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There is every indication that China wants to expand what it will call defense capabilities in the South China Sea. I expect eventually we will see warships and aircraft there regularly, if not based there permanently

China does not provide a breakdown for how it allocates its defense budget, leading neighbors and other military powers to complain that Beijing’s lack of transparency has added to regional tensions.

One senior Asia diplomat, speaking before the announcement was made, said the real rise would likely be at least double what China revealed considering efforts to build up the industrial military complex and deepen military-civilian integration.

it is particularly worrying how far the coronavirus is spreading within the political elite in countries where many senior politicians are over 60, making them especially at risk. In Burkina Faso, a country that has experienced more than its fair share of instability in recent years—and which is currently struggling against an insurgency—the ministers of foreign affairs, education, the interior, and mines have all tested positive.

In Nigeria, one of the most economically and politically important countries on the continent, Abba Kyari, the chief of staff to 77-year-old President Muhammadu Buhari, has come down with the disease. Although media outlets have reported that Buhari tested negative, this has not stopped damaging rumors that the often ill president has been incapacitated from circulating in Twitter.

The world should also be paying close attention to Iran, where media censorship has obscured the extent of the crisis. So far, two vice presidents and three cabinet officials are known to have gotten the virus. It is also estimated that 10 percent of parliament and many prominent figures within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are sick—including a senior advisor to the 80-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, raising questions about his health.

A leadership crisis is just one of the potential sources of political instability the coronavirus could spark. Others include the risk of popular unrest and the debt crises that will soon engulf many countries around the world. Along with the fact that some of the main providers of foreign aid are now preoccupied with their own financial crises, there is a serious risk that politically and economically weak states will face a perfect storm of elite deaths, debt, mass unemployment, and social unrest

In countries where poverty is widespread, health systems are weak, and the cost of food is high, citizens are already under intense financial pressure. Despite earning the least, those who live in slum areas around capital cities often have to pay more for access to water and food than those who have valuable properties in the city centers. While the cramped conditions of slum living make it implausible to self-isolate, limited and inconsistent income make it impossible to buy in bulk—or to stay home for weeks on end without working and risk starvation. For many of the poorest people in the world, hunger is just a few days away

Already, there have been sporadic incidents of unrest in a number of countries, including prison protests in Italy. Meanwhile, heavy-handed efforts to enforce the curfew threaten to further erode public confidence in the government and the security forces. There are reports of widespread human rights abuses being committed in Kenya and South Africa, where the police have been using water cannons and rubber bullets to enforce the lockdown.

Unless the deferral of debt goes hand in hand with debt cancellation and long-term rescheduling, the end of the coronavirus crisis could be followed by a series of economic collapses across the developing world. In turn, this will undermine the ability of governments to provide affordable fuel and food, further increasing the risk of public unrest.

Civil wars, political instability, and poverty kill millions of people every year. These deaths rarely elicit the kind of comprehensive media coverage that COVID-19 has received, but they are no less important. It is possible to prevent the worst political consequences of the coronavirus but only if governments and institutions act now. Wealthy nations must increase their aid budgets rather than cut them, and international organizations must anticipate and work to avoid political crises more proactively than ever before. That is the only way to collectively survive the present in a way that does not undermine the future.

6,785 Afghan security force members died in 2016 and 2,531 died in the first five months this year, according to the United States and Afghan governments. Tens of thousands of civilians also perished at the hands of various combatants, including in 2017, but the figures get little publicity. Most Americans tend not to think about them.

Senators who balk at paying for health care and the basic diplomatic missions of the State Department approved a $700 billion defense budget for 2017-18, far more than Mr. Trump even requested.Whether this largess will continue is unclear. But the larger question involves the American public and how many new military adventures, if any, it is prepared to tolerate.

Gorbachev was determined to stay in Russia and fight for reform, not to take up a life of well-compensated exile abroad. To do that, he would need money to fund his center, his staff, and his activities—urgently. As Gorbachev later told France 24 when asked about the ad, “I needed to finish the building. The workers started to leave—I needed to pay them.” To keep his vision going—and to stay relevant in a world moving beyond him—he would need a lot of money. More, even, than he could make by giving lectures. More than anyone in Russia could, or wanted to, give him.

(The exact amount that Gorbachev would receive for the commercial is secret, but it may have been one of the largest talent fees in history—an amount that would be easily in the seven figures today, adjusted for inflation.)

