1952, he published May’s theorem, which proved that majority voting is the only reasonable system possible for choosing between two candidates. And he continued his leftist political activity. In 1966, he signed a public vow of tax resistance over his opposition to the Vietnam War and moved to Canada. He died in Toronto in 1977.

May is best remembered for his work helping to found the International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM). He served as its first chair and oversaw the publication of the first World Directory of Historians of Mathematics in 1972. Two years later, he edited the first volume of the international research journal Historia Mathematica. After his death, the ICHM established the Kenneth O. May Prize for outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics.

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

DAVAO, Philippines — At 5 a.m. during the Kadayawan Festival, I woke to the sound of local drum ensembles marching down central Roxas Avenue, their percussive and rhythmic beats filtering up to my hotel room on the 30^th floor.

The Philippines hosts hundreds of local festivals each year but among them, Kadayawan is unique in that it doesn’t focus on the veneration of a specific Catholic saint or narrative of religious mythology. Instead, the aim of the week-long celebration is to showcase the cultural diversity of the Davao area’s 11 different ethnic Indigenous groups, divided into Lumad (Native) and Moro (Muslim) groups of tribes.

As a first-timer to the city, on the Mindanao region’s mainland, I was visiting for Kadayawan’s closing weekend, during which I watched 32 different drum squads and singers performing in the Pamulak (grand parade), and witnessed tribe members competing in the Dula (traditional Indigenous games) of wooden stilt-racing and spear-throwing. Annually hosted at the end of August, Kadayawan also coincides with the peak season for buying durian—a notoriously odorous, spiky fruit popular throughout Southeast Asia—and mangosteen fruits—small, deep purple globes with bright white flesh inside (they resemble baby eggplants).

In addition to visiting Kadayawan, I flew down to sunny Davao seeking a respite from the apocalyptic flooding throughout the capital Metro Manila resulting from a combination of habagat (the seasonal monsoon that sweeps through the Philippines from June to September) and back-to-back typhoons.

But my trip had another, more subtle purpose: I wanted to learn more from groups working with victims of the war on drugs based in the Davao area, the seat of former President Rodrigo Duterte’s influence and power. Much of my previous reporting was drawn from the experiences of communities in Manila and surrounding provinces, but urban poor communities in Davao City had experienced extrajudicial killings under then-Mayor Duterte for decades before he became president and launched a national drug war.

Between breaks during the Kadayawan festivities, I met furtively with several Davao-based victims’ rights groups. I expected to hear that the sensitive nature of their work requires basic security protocols, and, frankly, common sense caution of the sort I already heard described by Manila-based organizations. What I found instead was something much more sinister: an overwhelming sense that those groups in Davao are working from within the belly of the beast.

Davao is the third-most populous city in the Philippines (1.8 million residents) and the largest on Mindanao, a rugged and mountainous island almost as large as Luzon (where Manila is located). Home to the tallest peak in the Philippines, Mt. Apo, the region is a hub for the Philippines’ burgeoning eco-tourism industry, with whitewater rapids and scenic mountain ranges for paragliders and hikers alike to enjoy throughout its northern provinces of Cagayan de Oro and Bukidnon.

Distinct from the landscape and geography of Luzon, Mindanao’s incomparable natural beauty gives it an air of being the southern “frontier” of the country—a reputation further amplified by its political and social history of military conflict, insurgency and unrest. Among other groups, the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) fought for autonomous rule from the Philippines’ central government for decades, at one point resulting in active sieges of the Mindanaoan cities Zamboanga and Marawi in 2013 and 2017, respectively. A Zamboangan friend who relocated to Manila from the southwestern port city once told me that “I’d love for you to visit but I couldn’t guarantee your safety.” Her mother was once hit by shrapnel from an improvised explosive device detonated in the local airport.

Mindanao is also the site of one of the world’s worst incidents of violence against journalists and press workers, which I described in a previous piece. Known as the 2009 Maguindanao massacre (named for the western province in which it occurred), the politically motivated attack originated from a local clan rivalry over the region’s governorship. As the wife of the challenging gubernatorial candidate traveled in a convoy to file her husband’s certificate of candidacy, groups of armed men allied with the reigning Ampatuan clan ambushed and killed all those traveling in the party—a total of 58 people, 32 of whom were journalists covering the electoral event.

Although the massacre happened 17 years ago, it remains a flashpoint in the decades of political violence that have plagued Mindanao. In August, I attended the Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival in Manila for the premiere of “58,” a documentary about the 58^th victim, the photojournalist Reynaldo Momay. His family reported him missing after the ambush but his body was never found after the authorities’ excavations of the victims’ burial site. The lack of physical evidence prompted a Manila court to dismiss Momay as a complainant of the criminal case against the Ampatuan clan, and the film explores the ensuing impact on his family members and their own independent search for his remains. Walking out of the film with a heavy heart, I ruminated over the parallel themes of impunity in Momay’s case and those of victims killed in the more recent drug war.

