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Saudi-backed forces have since regained control of Aden and talks are under way to end the power struggle over the city, news agencies report.

US lawmakers have reacted with outrage to CNN's new findings. One of them, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a frontrunner to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 2020, said: "One report of US military equipment ending up in the hands of our enemies is troubling. Two reports is deeply disturbing."

When asked whether it knew if its technology was ending up in the wrong hands in Yemen, Real Time Laboratories told CNN they had supplied the product to BAE Systems in 2010 under a US government subcontract, but "cannot comment on what the US Government may have eventually done with this vehicle."

It, like several other pieces of weaponry that CNN identified, can be traced back to a $2.5 billion arms sale contract between the US and the UAE in 2014. Like all arms deals, this contract was bound by an end user agreement which certifies the recipient -- in this case the UAE -- as the final user of the weaponry. From this evidence, it is clear that this agreement has been broken.

One of the most prominent is a group known as Alwiyat al Amalqa or "Giants Brigade" -- a predominantly Salafi, or ultra-conservative Sunni -- militia supported by the UAE. One of their videos shows a US-made MaxxPro MRAP vehicle, purportedly being driven in convoy to join the separatists' battle against government forces in the south.

Not only is US weaponry being used directly against America's allies in Yemen, but its presence also plays into Iranian propaganda in the region. The latest example of this saw footage being broadcast on a pro-Iranian Lebanese channel that showed US-made armored vehicles being unloaded into a Yemeni port off UAE ships. It turned out this footage was not recent, but the broadcast indicates the presence of US hardware in Yemen continues to be a card played by America's enemies.

With the conflict spiraling and the role of US weapons in its deterioration becoming clearer, all while the humanitarian crisis deepens by the day, the Pentagon has pledged to investigate how its military hardware ended up in the wrong hands.

Senator Chris Murphy authored an amendment to the annual US defense spending bill, which is currently being debated in Washington, that would cut off support for the Saudi-led coalition until the Secretary of Defense could certify that both the Saudis and Emiratis have stopped transferring US weapons to third parties in Yemen. It's just one of recent bipartisan efforts in the US Congress to address US military involvement in Yemen.

Sen. Murphy responded to CNN's latest findings, saying: "For years, US-made weapons have been fueling the conflict in Yemen and it's no surprise they are now ending up in the hands of private militias."

A UN-commissioned panel of experts recommended that the US, UK and France "refrain from providing arms to parties to the conflict" because of "the prevailing risk that such arms will be used by parties to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law."

When President Trump announced this month that he would pull American troops out of northern Syria and make way for a Turkish attack on the Kurds, Washington’s onetime allies, many warned that he was removing the spearhead of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Although Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared victory over the Islamic State — even boasting to congressional leaders last week that he had personally “captured ISIS” — it remains a threat. After the loss in March of the last patch of the territory it once held across Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State dispersed its supporters and fighters to blend in with the larger population or to hide out in remote deserts and mountains.

Changes in the political context in Syria and Iraq have diminished the Islamic State’s ability to whip up sectarian animosity out of the frustrations of Sunni Muslims over the Shiite or Shiite-linked authorities in Syria and Iraq — the militants’ trademark.

Mr. Trump first said last December that he intended to withdraw the last 2,000 American troops from Syria; the Pentagon scaled that back, pulling out about half of those troops.

And within hours of Mr. Trump’s announcement almost two weeks ago that American forces were moving away from the Syrian border with Turkey, two ISIS suicide bombers attacked a base of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the Syrian city of Raqqa.

But now the American withdrawal and the Turkish incursion are threatening the informal supervision of those former prisoners, Ms. Khalifa said, creating a risk that some might gravitate back to fighting for the Islamic State.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has insisted repeatedly that Turkey should take over the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. “It’s going to be your responsibility,” Mr. Trump said he told the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women.

The square-limbed crusader cross

is a symbol often spotted on white supremacist marches.

The crusades – the long series of wars fought between 1096 and 1492 under the direction of medieval popes against a wide range of enemies of many different faiths, including Sunni and Shia Muslims – have long been fascinating to the extreme right wing, both in the United States and elsewhere.

Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand, where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping at mosques in Christchurch. The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of Taranto, prince of Antioch.

The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and in which there can only be one victor. Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a way.