The concept obviously exploited the shock value of having a former world leader appear. But the ad played on the fact that Gorbachev was far more popular outside Russia than inside it. As late as October 1991, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 54 percent of Americans wanted to see Gorbachev as the head of the Soviet Union, compared with only 18 percent for Yeltsin. And warm feelings toward Gorbachev persisted in the West long after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The negotiations took months. Partly, this represented a negotiating tactic: The longer the negotiations drew out, the higher Gorbachev’s talent fee would be. But it also represented real hesitation on Gorbachev’s part.

a Moscow Pizza Hut near Red Square, which had opened in 1990 as part of a Soviet-era deal with the chain’s then-parent company, PepsiCo. That arrangement, which had been hailed as the “deal of the century,” flopped when the Soviet Union collapsed, killing both the Russian economy and the restaurant’s supply chain. (Overnight, Lithuanian mozzarella became an expensive import from a foreign country.)

Gorbachev finally assented—with conditions. First, he would have final approval over the script. That was acceptable. Second, he would not eat pizza on film. That disappointed Pizza Hut. “We always wanted the hero of the ad to eat the pizza,”

Gorbachev’s granddaughter Anastasia Virganskaya ended up eating the slice.

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

Filming the interior scenes took the better part of a day in a different location, inside a real Moscow Pizza Hut. (Even though the bulk of the commercial is just a conversation around a table, multiple sources stressed that filming such a scene—with its complicated sightlines—is enormously challenging.) Coincidentally, it also happened to be Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Since the commercial was being shot at a working Pizza Hut, the cast and crew—including Gorbachev—ate pizza, which was “one of the most interesting Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever had,” said Shaine, who was seated with Gorbachev.

Gorbachev justified his decision to do the commercial on two grounds. First, the former leader argued, “pizza is for everyone.” It was nicely communal: “It’s not only consumption. It’s also socializing.”

Besides the expense and effort of the shoot and the postproduction (an original score recorded live!), the dialogue is entirely in Russian with English subtitles—even though Americans hate subtitles.

The commercial closes with the cheers resounding throughout Red Square and then all of Moscow in progressively wider shots with celebratory music underneath. “It has this impression, you might say the illusion, that the entire nation feels this is a wonderful thing that happened.” Of course, it is an illusion—in this case, taking the actor’s dialogue, adding reverb, and layering the chants over each other. But it’s also one that suited both the marketing needs of Pizza Hut and the myth-making needs of Gorbachev. Pizza Hut gets to be not only the avatar of global capitalism but also the restaurant that brings people together. In the commercial’s fiction, at least, Gorbachev gets the hero’s reception that Raisa always thought he deserved.

The future turned out to be much dimmer than the ad anticipated. A little less than a year after the ad was filmed, in August 1998, the Russian financial system collapsed. The economic recovery that had begun to take hold was wiped out. As the Moscow Times wrote, “The whole Russian economy fell to pieces at a stroke.”

Whatever optimism made the pro-Gorbachev slant of the ad even dimly plausible as a representative sampling of Muscovite opinion vanished. News reports suggest that the Pizza Hut location in which the commercial was filmed itself closed during the crash.

this fictional family, like most Russians, probably spent the early 2000s supporting the increasingly hard-line Vladimir Putin, seeing him as “the only person who can take them back to stability and potential for growth,” Weber said. Out with pizza, in with the vertical of power.

despite Gorbachev’s ambitions that his post-presidency could push his country toward greater openness, Russia has slipped ever further along a much less free path than he once envisioned

A tightening of laws on foreign support for nonprofits inside Russia squeezed the Gorbachev Foundation; many of his family members have reportedly moved to Germany. In a book released last month, Gorbachev even weakly offered praise for his successor on the grounds that Putin “inherited chaos” and that his moves could be justified if “the aim of authority is to create conditions for developing a strong modern democracy.”

In a 2018 poll by the respected Levada Center (another byproduct of Gorbachev’s reforms), 66 percent of Russians responded that they regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union. So, of course, does Gorbachev. His ambition was to perfect the country, not to end it.

As a leader, Russians rank Gorbachev well below Joseph Stalin.

the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1% of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing 1 of every 3 people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on

In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than 8 million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.

Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just 2 million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.

Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only goodwill and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war

To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders

Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years

If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.

the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted — catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes

Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one.

In the case of Addis Ababa, the World Bank suggests that in the second half of the century, many of the people who fled there will be forced to move again, leaving that city as local agriculture around it dries up.

North Africa’s Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65% of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of people.”

