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“It was slightly sad to me that the number one lesson from the first wave of transmission, which is that those countries that acted early had by far the best outcome and had lockdown in place for less time, was not remembered by the autumn.”

be believes Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel would have all gone for earlier lockdowns if they weren’t under enormous political pressure to keep their economies going.

By the same token, he acknowledges that no politician can hope to cancel Christmas, but there will be consequences in terms of a rise in transmission, though he thinks “it could be quite short-lived”.

he is excited about the “unprecedented levels of scientific collaboration and sharing of data” that have characterised research over the past year. In some ways, he says, the Covid crisis has been a “triumph of the scientific community and modern science”.

He would like to see the global commitment shown in the face of this pandemic replicated in dealing with climate crisis, which he says is going to kill many more people. The massive mobilisation of governments, funds and people we’ve seen “opens up vistas of possibilities that we maybe didn’t appreciate were even feasible at the beginning of this year”

When citizens cannot imagine security, politics becomes the distribution of insecurity, the allocation of fears and anxieties that push us away from an idea of common citizenship and toward authoritarianism. What is lethal for Americans is also lethal for our democracy.

I am an American historian who has seen the pandemic from both sides of the Atlantic, and who has just written a book about health care in the United States. When journalists from other countries ask me why so many Americans have died during the coronavirus pandemic, they phrase the question actively: “What have Americans done to bring about such needless mayhem?” And that is the right way to think about our COVID-19 policy. It is not a blundering, but a bludgeoning.

In other rich nations, it is easier to see a doctor and harder to die than in the United States. As I write these lines, I am sick in Austria. That means that if I call a doctor, I see her the same day, get tests right away, fill out no forms, and pay no fees. Without worries about access to care, I am a freer person. On the scale of a whole society, the gain in liberty is extraordinary. 

Lost to us are the political consequences: If we take for granted radical inequality and repeated emergencies in the realm of health, we are primed for authoritarianism in the realm of life.

Our babies and their mothers die at rates that Europeans find unbelievable. American Millennials will likely pay more for health care yet die younger than their parents and grandparents did. Life expectancy peaked here in 2014, even as it continues to rise elsewhere.

Americans pay twice as much per capita for health care as the citizens of peer countries do, for the privilege of dying years younger.

Many of us, by some calculations nearly half, simply avoid care because it seems unaffordable.

Those of us with insurance think about how good our insurance is, and where it will get us. Those of us who get access believe that we deserve it. It does not occur to us that the less-bad access we have is worse than what everyone has in countries with universal health care.

Too many of us take for granted that health and freedom are somehow in contradiction—and so we exclude our own bodies from our notion of rights. We treat as normal a system of commercial medicine in which decisions about life and death are made on the basis of profit.

ur sense that suffering is normal is also racial

Many white Americans regard their own suffering as virtuous, while maintaining that public health care would only be abused by Black people and immigrants. In other words, suffering is normal so long as others suffer more

In the health-care debate in the United States, proposals to extend coverage to all are decried as government overreach, socialism, even outright tyranny. But the lack of health security is what makes Americans vulnerable to demagogues and authoritarians.

Racial inequality brings unnecessary death. It also brings a sentiment that an authoritarian leader can exploit: Namely, that those who suffer the most are themselves at fault. When racism is a preexisting condition, the disproportionate death rates of Americans of color during a pandemic seem normal.

America’s only hope of stopping the COVID-19 pandemic was to do so at the outset. Such efforts have been mounted before. Under George W. Bush, the number of SARS cases in the U.S. was limited, and no one died. In 2014, the Obama administration took the fight against Ebola to West Africa, a prudent step that was normal then but that seems like science fiction now.

Before the novel coronavirus arrived in the U.S., the Trump administration dismantled the institutions that were responsible for early warning and early action

By telling Americans in February what they wanted to hear about the virus—that it was not serious, that it would disappear, that everyone could get a test—Trump ensured that death would be widespread.

By failing to institute a regime of testing, he made it normal for us to follow our own guesswork and emotions rather than dealing with facts.

The Trump administration announced a kind of new federalism, in which governors would have to show their loyalty to get federal assistance, and in which the Democratic ones would be blamed regardless of what happened

The bluster shrouded the basic decision, which was not to launch a federal response to the pandemic. No nationwide lockdown, no national testing initiative, no national contact-tracing initiative, no nationwide signaling on wearing masks and washing hands. This set the United States apart from every other comparable country.