In other words, the medieval crusades did indeed contain a clear spine of conflict between Christian and Islamic powers. It is also true that at certain times, these wars were essentially spiritual: that is to say, making war on unbelievers, either through the crusade or its Islamic equivalent, the jihad, was an end in itself. Yet we do not have to look very far at all to realize that the story is rather more complex than it appears.

for all that modern zealots like to paint the crusades as a period of mutual hostility between Christians and Muslims, the truth is that the story was more often one of co-operation, trade and co-existence between people of different faiths and backgrounds.

None of this nuanced history tends to appear in the manifestos of terrorists, or would-be car-bombers. They are content, alas, to perpetuate an idea of the crusades that is binary and zero-sum: an us-or-them narrative designed to justify hatred, racist vitriol, violence and even murder. The medieval crusades were a largely dreadful misdirection of religious enthusiasm towards painful and bloody ends. They were neither a glorious clash of civilizations, nor a model for the world as it is today.

My daughter hasn’t shown any sort of symptoms, let’s say. For me, I can feel it in my lungs, my throat has felt weird

Slovenian tennis player Dalila Jakupovic fell to her knees in a coughing fit on Wednesday while competing in a qualifying match for the Australian Open in Melbourne.

Hospital admissions have increased in the smoke-affected cities, with some patients suffering from asthma for the first time in their lives. The government has responded by distributing 3.5 million free particle-excluding masks.

Short-term exposure to wildfire smoke can worsen existing asthma and lung disease, leading to emergency room treatment or hospitalization, studies have shown.

There is little known about the long-term effects of wildfire smoke because of difficulties in studying populations years after a wildfire.

"If the US leaves, people across the region will think that despite his flowery rhetorical devices, Trump does not really have a strategy for the Middle East and at the end of the day will fold and go home," Gerges said.

Watling questioned what Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran was aiming to achieve. Iran's long-term strategy in Iraq, on the other hand, is paying off.

Much of Iran's power in Iraq comes through militia groups that have roots in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war. Recruiting fighters from Iraq wasn't that difficult. Iraq was a Shia-majority nation led for more than two decades by brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, born a Sunni. Iran, which has long pitched itself as the world's leader of Shia Muslims, took in Shia prisoners of war and refugees, and turned them into soldiers who would go back to Iraq to act in Tehran's interests, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Some became part of what is now known as the Badr Organization, the report said, both a militia group and an anti-US political party in Iraq today.

As Iran made steady headway in the Iraqi government and military, the US' objective in Iraq has changed so many times that it's become muddy and unfocused.

According to Watling, there are now around 113,000 salaried personnel in the powerful Tehran-backed Iraqi militia group. Of those, some 60,000 are actively deployable as fighters, and of those, 36,000 are directed by Iran.

Despite achieving the regime change the US was looking for, with the capture and execution of Saddam, the US left Iraq in 2011 with an unsteady government in place. It had no choice but to send troops back to put out fires with the spread of ISIS. Iran also took part in the fight against ISIS, but it continued with its drive to boost influence in Iraq.

Anti-government protesters galvanized by deep economic grievances that have accumulated over many years have found themselves facing off with Iranian-backed forces.

Central to Islamic beliefs are the Five Pillars of Faith, which all followers of Islam — called Muslims — must follow:: There is only one universal God: Allah. Followers of Islam (Muslims) are expected to pray five times each day while facing Mecca. All Muslims are expected to pay a yearly tax that is mostly intended to help the poor and needy. For the entire month of Ramadan, Muslims must not eat, smoke, drink, or have sexual relations from sunrise to sunset. All able Muslims must make a pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca at least once in their lifetimes.

Muhammad's message was especially well received by the poor and slaves.

In 622, fearing for his life, Muhammad fled to the town of Medina. This flight from Mecca to Medina became known as the Hegira

Muhammad fought a number of battles against the people of Mecca. In 629, Muhammad returned to Mecca with an army of 1500 converts to Islam and entered the city unopposed and without bloodshed. Before his death two years later, he forcefully converted most of the Arabian Peninsula to his new faith and built a small empire.

Unfortunately, Muhammad had not designated a successor. The struggle over leadership that followed his death has divided Muslims to this day, creating a division in Islam between the Sunnis and Shiites.