Despite that history, there’s reason to hope for a more peaceful future in Mindanao and constructive outcomes from ongoing negotiations with MILF and other groups. The Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, for one—made up of Maguindanao and three other provinces (including the formerly besieged city of Marawi)—held its first parliamentary elections in September 2026, with a voter turnout of approximately 2 million (84 percent of the electorate). The election was not without security concerns (including reports of voter intimidation and compromised ballots) but for now, it’s a cautious step forward to durable and lasting peace in a region wracked by instability and election-related violence.

While clashes with MILF have largely taken place in Mindanao’s remote provinces, highly urbanized Davao City has primarily weathered civil conflict between the central government and militant communist groups such as the New People’s Army (NPA), going as far back as the 1970s. During the administration of Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. (father of the current president), he imposed martial law under the pretext of suppressing the NPA and its chapters throughout the Philippines, although the proclamation was later used to more broadly suppress political dissent and consolidate Marcos Sr.’s dictatorial control over the country for almost 10 years.

In Davao specifically, the government’s approach to the NPA’s guerilla tactics has included both direct military action and paramilitary operations, the latter involving civilian-formed death squads. Former ICWA fellow Erik Guyot wrote in 1988 about Davao’s history of death squads, covering Alsa Masa, a vigilante group whose name translates to “Uprising of the Masses.” Davao’s municipal government formally designated Alsa Masa as a civilian-volunteer organization, deemed necessary for the fight against communist insurgents.

Guyot interviewed Rodrigo Duterte himself, then-mayor of Davao, calling him “young, friendly, easygoing.” Duterte publicly praised Alsa Masa at the time for improving law and order in Davao by targeting and killing suspected NPA members, saying, “It’s hard to duplicate this success in other places” in the Philippines.

While much has changed since Guyot’s fellowship—including the relative accessibility of an interview with Duterte, now imprisoned in Scheveningen prison in The Hague—there are clear throughlines of his approach to law and order. Duterte’s praise of Davao vigilantes in the 1980s rings similar to his presidential speech inaugurating his drug war in 2016, when he urged the public to “go ahead and kill [drug addicts] yourselves, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.” In the face of the country’s perceived major social ills—either communism or drug use—Duterte’s cure has consistently been violence.

Before he ran for president, Human Rights Watch called him the “death squad mayor,” in reference to his longstanding association with the group that succeeded Alsa Masa in the 1990s: the Davao Death Squad (DDS). Duterte’s well-documented and publicized leadership of DDS as mayor forms a core part of the ongoing International Criminal Court (ICC) case against him. The prosecution argues that Duterte perfected a “Davao model” of extrajudicial killing that later provided the blueprint for the nationwide drug war implemented by the Philippine National Police.

In 1999, the Davao-based Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE) formed as a group of NGOs dedicated to documenting such killings, which had begun to spike with the active operations of DDS under Duterte’s rule, as explained by Rommel*, my main contact in Davao. (*Throughout this piece, I’ve used asterisks to show where I provided pseudonyms for interviewees due to the security risks they face and in order not to compromise their ongoing work with communities targeted by extrajudicial killings.) I initially met him in Manila in 2025 at a University of the Philippines event about the ICC investigation. An active member of the human rights community in Mindanao for decades, Rommel has been involved in legal advocacy through the regional chapter of the national Free Legal Assistance Group and the Mindanao branch of the National Union of People’s Lawyers.

After navigating through crowds of people visiting Davao for Kadayawan, I traveled to meet Rommel in a nondescript room of a secure location. Ahead of time, my physical description was given to the onsite guards and I bypassed the normal protocol of giving my ID card for entry to the building—a level of caution to which I was unused, but Rommel quickly reminded me I wasn’t in proverbial Kansas anymore. “We can’t discuss these topics out in the open,” he said. “You can do that when you’re in Manila, not in Davao.”

Years of documentation work led Rommel to the case of Clarita Alia, a mother whose four children were killed over the course of several years for alleged involvement in petty crimes, all by DDS. “We tried to protect Clarita’s youngest son by sending him out of Davao after his brothers were murdered,” Rommel said. But when the son returned, he was eventually stabbed to death by assailants suspected to be DDS members. The group had previously threatened both Alia and her son; police later claimed the violence was gang-related.

On September 25, Alia testified about her sons’ killings before the Philippine Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which I covered in my last dispatch). Now 72 years old, she continues to receive online threats from supporters of the former president. But her case is outside the ICC’s jurisdiction—which covers only cases that occurred during the period in which the Philippines was a party to the ICC. Her youngest son’s killing took place in 2007, four years before the Philippines joined the court.

DDS had gained notoriety outside Davao by 2007, when Philip Alston, then-UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions found evidence of 500 deaths attributable to the group. Notably, while the ICC prosecution’s witnesses are currently kept confidential, statements made in the ICC’s September case conference heavily imply that Alston will be called to testify about his investigation at the trial’s start in November.