The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air conditioning will simply die.

We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk.

rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places.

Once the model was built and layered with both approaches — econometric and gravity — we looked at how people moved as global carbon concentrations increased in five different scenarios, which imagine various combinations of growth, trade and border control, among other factors. (These scenarios have become standard among climate scientists and economists in modeling different pathways of global socioeconomic development.)

every one of the scenarios it produces points to a future in which climate change, currently a subtle disrupting influence, becomes a source of major disruption, increasingly driving the displacement of vast populations.

Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador’s crop, slashing harvests by 70%. Then drought and unpredictable storms led to what a U.N.-affiliated food-security organization describes as “a progressive deterioration” of Salvadorans’ livelihoods.

climate change can act as what Defense Department officials sometimes refer to as a “threat multiplier.”

For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded. It’s in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure, resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn that the most severe strains on society will unfold

the World Bank has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into East African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population has doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035

now a little more than half of the planet’s population lives in urban areas, but by the middle of the century, the World Bank estimates, 67% will. In just a decade, 4 out of every 10 urban residents — 2 billion people around the world — will live in slums

Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go

High emissions, with few global policy changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador — just like rural Guatemala — to empty out, even as its cities grow. Should the United States and other wealthy countries change the trajectory of global policy, though — by, say, investing in climate mitigation efforts at home but also hardening their borders — they would trigger a complex cascade of repercussions farther south, according to the model. Central American and Mexican cities continue to grow, albeit less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows drastically, most likely concentrating poverty further. Far more people also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped and more desperate than ever.

By midcentury, the U.N. estimates that El Salvador — which has 6.4 million people and is the most densely populated country in Central America — will be 86% urban

Most would-be migrants don’t want to move away from home. Instead, they’ll make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city. It’s only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders, taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call “stepwise migration.” Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing into a foreign land — vulnerable to both its politics and its own social turmoil — is an entirely different trial.

I arrived in Tapachula five weeks after the breakout to find a city cracking in the crucible of migration. Just months earlier, passing migrants on Mexico’s southern border were offered rides and tortas and medicine from a sympathetic Mexican public. Now migrant families were being hunted down in the countryside by armed national-guard units, as if they were enemy soldiers.

Models can’t say much about the cultural strain that might result from a climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do say is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply. At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will most likely see its own climate exodus. One in 6 Mexicans now rely on farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability per capita could decrease by as much as 88% in places, and crop yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most likely come from Chiapas.

even as 1 million or so climate migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward in their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current stresses far worse.

Already, by late last year, the Mexican government’s ill-planned policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets, unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation. It has angered many Mexican citizens, who have begun to describe the migrants as economic parasites and question foreign aid aimed at helping people cope with the drought in places where Jorge A. and Cortez come from.

a new Mexico-first movement, organizing thousands to march against immigrants

Trump had, as another senior government official told me, “held a gun to Mexico’s head,” demanding a crackdown at the Guatemalan border under threat of a 25% tariff on trade. Such a tax could break the back of Mexico’s economy overnight, and so López Obrador’s government immediately agreed to dispatch a new militarized force to the border.

laying blame at the feet of neoliberal economics, which he said had produced a “poverty factory” with no regional development policies to address it. It was the system — capitalism itself — that had abandoned human beings, not Mexico’s leaders. “We didn’t anticipate that the globalization of the economy, the globalization of the law … would have such a devastating effect,”

No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate, increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming — that between now and 2050, nearly 9 million migrants will head for Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.

“If we are going to die anyway,” he said, “we might as well die trying to get to the United States.”

The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years

Without a decent plan for housing, feeding and employing a growing number of climate refugees, cities on the receiving end of migration can never confidently pilot their own economic future.

The United States refused to join 164 other countries in signing a global migration treaty in 2018, the first such agreement to recognize climate as a cause of future displacement. At the same time, the U.S. is cutting off foreign aid — money for everything from water infrastructure to greenhouse agriculture — that has been proved to help starving families like Jorge A.’s in Guatemala produce food, and ultimately stay in their homes. Even those migrants who legally make their way into El Paso have been turned back, relegated to cramped and dangerous shelters in Juárez to wait for the hearings they are owed under law.