After first blaming Democrats for not doing enough, Trump switched to blaming them for doing too much.

This is America’s basic problem: Health care is not a promise for all, but rather an expectation of the rich that they will do relatively better than the poor, and of white people that they will do relatively better than Black people

Suffering can seem meaningful if it affirms this basic order, even if that suffering is one’s own

Yet a democracy can become suffused with suffering, to the point where many voters do not even expect that policy might help them or loved ones stay well

An aspiring authoritarian such as Trump knows what to do: provide the emotional jolts of pleasure that distract from the general decline. “Winning” is no longer about gaining something for oneself, such as a healthier or longer life, but about taking pleasure in the suffering of others. This is a sensibility—the strong survive; the weak get what they deserve—that favors authoritarianism over democracy.

In this election, Americans face a choice not between individuals, but between regimes: between tyranny and a republic as forms of government, and between suffering and happiness as its aims. If Trump is defeated, our democracy should be reinforced by universal health care. Health and freedom collapse together, and they can be recovered together. We would be much freer as a people if we accorded ourselves health care as a right.

The decision on the new target comes just in time for the United Nations climate summit this Saturday

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said it was “worth losing a night’s sleep” over the climate deal. “I don’t want to imagine what would have happened if we hadn’t been able to achieve such a result,”

the details and language in the agreement were kept vague after many hours of often tense negotiations, leaving it up to the commission to hammer out the specifics.

The overnight discussions on climate, which has been declared as one of the European Union’s top priorities, have been obstructed by the familiar divisions between the wealthier Western European countries pushing for more ambitious targets, and a handful of Eastern European states, led by Poland, that depend heavily on coal.

In a gesture toward Eastern European governments, the E.U. leaders decided the target has to be reached by the bloc collectively — effectively giving coal-dependent countries more time to transition their energy consumption.

Five years after the Paris climate accords first brought together rich and poor countries in a politically binding agreement pledging to stem the rise of global temperatures, the European Commission laid out plans in March for a climate law that would make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050.

some climate activists expressed skepticism at the time, saying that it lacked intermediate goals and key details as to how the target would be turned into reality.

“European leaders have agreed a new target, with new money, and an outline of what will be needed to deliver,”

In the climate talks, Poland and Hungary — along with the Czech Republic and other heavily coal-dependent nations — said it was unfair that they be held to the same standard as other nations whose economies already drew on a wider mix of energy sources.

“We have an agreement which on the one hand allows us to realize the E.U. target, and on the other creates conditions for a just transition of the Polish economy and the energy sector,”

“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official told the authors

Johnson and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, backed Trump’s call for an in-person G7 summit at Camp David in the summer, which the US president saw as a way to show leadership and demonstrate that things were getting back to normal.

But the plan was torpedoed by Angela Merkel’s decision not to attend. According to Aftershocks, the refusal was only partly motivated by the German chancellor’s concern about the health risks of an in-person summit. She also thought her mere presence would be counterproductive to reaching agreement because of Trump’s viscerally hostile reaction to her.

Merkel told Trump of her decision not to come Camp David on 28 May and he reacted furiously, yelling and then hanging up on her. The president then announced the summit would be canceled and called into question the G7’s relevance, using the occasion to repeat his earlier calls for Russia to be readmitted.

“​​With the Europeans now fully estranged from the United States, for all practical purposes the G7 ceased to exist,” Wright and Kahl argue. “As Covid-19 swept through every part of the world in 2020, it would be every nation for itself.”

On the whole, European nations still have very different understandings of the rule of law and political order, different work ethics and conceptions of citizenship

The failure of convergence is most striking in Europe. True, a tiny sliver of European society is becoming more transnational. But only 2 percent of Europeans live in a different European nation than their country of citizenship.

The United States is a single nation with a common history, a common currency and a strong identity. Yet the country has become more polarized, not less. The country has become more difficult to govern, not less.

Less than 40 percent of Danes believe that work is a “very important” part of their lives, compared with roughly 65 percent of the French. More than 80 percent of the Croats believe that a parent’s duty is to do what’s best for their children, even at the expense of their own well-being. Only about 55 percent of Germans agree.

