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The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.

Information war combatants have certainly pursued regime change: there is reasonable suspicion that they succeeded in a few cases (Brexit) and clear indications of it in others (Duterte). They’ve targeted corporations and industries. And they’ve certainly gone after mores: social media became the main battleground for the culture wars years ago, and we now describe the unbridgeable gap between two polarized Americas using technological terms like filter bubble. But ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind. In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle. But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale. Even actual hacks are increasingly done in service of influence operations: stolen, leaked emails, for example, were profoundly effective at shaping a national narrative in the U.S. election of 2016.

The substantial time and money spent on defense against critical-infrastructure hacks is one reason why poorly-resourced adversaries choose to pursue a cheap, easy, low-cost-of-failure psy-ops war instead

Our most technically-competent agencies are prevented from finding and countering influence operations because of the concern that they might inadvertently engage with real U.S. citizens as they target Russia’s digital illegals and ISIS’ recruiters. This capability gap is eminently exploitable; why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology? This leaves us in a terrible position, because there are so many more points of failure

This shift from targeting infrastructure to targeting the minds of civilians was predictable. Theorists  like Edward Bernays, Hannah Arendt, and Marshall McLuhan saw it coming decades ago. As early as 1970, McLuhan wrote, in Culture is our Business, “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

The 2014-2016 influence operation playbook went something like this: a group of digital combatants decided to push a specific narrative, something that fit a long-term narrative but also had a short-term news hook. They created content: sometimes a full blog post, sometimes a video, sometimes quick visual memes. The content was posted to platforms that offer discovery and amplification tools. The trolls then activated collections of bots and sockpuppets to blanket the biggest social networks with the content. Some of the fake accounts were disposable amplifiers, used mostly to create the illusion of popular consensus by boosting like and share counts. Others were highly backstopped personas run by real human beings, who developed standing audiences and long-term relationships with sympathetic influencers and media; those accounts were used for precision messaging with the goal of reaching the press. Israeli company Psy Group marketed precisely these services to the 2016 Trump Presidential campaign; as their sales brochure put it, “Reality is a Matter of Perception”.

There’s very little incentive not to try everything: this is a revolution that is being A/B tested.

Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead. Hostile state intelligence services in particular are now increasingly adept at operating collections of human-operated precision personas, often called sockpuppets, or cyborgs, that will escape punishment under the the bot laws. They will simply work harder to ingratiate themselves with real American influencers, to join real American retweet rings. If combatants need to quickly spin up a digital mass movement, well-placed personas can rile up a sympathetic subreddit or Facebook Group populated by real people, hijacking a community in the way that parasites mobilize zombie armies.

Attempts to legislate away 2016 tactics primarily have the effect of triggering civil libertarians, giving them an opportunity to push the narrative that regulators just don’t understand technology, so any regulation is going to be a disaster.

The entities best suited to mitigate the threat of any given emerging tactic will always be the platforms themselves, because they can move fast when so inclined or incentivized. The problem is that many of the mitigation strategies advanced by the platforms are the information integrity version of greenwashing; they’re a kind of digital security theater, the TSA of information warfare

Algorithmic distribution systems will always be co-opted by the best resourced or most technologically capable combatants. Soon, better AI will rewrite the playbook yet again — perhaps the digital equivalent of  Blitzkrieg in its potential for capturing new territory. AI-generated audio and video deepfakes will erode trust in what we see with our own eyes, leaving us vulnerable both to faked content and to the discrediting of the actual truth by insinuation. Authenticity debates will commandeer media cycles, pushing us into an infinite loop of perpetually investigating basic facts. Chronic skepticism and the cognitive DDoS will increase polarization, leading to a consolidation of trust in distinct sets of right and left-wing authority figures – thought oligarchs speaking to entirely separate groups

platforms aren’t incentivized to engage in the profoundly complex arms race against the worst actors when they can simply point to transparency reports showing that they caught a fair number of the mediocre actors

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation. We are (rightfully) concerned about silencing voices or communities. But our commitment to free expression makes us disproportionately vulnerable in the era of chronic, perpetual information war. Digital combatants know that once speech goes up, we are loathe to moderate it; to retain this asymmetric advantage, they push an all-or-nothing absolutist narrative that moderation is censorship, that spammy distribution tactics and algorithmic amplification are somehow part of the right to free speech.

We need an understanding of free speech that is hardened against the environment of a continuous warm war on a broken information ecosystem. We need to defend the fundamental value from itself becoming a prop in a malign narrative.

Unceasing information war is one of the defining threats of our day. This conflict is already ongoing, but (so far, in the United States) it’s largely bloodless and so we aren’t acknowledging it despite the huge consequences hanging in the balance. It is as real as the Cold War was in the 1960s, and the stakes are staggeringly high: the legitimacy of government, the persistence of societal cohesion, even our ability to respond to the impending climate crisis.

Influence operations exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. We have to move away from treating this as a problem of giving people better facts, or stopping some Russian bots, and move towards thinking about it as an ongoing battle for the integrity of our information infrastructure – easily as critical as the integrity of our financial markets.

The purpose of all this is not simply to revisit the sins of Western imperialism. Rather, it is to say that invoking Westphalia as some kind of politically neutral model confuses, rather than clarifies, one of the biggest challenges for anyone trying to envision a viable international order: who gets to make the rules and decide how they are enforced. The tension, inevitably, is between an egalitarian process and one in which more powerful states exercise more power

OUR is now a celebrated anti-trafficking charity, claiming to have worked in 26 countries, with the stated aim of bringing together "the world's experts in extraction operations and in anti-child trafficking efforts to bring an end to child slavery." It brought in more than $21 million in donations in 2019, the most recent year for which tax filings are available, and has enjoyed the support of high-powered backers

a common pattern for anti-trafficking NGOs working abroad, according to sex worker activists with Thailand’s Empower Foundation.

while OUR often claims to partner with local law enforcement on trafficking investigations and rescues, the extent of that “partnership” is often a modest donation OUR gives the agency, which in return credits it in press releases about any investigation, rescue, bust, or arrest that used the money.

OUR’s overseas operations, and the “jump team” it says conducts them, are the jewel in its crown: the subject of innumerable fundraising emails, interviews with Ballard, two documentaries, and Sound of Freedom, an upcoming feature film starring Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard. (The casting of an actor most famous for playing Jesus Christ is perhaps not coincidental; while OUR is not an expressly religious organization, it heavily employs the language and imagery of faith, and Ballard, a devout Mormon, has said he was directly called by God to "Find the lost children.") OUR routinely claims that its overseas jump teams are made up of former members of the military, CIA, and law enforcement who undergo rigorous training.

nothing OUR did seemed recognizably informed by professional military or intelligence practice. There was, they said—contrary to the process for operations laid out on OUR's website—no meaningful surveillance or identification of targets; no development of assets; no validating that people they sought to rescue had in fact been trafficked, or that people they were targeting were indeed traffickers; and no meaningful follow-up with people who had been rescued on the missions in which they took part.  

“They’d go and just push for pimps to show up with girls.” If presented with sex workers of legal age, OUR would insist on younger girls—a method that several experts said could, when combined with a lack of intelligence-gathering and vetting, potentially lead to girls being trafficked who otherwise wouldn't have been.