Despite these problems, a vast Islamic empire was created over the next 12 centuries that would build a base of worshipers unrivaled by any other religion.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.

As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan

The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.

Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.

“It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”

in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.

the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.

It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.

The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.

Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.

Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”

When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.

If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.

In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.

That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.

the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.

It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.

t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.

In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.

Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.

Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.

The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.

A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach

Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”

A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.

A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.

Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics

It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.

Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.

This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.

Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.

More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found

More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide

So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.

The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism

An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.

During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization

Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks

Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives

And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.

“It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.

Moreover, there’s a strong possibility that the virus hit care facilities so hard not just because those elderly patients were so extra-vulnerable but because those elderly patients were in an institution, unable to isolate themselves

Another possibility is that we understand the risks but have collectively realized that long-term self-isolation is unsustainable, and that we’re all going to get it eventually, so we might as well start now.

If we’ve really decided to accept our own mortality with a certain cheerful fatalism, though, why go through the motions of carefully positioning those cafeteria chairs six feet apart?

a third possibility: Americans have neither the stoicism to actually bear the risk of dying from covid-19 nor the fortitude to embark on an indefinite period of rigorous self-isolation

Nor, even if we could muster those qualities, could we get a majority of our fellow countrymen to go along.

so, instead of deciding upon some basically rational course of action, we have collectively agreed to forget the things we could no longer bear to know.

In other words, one can hardly imagine a comparatively safer environment than a sunny, windy ocean beach. It’s not that there is any activity with absolutely zero risk, but the beach may well be as good as it gets—if people stay socially distant, which is much easier to do on a big beach.

But what about the indoor restaurants, packed shops, and house parties at vacation hot spots by those beaches? These activities represent a real risk, and especially given what scientists have found elsewhere, it’s crucial to emphasize that the crowded indoors appears to be conducive to transmitting this virus efficiently.

Furious scolding about the least risky part of a potentially risky chain of activities is certain to backfire. When we scold, people stop listening, especially when they figure out that the scolding isn’t evidence-based—and they eventually will.

For example, more than a few Germans “without a migration background” find it impressive when binational children speak Spanish or English in addition to German, only to get up in arms when Turkish or Lebanese children switch to their native language in lieu of German.

But there’s also racism by minorities against mainstream society as well as against other minorities. It’s not uncommon that marriages or even friendships are forbidden not only between migrants and Germans, but also between Turks and Kurds, or Moroccans and African-Germans, or Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, or Muslims and atheists.

As children often emulate their parents and others in their surroundings, it begs the question: Have some migrants become xenophobes themselves? Or are all people more or less racists?

Within many of these communities, the lack of integration assistance reinforces a general dismissal of the culture of their host country

To fill the void, the well-trodden reactionary, patriarchal – read: religious – structures so widespread in many of their home countries take hold. The goal here has not been to foster integration, but rather to establish a parallel society defined by the norms of the cultures from which the newcomers came, cultures that are often diametrically opposed to the democratic societies of Germany and France.

After the brutal murder of George Floyd, the racism debate reignited across the globe. This is a good thing. However, as a woman with a migration background, I find the current discussion surrounding “white privilege” both ethnocentric and misleading.

“Being white” once again dominates the discourse as human rights violations are displaced from center stage. This is the approach of several no-doubt well-intentioned anti-racist activists. But their proponents should be aware that they are once again reducing individuals to the color of their skin.

The idea here is to target the unjust system, not the people it represents. The goal should be to combat the causes and instruments that prevent the equitable and respectful coexistence of fellow humans.

The economic and linguistic integration of migrants is indispensable. But in order to become responsible citizens within mainstream society, they must come to terms with the state’s liberal democratic system of norms and find their bearings in relation to the enlightenment and the advantages of a humanist secular democracy.

The French philosopher and author Henri Peña-Ruiz recently wrote: “To effectively fight racism, there are two invaluable maxims. The first is to remain vigilant as to the singularity of the human species

The second is to reject any abstract stratification of human groups, independent of whether this may derive from assertions related to nature or culture. An individual should never be drowned in a feeling of affiliation, nor should an ethnicity be judged through a global lens.”