Two years after Alston’s investigation, Human Rights Watch released a 2009 report titled “You Can Die Any Time,” publishing further evidence of hundreds of targeted killings by death squad members in Davao City and surrounding areas such as Digos and General Santos City. The report heavily relied on CASE’s near-decade of documentation, as Human Rights Watch had no Philippines-based researchers at the time, and on an investigation by Tambayan, a children’s rights NGO that focuses on documenting killings of minors in Davao.

In Davao, I also spoke with Isabel*, who described Tambayan as an explicitly feminist organization, given that she works with many adolescent girls who live on the street or are teen mothers who need reproductive health care.

“Many of the girls are the ‘girlfriends’ of gang members, often minors themselves,” Isabel told me. The girls are referred to as buntog, the Bisayan name for a small quail found throughout the Philippines. The pejorative comparison implies that they are flighty or loose, since some are engaged in sex work in order to survive. Many of their partners have died in circumstances that match patterns of extrajudicial killings, while police write off the murders as gang violence—narratives that echo the deaths of Clarita Alia’s four sons.

When Duterte became president in 2016, CASE and Tambayan continued to document extrajudicial killings, although there were noticeably fewer after he left the mayor’s office. At the same time, international groups that first investigated the Davao area killings began to take notice of the nationwide deaths of the drug war.

In 2017, the attorney Jude Sabio filed a complaint with the ICC to address killings committed during the first year of the drug war; by 2020, he had withdrawn and recanted his complaint for contested reasons. But in that first ICC submission, he cited CASE’s reporting, forcing the organization into the national limelight and, significantly, into a position of regularly cooperating with the ICC in an environment increasingly hostile to the court during Duterte’s presidency.

After his arrest and detention in The Hague in 2025, the atmosphere in Davao shifted. “It was like a breath of fresh air for us in Davao,” Rommel said.

But that relief was temporary. The former president’s arrest warrant of March 2025 contained only a brief outline of the criminal charges. But when the ICC prosecution released further detailed information about the extrajudicial killings underlying the charges—in particular, designating that nine incidents were from Davao—municipal and barangay (neighborhood) government entities stepped up their surveillance of victims in the city.

“Some barangays are directly asking families affected by extrajudicial killings, ‘Who are the NGOs regularly assisting you?’” said Francis*, another contact I met in Davao who is involved in the CASE-affiliated organization, Amaya Lay.

The increased surveillance is meant to help identify victims who cooperated with ICC investigators and provided information to support the Davao-specific charges against Duterte, under the suspicion that NGOs are the main facilitators of contact between victims and the court. Isabel says the ongoing scrutiny of interactions between NGOs and families has a chilling effect on their work. In one instance, Tambayan organized a legal aid clinic for families of extrajudicial killings victims. Organizers went house-to-house the previous day, confirming the families’ attendance. The next day, no one showed up at the event.

“They were afraid of being ‘red-tagged,’ through association with us,” Isabel said. “If their neighbors knew they were going to our clinic, everyone would assume they either use or sell drugs, just because Tambayan advocates against extrajudicial killings.”

Isabel believes Tambayan itself had been “red-tagged” as an organization—meaning it was labeled “communist” with no credible evidence as a means to repress its work through heightened surveillance and harassment. Red-tagging has often been used against critics of Duterte’s drug war despite the lack of any necessary correlation between opposing extrajudicial killings or violence in general and belonging to the militant communist NPA.

In Davao, a red tag is especially dangerous given the city’s historically violent response to communist groups. In a 2018 executive order, Duterte also formed the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, which provides budgets for cities and barangays to act locally and investigate alleged “fronts” for the NPA. It’s still in place. Tambayan members reported that the local barangay captain has regularly interrogated them about their funding, seeking alleged financial ties to the NPA.

Thus, the line between NGOs and the communities they serve is blurring, with dangerous implications for those based in Davao, working in a political climate where the interim mayor, Sebastian Duterte, is following in the footsteps of his detained father.

Tambayan advocates for street children, who are often described as pasaway (nuisances, troublemakers). According to a Tambayan member, when children are disappeared or killed by DDS, the public in Davao tends to accept their deaths, assuming they’re criminals anyway. If Tambayan were shuttered under claims of affiliation with the NPA, no doubt there would be little outcry, too; Davaoeños would assume it was a criminal organization anyway.

“In Davao, you can’t trust anyone,” Ana* told me once I had arrived back in Manila. We met at the Cafe Siriusdan, an artsy hole-in-the-wall in the residential area of Mandaluyong. After a week in Davao with Rommel and others, I eyed the cafe patrons next to us with slightly heightened suspicion; they were high school students, wearing uniforms and loudly scrolling TikTok. Feeling silly, I resolved to let my guard down a bit.

Ana wears a lot of hats, but she primarily represents the national Network Against Killings (NAK), although like Rommel, she’s been documenting extrajudicial killings in Davao since Duterte was mayor—long enough to watch him become president and his national fanbase coalesce into Diehard Duterte Supporters. The group uses the same abbreviation as the death squad.