Typically, after arranging for the women and girls to be brought to them, OUR's operators would call local police, who would make arrests. The operators would then leave the country.“They conflate sex work and trafficking,” said a former military member who has worked with OUR. “They’re making it worse.” 

Much research has been published demonstrating how these types of rescues are severely undermining the agency of trafficked persons and disempowering the individuals the involved organizations are claiming to help.

“There’s so many of these organizations here I don’t know one from the other,” Mai Janta, a sex worker leader of the organization, told VICE World News, laughing. 

it faces an ongoing investigation by Davis County, Utah attorney general Troy Rawlings, as Utah’s Fox 13 reported last October. While Rawlings hasn’t publicly described the contours of the investigation, people familiar with it have told both Fox 13 and VICE World News that his office is looking into whether OUR has made misleading statements in its fundraising appeals

Before the training began, candidates were given a psychological examination. On his way to his, William passed a candidate exiting an exam, who said, “If you mention God, you're a shoo-in.” 

“Before I went to this training,” he said, “I was counting down the days. I was expecting a world-class training, because these are supposed to be the best operatives.” Instead, he didn't feel like he was learning anything, and certainly not like he was being prepared to rescue children from dangerous traffickers. William wasn't taught, among other things, basic self-defense, signs to look for in a trafficker or trafficking survivor, surveillance technique, or secure communication. Topics that were covered included how to compartmentalize your discomfort if you find yourself in a gay bar, and the instructors' many war stories, including one that involved someone being stabbed dozens of times.

real estate brokers seem to have figured heavily in the world of OUR’s operators

Empower says that more than 50,000 sex workers have been a formal part of its operations over the years, and that members include sex workers from Thailand and migrant sex workers from Laos, Myanmar, China, and Cambodia. Its members are often extremely familiar with the various rescue operations that come to the country intent on “saving” trafficked women and girls; many organizations, working with local police, have conducted raids on massage parlors, legal brothels, and other places where they work. Most of these groups hail from the U.S., United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, said Janta, and often have a clear religious focus. 

“They say they’re helping but really want to change your religion and your job,”

Beyond individual organizations, the entire raid-and-rescue model has fallen out of favor with responsible anti-trafficking organizations

“From our point of view, they come into our workplaces and make a relationship with the employer as well as the police. If there are no underage workers they continually ask and ask for the employer to find them some underage workers,” Janta added. “So they create a situation where there are underage workers, where there weren’t before.” 

“Just because they’re Americans or American missionaries, does not mean they’re actually representing the U.S. and U.S. interests,”

OUR's future seems, by all appearances, to be bright. Sound of Freedom, the film about the founding of OUR starring Jim Cavizel and Mira Sorvino as Tim Ballard and his wife Katherine, has been screened in theaters and awaits broad release. Celebrity backers like NFL players Corbin Kaufusi and Josh Allen enthusiastically promote OUR's work. And the public's continued fascination with QAnon and related conspiracy theories about pedophilia and child sex trafficking—from which OUR has publicly distanced itself—has led to huge interest in, and funding for, groups vowing to combat them. 

“We didn’t see them,” said Laovilawanyakul. “But we could’ve used their money for this time. They could have spent some of their money helping people get through COVID.”

“Instead of donating money to anti-trafficking orgs in the hope that it will help after something bad has happened, think about support for us all to be more secure and able to defend ourselves,” she said. “Scholarships, apprenticeships, family payments for mothers, support for teenagers who have left home.” Losing the ability to make a living has dislodged many women and girls from their villages and forced them into journeys as migrant sex workers.“If us and our families are secure,” Janta added, “we can defend ourselves and build our own lives without the need for rescue.”

we may be sure that without Washington to encourage their ambitions and save them from the consequences, even the most expansionist European members of NATO will in fact be very glad to do nothing

The S.D.F. offers a remarkable vision to counter ISIS’s draconian rule — local councils, farmers’ cooperatives, and committees that promote the rights of oppressed minority groups. In the village of Jinwar, a female-controlled town, the S.D.F. has built a commune for women and their children, both Kurdish and Arab, seeking to escape oppressive families and realize a community without patriarchy. According to the constitution of the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, the S.D.F.-linked ruling authority in the region, a post-ISIS Syria will be “a society free from authoritarianism, militarism, centralism and the intervention of religious authority in public affairs.” In order to realize this vision, part of the S.D.F.’s mandate is not just to govern, but also to annihilate ISIS. Several soldiers and S.D.F. spokesmen told me that the war against ISIS isn’t over — its aim now, with the support of the U.S., is to destroy sleeper cells and root out the ideology.

If we portray certain enemies solely as existential threats, we sweep over the political conflicts unfolding in places like Iraq and Syria, and the political violence wrought upon these communities, even by those who claim to be fighting a just war.

If our enemy is everywhere, we will seek allies in even the most oppressive of regimes (like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to hunt down “terrorists,” no matter if they are gun-wielding militants or political dissidents who believe that the current state of affairs does not serve them.

If a war is a “good war,” or merely conceived of as a necessary one, it matters little why a terrorist group gained support, or how we may be inadvertently contributing to the group’s appeal. Yet, while the current approach to terrorism has been wildly successful in building a cottage industry of extremism and deradicalization experts, it has failed to rid the world of terrorists.

Massacres of Iraqi civilians, deaths of Afghan civilians by airstrikes, and indiscriminate detention and torture and rape have all happened at the hands of state security forces, including those allied with the U.S.

The Manichean framework helps absolve the West of its role and its responsibility in ending an endless conflict. “Terrorism” has become so synonymous with horrific violence that most Americans are likely unaware that the vast majority of civilian deaths in global conflicts today are caused by states, not non-state actors.

As with other battles against evil, the “killers and fanatics” necessitated the dropping of bombs, an operation that Obama’s successor continued.

a core argument for the war depended on the idea that terrorism was, in essence, a form of religious violence

What the Bush administration argued, and what the media accepted, was that terrorism is not a mere tactic, but a full-blown ideology — what Bush called “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” including “fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.” In practice, this means non-state armed groups not allied with the U.S. should be understood as terrorist organizations — no matter if, like the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and Hamas, they have little else in common

By and large, the media accepted the Bush administration’s framing. By 2006, public criticism of the handling of the Iraq War was mounting, but even then, few questioned the legitimacy of the war itself. In a 2009 study of media coverage after 9/11, two scholars from the University of Texas found that journalists “helped brand the policy, [then] labeled the frame as public opinion,” ultimately contributing to the acceptance of that frame as a “fact of life,” and a “larger narrative of struggle and heroism.” Journalists did not treat the War on Terror as a policy decision made by the Bush administration, but as the natural and inevitable order of things. 

mainstream media coverage of ISIS receives almost no scrutiny. But many other publications and reporters have operated on the same flawed assumptions and premises as Caliphate, ones that animated the West’s understanding of the Middle East long before ISIS gained its first foothold

The political scientist Austin Doctor recently conducted a study of sexual assault by 143 rebel groups around the world, from 1989 to 2011, and separately applied the results of his analysis to ISIS.  He found a correlation between the presence of foreign fighters and increased incidence of sexual violence, which suggests that the Islamic State functioned much like other rebel groups — that ISIS is not so singular as it may seem.