This underscores that a relativistic approach to culture has the further disadvantage of discouraging migrants from questioning and debating their community’s norms that may violate certain human rights. This results in the deprivation of a migrant’s opportunity to develop into a responsible citizen, which in itself is a form of racism.

Naïla Chikhiborn in 1980 in Algiers, is a cultural scientist who works as an independent advisor and consultant in the fields of integration and women’s issues.

Earlier the same day, Mr. Trump ridiculed the notion that the virus was spreading rapidly again, falsely telling a crowd in Lansing, Mich., that the reported “spike in cases” was merely a reflection of increased testing

His determination to brush aside the ongoing crisis as a campaign issue has become the defining choice of his bid for a second term and the core of his message throughout the campaign’s endgame.

a Marquette University Law School poll published Wednesday showed that 58 percent of voters there disapproved of the president’s handling of the pandemic. Mr. Biden was leading Mr. Trump in the crucial state by five percentage points.

The country has reported more than 8.8 million cases of the coronavirus, including a 39 percent increase in new cases over the last 14 days.

More than 227,000 Americans have perished from the disease.

There is considerable evidence it is not working. The stock market, long the focal point of Mr. Trump’s cheerleading efforts, plunged by more than 900 points on Wednesday, suffering its worst drop in months as investors grappled with the mounting disruptions wrought by the pandemic. Polling and interviews with voters show that most are not inclined to trust Mr. Trump’s sunny forecast.

Last week, she was dismayed to see that Mr. Trump was holding a rally in her area, because it had the potential to help spread the disease

A national poll published recently by The Times found that nearly two in five voters agreed with Mr. Trump that the worst of the crisis was over

In the same Times survey, most voters said that the worst of the pandemic was still ahead, including half of independent voters and a fifth of Republicans. By a 12-point margin, voters said they preferred Mr. Biden to lead the response to the pandemic rather than Mr. Trump. And 59 percent of voters said they favored a national mask mandate, including majorities of Democratic and independent voters, and three in 10 Republicans.

Mr. Biden, 77, has kept a strictly limited campaign schedule, holding no large rallies and traveling far less frequently than a typical presidential nominee.

“Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up,” Admiral Giroir said, urging Americans to wear masks and avoid clustering indoors

“not going to control the pandemic” — a remark Mr. Biden brandished as confirmation that Mr. Trump was capitulating.

In Wisconsin, where new cases have skyrocketed by 46 percent in the last two weeks, Mike Mitchell, a retail manager who backs Mr. Trump, blamed out-of-town visitors for the uptick in his area

I may not agree with the way he tweets and everything else, but he’s turned this country around, and he’ll do it again,” said Mr. D’Amato, 71, who wore a mask to vote near downtown Fort Myers last week.

But when such crises occur during a sitting president's reelection campaign, voters have historically turned him out in favor of a challenger offering a new direction for the nation. In short, incumbents fail when they cannot convince the American people to stay the course.