“I get a chill when I hear common people describe themselves as DDS,” Ana told me. “Before [Duterte was president], you would be afraid to even say those three letters and to invoke the death squad,” she said. “Now, people say it proudly: ‘I’m DDS.’” Ana believes the association has helped sanitize the death squad’s public image from cold-blooded killers to the larger everyman movement that voted Duterte into national office and supported the drug war.

Diehard Duterte Supporters call for Duterte to be brought home from The Hague, while Facebook profiles labeled “DDS” attack and harass public figures advocating for drug war victims, blaming them for Duterte’s detention. Working and traveling between Manila and Davao on behalf of different victims’ groups therefore requires a heightened level of security. “We have to compartmentalize victims,” Ana said. “We don’t let groups from Mindanao and Manila mix even if they have similar interests, as those still living in Mindanao need heightened confidentiality and protection of their anonymity.”

Sometimes NAK is forced to get creative to keep its work discreet. “When we want to have a meeting with a group of victims, we’ll ask, ‘Who among you has the most recent birthday?’ and then book a karaoke room under the pretense we’re celebrating,” Ana said, explaining that, in Davao, omnipresent CCTV is also audio-enabled to pick up sound. Karaoke rooms are sufficiently noisy to obscure their discussions.

Ana’s Davao-based NAK counterpart Gloria* also supports victims of the war on drugs by helping them set up direct video-link meetings with ICC staff. “When the ICC has hearings, we gather the families of the victims and use a codename, calling it instead a ‘movie marathon,’” she told me.

That has the dual purpose of both empowering families to be active participants in the ICC process by sharing their real-time reactions to developments in The Hague and also countering the spread of misinformation about the Duterte trial with actual up-to-date information. “Fake news really affects the mindset of the victims,” Gloria said, an additional burden while the families are already grappling with fears that Duterte’s daughter, Sara, will be elected president in 2028 and retaliate against them. “With the power and resources of the Duterte family, victims are afraid that their identities will be revealed and they’ll be targeted for killings next.”

The fear is not unfounded. Back in 2009, the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights (CHR) launched a public inquiry into the Davao area killings, led by then-commissioner Leila de Lima. Although the commission found evidence of official involvement in the DDS killings by Duterte’s administration, its report was never published. Decades later, during Duterte’s presidency, now-Senator de Lima was jailed on spurious drug charges, which many consider politically motivated as retaliation for her criticism of the war on drugs and legacy of her opposition to the violence in Davao.

“The Dutertes do not forget their enemies,” Ana said. “Sara is as fierce as her father, and much younger. She would follow through on her threats.” The depiction of Sara Duterte as more vicious or retributive than Duterte is oft-repeated in conversations I’ve had with different victims’ groups. At first, it smacked of latent misogyny to me: an uncomfortable reaction to a woman in male-dominated politics who has adopted a masculine image in order to be taken seriously. How could Sara be more vengeful than the former president who, on his own admission, used to ride his motorbike around Davao looking for criminals to kill?

But a notorious 2011 incident holds clues as to why so many in Davao fear her ascent to the presidency. As mayor of Davao, Sara Duterte punched a city sheriff for defying her request that he postpone the scheduled demolition of a building. The confrontation was captured live by news cameras as she hit the cowering man four times while cheers and clapping from the crowd could be heard in the background. The sheriff was hospitalized, and in later interviews, the mayor refused to apologize for her actions. Her father publicly approved.

It’s illustrative of what Ana, Gloria and others have described to me as Davao’s punitive social norms and culture, which have facilitated the widespread embrace by Davaoeños of Duterte’s ruthless model of governance through vigilante justice. That environment—pro-Duterte, pro-punishment, pro-street justice—makes it difficult to call for law enforcement to respect human rights. “I’ve felt very stifled because of the overwhelming support for Duterte’s policies, even among some members of CASE,” Ana told me, disbelief playing out on her face. Those members have since left the coalition but remain part of the larger social fabric of Davao.

“Look at DDS,” she said, “They don’t just kill criminals and street kids, there’s physical evidence that they torture their victims before killing them. But ask them about it, and they have no remorse because they think it’s a righteous thing to do. It’s their ‘job’ to protect Davao.”

Two of the insider witnesses whose accounts form a substantial basis of the ICC prosecution’s evidence of the Davao killings—Arturo Lascañas and Edgar Matobato—are former DDS members. Their testimonies describe in great detail numerous incidents of torture, rape and murder by the squad over the years in which the Dutertes ruled Davao. Lascañas’s affidavit, informed by his high position within DDS, specifically claims that Duterte and his daughter personally ordered him and other squad members to carry out politically motivated killings. It’s a chilling image: a former president and a potential one, somewhere inside City Hall, greenlighting hundreds of murders.