the issue here isn’t just the violence — after all, Assad has also relished the torture, starvation, and murder of his citizens. Since 2011, his regime has used chemical weapons repeatedly, more than three hundred times according to one study. The critical difference is that while Assad depends on the international system for legitimacy (Russia and Iran are key supporters, and Syria remains part of the global financial system), ISIS rejects it. While Assad would prefer that the world looks away, ISIS practically begs us to stare. It aims to demoralize Western audiences, while projecting to potential recruits its vision of a new world order

In parts of the Caliphate, ISIS did promise a different model, at least nominally. In one piece of propaganda, the group declared, “The people are as equal as the teeth of a comb. There is no difference between the rich and the poor and the strong and the weak. The holder of a right has redress, and the grievance of an injured party will be answered.” In appealing to residents and new recruits, ISIS touched upon something familiar: the desire for justice, equality, and law and order in a world that has manifestly failed to deliver any. Women, too, found opportunities under ISIS. In Fallujah, they used the regime’s justice system to secure divorces, which had been more difficult under the Iraqi government.

civilians were likely to stay in ISIS-controlled territory because, among various reasons, the “quality of governance,” including “availability of electricity, cleanliness of streets, and crime rates,” was better compared to services provided by the Iraqi government

“All the locals here wonder why the U.S. coalition never came to rescue them from Assad’s machine guns, but run to fight ISIS when it took a few pieces of land,” one rebel told the Guardian. 

the current global order has left many people behind

decades of imperialism, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and Russia and Iran’s interventions, have irrevocably transformed communities in the Middle East. Similarly, though ISIS opposes the Saudi government, the Salafi-Jihadi underpinnings of the group could not have gained traction without the Kingdom’s years of effort of exporting and standardizing a particular form of Islam across the Middle East. 

devoid of any political context, terms like “radicalization” and “ideology” lose meaning

how ISIS appeared in the public imagination: as a movement beyond human understanding. The only sensible answer to so inscrutable and atavistic an adversary was total war.

This frenzied interest in the U.S.’s darkly powerful new enemy lured some journalists and analysts to focus on the group full-time. It emerged as a distinct topic from the Syrian civil war, whose crowded theater was becoming difficult to explain, or the Iraq War, now a nearly-adolescent 11 years old. Soon, writers covering ISIS, what Wired called “the world’s most important beat,” developed a signature flourish, describing it not just as a terrorist organization, but as an almost supernatural threat. “It is not clear,” argued a New York Review of Books piece in 2015, “whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.”

Stories of the group’s atrocities emerged in quick succession, echoing the parade of violence ISIS was proudly broadcasting on its own channels: public executions, conscription of child soldiers, disappearances and murders of thousands, Yazidi girls sold into slavery.

by narrowly focusing on the savagery of ISIS fighters, we miss the deeper and more important story of how ISIS grew into a political force, and of how it moved not just the hearts and minds, but the physical bodies, of tens of thousands

the core issue with Caliphate isn’t just that a lying source may have misled overeager journalists. Rather, the controversy, and indeed even the proposition that a “terrorism editor” would have resolved the problem, points to a deeper flaw in the way media has long covered extremism: divorced from the local and historical contexts that have fueled its rise

After a decade of the War on Terror and chaos in the Middle East, ISIS seemed to be the ultimate testament to an enduring clash of civilizations. It is not that surprising that ISIS itself encouraged this fantastical narrative — but it is striking that our media took their word for it.

“While administration officials could say they had imposed consequences on Assad’s regime for crossing the red line, they could not specific the nature of these consequences in any detail,” she writes. “Since even Assad didn’t know the particulars of the cost he would be bearing, he seemed unlikely to be deterred from carrying out further attacks.”

confronting ongoing or imminent atrocities can require quickly shifting perpetrators’ incentives. In the immediate aftermath of the Libyan protests, for instance, Power argues rapid, joint Security Council and American action “was probably the best example in history of governments hastily using a vast array of “tools in the toolbox” to try to deter atrocities.” But this proved insufficient: “The pressures that the United States and other countries were imposing on Qaddafi’s regime would take months to reach their full effect, and we had run out of further nonmilitary steps to take to try to affect the Libyan leader’s near-term calculus.”

the implicit promise of force underlies each alternative set of policies Power proposes. Actors who are willing to abandon mass atrocity campaigns voluntarily may be easily deterred — but actors committed to a mass atrocity campaign could find themselves diplomatically isolated, operating under economic sanction, or threatened by prosecution, and still continue to wage campaigns of death. “Stop this or else” undergirds threats when a powerful actor makes them. The toolbox’s logic is ultimately escalatory as a result: force is a tool of last resort, but no other tool works without the latent presence of American military force.

American military force underwrites other dimensions of statecraft, and mobilizes when other deterrent measures have failed. But the problem, then, is not simply, as her critics allege, that Samantha Power is a hawk, or that she doesn’t understand which conflicts constitute core American interests — the problem is that all deterrent models of atrocity prevention rest on the threat of force.

UN peacekeepers are the largest deployed force in conflict zones today; UN peacekeeping constitutes an enormous part of the Security Council’s agenda; the UN peacekeeping budget is separate from and larger than the UN’s operational budget; and a heated debate on the use of force by UN peacekeepers has now been running over twenty years. Peacekeeping is an effective tool that works best when it is all carrots and few sticks — but peacekeepers today are usually charged with protecting civilians under threat of imminent violence, as well. They rarely use force, and while they seem to protect civilians from rebels well, they struggle more to protect civilians from government forces.

Historically, when deterrence fails, the UN Security Council has outsourced this work — instead of sending in the Marines, for example, the UN instead turns to the French, as they did in the Central African Republic, or British Special forces, as they did in Sierra Leone, or — yes — NATO, as they did in the former Yugoslavia and then Libya.

discussions about US restraint are nearly entirely divorced from these extremely active debates about the use of force in UN peacekeeping — and considering the two together is instructive

a military with stunningly excess capability demands we continually interrogate its purpose; people who live under imminent threat of violence are not marginal to US foreign policy interests unless we define them that way; and the US outsources most conflict management to the UN system, which then relies on the military might of its member states to wield force in the places most dangerous for civilians

If unwilling actors cannot be swayed save by the use of force, and we are reluctant to use force for practical or ethical reasons, then we are left with two options: we can address the root causes of conflict, and we can help those refugees and internally displaced people who manage to escape violence. The first set of options requires reimagining the fundamental structures of foreign policy; the second set of options is currently so politically unpopular that it is remaking domestic politics across refugee-receiving countries

“We want to move Africa away from this colonial economic model of perpetually being an exporter of primary commodities for processing elsewhere,”

goods traded within Africa were more processed than the raw materials exported from the continent to China, India, Europe and other major trading partners

“Policymakers have understood that, although trade on the continent is limited, this is value-added trade,” he said. “This is where the jobs are coming from, as opposed to trade with the rest of the world, which is mostly commodities.”

Jeffrey Peprah, chief executive of Volkswagen, Ghana, said he hoped eventually to export cars assembled in Accra to other west African countries.

For the agreement to work, one western diplomat said the free trade zone must benefit producers in smaller, poorer countries as well as those in more industrialised parts of the continent. Many countries saw the free trade area as a way of boosting their exports but few had embraced the corollary that they would need to import more, the diplomat said.