There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to a changing climate than to migrate. It is the obvious progression the earliest Homo sapiens pursued out of Africa, and the same one the Mayans tried 1,200 years ago. As Lorenzo Guadagno at the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration told me recently, “Mobility is resilience.” Every policy choice that allows people the flexibility to decide for themselves where they live helps make them safer.

what may be the worst-case scenario: one in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated, closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human life

the global trend toward building walls could have a profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will bring

America’s demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth alone doesn’t overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and exacerbating inequalities.

At the same time, the United States and other wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N. World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and improved farmers’ incomes. It can’t reverse climate change, but it can buy time.

Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds, in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet’s population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study’s authors, told me that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the peer-review process and that he felt pushed to “understate” the implications in order to get the research published. The result: Migration is only superficially explored in the paper.

Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.

El Paso is also a place with oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of the year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every two days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs — already a third of some residents’ budgets — will get pricier, and warming will drive down economic output by 8%, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable as the places farther south.

“If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

The flu vaccine that Americans receive at drugstores and doctors’ offices is based on work that the CDC and Food and Drug Administration conduct through the WHO

Since 2004, the U.S. has helped build a global network of WHO flu centers, buying lab equipment and training scientists. The centers in more than 100 countries collect samples from sick people, isolate the viruses and search for any new viruses that could cause an epidemic or pandemic. The CDC houses one of five WHO Collaborating Centers that collect these virus samples, sequence the viral RNA and analyze reams of data on flu cases around the world, while the FDA runs one of the four WHO regulatory labs that help vaccine makers determine the correct amount of antigen, which triggers the immune response, to include in vaccines.

The uncertainty has caused concern in the pharmaceutical industry as well as the government, officials said. The CDC could lose access to the data and virus samples that protects Americans from potentially deadly strains of flu from around the world.

The onslaught of the coronavirus has hurt immunization activities worldwide, causing a rise in measles and other diseases.

fear that the U.S. decision will endanger a WHO-led program that has come tantalizingly close to the eradication of polio

The Trump administration’s plan to bypass the WHO and address global health problems directly with foreign governments will run into trouble in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and other regions where Americans encounter hostility or have difficulty operating

“People coming into countries in WHO shirts to work on polio or AIDS are less threatening,”

“No one is looking for U.S.-based alternatives to WHO,” he said. “Dead on arrival. There is no way they are going to be supported or even accepted.”

The WHO has a history of bringing together ideological rivals. William Foege, a CDC director under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, credits the global agency for uniting American scientists and their counterparts from the Soviet Union during the Cold War to eradicate smallpox in a little more than a decade.

“It’s not a failed bureaucracy,” said Foege, who worked on the international fight against smallpox. “If you go there and see all they do every year, and they have a budget for the entire world that’s smaller than many medical centers in this country.”

global health experts across the political spectrum admit that the WHO needs reform

“In general, the WHO is deferential to member states,” Kolker said. “Yes, it should have been more aggressive in response to Chinese obstruction. Tedros surely realizes the public statements were too deferential to China. But the organization is not dominated by China. Its weaknesses reflect the challenges we have long faced in international collaboration on public health.”

“There’s one country that’s desperate for the United States to leave the WHO, and that’s China,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said at a hearing Thursday of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “They are going to fill this vacuum. They are going to put in the money that we have withdrawn, and even if we try to rejoin in 2021, it’s going to be under fundamentally different terms because China will be much more influential because of our even temporary absence from it.”

Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance.

Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.

Suharto, appointed supreme army commander on 14 October, used the rebellion to undermine and eventually overthrow Sukarno, and as what historian John Roosa has called a “pretext for mass murder”: the elimination of the PKI in a series of massacres across Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

British intelligence agencies and propaganda specialists were complicit, carrying out covert operations to undermine Sukarno’s regime and eliminate the PKI by blaming them for the Untung coup.

Reddaway had served in the army during the second world war before joining the Foreign Office and playing a key role in the establishment of IRD. After the failed Untung coup he arrived to take charge of the British operation. His brief was simple. In an interview in 1996 with two of the authors, he said he’d been given a budget of £100,000 by the Foreign Office and was told “to do anything I could do to get rid of Sukarno”. Only now do we know what “anything” fully meant.

“No, we do not cry out for violence,” the IRD propagandists wrote, “but we demand in the name of all patriotic people that this communist cancer be cut out of the body of the state.” The PKI “is now a wounded snake”, they wrote: “Now is the time to kill it before it has a chance to recover.”