On my final day in Davao, I perused a local market to buy some pasalubong (souvenirs) for friends back in Manila, trying to find a portable snack that tasted like durian without the oppressive smell. As I ambled around the market’s open-air lanes, I soon realized I was being followed by a man in a lime-green shirt—the exact color sported by self-identified Diehard Duterte Supporters, the equivalent of a firetruck-red MAGA hat.

For a tail, he was quite ineffective and ill-prepared to avoid notice. When I turned around to confrontationally look into his eyes, the man sheepishly scratched his head, fumbled around with his bag and tried to scurry backward through the narrow market lane. My reaction was automatic, honed from years of traveling by myself, and I returned to the market’s entrance where a kindly security guard stood watch over the comings and goings of customers and pedestrians of the nearby street. I waited next to him, observing the nearby exit, as my shadow left the market and made his way onto the busy sidewalk. He loitered a bit, looking back over his shoulder periodically to see that I was still staring at him, unsmiling, my arms crossed. Eventually, he weaved through the traffic and turned into a nearby alleyway, finally out of my sight.

I stood there silently for a few minutes more, expecting to see his bright shirt pop back around the corner at any moment but it never did. Unsettled and empty-handed, I took the long way home.

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.

The soil in Malaysia is full of high concentrations of iron oxide. Leached by tropical rain, the earth is a brilliant red. It made a striking contrast with the white shroud around Raja Haji Abdul Aziz as his body was lowered into a grave and placed on its side, facing Mecca last month. Workers from the local mosque carefully placed rocks around the body, then a piece of plywood, to separate it from the backfill. A backhoe moved in, filling the grave, mounding the soil on top.

Aside from a few sniffles, there was no outward emotion from the onlookers, standard practice at a Malay funeral. I was watching on Facebook Messenger from my home in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. My wife Shelley and I had sent a fruit basket and a card with ritual language used in times of mourning.

In the Malay language, animals die but people meninggal dunia—they “leave the earth.” Raja Aziz, known as Wan, was the final member of his family to leave the earth. Wan’s family was also my host family when I lived in Malaysia in the early 1970s. He was 74, preceded by his parents Raja Ibrahim and Raja Hawa, his elder sister, Raja Zahara, known to the family as Kak Hanim, his elder brother Raja Abdul Rahman, known to the family as Haris, and his younger brother Raja Mohamed, known to the family as Mohai and Azahar, a year older than I.

That leaves me. I am the last of us.

Raja Ibrahim and Raja Hawa invited me to live with them for a year in 1973 under the auspices of AFS Intercultural Programs, the international high school student exchange program, an experience that upended my parochial Southern Californian life. AFS is the oldest high school exchange program in the world, founded by volunteer ambulance drivers during World War I as the American Field Service.

In World War II, the service’s ambulances carried more than 700,000 wounded. They also helped evacuate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In the war’s aftermath, starting in 1946, the organization transitioned to student exchanges from France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway and Syria to the United States. In 1950, the Americans Abroad program began sending US students to Europe and in 1970, AFS became multinational with country-to-country exchanges that did not include America. In every country, families volunteer to host students, for which they receive no remuneration.

The original ambulance drivers hoped we could avoid another world war if teenagers—those who would do most of the fighting and dying—got to know one another face to face, personally, intimately. Friends are less likely to kill one another. The goal was to create a more peaceful and just world by promoting cross-cultural exchange. As the Trump Administration defunds programs, deports migrants and makes it harder for foreigners to enter the United States, that world is now in danger.

My host family lived in a small house in a small village called Kampung Pasir in Johor, a state in the south of the Malay Peninsula. My parents and siblings were called Raja in recognition of their connection to Johor’s ruling family, one of many honorifics Malays use to establish rank, status, experience and birth order.

Their home at Number 56 Mangosteen Lane was 5 miles outside Johor Bahru, the regional capital and Malaysia’s second-largest city, on the border with Singapore. The village was squeezed between a river noted for its crocodiles, a factory, the Singapore-Kuala Lumpur trunk road and a mangrove swamp. Our home, with overlapping plank walls and a corrugated iron roof, was raised on stilts for protection from floods and wild animals. We had a single outlet to supply the family electrical needs: lights, fan, television. We had a single indoor tap for water and an outhouse in the back. Some other families, less fortunate, ran their homes on car batteries and hoses strung like telephone wires from the public tap. Everyone in the village was Malay and Muslim.

On the other side of the trunk road was a Chinese town, Tampoi, which we visited to mail letters, buy food and see movies. Nearby was a rubber plantation staffed by Tamil laborers. School was English College, five miles away, where I made Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian friends, relationships that have endured to this day. I wore a school badge, white shirt, white pants, white socks and white shoes that I whitened weekly with whitener.