73 percent of Germans think that economic conditions are good right now. In France, 19 percent think that, and in Spain it’s 6 percent.

people in most Western nations are becoming more distrustful of their neighbors, not less. There are huge variations across nations, but levels of social and political trust have been declining almost everywhere except the Nordic countries. If there’s convergence, in other words, it’s in our increasing agreement that we don’t trust each other.

The euro crisis is not a crisis of debt. Total European debt levels are not that high. It’s a crisis of legitimacy. Debt burdens are divergent across nations, and Europeans with one set of habits and values do not want to bail out Europeans with other habits and values.

we face the likelihood that the euro will crack up. This is not an outcome to be desired. The ensuing recession and chaos could be horrible on both sides of the Atlantic. But we should prepare for a crackup because the underlying sense of shared identity required for the euro’s survival is not there.

The most popular major European politician is Angela Merkel, who is holding tough on more bailouts. She has 80 percent approval in Germany, 66 percent approval in Britain and 76 percent approval in France.

The larger issue is, how will the world cope with its own segmentation? How do you govern amid divergence? If multilateral organizations can’t bind nations, do we simply resort to an era of regional hegemons — or chaos?

The first step, surely, is abandoning the illusions of convergence and the schemes based upon them. In 1949, Niebuhr questioned the naïve belief that history drives toward unity. He cited the book of Psalms: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.”

The Senate deal, which was reached late Friday night, was a grudging concession by Democrats to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who has delayed the confirmation of dozens of President Biden’s nominees to protest what he called Mr. Biden’s weak opposition to the pipeline.

Mr. Cruz and others insist that Nord Stream 2 will provide Russia with a cash infusion and dangerous control over Europe’s energy supplies, while potentially costing Ukraine’s government around $3 billion in annual transit fees from a similar pipeline through its territory that Russia could circumvent.

“When the Senate reconvenes, we’ll finally have a vote on sanctioning Putin’s pipeline.”

It is a vote the Biden administration hoped to avoid. But in exchange, Mr. Cruz agreed to step aside and allow the confirmation of 36 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees, including 28 ambassadors

Biden officials said at the time that while they opposed construction of the pipeline, which will pump gas from the Russian Arctic to Germany through the Baltic Sea, the project was nearly complete by the time Mr. Biden took office and virtually impossible to stop. At this point, White House officials say, the cost of friction with the German government outweighs any potential loss to Mr. Putin.

some analysts say the pipeline may be less important to Mr. Putin than his longtime designs on Ukrainian territory.

A Dec. 7 call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin has done little to soothe the situation, and last week the Kremlin issued a set of demands that Biden officials called largely unacceptable.

Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close Biden ally who helped to negotiate the deal, said he would wait to see the final language in the measure and confer with Biden officials before deciding how he will vote. A State Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyMr. Coons said he recently met in Berlin with Olaf Sholz, who succeeded Angela Merkel this month as Germany’s chancellor. He noted the new German government’s pledge not to certify the pipeline until well into 2022.

“Imposing sanctions on a close ally like Germany when they are moving in the right direction is something that I would not do lightly,” Mr. Coons said.

“We need a fully staffed senior team at the State Department and at the United Nations, and ambassadors around the world,” Mr. Coons said. “And while I respect that senators of both parties have the right to use the occasional hold to force a policy discussion, I think this has gotten way out of hand.”

Schranz’s supporters contended the mystery man had been a French policeman or soldier who had purposely interfered with the run to ensure Killy’s victory. The French hinted Schranz had made up the story."I was descending and I saw a dark shadow ahead of me," Schranz said at a news conference. "I wanted to avoid it, and I stopped. It was apparently a ski policeman."

The women's luge competition at the Grenoble Games was all but a lock for East Germany. Defending champ and gold-medal favorite Ortrun Enderlein stood in first; teammates Anna-Maria Müller and Angela Knösel were second and fourth. 

Jewtraw's win, by 1/5 of a second, stunned him. too. In a 1983 interview with Sports Illustrated, Jewtraw said he had never competed in the 500 prior to the gold-medal race and hadn't even trained for the Games.

A month before the 1994 Winter Games, a man wielding a metal baton attacked gold- medal favorite Kerrigan during a practice at the U.S. Nationals, paving the way for Harding to win the event and to qualify for the Olympics. Soon afterward, however, it was discovered that Harding’s ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, had planned the attack. With Kerrigan recovered—and Harding allowed to compete despite her not-yet-confirmed connection to the crime—the women’s figure skating competition became the hottest event at the Olympics. TV ratings soared.