Detailed historical research has established that the mass killings of PKI party members and alleged supporters appear to have been triggered by local army commanders or the arrival of army special forces, about three weeks after the botched coup had been put down by Suharto.During that period the media in Indonesia was full of black propaganda against the PKI and its alleged atrocities, as the army whipped up popular anger against communists and legitimised what Roosa has described as its “already-planned moves against the PKI and President Sukarno”.

The newsletters were approved by IRD in London before dispatch. Copies sent to senior Foreign Office officials were destroyed after reading at IRD’s request.

“Anyone who was leftist was picked up. They were very systematic. They targeted all the leftist groups and not just PKI. People kept themselves to themselves and only talked in whispers.”

As the massacres progressed in the autumn of 1965, IRD’s unit in Singapore reassured their readers as to the necessity of the slaughter.In Newsletter 21 they wrote: “Unless we maintain a vigorous campaign to eradicate communism … the red menace will envelop us again.”The stakes were life and death. “We are fighting for our lives and the very existence of Indonesia and we must never forget that. THE CATS ARE WAITING TO POUNCE!”In Newsletter 23 Winchester Road’s propagandists praised “the fighting services and the police” for “doing an excellent job”. Sukarno, then trying to restrain the generals, was wrong: “Communism must be abolished in all its forms. The work started by the army must be carried on and intensified.” The authors finished by equating the PKI to Hitler and Genghis Khan.

What Gilchrist wanted and what became the unit’s mission was the production of black propaganda, apparently produced by patriotic Indonesian émigrés abroad, to stir Indonesian anti-communists into action.The influential targets of a propaganda newsletter, according to a declassified report by Wynne, would eventually include “as many personages in the hierarchy of government, army and civil service as we can find”.To disguise the British origin of the newsletter it was sent into Indonesia via Asian cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Manila.

In the 1996 interviews Reddaway boasted of manipulating the British and other global media to take an anti- Sukarno and PKI line but insisted IRD only passed on true facts and did not use black propaganda.As ever with IRD, Reddaway told us a partial truth. According to a memo he had written: “The bludgeon was surprisingly effective because we were able … to supply publicists with information which they could not find from other sources because of Sukarno’s censorship.”

“GCHQ could break and read Indonesian codes without difficulty. The government was among many third world countries using equipment supplied by Swiss-based company Crypto AG. For over 50 years, Crypto AG supplied secretly sabotaged cypher machines, with built-in back doors to which the CIA and GCHQ had keys.”

The newsletters remained the core work of Ed Wynne and his colleagues in Winchester Road. A key theme was to encourage their influential readers to support the army’s campaign against the communists. They urged Indonesian patriots: “The PKI and all it stands for must be eliminated for all time.”We now know that to do that they included sensationalised lies. On 5 November the pro-military Jakarta Daily Mail claimed that on the day of the Untung coup 100 women from PKI’s Gerwani women’s organisation had tortured one of the generals using razor blades and knives to slash his genitals before he was shot.The story of the torture and mutilation of the generals by the Gerwani women became part of the founding myth of Suharto’s regime, used to justify the destruction of the PKI. It was also, according to Roosa, a pretext for murder. A lie propagated by the Indonesian army, regurgitated and repurposed to incite IRD’s influential readers.

The IRD was deliberately silent on the massacres. One document from December 1965 says they should “do nothing to embarrass the generals” and the newsletter carefully itemises accounts of isolated incidents of PKI brutality but makes no explicit mention of the army’s killings.

By early 1966 the mass murders in Indonesia, if not their scale, were well known.In January Robert F Kennedy compared the massacres to “inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the communists” and asked when people would “speak out … against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100,000 alleged communists have not been perpetrators, but victims?”

Wynne regarded the operation as a success. In his 1966 annual report he proudly says his operation was “fairly successful” because all his enemies (Konfrontasi, Sukarno, Subandrio and the PKI) were “destroyed”.

According to Prof Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham, the declassified documents show that: “Britain was prepared to engage in dirty deeds which ran contrary to its purported values.” They reveal, he says, “how important black propaganda was to give the illusion that Britain could wield global power – even if many people might be killed for that illusion”.

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.

In the era of the Sustainable Development Goals, local communities are almost always the lead development actor. In fact, a deeper examination of the goals’ underlying targets shows that almost 65 percent of them are supposed to be implemented by local governments. And yet the global financial architecture does not operate on that basis.

Around 80 percent of global GDP is already being generated in cities, while 68 percent of the total global population will be made up of urban residents by 2050, according to World Bank data

of the 1.4 billion-person increase in population projected to occur within developing countries by 2030, 96 percent are expected to live in urban areas. And 30 of the world’s 35 most rapidly growing cities are in the least-developed countries.