AGRA, initiated in 2006, heralded a new campaign to bring the kind of input-intensive agriculture to Africa that had failed to take hold on the continent when the first Green Revolution swept through much of Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

AGRA worked with governments to speed the development of high-yield commercial seeds designed for Africa’s wide range of soils and climates and to facilitate the delivery to farmers of those seeds and the inorganic fertilizers that would make them grow.

Many warned that it was seeking to impose Western technologies inappropriate for the continent’s soils, farmers and food systems. Some decried the lack of consultation with African farmers on the nature of the interventions.9 Others pointed out the serious flaws in the first Green Revolution: water supplies depleted and contaminated with chemical runoff; farmers indebted due to high input costs while yields declined after their initial increases; and the loss of crop and diet diversity as Green Revolution crops took over the countryside

African farm groups like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) also warned of the loss of food sovereignty, the ability of communities and nations to freely choose how they wanted to feed themselves, as large commercial firms could come to dominate local markets backed by new government policies designed to ensure market access.

Only one country, Ethiopia, shows anything resembling the combination of yield growth and hunger reduction Green Revolution proponents promised, with a 73% increase in productivity and a 29% decrease in the number of hungry. Note, however, that neither of these is on track to meet AGRA’s goal of doubling productivity (100% increase) and halving the number of hungry (which would be a 50% decrease). Ghana is the only other AGRA country that shows decent productivity growth with some decrease in hunger. Malawi achieved relatively strong yield growth but only a small reduction in undernourishment.

These data suggest that Green Revolution programs have not produced a productivity boom through intensification but rather an extensification onto new lands. The promotion of extensification is a serious contradiction for Green Revolution proponents. The explicit goal of “sustainable intensification” is to minimize pressure on land and water resources while limiting further greenhouse gas emissions. To the extent Green Revolution programs are encouraging extensification, they are at odds with national and donor government commitments to mitigate climate change. Depending on individual countries’ land endowments, extensification can be a serious problem. Rwanda, for example, is densely populated and does not have vast tracts of uncultivated arable land.

Evidence would suggest that the main beneficiaries are likely not the poorest or most food-insecure farmers but rather a growing number of medium-scale farmers who have access to more land and are already integrated into commercial networks. Only a fraction of such farmers come up from the ranks of smallholders; many are new investors in farming from urban elites. One study showed that a tiny fraction of smallholders is likely to become commercial farmers.18

Cassava, a key staple in Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and many other AGRA countries, saw a 6% decline in yields. Overall, roots and tubers, which include nutritious crops such as sweet potatoes, experienced a 7% decline in yields. Groundnuts, another critical staple source of protein in many countries, saw an alarming 23% drop in yields.

The Staple Crop Index shows that Rwanda’s apparent success in maize has come at the expense of more comprehensive food crop productivity.

The total number of undernourished in AGRA’s 13 countries has increased from 100.5 million to 131.3 million, a 30% increase, from before AGRA to 2018. Only Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali report a significant decline in the absolute number of chronically hungry residents

One of the negative consequences of the Green Revolution focus on maize and other commodity crops is the declining importance of nutritious and climate-resilient crops like millet and sorghum, which have been key components in healthy diets. These are rarely supported by African governments or AGRA; meanwhile, input subsidies and supports for maize and other favored crops provide incentives for farmers to decrease the cultivation of their own crop varieties

AGRA seems to be feeding Africa’s worrisome trend toward locking in path dependency on input-intensive agriculture, much to the detriment of smallholder farmers

Unlike industrial-scale farmers in developed countries, their path has not yet been determined; there remain opportunities to chart paths different from the high-input agriculture model promoted by AGRA.

Agroecology is one of the systems giving farmers the kinds of innovation they need, farming with nature to promote the soil-building practices that Green Revolution practices often undermine. Building on farmers’ knowledge of local conditions and food cultures, multiple food crops are grown in the same field. Compost, manure and biofertilizers — not fossil-fuel-based fertilizer — are used to nourish fields. Biological pest control decreases pesticide use. Researchers work with farmers to improve the productivity of their seeds rather than replacing them with commercial varieties farmers need to buy every year and douse with fertilizer to make them grow.25 AFSA has documented the effectiveness of agroecology, now widely promoted among its member organizations as a key step toward food sovereignty.26 Such initiatives also achieve productivity increases more impressive than those achieved by Green Revolution programs. One University of Essex study surveyed nearly 300 large ecological agriculture projects across more than 50 poor countries and documented an average 79% increase in productivity with decreasing costs and rising incomes.27 Such results far surpass those of the Green Revolution.

It is time for international donors and African governments to change course, to shift their agricultural development funding toward the kinds of low-input sustainable farming that many small-scale farmers in Africa are pioneering under the banner of agroecology. With substantial support, like that provided to Green Revolution programs, agroecology can be Africa’s food future

emphasize the overriding importance of some combination of sovereignty, territorial borders, and national identity and culture. They routinely claim that efforts, spearheaded by sinister external forces, to undermine all three constitute an existential threat to the political community

in order to implement their policies, populists need to shield themselves from pressure to, variously, protect human rights, maintain the rule of law, combat corruption, and respect domestic pluralism

populists in Europe rightly see the liberal values that undergird the EU as an obstacle to their political programs

Even as he depends on EU subsidies to maintain his patronage networks, Orban positions himself as defending Hungary against EU efforts to subvert its sovereignty and values.

populists have converged on the idea that a multipolar international system will best serve their interests and is therefore something to both welcome and advance

Leaders argue that, unlike Western donors, China and other new patrons do not demand intrusive conditions such as economic conditionality or respect for individual rights. However, these deals involve opaque schemes and private payoffs, as well as expectations of future support. Beijing, for example, expects recipients to back its foreign-policy priorities and support—or at least not overtly criticize—China on matters such as respect for human rights in general or its current policies toward Uighurs in Xinjiang in particular.

This “goods substitution” is significant on its own terms because the provision of international club and private goods is the main mechanism by which great powers order international politics. But countries such as China and Russia often do not, in fact, provide superior goods and bargains to those offered by the United States and its allies. China’s behavior surrounding the BRI and its preexisting aid programs has led recipients to accuse Beijing of neocolonialism, and growing evidence suggests that Chinese development projects are more problematic than Western ones.

A critical part of the domestic politics of goods substitution is that populists claim that their pragmatic courting of illiberal or authoritarian states affords them a wider range of partnerships and international networks. The fact that new partners like China and Russia are authoritarian becomes a net political positive: a signal that populist leaders are pragmatic and committed to protecting national interests—because they are flexible enough to find new partners who can deliver the goods.

Leaders, and populists especially, now increasingly see partnership with the United States—once viewed as an indispensable pillar of foreign policy—and its Western allies as overly constraining. For example, Duterte, Erdogan, and Orban all came to power in states that were fully integrated members of the U.S.-led security order. All three now point to potential security relations with Russia and China as providing the possibility of greater balance with, if not outright exit from, that order.