EC was a tropical Eton with a syllabus not much different from the days of British rule. Exams were set and graded in London. English, spoken with Received Pronunciation, was the language of instruction. In history class, Mr. Mohan Singh Penu taught us about Lord William Bentinck (first governor-general of India), Lord Dalhousie (second governor-general of India), the first Anglo-Afghan War, the Second-Anglo Afghan War, the Third Anglo-Afghan War and so on. Mr. Bakshi taught us “King Lear” and Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell.” Teachers would open a textbook to the appropriate page and copy a passage word for word onto the blackboard. We would then copy the copy into our copybooks. Successful students would regurgitate the text on the exam. That was learning.

In time, after navigating a crushing bout of homesickness, I learned to speak Malay and adapted to the rhythms and rituals of village life: the hot season, the wet season, births, weddings, funerals, prayer five times a day, the Prophet’s birthday, the Sultan’s birthday, Independence Day, Hari Raya (Eid). I ran 5 miles a day trying to stay in shape for my senior year of track and field back in the US. At the English College Sports Day, I won the 5,000-meter. At the state finals held at the big stadium in Johor Bahru, I ran my one and only steeple chase, coming in dead last.

Raja Hawa, Raja Mohamed and one of my aunts were practicing bomohs, or shamans, curing everything from possession to adultery to cracked metatarsals to congestive heart failure, giving me a front row seat to their belief—a combination of animism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. That syncretic layer cake was already under assault by Saudi missionaries trying to transform Malaysia into an outpost of ultra-conservative Wahabism. They were successful.

Once a week, I took chloroquine to prevent malaria. I got ringworm, something neither the shamans nor allopathic salves, ointments and creams from the general hospital were able to cure. The Chinese doctors blamed the unhygienic conditions in my Malay village. One physician refused to treat me until I gave him some American coins, including a Kennedy half-dollar, for his collection, the one and only time I resorted to bribery in Malaysia. He told me to boil my clothes. The gentian violet antiseptic dye he recommended turned my underwear pink.

One of five AFSers change families or return home early. I nearly left mine. Our neighbors, Abas and Aminah, a young married couple, had invited me to their home so I could demonstrate how to make apple pie, my go-to example of American culinary art. I arrived at the appointed time with the ingredients and Aminah invited me in. We chatted in the parlor waiting for Abas to return from work. A downpour made motorcycle travel impossible. Instead of waiting for another day, we got to work and made our pies. After several hours, Raja Mohamed arrived at the door and said I needed to get home immediately. I proudly brought home my pie and discovered Raja Ibrahim puffing furiously on his pipe. The whole village was talking about the hours the foreigner had spent alone with the married woman. Haram. Forbidden. I had fulfilled their darkest fantasies about Western depravity. It took 30 days of Ramadan fasting to demonstrate my commitment to village life and reestablish mutual trust.

After my AFS year, I made Malaysia the centerpiece of my identity. In college at UC Berkeley, every artwork and term paper was somehow connected to that experience. My roommate Halim was Malay. Later, he was my landlord and later still, best man at my wedding. We had many adventures together.

In my junior year, I returned to Malaysia to do field work for my senior thesis. I was best man at my brother Raja Mohamed’s wedding, the pengapit, sleeping on the floor outside the bridal chamber to ensure the groom did not run home to mama. After art school, I returned to Malaysia again on an Institute of Current World Affairs fellowship to study intercultural visual communication, and again with my own family on a Fulbright to teach. I shuttled back and forth between the United States and Malaysia over the ensuing decades, an unofficial ambassador of optimism and hope and connection. I had kids. They had kids. My children got to know their children and their grandchildren, a web of intercultural communication that transcended borders.

Today, Kampung Pasir is nothing like the village I lived in 50 years ago. It’s an urban barrio, swallowed up by Johor Bahru’s urban expansion. The palm trees are gone. The crocodiles are gone. The sandy lanes are asphalt. The kampung houses once cooled by floor-to-ceiling windows and riparian breezes have been replaced by cinderblock homes with air conditioners. The trunk road has been replaced by a freeway cloverleaf. The factory has been replaced by a multistory mall. None of my host family lives there anymore. But the connections remained.

I became intensely curious about the world, traveling widely for study, work and pleasure. Whenever possible, I made a point of connecting with other families: in Tehran, Beirut, Marrakesh, Shanghai, Tokyo. The AFS gamble had paid off. There are half-a-million AFS returnees like me. Adding in host families and other volunteers, the organization is over a million strong.

There’s only so much good will a single organization can create, however. After 9/11, my friends from Johor Bahru, Mark and Sheila, visited me on San Juan Island. Tired of anti-Indian discrimination in Malaysia, they had decided to emigrate. A visit here changed their minds. They moved their family to Perth. Halim (my Berkeley roommate) and his wife Saleha had second thoughts about sending their four children to the United States for university. The kids studied in Sydney and Melbourne instead. Their youngest daughter married an Aussie.