Times were flush in America when the nation elected Hoover -- touted as the "Great Engineer" -- as president in 1928. Four years later, the country faced the worst economic crisis in its history, the Great Depression. The popular outcry against the president summoned new words into existence: "Hooverville" for a shantytown of the homeless and "https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Furldefense.proofpoint.com%2Fv2%2Furl%3Fu%3Dhttps-3A__nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com_-3Furl-3Dhttps-253A-252F-252Furldefense.proofpoint.com-252Fv2-252Furl-253Fu-253Dhttps-2D3A-5F-5Fnam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com-5F-2D3Furl-2D3Dhttps-2D253A-2D252F-2D252Fwww.ushistory.org-2D252Fus-2D252F48d.asp-2D26data-2D3D04-2D257C01-2D257Cbalcerskit-2D2540easternct.edu-2D257Cf504669cb9cd421b19d308d87ba94456-2D257C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a-2D257C1-2D257C0-2D257C637395314221385811-2D257CUnknown-2D257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-2D253D-2D257C1000-2D26sdata-2D3DZ-2D252BQzKDaHxQ2jYBKYrQvJuRk1RPwMeJOLvEB-2D252B7DyJGH4-2D253D-2D26reserved-2D3D0-2526d-253DDwMGaQ-2526c-253Dtq9bLrSQ8zIr87VusnUS9yAL0Jw-5FxnDiPuZjNR4EDIQ-2526r-253DfqdvyATuskufZZ6lHWLDX7rjOgtfuIwFFgyFWTSfNss-2526m-253DxIZtC-5FUtx-2DbHITyb6-2D8CwaYXg5eK-5Fmk9FWumiGu6d6M-2526s-253Dq96yS8DFGwSISOOmLLR5WbA0V2YS1apeWBDmpXUf00E-2526e-253D-26data-3D04-257C01-257Cbalcerskit-2540easternct.edu-257C8d842cd7f6654944dc0d08d87babf248-257C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a-257C1-257C0-257C637395325741251331-257CUnknown-257CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0-253D-257C1000-26sdata-3DkRZ-252FoKQ05pJxDSHqKx2XgnLUHtWa-252BHnkZddOrHzzXfc-253D-26reserved-3D0%26d%3DDwMGaQ%26c%3Dtq9bLrSQ8zIr87VusnUS9yAL0Jw_xnDiPuZjNR4EDIQ%26r%3DfqdvyATuskufZZ6lHWLDX7rjOgtfuIwFFgyFWTSfNss%26m%3DPsd0YU3mz1QSXOmUwvnRXVoJyl9RuP_TWfEHJ0yDWxw%26s%3DqL37mqHWsBhBnO2QOtSnmsOuXDDjmapvvunVTxkoapo%26e%3D&data=04%7C01%7Cbalcerskit%40easternct.edu%7C0d8701f780904a7323f608d87bad4758%7C00bc4ae8576c45e3949d4f129d8b670a%7C1%7C

But Hoover's own actions made matters far worse. To combat the depression, he promoted voluntarism with limited government intervention.

In July 1932, Hoover ordered the US Army, under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, to clear out the "Bonus Army" encampment of World War I veterans. Then, as now, the optics were terrible.

Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt touted a "New Deal" for the American people.

The nation elected Bush with a wave of popular support in 1988. Like Hoover before him, Bush followed two terms of Republican control of the White House. But by 1992, a sharp recession had set in, leaving many Americans out of work and facing difficult times.

Political life in America reached a new low in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned amid scandal. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned the ex-president, leaving him vulnerable to a Democratic challenger in 1976. Former Georgia Gov. Carter ran as an outsider and won a narrow victory.

By 1980, however, a global economic downturn had weakened the country. Oil shocks, rising inflation and industrial competition from abroad all took a toll. Abroad, the United States suffered a humiliating setback when Iranian militants took Americans hostage at the US embassy in Tehran.

In 1979, Carter described a "crisis in confidence" affecting the country.

To make matters worse, Carter asked for the resignation of his entire Cabinet, and five members acceded to the demand.

Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, by contrast, projected a sunny optimism, famously declaring recovery happens "when Jimmy Carter loses his" job.

As the 1970s yielded to the 1980s, the nation chose a new direction, handing Reagan a resounding victory over the incumbent Carter

An unprecedented 40 million Americans voted that November, yielding FDR an even larger popular victory than Hoover had won four years earlier.

With the government facing revenue shortfalls, Bush went against his own campaign rhetoric -- his "read my lips" promise to not raise taxes -- and increased taxes in 1991.

Political controversies also hurt. The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, during which Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment, rankled. When combined with domestic challenges, such as the Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992, Bush was the definition of an embattled incumbent president.

Democratic challenger Bill Clinton proved popular, leading many to choose the younger candidate and informal motto: "It's the economy, stupid." Bush also likely lost votes to the third-party candidate Ross Perot. Although no candidate won a majority of the popular vote in November, Clinton secured enough electoral votes to become president.

Yet Bush could not win reelection in 1992 for similar reasons to his long-ago predecessor -- an economic downturn had soured the American people against him.

, making it the youngest of the major world religions.

The word “Islam” means “submission to the will of God.”

Muslims are monotheistic and worship one, all-knowing God, who in Arabic is known as Allah.

Followers of Islam aim to live a life of complete submission to Allah

Mosques are places where Muslims worship.

The prophet Muhammad

was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D

Muslims believe he was the final prophet sent by God to reveal their faith to mankind.

Starting in about 613, Muhammad began preaching throughout Mecca the messages he received. He taught that there was no other God but Allah and that Muslims should devote their lives to this God.

n 622, Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Medina with his supporters. This journey became known as the Hijra

marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

He continued to preach until his death in 632.