The difference now is that elites in multiple, and otherwise very different, countries are actually implementing policies that distance themselves from the U.S.-led security order. In all of these cases, populist leaders are invoking multipolarity as a rhetorical commonplace, taking advantage of the growing shift toward a multipolar order, or both. In doing so, they contribute to a power transition away from the United States by reducing its influence.

invoking multipolarity also makes it easier for populists to reject external, mostly Western, criticism of their domestic governance practices. When the West was dominant, even autocrats had to accept significant incursions on their domestic sovereignty—such as critical election monitors, foreign-sponsored NGOs, and members of the Western press. Now, emulating the practices of China and Russia, populists are much more comfortable with banning or repressing these same actors—and in justifying their actions as ways of protecting their national values and interests

The global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, at first glance, strengthens and fuels these dynamics. The closing of borders and the curtailment of international economic exchange increase the appeal of national fortress narratives conjured by populists about the perils of globalism

It’s one thing to use exit options to reduce external liberalizing pressure, but it’s another when new patrons start calling in favors. Despite Beijing’s defense of sovereignty as an international principle, its practices toward clients suggest that, eventually, it will use its leverage in ways no less coercive than other great powers. Moscow has already demonstrated its lack of concern for the sovereignty of clients and partners

the COVID-19 crisis underscores that international goods provision abhors a vacuum

Because states often go to war out of sense of overconfidence (however misplaced it sometimes turns out to be), pandemic-induced pessimism should be conducive to peace.

even an impulsive and headstrong warmaker like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman has gotten more interested in winding down his brutal and unsuccessful military campaign in Yemen.

One familiar argument is the so-called diversionary (or “scapegoat”) theory of war. It suggests that leaders who are worried about their popularity at home will try to divert attention from their failures by provoking a crisis with a foreign power and maybe even using force against it. Drawing on this logic, some Americans now worry that President Donald Trump will decide to attack a country like Iran or Venezuela in the run-up to the presidential election and especially if he thinks he’s likely to lose.

This outcome strikes me as unlikely, even if one ignores the logical and empirical flaws in the theory itself. War is always a gamble, and should things go badly—even a little bit—it would hammer the last nail in the coffin of Trump’s declining fortunes. Moreover, none of the countries Trump might consider going after pose an imminent threat to U.S. security, and even his staunchest supporters may wonder why he is wasting time and money going after Iran or Venezuela at a moment when thousands of Americans are dying preventable deaths at home

states do not start wars unless they believe they will win a quick and relatively cheap victory. As John Mearsheimer showed in his classic book Conventional Deterrence, national leaders avoid war when they are convinced it will be long, bloody, costly, and uncertain. To choose war, political leaders have to convince themselves they can either win a quick, cheap, and decisive victory or achieve some limited objective at low cost. Europe went to war in 1914 with each side believing it would win a rapid and easy victory, and Nazi Germany developed the strategy of blitzkrieg in order to subdue its foes as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 because Saddam believed the Islamic Republic was in disarray and would be easy to defeat, and George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 convinced the war would be short, successful, and pay for itself.

launching a war has to be one of the least efficient methods available. The threat of war usually spooks investors too, which any politician with their eye on the stock market would be loath to do

Economic downturns can encourage war in some special circumstances, especially when a war would enable a country facing severe hardships to capture something of immediate and significant value. Saddam Hussein’s decision to seize Kuwait in 1990 fits this model perfectly:

Even conquering an oil-rich country—the sort of greedy acquisitiveness that Trump occasionally hints at—doesn’t look attractive when there’s a vast glut on the market

a sustained economic depression could make war more likely by strengthening fascist or xenophobic political movements, fueling protectionism and hypernationalism, and making it more difficult for countries to reach mutually acceptable bargains with each other

Nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian rule were making a comeback well before COVID-19 struck, but the economic misery now occurring in every corner of the world could intensify these trends and leave us in a more war-prone condition when fear of the virus has diminished.

Another familiar folk theory is “military Keynesianism.” War generates a lot of economic demand, and it can sometimes lift depressed economies out of the doldrums and back toward prosperity and full employment. The obvious case in point here is World War II, which did help the U.S economy finally escape the quicksand of the Great Depression. Those who are convinced that great powers go to war primarily to keep Big Business (or the arms industry) happy are naturally drawn to this sort of argument, and they might worry that governments looking at bleak economic forecasts will try to restart their economies through some sort of military adventure. I doubt it. It takes a really big war to generate a significant stimulus, and it is hard to imagine any country launching a large-scale war—with all its attendant risks—at a moment when debt levels are already soaring

The bottom line: Economic conditions (i.e., a depression) may affect the broader political environment in which decisions for war or peace are made, but they are only one factor among many and rarely the most significant. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic has large, lasting, and negative effects on the world economy—as seems quite likely—it is not likely to affect the probability of war very much, especially in the short term.

I can’t rule out another powerful cause of war—stupidity—especially when it is so much in evidence in some quarters these days

On a planet that shares a single atmosphere, concepts like "here" and "there" are misleading. The steak we eat "here" threatens a farmer’s harvest "there". The plane someone catches "there" makes the water levels rise "here".

Each and every individual, organisation and country that reduces its carbon footprint is a small but indispensable link in the fight against global warming. Eventually, we will reach the tipping point: so many people will have switched to zero-carbon energy sources that fossil fuels will be "overcome".

The elderly, people of colour, immigrants, low-educated adults, people in debt, people on lower incomes, people in developing countries, refugees, the uninsured, the unemployed: all these groups have an above-average risk of falling prey to this pandemic, both physically and socio-economically

those who contribute least to the climate crisis are most severely affected by it – and vice versa

the unequal distribution of the climate emergency is a crisis in its own right.

The coronavirus pandemic shows that “keeping distance” and similar measures are primarily for the privileged, only available to people who “can afford to retreat in individualism”, as OluTimehin Adegbeye, our correspondent in Nigeria, put it so powerfully.

These flaws are more visible now than ever before. The way we deal with animals is untenable. Patent laws in the pharmaceutical industry pose a real threat to public health. The fossil fuel industry, like the financial sector, is only able to exist by the grace of privatised profits and socialised losses.

a sustainable society is not a pandemic bunker. The similarity is that the change that is needed will affect every aspect of society. There really isn’t an app for it.

Continuing to see Earth as an infinite resource and the sky above us as an infinite garbage bin, in order to artificially boost quarterly profits, with CEOs sitting in reality-proofed boardrooms comparing the size of their bonuses while begging for taxpayer bailouts but refusing to pay taxes themselves: no, that’s a “normal” we simply can’t afford going back to.

Thousands of deaths and intensive care units (ICUs) flooded with patients struggling to breathe cannot be denied for very long, even by the most persistent manufacturers of alternative facts – unlike climate refugees (“fortune seekers!”), loss of biodiversity (“the dinosaurs died out too, right?”), and global warming itself (“temperatures have risen before!”).

we are, in fact, capable of bringing about sweeping societal change to protect us all. Now is the time to resolve not one crisis but two. Starting with sustainable spending of the trillions (!) being allocated to coronavirus-related measures right now.

No government bailouts for fossil industries without an exit strategy towards a zero-carbon business model within 30 years. No government bailouts for companies with primary bank accounts in tax havens. And even more government funding for truly sustainable alternatives. How about giving that a try?