As the education scholars Baoyan Cheng and Manca Sustaric of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa wrote in 2022, “globalization has provided accelerating forces for countries and peoples to connect and converge. In recent years, however, there has been a counterforce of deglobalization, characterized by the prioritizing of national protectionist policies and a retreat from global integration… in today’s world that faces increasing ideological polarization and social fragmentation along lines of race, class and citizenship, connecting people on the basis of mutual respect and understanding—and thus providing a common humanity so that mankind can live in peace and solidarity—becomes an especially pressing issue.”

It was probably inevitable that the original utopian peace-love-and-understanding ideals of AFS and competing high school exchange programs would become the object of statecraft. Governments now see high school student exchange as just another tool in the soft power toolbox. The Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX), started in 1983 and jointly funded by the American and German governments, provides scholarships for high school students interested in vocational and professional fields. The US Future Leaders Exchange program (FLEX), begun in 1992, recruits high school students from Eastern Europe and Central Asia to cultivate “a network of young leaders who understand and support US culture and priorities, with a focus on entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership…to become lasting partners for the United States.” The Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange Study program (YES) created in the wake of 9/11 provides study abroad scholarships to high school students in “countries of strategic importance” with significant Muslim populations to create “a network of young leaders who support US principles.” YES, CBYX and FLEX are all administered by AFS in coordination with the State Department: can’t-we-all-just-get-along meets realpolitik.

Unfortunately for the United States and the world in fiscal year 2025, YES, CBYX and FLEX were three of 22 congressionally mandated cultural-exchange programs to be defunded by the Trump Administration. “Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, every policy we pursue must be justified by the answer to one of three questions,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Or does it make America more prosperous?”

The cuts amounted to $100 million dollars, affecting some 10,000 students. That’s 10,000 students who would not be sharing their cultures with their host families, 10,000 students who would not bring memories of American generosity back to their home countries, 10,000 students whose foreign exchange experience would not shape their futures. In addition to YES, CBYX and FLEX, a partial list of affected programs included the Community College Administrator Program, Community Engagement Exchange, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, English Access Scholarship Program, English Language Fellow Program, Global Undergraduate Exchange Program, IDEAS program, International Center for Middle Eastern-Western Dialogue, Leaders Lead-On Demand, Mandela Fellowship for Young African Leaders, Mike Mansfield Fellowship Program, National Clearinghouse for Disability and Exchange, Professional Fellows Program, Survey of International Exchange Activity in the United States, TechWomen, The J. Christopher Stevens Virtual Exchange Initiative, US Congress-Korea National Assembly Exchange Program, US-South Pacific Exchange Program, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Academic Fellowship and Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Professional Fellowship.

After the cuts were announced, the Alliance for International Exchange organized a letter-writing campaign. Americans sent 20,000 messages to legislators demanding the reductions be rescinded. Congress restored the funding. But in fiscal year 2027, the White House has again proposed a 68 percent cut in cultural exchange programs and a 93 percent cut in the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. If enacted, the Fulbright exchange program would lose 80 percent of its budget.

For those ambulance drivers evacuating the survivors of Bergen-Belsen, the lessons of World War II were clear: to break down stereotypes, counteract hate, stop violence and end war, we need more connection, more communication, more sharing. The proposed cuts “will isolate the US in the long term” at “a time in our history when cultural understanding is needed the most,” a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was quoted as saying by The Pie, a digital publication about international education.

For the moment at least, we are going to have to live with less exchange—more alone, more ignorant, looking through a glass darkly, admiring our reflection in a fortress of mirrors.

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.

A CCTV camera detects someone lingering by a jeweler’s storefront. It’s connected to a surveillance system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze posture and pacing. Is the person a potential thief, about to smash the window and grab a fistful of rings? Within seconds, the system flags the situation as “high risk” and alerts a nearby police patrol—before any crime is committed.

That’s a world away from the camera technology most of us grew up with, but it’s no longer hypothetical. For decades, CCTV offered a detailed record of what had happened. Its function was archival. That began to change in the 2010s. So how did CCTV learn to anticipate trouble?

Strictly speaking, it never did.

When a teenager named Taki Allen was eating Doritos outside his Baltimore high school waiting for a ride after football practice last October, police swarmed in with guns drawn, ordering him to the ground. Surveillance software had flagged his behavior; it had appeared the Black teen was holding a gun instead of a snack.

Now as the world debates the existential risks of AI, its widespread adoption is also raising questions about its threat to liberty in a time of mounting authoritarianism. A camera that merely keeps a record changes nothing about how you walk down a street. A camera that decides—through mere malfunction or deliberate misuse—whether your walk is normal can change everything.

Both the promise and the failure of AI-enabled CCTV originate from the same design choice.

Video anomaly detection, as this field of machine learning is called, doesn’t rely on human-written rules. Instead, the AI models are shown vast amounts of training footage. That’s how a model learns what is normal in a specific location—and can identify what’s unusual.

Point such a surveillance system long enough at a train platform and it establishes patterns. A crowd surging toward the edge at 7:35 a.m. is the morning commute. A single person drifting toward that same edge at noon, when mainly freight trains pass through, is an anomaly—and a potential reason to alert the station’s authorities.