Ice dancing got a dose of spy games in Nagano, Japan, when a Canadian judge secretly taped a conversation with another judge about picking winners before the competition.After her complaints to officials had been brushed aside, Jean Senft recorded Ukrainian judge Yuri Balkov discussing skater placements as proof of her accusations. During the call, Balkov said he would vote for Canadians if Senft voted for a Ukrainian pair."The athletes are not competing on a fair playing field," Senft later told CBC News. "This isn't sport. Somebody had to get proof."

were made. (Ice dancing was not removed from Olympic competition.) "If [cheating] happens at the world championships in some small town, nobody notices," Pound said, according to The New York Times. "But in the Olympics, hundreds of millions of people are watching."

The Russian team of Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze edged Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier for the gold medal. But Marie-Reine Le Gougne, a French judge, came forward, saying she was pressured by the French ice sports federation to put the Russians first. “I knew very well who would vote in favor of the Russians and who would vote in favor of the Canadians," she told Reuters. "I was almost certain that I was the one who would award the Olympic title. What I feared would happen really did.”

Le Gougne was suspended from judging for three years and banned from the 2006 Winter Games. The scandal led to sweeping judging reforms in the sport. 

It means scrapping rules about weapons exports, a huge boost in defence spending and an end to Russian energy imports. A Russian gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream 2 has already been suspended.

"For the foreseeable future, co-operation with Russia will not occur. It will be more about containment and deterrence and, if needed, defence against Russia," Mr Schmid tells me.

Unexpectedly hawkish words for a party that until seven weeks ago believed Germany's historical guilt and moral duty to make up for Nazi crimes meant peace with Russia at all costs.

Even Germany's view of its own history is changing.

Until the invasion mainstream opinion was that German reunification was thanks to dialogue with Moscow by another SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt. But now the debate has shifted, with reminders that Mr Brandt's diplomacy was backed up by strong deterrence, including a West German defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The issue of German historical war guilt has also become more nuanced. Before the invasion the government argued against weapon deliveries to Ukraine because of Nazi crimes against Russia.

"Under Putin, official Russian policy tried to monopolise the memory of the Second World War for the bilateral German-Russian relationship," explains Mr Schmid. This blinded parts of German society to the suffering of Ukrainians during he war, he adds.

Now there is a greater awareness of Ukraine's traumas under the Nazis.

Berlin's rhetoric has shifted dramatically. But some ask whether actions are following fast enough. Certainly warm words of support are not enough for Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. He has criticised Germany's continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.

Olaf Scholz has to keep his party onside, govern in a three-way coalition and overturn Germany's guilt-laden pacifist identity overnight.

certainly German politicians and commentators interpret the failed visit as a sign of Ukraine's distrust in the German president, who as foreign minister under Angela Merkel spent years trying to achieve peace by engaging with Russia.

"Our partners look at us, and say: OK, you do a Zeitenwende but what are you practically doing?" she says. "On sanctions we are timid and on weapons delivery, we are reluctant. So, rightly, they wonder what that Zeitenwende is about, and given that Germany is a big economic, military, political power in the middle of Europe, whatever we do makes a difference, in good ways and bad."

"This is a dilemma that Germany has created itself," argues political scientist Liana Fix, head of the Körber Foundation. "That's obviously difficult to accept for other countries, who are willing to go ahead with an embargo and have done their homework on energy diversification."

Ironically, it's a Green Party politician, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, from a party that for years has been calling for energy independence from Russia, who is having to solve this dilemma.

On military support for Ukraine, Berlin says it is prepared to send whatever weapons Kyiv needs. But there are allegations that some ministries are getting tied up in bureaucracy. Here, too, it is a Green politician, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is pushing the governing coalition to go faster. She has called for heavy weaponry, such as tanks or fighter jets, for Ukraine.

In a BBC interview last week, Mr Zelensky called payments for Russian energy "blood money". And a planned visit to Kyiv by President Steinmeier was cancelled at the last minute.

But even his allies say the chancellor should at least communicate better what's going on

Meanwhile, it feels like many individual Germans are going through their own Zeitenwende. Ariane Bemmer, a columnist for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, has written about reassessing her own feelings towards Russia. "I definitely got it wrong, it's like losing a friend,"

Like many in the former West Germany in the 1980s, she was wary of US-style cutthroat capitalism. She bought a book called Ami Go Home - she never read it, but felt it would look good on her bookshelf - and was intrigued by the reforms in Russia.