Xi is not promising an immediate turnaround. The peak will still be expected around 2030. Recent investments in new coal-fired capacity have been alarming. A gigantic 58 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity have been approved or announced just in the first six months of this year. That is equivalent to 25 percent of America’s entire installed capacity and more than China has projected in the previous two years put together. Due to the decentralization of decision-making, Beijing has only partial control over the expansion of coal-burning capacity

Chinese officials laugh when they earnestly seek advice from Europeans on problems of the “just transition” and realize that the entire fossil fuel workforce that has to be taken care of in Germany is smaller than that of a single province in China. It will be an upheaval similar to the traumatic 1990s shakeout of Mao Zedong-era heavy industry.

Hitherto the only big bloc fully committed to neutrality was the EU. The hope for this year was an EU-China deal that would set the stage for ambitious new targets to be announced at the COP26 U.N. climate conference planned for Glasgow in November. Rather than a summit in Leipzig, the Sino-EU meeting took place via videoconference. The exchanges were surprisingly substantive. The Europeans wanted China to commit to peak emissions by 2025 and made menacing references to carbon taxes on imports from China if Beijing did not raise its ambition. They have given a cautious welcome to Xi’s U.N. statement. They can hardly have expected more.

Now the pressure will be on India, long China’s partner in resisting calls from the West for firm commitments to decarbonization, to make a similarly bold climate announcement

On the one hand, the Europeans increasingly want to stake out a strong position on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, human rights, and any geopolitical aggression in the South China Sea. Europe’s residual attachment to the United States is real. But China has now underscored how firmly it aligns with a common agenda with the EU on climate policy. The contrast to the Trump administration could hardly be starker.

The sobering truth is that neither the EU nor China is any longer conditioning its climate policy on the United States. If you are serious about the issue, how could you? If Washington does come around to supporting a Green New Deal of the Joe Biden variety, that will, of course, be welcome. But in light of America’s cavalier dismissal of the Paris agreement, even if a new administration were to make a new and more ambitious round of commitments, what would that amount to? So long as the basics of the American way of life remain nonnegotiable and climate skepticism has a strong grip on public opinion, so long as the rearguard of the fossil fuel industries is allowed the influence that it is, so long as one of the two main governing parties and the media that supports it are rogue, America’s democracy is not in a position to make credible commitments.

Trump’s inversion of U.S. policy is possible because Obama never put the Paris agreement to Congress. Indeed, after the abortive cap and trade legislation of 2009, the cornerstone of the original Green New Deal, the Obama administration abandoned major legislative initiatives on climate change. Instead, it relied on regulatory interventions and the force of cheap fracked gas to deliver a modest decarbonization agenda, anchored on ending coal.

If there are affordable and high-quality technological options, the switch to green will happen. Due to the advances in solar and wind power, we are rapidly approaching that point. Whatever Trump’s bluster, coal is on its way out in the United States, too.

There are no doubt positive synergies to be had between market-driven energy choices in the United States and the industrial policy options that the European and Chinese bids for neutrality will open up. Solar and wind have already given examples of that. But amid the shambles of U.S. policy both on climate and the coronavirus, it is time to recognize a qualitative difference between the United States and Europe and China. Whereas Europe and China can sustain an emphatic public commitment to meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene with international commitments and public investment, the structure of the U.S. political system and the depth and politicization of the culture wars make that impossible. Perversely, the only way to build bipartisan political support for a green transition in the United States may be to pitch it as a national security issue in a cold war competition with China.

For the United States, everything hangs in the balance. For the rest of the world, that is not the case. As Xi made clear on Sept. 22, as far as the most important collective issue facing humanity is concerned, the major players are no longer waiting. If the United States joins the decarbonization train, that will be all well and good. A constructive U.S. contribution to U.N. climate diplomacy will be most welcome. But the era in which the United States was the decisive voice has passed. China and Europe are decoupling.

despite some real climate successes by the Chinese government, it’s not clear that authoritarian models offer a general solution. Restricting speech and freedom of information makes monitoring environmental conditions harder, and officials in such systems face their own bad short-term incentives.

we have yet to identify a moral equivalent of war that can supply a clear, visible foe against which to organize

there is no clear link between a challenge’s scale and willingness to cooperate—especially when the benefits and costs of policies fall unevenly, as they always will

communities where solar and wind projects will be sited often oppose such developments. In July, developers abandoned trying to turn a stretch of Nevada desert into what would have been the largest solar power array in the United States after opposition from a broad (and notably inter-ideological) coalition of residents, conservationists, bicyclists, and skydivers. As the project would have contributed up to one-tenth of Nevada’s electrical capacity, that single project’s failure threatens the state’s goal of achieving 50 percent reliance on renewable sources by 2030.

opposition to necessary climate policies extends beyond conservatives—and gets all the more tangled as you drill down into local issues. Even those who think globally don’t always act locally.

Making cities denser could substantially improve climate outcomes. Actually doing so will require American politicians to change zoning laws that make dense housing difficult or even illegal to build—a measure deeply unpopular with many homeowners, and especially the deeply unrepresentative set of citizens who show up to public hearings about new development.

Americans might support putting climate policies in packages with other policies, such as minimum wage increases, job guarantees, and affordable housing. Similarly, federal or state governments could preempt local governments and simply require policies enabling new housing (or just build housing themselves).

The incentives facing actors in the short run don’t align well with what’s needed for a fix in the long run

Many U.S. states and localities won’t even mandate vaccines—a simple solution for a well-defined problem. It’s hard to see how the much heavier lift of uprooting neighborhoods, curbing energy budgets, and sharing other costs will be borne by politicians responsive to an electorate more interested in the short term and immediate costs than in complex, long-term solutions.

Compared with the uncertainties and generational time scales for climate policies, the pandemic was easy mode—one that even came with the kind of technological quick fix (in the form of a vaccine) that’s unlikely to fix the climate.

Even the shock of an apocalypse isn’t the one weird trick needed to force action on catastrophic issues.

Niger has been a base of international military operations for years as Islamic extremists have greatly expanded their reach in the Sahel. Those include Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria and Chad, but the more immediate threat comes from growing activity in Niger’s border areas with Mali and Burkina Faso from the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara and the al-Qaida affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, known as JNIM.

Mali’s military junta last month ordered the 15,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping mission to leave, claiming they had failed in their mission. However, Wagner forces remain there, accused by watchdogs of human rights atrocities.

The United States in early 2021 said it had provided Niger with more than $500 million in military assistance and training programs since 2012, one of the largest such support programs in sub-Saharan Africa. The European Union earlier this year launched a 27 million-euro ($30 million) military training mission in Niger.

The U.S. has operated drones out of a base it constructed in Niger’s remote north as part of counterterrorism efforts in the vast Sahel. The fate of that base and other U.S. operational sites in the country after this week’s coup isn’t immediately known.

West Africa’s Sahel region has become one of the world’s deadliest regions for extremism. West Africa recorded over 1,800 extremist attacks in the first six months of this year, resulting in nearly 4,600 deaths, a top regional official told the United Nations Security Council this week.

Niger is one of the world’s poorest countries, struggling with climate change along with migrants from across West Africa trying to make their way across the Sahara en route toward Europe. It has received millions of euros of investment from the EU in its efforts to curb migration via smugglers.

Operators of hyperscale data centers, those with more than 5,000 servers, are migrating to places where water is plentiful, such as Norway, but also to drought-prone places like Italy and Spain where energy is cheaper—and where extreme heat is becoming the norm.