The surveillance system doesn’t know what’s suspicious. It registers only that a configuration of pixels is rare compared to the footage on which it was trained.

It took a century and two lineages for surveillance systems to learn to point to what’s unusual. One begins in Stalin’s USSR around 1927. The inventor Léon Theremin is believed to have wired a camera to a television screen for the Kremlin, reportedly enabling the operator to see people passing through the courtyard at a distance of roughly 100 feet from the camera. But the historical evidence for that project is sparse.

The first system for which historians have plenty of sources came 15 years later. In 1942, the German authorities installed a closed-circuit setup at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. Its purpose wasn’t surveillance but remote observation: It enabled engineers and military staff to watch rocket launches from the safety of a distant bunker. The United States would later use CCTV during some of its nuclear tests.

But the early systems shared a significant limitation: They didn’t record. The picture existed only in the instant it was transmitted. Unless someone was sitting in front of a monitor and paying attention, the camera was of little use.

Videotape solved that. From the 1970s, the spread of video recording made it practical to store CCTV footage for later inspection. The camera became a witness. When the Symbionese Liberation Army robbed Hibernia Bank in San Francisco in 1974, CCTV documented the raid—and produced the legendary image of the 19-year-old hostage Patty Hearst holding an M1 carbine.

The 1990s brought the Internet Protocol (IP) camera, streaming its picture over the World Wide Web. Now a warehouse in Rio could be watched from a computer in Rotterdam. The advances also made pictures sharper and storage cheaper.

But for systems to watch out for the unusual, the second lineage needed to be added. That stream had begun decades earlier in an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT was an epicenter of computer research in the 1960s thanks to the Project on Mathematics and Computation, an ambitious program funded by the Defense Department’s ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), the predecessor agency to the military’s DARPA.

In 1966, a mathematician and AI researcher named Seymour Papert wanted to spend the summer building a seemingly straightforward computer system: It should describe what was in a camera picture, thereby offering a rudimentary analysis of the image. The task didn’t take a summer but over half a century. That’s because images are full of shadows, reflections, textures, overlapping objects and shifting light—none of which the algorithms of the day could handle.

Papert’s Summer Vision Project illustrated the deceptive effortlessness of human sight. We spot a friend in a crowd, in the rain, in an outfit we’ve never seen before, and do so without noticing the extraordinary task we just completed.

MIT remained dedicated to video analytics. In the 1990s, its scientists helped develop ways to classify and track activity in footage. But those early systems worked only with simple scenes. Since the 2010s, AI has learned to extract far richer patterns from video—it was then that the lineages of the lens and the algorithm met.

Today, avoiding surveillance systems has become close to impossible. According to industry estimates, 4.3 billion cameras are in operation worldwide. That’s more than one lens for every two people alive. And the technology is used in ways that can violate human rights.

In China, CCTV cameras are a central element of a surveillance state in which the authorities regard behavior such as not socializing with neighbors and using the back door as suspicious, according to Human Rights Watch. Those who deviate in such ways risk being detained and interrogated.

China exports its surveillance technologies around the globe. The buyers form a clear pattern: Fragile democracies and autocracies are particularly likely to obtain the devices—especially in years of protest and unrest at home. Under China’s Belt and Road Initiative—and its Digital Silk Road program—Chinese companies have sold camera networks and behavior-based analytics across more than 50 countries from Azerbaijan to Zambia.

Western institutions are among the buyers, too, drawn by equipment that’s cheap and technically excellent. Both qualities have roots in China’s mass surveillance. The government is the largest supplier of training data and biggest customer of Huawei, Hikvision and their domestic peers. They are far more likely to export surveillance AI than companies from other countries, including the United States, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Chinese firms invented neither the lens nor the algorithm. But they collapsed the distance between them. Hikvision and Dahua began with recording. First video recorders, then cameras—and from the mid-2010s, they added the algorithms. Today, they run deep-learning models on a chip in the camera itself. The surveillance systems do not require a server to study people, vehicles and events. The archive and analysis are combined into one object, small enough to sit above a shop door and cheap enough for a shopkeeper to buy. The camera now decides, at the lens, what needs intervention.

In England, Hikvision and Dahua cameras were found at 73 percent of local government councils, 57 percent of secondary schools, and numerous universities and police forces. Even the security cameras protecting the Magna Carta at Salisbury Cathedral were supplied by Dahua. That historical document sought to limit the powers of a sovereign. Now it’s kept safe by a technology that’s making another sovereign halfway around the world even more powerful.

Throughout most of history, watching a population required people: informants to report on neighbors, police to tail suspects, clerks to sift through files. Each need sleep and might have second thoughts. AI-based surveillance removes that constraint. Software that flags “suspicious” behavior never tires and never questions a command.

Tyranny once required countless accomplices. Now that AI can do the watching—and far more of it—dictatorship increasingly requires only a purchase order.

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.

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.”