After Muhammad’s passing, Islam began to spread rapidly.  A series of leaders, known as caliphs, became successors to Muhammad. This system of leadership, which was run by a Muslim ruler, became known as a caliphate.

During the reign of the first four caliphs, Arab Muslims conquered large regions in the Middle East, including Syria, Palestine, Iran and Iraq. Islam also spread throughout areas in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

he caliphate system lasted for centuries and eventually evolved into the Ottoman Empire, which controlled large regions in the Middle East from about 1517 until 1917, when World War I ended the Ottoman reign.

When Muhammad died, there was debate over who should replace him as leader. This led to a schism in Islam, and two major sects emerged: the Sunnis and the Shiites.

The Quran (sometimes spelled Qur’an or Koran) is considered the most important holy book among Muslims.

t contains some basic information that is found in the Hebrew Bible as well as revelations that were given to Muhammad.

The book is written with Allah as the first person, speaking through Gabriel to Muhammad. It contains 114 chapters, which are called surahs.

The Islamic calendar, also called the Hijra calendar, is a lunar calendar used in Islamic religious worship. The calendar began in the year 622 A.D., celebrating the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.

Muslims follow five basic pillars that are essential to their faith. These include:Shahada: to declare one’s faith in God and belief in MuhammadSalat: to pray five times a day (at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening)Zakat: to give to those in needSawm: to fast during RamadanHajj: to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during a person’s lifetime if the person is able

Islam’s legal system is known as Sharia Law. This faith-based code of conduct directs Muslims on how they should live in nearly every aspect of their lives.

The prophet Muhammad is credited with building the first mosque in the courtyard of his house in Medina.

Muslim prayer is often conducted in a mosque's large open space or outdoor courtyard. A mihrab is a decorative feature or niche in the mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca, and therefore the direction to face during prayer.

Men and women pray separately, and Muslims may visit a mosque five times a day for each of the prayer sessions.

There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.

Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.

Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.

The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.

Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.

Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.

Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.

The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.

there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.

At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.

it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.

Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms

How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.

Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”

Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.

“The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”

Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?

In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.

localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.

in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”

We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible

The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.

we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.

The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.

We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

we are firmly in a transition from a Middle East shaped by great powers to a Middle East shaped by Mother Nature.

“The U.S. is not pulling out entirely, but it is pulling back, and all of its Sunni Arab partners are now acting to protect themselves — and to stabilize the region — in an era when the U.S. will no longer be dominant there,”

et’s go back to Biden. He was dead right: America’s presence in Afghanistan and tacit security guarantees around the region were both stabilizing and enabling a lot of bad behavior — boycotts, occupations, reckless adventures and brutal interventions.

President Barack Obama’s pullback from the region and President Donald Trump’s refusal to retaliate against Iran — after it sent a wave of drones to attack a key Saudi oil facility in 2019 — were the warning signs that America had grown weary of intervening and refereeing in the Middle East’s sectarian wars. Biden just made it official.

We are just at the start of this paradigm shift from resistance to resilience, as this region starts to become too hot, too populated and too water-starved to sustain any quality of life.

“But the U.S. will still be needed to deter Iran, should it develop a nuclear capability — and to defuse other conflicts.”

just as we once supplanted the Soviets as the dominant shaper in the region, Mother Nature is now supplanting America as the dominant force.

In Mother Nature’s Middle East, leaders will be judged not by how much they resist one another or great powers, but by how much resilience they build for their people and nations at a time when the world will be phasing out fossil fuels, at a time when all the Arab-Muslim states have booming populations under the age of 30 and at a time of intensifying climate change.

The United Nations recently reported that Afghanistan has been hit with the worst drought in more than 30 years. It is crushing farmers, pushing up food prices and putting 18.8 million Afghans — nearly half of the population — into food insecurity. Over to you, Mr. Taliban: You broke it, you own it.

there may be a day, very soon, where the United States will need to return to active Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy — not based on land for peace, but sun and fresh water for peace. EcoPeace Middle East, an alliance of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists, recently put forward just such a strategy called the “Green Blue Deal.”