"In America you had Ronald Reagan as a president, which was a shock for us. We thought: what will he do, this crazy actor with his cowboy boots? Will he set the world on fire? Russia was a place where all the good changes were, perestroika, freedom, wind of change," she says.

Few in Germany think that now. In one recent poll, 55% of Germans said Berlin should send heavy weapons, such as tanks and fighter jets, to Ukraine to fight against Russia.

For Ariane, and many other Germans, any lingering Russophile romanticism vanished for good the day Putin's tanks rolled over Ukraine's border.

Some executives like Mr. Haeusgen are embracing transformation, testing new strategies and markets. Other businesses, however, are wary of abandoning a model that for decades enabled Germany to thrive but defied change.

Hawe’s handling of international affairs is not just a concern for its 2,700 employees. The economies of some German towns depend on it.

In Kaufbeuren, a brightly painted Bavarian town nestled below the Alps, Hawe is a top employer. In the tiny village of Sachsenkam, 60 miles to the west, Hawe provides 250 jobs — the next largest employer is the local brewery, with a staff of 17.

“It’s like we were successful for too long,” said Stefan Bosse, the mayor of Kaufbeuren, who is keen to attract other businesses to diversify the employers his town relies on. “Now, gradually, we see: ‘Uh oh — this is not a given. This can also be endangered.’

The archetypal Mittelstand company is based in a rural German town, making a piece of equipment few have heard of, but that is crucial for goods worldwide — like a screw needed for every airplane or passenger car.

The government, too, has a poor record in shedding outdated practices — like its labyrinth, paperwork-based bureaucracy. In 2017, it vowed by 2022 to digitalize its 575 most used services, like company registrations. A year past that deadline, said Mr. Bianchi, only 22 percent of those services are online.

“The German business model, particularly Mittelstand, is being extremely good at doing one thing: Slowly but steadily perfecting one product,” said Mathias Bianchi, spokesman for the German Mittelstand Association. “Because that worked so well for years, they had no need to adapt to changes. But now, they need to adjust to the new economic reality.”

Even as the tech revolution and climate change added strain in recent decades, Germany’s model plodded profitably along.

But the pillars it relied on to do that — cheap Russian natural gas and the Chinese market — are collapsing.

Staking out a socioeconomic transformation for the country, pledged by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, has become a source of national anxiety.

Like its population, Germany’s business owners and entrepreneurs are aging — the average Mittelstand association member is 55.

Some are resistant to adapting to new technologies and cling to a loyalty-based system that created lifetime employees — and customers

How Hawe and other midsize German companies navigate these new global forces will be critical to the country’s future prosperity. Though Germany’s 20th century success as the economic powerhouse of Europe is often seen through its biggest brands — like Volkswagen, Mercedes and Siemens — it is small and medium enterprises that are the backbone of its economy.

Such failures makes businesses wary of transformation plans the government says will be costly now, but will make Germany a diversified, digitized and climate neutral economy.

Over half the companies polled did not want to expand in Germany, and a quarter were considering relocating.

Marita Riesner, inspecting parts, said her heating costs spiked to 740 euros ($803) a month from 120 euros ($130). She and her neighbors are growing vegetable gardens to ease the pain of inflation as the country dips into recession.

“I was a very positive thinker before,” she said. “But these days, I’m sweating it. It seems a lot is going wrong.”

Should geopolitical events disrupt business with China, Mr. Haeusgen said, the consequences could eliminate more than half of Hawe’s jobs in Kaufbeuren. Currently, he said, 20 percent of Hawe’s business comes from China.

Some business groups raised alarm in recent years over Germany’s vast exposure to China — before the risks were taken seriously by former chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which had heavily encouraged German-Chinese trade.

Today, some policymakers privately worry that an event like a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be an inescapable disaster for Germany’s economy. The government is now pushing “de-risking” by finding alternatives to trade with China.

The new socioeconomic model for Germany may be less about erecting pillars than managing an ever more intricate, international juggling act.

German officials say their strategy will maintain ties to China, but will counterbalance that by strengthening relationships with other nations, like India or Vietnam

The Mittelstand is doing the same: Hawe is investing heavily in India, where it plans to build a new plant, and other companies are looking to North America.

“It used to be that we made a majority of sales with three customers from China,” he said. “Now we have many, many smaller customers scattered all over the globe.