Relative to national governments, local governments are singularly positioned to advance projects to address climate change, including infrastructure projects for climate adaptation and resilience: They have the clearest understanding of local needs, they are able to convene local stakeholders to democratize the creation of a climate action plan, for example, and they can pass appropriate policies in much easier fashion than central governments.

cities are stuck between hoping that more money trickles down from the central government or accessing international credit. But in a nation-centric system, the second is often impossible

Under this nation-centric architecture, national debt determines whether cities can access international credit almost regardless of that city’s own debt profile

In Bangladesh, when cities were graded for credit at the local level, over a third of them attained a rating that was above investment grade. Yet those ratings make no difference, because Bangladeshi capital markets are not accessible by municipalities. The same is true for many cities in developing and least-developed countries, such as Kenya, Morocco, Botswana, and Indonesia.

between now and 2050, the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to more than triple, reaching approximately 1.3 billion people. Yet, barring fundamental changes, the region will likely lack the levels of capital investment necessary to finance development to support this population growth—including investment in infrastructure and urban planning, as well as commercial and residential real estate. If financing is not able to reach the local level, this will practically assure that the rise in urbanization in this part of the world, as well as others, will coincide with a rise in poverty—especially urban poverty and the growth of slums and unplanned communities—and its attendant consequences.

Urban areas can leverage their new capability and financial strength to help rural areas access international credit, whether by creating a pooled fund where urban and rural areas can issue a single bond or by collectively accessing thematic funds that focus on specific interests like climate change, women’s economic empowerment, or financial inclusion.

an independent municipal investment fund that will exclusively focus on delivering investment to local projects, notably in developing countries and particularly in the least-developed countries—the creation of which was supported by the United Nations Capital Development Fund, United Cities and Local Governments (an umbrella organization for local and regional governments around the world), and the Global Fund for Cities Development (their technical partner). The hope is that the successful investments will create demonstration effects that will incentivize public and private lenders to expand financing of the municipal finance space.

degrowth has come under severe criticism from pundits, mainstream economists, and the jet-setting Davos elite

austerity is always imposed for the sake of growth. We have been convinced, for half a century now, that cutting public services is good for us because it will increase competitiveness, balance the budget, and eventually lead to growth. Degrowth, by contrast, is the argument that we can, and should, move away from an economy that exclusively depends on economic growth.

While austerity increases inequality by curbing public services and benefitting the rich through tax cuts and privatisation of government services, degrowth policies focus on democratising production, curbing the wealth and overconsumption of the rich, expanding public services, and increasing equality within and between societies.

Recessions make inequality worse, degrowth is about making sure everyone has their needs met. Recessions often cause bold policies for sustainability to be abandoned for the sake of restarting growth, while degrowth is explicitly for a rapid and decisive transformation.

Because profits are based on making labour and nature as cheap as possible, the very basis of profit is always at risk, for example, through labour shortages or supply bottlenecks. Thus, constant economic expansion will also see constant crises.

As argued by Naomi Klein in the book Shock Doctrine, crises are often taken advantage of by the owners of capital because they make it possible to thrash social and ecological legislation, thus lowering the costs of wages and resources, and further generating windfall profits through inflation.

infrastructure projects which will lock in fossil fuel use for decades continue to be built and expanded, while banks, energy companies and multinationals that are involved in polluting and carbon-intensive industries are bailed out with public money and given lucrative government contracts

A recent UN report found that nine out of 10 countries worldwide have fallen behind on life expectancy, education and living standards. For decades, international organisations have promised to fight global inequality and poverty with growth – but the results are anything but promising.

guarantee access to “universal basic services” like housing, food, healthcare, mobility, and childcare to the general population, by taking them out of the market.

Germany’s three-month experiment with a $9 monthly ticket for all regional and city public transport could serve as an example. It not only reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 1.8 million tonnes – equivalent to powering about 350,000 homes for a year – but it also helped mitigate the effects of high inflation rates, increased freedom of mobility for all, and was quite popular with the public.

a 2020 research paper on energy sufficiency found that it is possible to provide a decent life to the entire global population at 40 percent of current energy use, despite population growth until 2050.

reducing the excess energy and resource use of the rich and making designs more efficient within the framework of a truly circular economy have huge potential to reduce demand

many people would likely possess fewer material objects – but most would have access to better services and society would be more sustainable, just, convivial, and fulfilling