A survey conducted last year by the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm, found that only 39% of data centers even tracked their water use, a 12 percentage-point drop from 2021. Tech companies in the past have refused to disclose information about individual centers’ energy and water consumption, claiming that such data was a trade secret.

Over the last couple of years, Google, Meta and Microsoft have started publishing their total water use across their operations, but they don’t break the number down by business unit nor use standardized metrics. Bluefield Research has estimated data centers use more than a billion liters of water per day, including water used in energy generation.

Operators often use shell companies to apply for planning permissions, and a data center can look like any large warehouse or factory from the outside.

Arman Shehabi, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California best known for a landmark paper on energy consumption at data centers, thinks the facilities could contribute to scarcity as droughts become longer and more intense. Part of the problem, he says, is that data center operators “are generally the last ones to the table to ask,” straining the system by asking for access to scarce water after agricultural interests and local communities have already come up with a plan. “Everybody is going to feel that,” he says.

Companies say data centers are getting more energy-efficient, but the increase in overall demand for computing power is outpacing such gains.

The specialized chips required for AI—broadly known as accelerators—emit so much more heat than general-purpose chips do that data center operators are having to rethink their cooling systems entirely

over time data centers will need to radically change the way they dissipate heat. The gold standard, he says, is a process called immersive cooling, in which servers are bathed in a special fluid that transfers heat from the chips. For now, operators are likely to opt for a hybrid model, wherein a high-performance section of the data center will be liquid-cooled while the rest will continue to use air conditioning

Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft have all made water stewardship pledges, promising to use more nonpotable and recycled water and to replenish more water than they consume operationally by 2030. This is the equivalent to offsetting carbon by planting trees—something that looks good on paper but may not directly benefit the communities affected by data centers, because water may be replenished only in places where it’s easy to do so.

The largest states in the world have the scale of empires but, Roberts suggests, they are a new breed. They are ‘superstates’, distinct from their neighbours ‘by expanse of territory, number and diversity of people, and social and economic complexity’. They aren’t quite empires and they aren’t all superpowers. Instead they represent a more recent development in a linear history: ‘The age of empires gave way to the age of states and next to the age of superstates.’

The main problem with the four superstate model is what to do about Russia. Roberts excludes what is territorially the biggest state in the world from his quadrumvirate because its population has collapsed and its economy is much smaller than that of the US, China or the EU. But India’s economy, too, is dwarfed by the others.

The EU has the dual distinction of being the only polity that is regularly referred to as a superstate and the only one that arguably shouldn’t be considered a state at all. Its economic power in the global system is undeniable, but in every other sense its power is much less certain. The EU’s formal structure, which seems to embody both postmodern technocratic management and premodern oligarchy, evades comparison

om Nairn argued that the EU suffers from a condition that also characterised the pre-First World War multinational empires: uneven development generates subtle forms of nationalist resistance which frustrate supranational designs. The EU has a fearsome border control agency, Frontex, but no central security apparatus. Can you have a superstate without an army, or rather an army of one’s own? The only centralised pan-European army is that of the United States, which has around a hundred thousand military personnel deployed across Europe.

The geographical division of the country remains an operative reality for alchemical electioneers, but talk of geographical divisions also serves as a convenient distraction from class divisions. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have talked of small government while increasing federal spending and the number of federal employees. But since the late 1970s they have succeeded in transferring trillions of dollars from the poor to the rich. One problem with calling the continental US a superstate is that it deliberately erases US overseas possessions – Guam, Puerto Rico etc. Another is that it distracts from the fact that so much of the energy of the US state apparatus is involved in its global posture.

Roberts stresses that empires need to justify themselves with a noble creed, both to propagandise to conquered peoples and to bolster the self-delusion of elite cadres. It’s easier to assert yourself if you’re convinced you’re bringing either civilisation or salvation.

All today’s superstates exhibit a resurgence of something like nationalism. China has Xi Jinping thought, India has Hindutva, US presidents will make America great again and the EU, according to Josep Borrell, is a garden surrounded by perilous jungle

Superstates or no, the five largest economies in the world are all either currently involved in a war, rearming, or making preparations.

significantly cheaper than decarbonising their business models and would encourage governments to continue subsidising their products

Some of the firms analysed plan to increase oil and gas production by 2026, something the analysts said would see their emissions "significantly overshoot" the International Energy Agency's recommended net-zero pathway.

"climate disinformation"

Members of the hasbara-oriented tech world WhatsApp group have eagerly taken up the call to shape public opinion as part of a bid to win what’s been described as the “second battlefield” and “the information war.”

The group, which also includes individuals affiliated with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has tirelessly worked to fire employees and punish activists for expressing pro-Palestinian views. It has also engaged in a successful push to cancel events held by prominent Palestinian voices, including an Arizona State University talk featuring Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American in Congress. The group has also circulated circulated a push poll suggesting Rep. Tlaib should resign from Congress and provided an automatic means of thanking Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., for voting for her censure.

J-Ventures has also veered into an unusual kind of philanthropy: shipments of military supplies. The group has attempted to provide tactical gear to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. Navy SEALs, known as Shayetet-13, and donated to a foundation dedicated to supporting the IDF’s undercover “Duvdevan” unit, which is known for infiltrating Palestinian populations. Many of the shipments intended for the IDF were held up at U.S. airports over customs issues.

Israel would soon lose international support as its military response in Gaza kills more Palestinian civilians, noted Schwarzbad, who stressed the need to refocus attention on Israeli civilian deaths. “Try to use names and ages whenever you can,” she said. Don’t refer to statistics of the dead, use stories. “Say something like, 'Noah, age 26, was celebrating with her friends at a music festival on the holiest day of the week, Shabbat. Imagine if your daughter was at Coachella.’”

The Israel-based venture capitalist outlined three categories of people for whom outreach, rather than attacks, is the best strategy. The first group is what he dubbed “the impressionables,” who are "typically young people, they reflexively support the weak, oppose the oppressor," but "are not really knowledgeable." For this category of people, the goal is not to "convince them of anything," but to "show them that it's much more complicated than it seems." Seeding doubt, he said, would make certain audiences think twice before attending a protest. "So it's really about creating some kind of confusion,” Fisher continued, “but really, just to make it clear to them that it's really a lot more complicated."

The final group consists of those who are "reflexively pro-Israel, kind of ‘Israel, right or wrong.’" Members of this group "are not actually very knowledgeable," so they needed to be equipped with the right facts to make them "more effective in advocating for Israel,” Fisher said.

Last year, the Israeli government revoked funding for a theater in Jaffa for screening the film, while government figures called for other repercussions to Netflix for streaming it.

efforts to discredit HRW stem directly from its outspoken criticism of Israel’s record in the occupied territories and its military conduct. An HRW report released the same day as Fisher’s remarks cited the World Health Organization’s conclusion that the IDF had killed roughly one child in Gaza every 10 minutes since the outbreak of violence in October.

members of the J-Ventures group chat also internally circulated a petition for Netflix to remove the award-winning Jordanian film ‘Farha,’ claiming that its portrayal of the actions of IDF soldiers during the 1948 displacement of Palestinians constituted “blood libel,” while another said the film was based “antisemitism and lies.”

Fisher repeatedly noted the need to offer accurate and nuanced information to rebut critics of Israel's actions. Yet at times, he offered his own misinformation, such as his claim that "anti-Israel" human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch "didn't condemn the October 7th massacre."