Instead of making a few parts at a huge scale, as cheaply as possible, Hawe must make a wide variety of parts for an array of customers, as quickly as possible.

But major brands like Volkswagen and BASF insist that China, as the world’s second-largest economy, is too important a market to give up. Such German-based multinationals are responsible for a 20 percent rise in foreign direct investment in China this year.

“Being able to live with and manage uncertainty and to handle complexity becomes, in my opinion, a core strength,” Mr. Haeusgen said. “The way my grandpa did it won’t work today.”

Should they pivot further right themselves and risk their centrist identity? Should they continue to try to isolate the AfD? Or, as that becomes increasingly difficult, should they break longstanding norms and work with the AfD instead?

For now, the AfD has the political winds at its back. Germany’s support for Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s invasion — and the energy and refugee crises the war has provoked — has fueled German anxiety and, along with it, support for the AfD.

And whereas Ms. Merkel famously declared “We can do it!” at the peak of Europe’s immigration crisis in 2015, Mr. Merz has adopted a more hawkish tone.

“The C.D.U., its more moderate worldview and its moderate position is not really equipped for the situation of this time, when we are having a war, when we have in the energy crisis, with high costs and now with a government which tries to ideologically influence people’s lives,” Mr. Voigt, the leader of the C.D.U. in Thuringia’s state parliament, said.

Some political experts view the resurgence of the AfD as a rejection of Ms. Merkel’s policies — particularly her immigration and climate-friendly stances. That has created a particularly awkward situation for current members of the party.

Much of the party’s angst has been channeled into pummeling the climate-friendly Greens, a part of Chancellor Scholz’s governing coalition. Conservatives blame the Greens for stoking anti-Berlin sentiment in the more rural, economically depressed areas where the AfD enjoys strong support.

“This together, in my opinion, forces the C.D.U. to answer the question: What is your DNA? What is your different perspective?”

“The refugee crisis is present again, combined with the uneasy feeling that there is always enough money for refugees, but less and less for kindergartens, schools and hospitals,” he wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, explaining the rise of the AfD.

Jan Redmann, the party leader in Brandenburg, said in an interview that he believed that C.D.U. members had inadvertently allowed the AfD to define their positions on crucial issues like immigration, because they “tried not to be mixed up with” the far-right party.

, it’s the day to day violence that is most eroding the nation’s morale.  

Many of these new arrivals are economic migrants, willing to put in the hours and the effort that young westerners no longer are. Absenteeism levels hit record levels in Britain and France last year, with Monday and Friday the days when workers were most often not to be seen. As a consequence productivity in both countries is falling; in Britain’s case growth in output per hour worked is forecast to average 0.25 per cent a year over the next three years, down from 2 per cent in the first decade of the century. 

In his 2005 book, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the historian Bryan Ward-Perkins concluded with a warning for the West: ‘Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.’

If anything, the reverse has been the case: responses to the pandemic sharply diverged, even within entities like the European Union, ostensibly committed to common policies.

Mercifully, it has not all been a zero-sum game. In late March 2021, 25 world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, Johnson, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Cyril Ramaphosa, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the head of the European Council, Charles Michel, as well as the prime ministers of South Korea, Fiji, Thailand, Chile, Senegal and Tunisia – but, depressingly, missing the leaders of the US, Japan, Russia and China – issued a statement explicitly acknowledging the chain linking human and non-human lives and destinies. Invoking the multilateralist idealism of the years following the second world war that sought a reconnected world through the United Nations and agencies like the WHO, they proposed a legally binding international treaty to deal with future pandemics. Such a treaty would embody “an approach that connects the health of humans, animals and our planet”

two years’ experience of the pandemic, in particular the unpredictable incidence of recurring outbreaks and viral mutations, has made the locking off of discrete zones of exclusion all but impossible. The need for an alternative, transnational approach to containment, mitigation and protection, coordinated by the WHO, has never been more urgent

Before long, any possibility of a clear and honest understanding of the common worldwide conditions that allowed such disasters to happen, not least the biological consequences of environmental degradation, became swallowed up by this default vocabulary of competitive nationalism.