How would it work? Jordan, with its vast desert areas, has the comparative advantage to produce large amounts of cheap solar electricity to meet its own needs and also to sell to the Israeli and Palestinian grids to “generate the electricity for desalination plants that could provide all three parties abundant fresh water,”

All the parties there are ecologically interdependent, but they have unhealthy interdependencies rather than healthy ones. America could become the trusted mediator who forges healthy interdependencies

Chinese universities have organized classes to give students a “correct understanding” of the war, often highlighting Russia’s grievances with the West. Party newspapers have run series of commentaries blaming the United States for the conflict.

Mr. Xi has given that tale a more urgent, ominous spin. In doing so, he has embraced Mr. Putin as a fellow authoritarian lined up against Western dominance, demonstrating to the Chinese people that Mr. Xi has a partner in his cause.

“The most powerful weapon possessed by the West is, aside from nuclear weapons, the methods they use in ideological struggle,”

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it says, “some countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Transcaucasia have become forward positions for the West to contain and meddle in Russia.”

It describes Mr. Putin as cleansing Russia of the political toxins that killed the Soviet Union.

In 2013, propaganda officials under Mr. Xi put out a documentary on the lessons of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This latest take offers an even more conspiratorial interpretation

They regard China and Russia as both menaced by “color revolution,” the party’s phrase for insurrections backed by Western governments

“They actually believe their own narrative about color revolutions and tend to see this whole situation as a U.S.-led color revolution to overthrow Putin,”

“Both domestically and internationally, Xi has been pedaling this dark narrative since he took power,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “It allows him to justify his accumulation of power and the changes he’s made by creating this sense of struggle and danger.”

The Biden administration has cast the war as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. Chinese officials are mounting a counternarrative that American-led domineering is the source of conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere.

The documentary attributes the decline of the Soviet Union to political liberalization, especially what Beijing calls “historical nihilism,” or emphasizing the Communist Party’s mistakes and misdeeds. It accuses historians critical of the Soviet revolution of fabricating estimated death tolls by many millions for Stalin’s purges.

Stalin, it argues, was a modernizing leader whose purges went too far but initially “were something of a necessity” given the threats to Soviet rule. It suggests that rock music and modern fashion were symptoms of the moral rot that later set in.

“They’ve taken only one lesson from all of this, and that is you do not allow any freedom of expression,”

Previous leaders in Moscow — above all Mr. Gorbachev and Nikita S. Khrushchev — are portrayed as dupes, bewitched by the siren song of liberal reform and Western superiority.

Officials overseeing the screenings are often described in official notices as calling for cadres to maintain firm loyalty to Mr. Xi.

“Loving a party and its leader is not a cult of personality,”

Chinese leaders have been debating why the Soviet Union fell apart ever since it dissolved in 1991. More than his predecessors, Mr. Xi has blamed the Soviet Union’s breakup on lack of ideological spine and Western political subversion.

“If you have the worldview that you see in this documentary, you could tell yourself the story that the Russians are facing a real threat from the West,”

Political loyalty has become more crucial to Mr. Xi as Beijing tries to contain Covid outbreaks with stringent lockdowns, and manage a slowing economy. China’s foreign policy is under scrutiny, after some Chinese scholars posted essays criticizing Beijing’s refusal to condemn Mr. Putin.

Universities and colleges have organized indoctrination lectures for students, suggesting that officials are worried that young, educated Chinese may be receptive to the criticisms that Beijing has been too indulgent of Mr. Putin.

“There’s an ‘either we hang together or we hang separately’ attitude that comes into play,” Mr. Johnson, the former C.I.A. analyst, said of Chinese leaders. “If it’s a strong nationalist approach, then who in the party doesn’t want to be a good nationalist?”

And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.

When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.

When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.

 Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.

In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.

Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.

Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.

FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.

Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.

This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 

“If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”

Germany would promote economic links with Russia and China under the doctrine of “Wandel durch Handel” — change through trade — which asserted that integration with the world economy would promote democratization and rule of law.

And rather than forcing nations to get along, globalization seems to have created new frontiers for international confrontation.

Three years ago the international relations experts Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman published a prescient paper titled “Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion.” They argued, in effect, that conventional trade wars — in which nations try to exert economic power by restricting access to their markets — are no longer where the action is. Instead, economic power comes from the ability to restrict other countries’ access to crucial goods, services, finance and information.

the big surprise on the economic side of the Ukraine war was the early success of the United States and its allies in strangling Russian access to crucial industrial and capital goods. Russian imports have begun to recover, but sanctions probably dealt a crucial blow to Vladimir Putin’s war-making ability.

Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, gave a fairly startling speech calling for U.S. industrial policy aimed in part at protecting national security. She denounced China’s “state-directed industrial dominance policies” and declared that the efficiency gains from trade liberalization “cannot come at the cost of further weakening our supply chains [and] exacerbating high-risk reliances.” On the same day, the Biden administration announced its new export controls aimed at China. Suddenly, America is taking a much harder line on globalization.

it’s a dangerous world out there, and I can’t fault the Biden administration for its turn toward toughness — genuine toughness, not the macho preening of its predecessor.

Many new residents cite cost of a living as a key factor behind their moves, but home insurance costs are rising faster there than the national average, meaning homeowners should brace for sticker shock.In Florida, the average home insurance premium in 2019 was $1,988. Today, it’s $2,714 — an increase of $726.

The risk is highest in the Sun Belt region, which is experiencing rapid growth, yet Americans are moving directly into areas of danger. Hurricane Ian alone killed more than 150 Floridians, knocked out power for 2.6 million residents and left Florida with a bill of nearly $113 billion in its wake.

Those states are also experiencing extreme weather: Hurricanes like Ian, Nicole and Fiona, as well as record heat, ice and snow storms, wrought billions of dollars of destruction in 2022 and killed nearly 500 Americans.

California bucked the trend in several ways. Despite being battered by wildfires and extreme storms in recent years, home insurance rates there grew by only 25 percent, below the increase in other coastal states. California lost 343,230 residents, accounting for a 0.3 percent dip, last year.

In South Dakota, 8,424 new residents moved into the sparsely populated state in 2022, while insurance costs have jumped 39 percent since 2015. In dry, sunny Arizona, where nearly 71,000 new residents flocked in 2022, costs grew 28 percent

Florida grew by more than 318,000 new residents in 2022, accounting for a population increase of 1.9 percent last year — the largest uptick in the nation. Texas, with more than 230,000 new residents, was right on its tails.

In the 20th century, a collection of fascist and communist leaders showed how rapidly the world could descend into the darkness of repression and aggression.

In 2007, as Western intellectuals were celebrating the triumph of the liberal international order, Putin warned that he was about to start rolling that order back. In a scorching speech at the Munich Security Conference, Putin denounced the spread of liberal values and American influence. He declared that Russia would not forever live with a system that constrained its influence and threatened its increasingly illiberal regime.

Putin’s policies have assailed three core tenets of post-Cold War optimism about the trajectory of global affairs.

The first was a sunny assumption about the inevitability of democracy’s advance.

To see Putin publicly humiliate his own intelligence chief on television last week was to realize that the world’s vastest country, with one of its two largest nuclear arsenals, is now the fiefdom of a single man.  

He has contributed, through cyberattacks, political influence operations and other subversion to a global “democratic recession” that has now lasted more than 15 years.

Putin has also shattered a second tenet of the post-Cold War mindset: the idea that great-power rivalry was over and that violent, major conflict had thus become passe.

Violence, Putin has reminded us, is a terrible but sadly normal feature of world affairs. Its absence reflects effective deterrence, not irreversible moral progress.

This relates to a third shibboleth Putin has challenged — the idea that history runs in a single direction.

During the 1990s, the triumph of democracy, great-power peace and Western influence seemed irreversible. The Clinton administration called countries that bucked these trends “backlash states,” the idea being that they could only offer atavistic, doomed resistance to the progression of history.

But history, as Putin has shown us, doesn’t bend on its own.

Aggression can succeed. Democracies can be destroyed by determined enemies.

“International norms” are really just rules made and enforced by states that combine great power with great determination.

Which means that history is a constant struggle to prevent the world from being thrust back into patterns of predation that it can never permanently escape.

Most important, Putin’s gambit is producing an intellectual paradigm shift — a recognition that this war could be a prelude to more devastating conflicts unless the democratic community severely punishes aggression in this case and more effectively deters it in others.

he may be on the verge of a rude realization of his own: Robbing one’s enemies of their complacency is a big mistake.