One member noted that despite the controversy over a scene in the film in which Israeli soldiers execute a Palestinian family, Israeli historians have documented that “such actions have indeed happened.” The critique was rejected by other members of the group, who said the film constituted “incitement” against Jews.

a variety of automated attempts to remove pro-Palestinian content on social media

Over the last two months, dozens of individuals have been fired for expressing opinions related to the war in Gaza and Israel. Most have been dismissed for expressing pro-Palestinian views, including a writer for PhillyVoice, the editor of ArtForum, an apprentice at German publishing giant Axel Springer, and Michael Eisen, the editor-in-chief of eLife, a prominent science journal. Eisen’s offense was a tweet sharing a satirical article from The Onion seen as sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

The WhatsApp chats provide a rare look at the organizing efforts behind the broad push to fire critics of Israel and suppress public events featuring critics of the Israeli government. The scope is surprisingly broad, ranging from investigating the funding sources of student organizations such as Model Arab League, to monitoring an organizing toolkit of a Palestine Solidarity Working Group – “They are verrrry well organized”, one member exclaimed – to working directly with high-level tech executives to fire pro-Palestinian employees.

One participant even suggested that they appeal to the university’s “woke” aversion to exposing students to uncomfortable ideas.   The participant drafted a sample letter claiming that Tlaib’s appearance threatened ASU’s “commitment to a safe and inclusive environment.” The following day, ASU officially canceled the Tlaib event, citing “procedural issues.”

Lior Netzer, a business consultant based in Massachusetts, and a member of the J-Ventures WhatsApp group, requested help pressuring the University of Vermont to cancel a lecture with Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer for The Nation magazine. Netzer shared a sample script that alleged that El-Kurd had engaged in anti-Semitic speech in the past.The effort also appeared to be successful. Shortly after the letter-writing campaign, UVM canceled the talk, citing safety concerns.

The WhatsApp group maintained a special focus on elite universities and white-collar professional positions. Group members not only circulated multiple petitions to fire professors and blacklist students from working at major law firms for allegedly engaging in extremist rhetoric, but a J-Ventures spreadsheet lists specific task force teams to "get professors removed who teach falcehoods [sic] to their students." The list includes academics at Cornell University, the University of California, Davis, and NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, among others.

Many of the messages in the group focused on ways in which to shape student life at Stanford University, including support for pro-Israel activists. The attempted interventions into campus life at times hinged on the absurd. Shortly after comedian Amy Schumer posted a now-deleted satirical cartoon lampooning pro-Palestinian protesters as supporters of rape and beheadings, Epstein, the operating partner at Bessemer Ventures Partners and member of the J-Ventures WhatsApp group, asked, “How can we get this political cartoon published in the Stanford Daily?"

The influence extended beyond the business and tech world and into politics. The J-Ventures team includes advocates with the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC. Officials in the J-Ventures group include investor David Wagonfeld, whose biography states he is “leading AIPAC Silicon Valley;” Tartakovsky, listed as “AIPAC Political Chair;” Adam Milstein, a real estate executive and major AIPAC donor; and AIPAC-affiliated activists Drs. Kathy Fields and Garry Rayant. Kenneth Baer, a former White House advisor to President Barack Obama and communications counsel to the Anti-Defamation League, is also an active member of the group.

Other fundraising efforts from J-Ventures included an emergency fund to provide direct support for IDF units, including the naval commando unit Shayetet-13. The leaked planning document also uncovers attempts to supply the mostly female Caracal Battalion with grenade pouches and to donate M16 rifle scope mounts, “FN MAG” machine gun carrier vests, and drones to unnamed IDF units. According to the planning document, customs enforcement barriers have stranded many of the packages destined for the IDF in Montana and Colorado.

the morning after being reached for comment, Hermoni warned the WhatsApp group against cooperating with our inquiries. “Two journalists … are trying to have an anti semi[tic] portrait of our activity to support Israel and reaching out to members,” he wrote. “Please ignore them and do not cooperate.” he advised. Shortly thereafter, we were kicked out of the group

Victory on the “media battlefield,” Hoffman concluded, “eases pressure on IDF to go quicker, to wrap up” and “goes a long way to deciding how much time Israel has to complete an operation.”

The US is still the world leader in supporting human capital development across the world. As we celebrate 20 years of PEPFAR history, it is important to recognize what an unrivaled achievement it has been. A world without PEPFAR is one of total carnage across the African continent. Over $100 billion in the fight against aids over those twenty years is the largest ever disbursement by any nation for the eradication of a single disease. US support through bilateral and multilateral channels for health, education and other social programs are crucial to the provision of those services across the developing world. It is the assumption that these acts are an argument for themselves that has left the US struggling for a narrative to “counter” its rivals. An estimated  $20  of the $55 billion commitment to Africa over the next three years will go toward health care – including pandemic preparedness and vaccine manufacturing. Without that scale of investment, we will measure the cost in lives and livelihoods across the continent. US human capital investment is thus complementary to China’s  hard infrastructure expertise. The insistence that one is better than the other or that China should reap no benefit (influence or otherwise) is ridiculous.

we never talk about going to war to preserve democracy when it is at risk in places like Hungary, Turkey, India, or Mexico. What makes Taiwan a special case? We need to ask ourselves whether that has to do with our predisposition to contain Chinese power more than it has to do with a careful assessment of U.S. national interests.

if all nations seek to have sufficient power that they cannot be bullied by global hegemons (and let’s be realistic, we’re the only global hegemon in this conversation at the moment), isn’t their desire to have military power consistent with the size of their country, their economy, and their national security interests what we should expect of them?

Is there something inherently wrong or dangerous about China seeking to challenge the United States economically, technologically, or politically? Isn’t that what all nations do? Don’t we believe in the inherent superiority of our system? Don’t we believe in the benefits of competition? (I thought that was fundamental to America’s national identity and values.)

until the start of the industrial revolution, China had the world’s largest economy and it is now resuming that role.

What really bothers us about China’s rise is that they are quite open about the fact that they want to challenge our influence in the world. We want to be No. 1. We don’t like being challenged.

we need to get over the idea that somehow the U.S.-China relationship is a zero-sum conflict, the way the U.S.-Soviet Union relationship was.

Our economies are intertwined. Over 70,000 U.S. companies are active in China. There is not a single major global issue we can resolve without cooperating with China. On many of them, our interests intersect. On some of them, they overlap.

even if our goal is to maximize our influence and our piece of the global economic pie, we need to carefully weigh whether a Cold War and ballooning military expenditures are the best way to balance our interests. It can be argued that overspending on defense has and will cost us influence and undercut the dynamism of our economy.

Being called out by the Chinese leader may have been uncomfortable for the U.S. But, as it happens, everything Xi said was true. The U.S. is actively seeking to contain China and impede its ability to develop key technologies.

We should believe in our hearts that our values and system serve the world better than theirs do and we should seek to persuade the world of that.

We have, I fear, entered a period in which the self-interested search of our defense establishment and our political classes for an international enemy are pushing us into misreading and mishandling the most important bilateral relationship in the world. We are applying old models and obsolescent frameworks to something new. We are mistaking our own bellicosity for strength. We are underestimating our strengths and our rival’s weaknesses. We are relying on reflex, when what we need is creativity.