To some extent, the raising of walls, psychological and institutional, is understandable. The instinctive reaction to contagion breaking out somewhere distant is to erect barriers against its importation

This moment in world history is no less fraught for being so depressingly familiar: the immemorial conflict between “is” and “ought”; between short-term power plays and long-term security; between the habits of immediate gratification and the prospering of future generations; between the cult of individualism and the urgencies of common interest; between the drum beat of national tribalism and the bugle call of global peril; between native instinct and hard-earned knowledge

If it is a happy answer you want to the question as to which will prevail, it is probably best not to ask a historian. For history’s findings are more often than not tragic, and its boneyard littered with the remains of high-minded internationalist projects.

The appeals of idealists fill whole-page declarations in earnest broadsheets and win funds from far-sighted philanthropic foundations. But the plans and the planners are demonised by the tribunes of gut instinct as suspiciously alien, hatched by cosmopolitan elites: the work of foreign bodies.

My high level of vaccine antibodies probably explains my success more than my behavior. I make some effort to avoid Covid, but have been far from perfect. And I’ve been potentially exposed at least twice: Once last December, when someone at a small holiday gathering I’d attended developed symptoms the next day, and more recently, when I shared a large indoor space with two people who later tested positive. But according to my lab work, I’ve never had even a silent infection.

As for me, I have some data that can, to an extent, quantify and explain my own good luck in avoiding Covid so far. I’m participating in a study on immunity which allowed me to learn that my blood still carries loads of antibodies induced by my vaccine and December booster shot, and no signs of any prior infection. Not everyone’s antibodies wane at the same rate, and in some people, the antibodies don’t wane much at all. (At some point it should become routine to collect this information to help people decide whether to get additional booster shots.)

But one piece of advice almost no one is giving? Be lucky. Pediatrician Neil Stone says that there’s no “secret” for staying Covid-19 free because there’s just too much luck involved.

It’s possible I was protected by my high antibodies, or that some quirk of air flow meant I never breathed in enough virus to get sick. Or perhaps I benefited from a different form of luck. There’s another facet to immunity called the innate immune system, which acts as a first line of defense and sometimes knocks out a virus or other pathogen before it replicates enough to elicit the production of antibodies. Good innate immunity might help explain something many of us have experienced — not getting a cold or flu even when sleeping in the same bed with the sick person through the whole illness.

Stress, diet, general health and even sunlight might all affect innate immunity. So could other factors. There’s so much we still don’t know about the immune system. And that’s one reason we talk about “luck.”

understanding how the luck works could help other people avoid Covid, whether for the first time or for the second or third time. Taking a closer look at what passed for luck helped researchers like Gary Taubes discover that public health had obesity all wrong, and the standard high carb/low fat diets were causing people to gain weight.

So what accounts for the dogged support Berlin extends to Israel in its war against Hamas? You must look beyond immediate crisis. Germany’s foreign policy establishment has suffered a deep shock, indeed the second one, after last year’s realisation that Russia could not be appeased by diplomatic overtures, pipeline deals and “change through trade”

When Israel used excessive violence in earlier Gaza wars, Germany raised public concerns. Berlin has constantly criticised the expansion of settlements. More than a decade ago, the then foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, called the situation in Hebron (in the occupied West Bank) “apartheid”. Berlin has supported the Palestinian Authority with over €1bn, and is among the top donors to Unwra, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees.

Similarly, Germany had pushed for diplomacy to deal with Iran’s nuclear and regional ambitions.

Then the Gazan member of Iran’s axis of resistance attacked Israel on 7 October. The Jewish state is trapped in a pincer movement between Hamas and Hezbollah – and the possibility of a wider war. This is an existential crisis for Israel.

The cornerstones of Germany’s foreign policy have crumbled. Engagement with Russia and Iran has failed. This is the view from Berlin: these two powers must be stopped, and that includes the destruction of Hamas. This is the reason for Germany’s staunch support of Israel’s war against Hamas, notwithstanding the deep distrust of Netanyahu – and the wish to see him gone as soon as hostilities end.

Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.

And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.

The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.

The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.

The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect

Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.

the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position

The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.

politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda

When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”

More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.

Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”

In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.

Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks

it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.

Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.

Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.

The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.

Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.

German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.

Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.

The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.

everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”

It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction

Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.

The two argued that democracy “can be realized in multiple ways” and isn’t the prerogative of any one country or group of countries. It called China “a whole-process, socialist democracy” and said democracy was the fundamental principle of Russia’s “democratic federative law-governed state.”

The Feb. 4 joint statement said both countries “have profound democratic traditions rooted in a thousand years of development,

It was Beijing that suggested including that the two countries’ friendship has “no limits”—wording read with apprehension in the West—according to the officials and advisers. The intention was less a declaration China would stand by Russia in case of war than a strong message to the U.S. about the resolve the two have in confronting what they see as increased American threats, the people said.

“China’s eagerness to present a strong alignment with Russia to counter the U.S. caused it to miss all the signs and to go in a dangerous direction,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank focused on promoting peace and security.

“It’s undeniable that right now, China is occupying an awkward nexus in which they’re trying to sustain their deep and fundamental relationship with Russia,”

“We believe they chose not to weigh in in advance.”

Beijing has refrained from coming to Moscow’s aid in a significant way. China is taking steps to buy Russian farm and energy products. But it is complying with the more damaging financial sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Russia, for fear of losing access to the dollar-dominated global trading system, say some Chinese bankers. They say their default position is to comply with the sanctions unless higher-ups tell them otherwise.

China’s ambiguous stance on the Russia-Ukraine war will likely speed up moves by countries from the U.K. and Australia to Japan to guard against Beijing,

a planned summit between China and the EU for April, if it isn’t canceled, is now likely to be dominated by discussions of China’s position on Ukraine.

Beijing’s most difficult contortions are on territorial sovereignty. China has built its foreign policy around the principle that a country’s territory is inviolable and its internal affairs should be free from interference by others.

China’s commitment to that principle seemingly would force it to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something it has refrained from doing. Its policy statements have called for dialogue to resolve the crisis, avoiding the word invasion. Meanwhile, Western officials worry that Russia’s actions based on the argument that Ukraine is historically a part of Russia could embolden China to step up its own long-stated goal to bring Taiwan into its fold.

Since rising to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has made himself the dominant force in China’s foreign policy and put emphasis on what he calls “big-power diplomacy”—a marked change from the relatively unassuming foreign-policy agendas of previous Chinese leaders that featured compromise and focused on building up ties with the U.S.

Today, despite Chinese state media’s pro-Russia rhetoric, some advisers privately question whether the partnership could cut China off from Western technologies and other resources and hurt its development, according to the foreign-policy advisers. After all, they have noted in private discussions, it is China’s opening to the U.S. and its allies that has propelled enormous Chinese growth in the past four decades.

China and Russia’s shared interest in confronting the U.S. has helped drive their relationship to its closest point since early in the Cold War. Part of that is due to the personal ties between Messrs. Xi and Putin, authoritarians who have visions of restoring their countries to past glory, even if in China’s case that past was centuries ago.

Sergey Radchenko, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, pointed to instances where Mr. Putin would be deliberately late for meetings with foreign dignitaries. On one occasion, he brought out his dog to a meeting with then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel who, Mr. Putin knew, was terrified of dogs.

“He would never let himself do anything like that to Xi,” Mr. Radchenko said. “He’s extremely respectful to Xi because he sees a close relationship with China as one of Russia’s most valuable political assets.”

the Telluride workshops were being organized by two college-age students, filled with the spirit of the times

From what I gleaned, they involved crudely conveying certain dogmatic assertions, no matter what topic the workshops were ostensibly about:Experiencing hardship conveys authority. There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for anti-black oppression, which is in a class of its own. Trust black women.Prison is never the answer.Black people need black space.Allyship is usually performative.All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness.There is no way out of anti-blackness.

It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.

Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete.

The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.

Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes

By its nature, a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions

If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.

“Two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program.”In the 2022 anti-racism workshops, the non-black students learned that they needed to center black voices—and to shut up.

The effects on the seminar were quick and dramatic. During the first week, participation was as you would expect: There were two or three shy students who only spoke in partner or small-group work, two or three outspoken students, and the rest in the middle. One of the black students was outspoken, one was in the middle, and one was shy. By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent

In their “transformative-justice” workshop, my students learned to name “harms.”

In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. My seminar became the site at which to try out—and weaponize—this language.

John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult

the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat.

The feature of a cult that seems to be missing from this story is a charismatic leader, enforcing the separation of followers from the world, creating emotional vulnerability, and implanting dogma. Enter Keisha

Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse: Pathological relationships that cut us off from the world, from the give-and-take of reasons and feelings unfolding over time that makes up life in the world.

We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered

The experience was supposed to be organized around a “transformative justice,” rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members.

Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change

The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all, but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.

Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them