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A senior State Department official underscored the urgency, telling reporters: “We are now at a point where Russia could launch an attack on Ukraine at any time.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki underscored the urgency. “We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine. And what Secretary Blinken is going to go do is highlight very clearly there is a diplomatic path forward,” she said.

From Kyiv, Blinken will travel to Berlin, where he will meet with his German, British and French counterparts to discuss a possible response to any Russian military action. In Geneva on Friday, Blinken will be testing Lavrov on Russia’s interest in a “diplomatic off-ramp” for the crisis, the senior State Department official said.

Blinken’s meetings follow inconclusive diplomatic talks between Moscow and the West in Europe last week that failed to resolve stark disagreements over Ukraine and other security matters.

Russia has massed some 100,000 troops with tanks and other heavy weapons on its own soil near the Ukrainian border in what many observers believe may be preparation for an invasion.

CIA Director William Burns visited Kyiv last Wednesday to consult with his Ukrainian counterparts and discuss current assessments of the risk to Ukraine, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss Burns’ schedule, which is classified. While there, he also discussed the current situation with Zelenskyy and efforts to de-escalate tensions.Blinken spoke by phone Tuesday with Lavrov, discussing the diplomatic talks and meetings held last week. The State Department said Blinken “stressed the importance of continuing a diplomatic path to de-escalate tensions” surrounding the Russia-Ukraine situation and “reiterated the unshakable U.S. commitment” to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.On Monday, Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, rejected the U.S. allegations that his country was preparing a pretext to invade Ukraine. Speaking to reporters, he dismissed the U.S. claim as “total disinformation.”

Russia in 2014 seized the Crimean Peninsula after the ouster of Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly leader and also threw its weight behind a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. More than 14,000 people have been killed in nearly eight years of fighting between the Russia-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces in the country’s industrial heartland called Donbas.

Putin has warned that Moscow will take unspecified “military-technical measures” if the West stonewalls its demands.

Even when you take all those other factors into account, the larger the racial generation gap, the less the state spends per student.

The peak of the racial generation gap occurred in California around 1994 to 1998. During this era, Proposition 187 passed, followed by a series of “racial propositions” that ended affirmative action, banned bilingual education and stepped up the incarceration of young men of color.

When the racial generation gap peaked, the damage to the California Dream was deep – and the state is still trying to work its way back from the wreckage.

California fell from among the top spending states on education to become one of the stingiest. Our state prison population increased by more than sixfold between 1980 and 2006, twice as fast as in the rest of the country. And we went from being roughly in the middle of the pack in terms of income inequality back in the glory days of the late 1960s to the sixth most unequal state in 2012.

Would California have gone through the same turmoil had the generational gap been narrower? It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s also not prudent to wait around for elders to come to their political senses or for the younger generation to age into power. We need a national game plan that can accelerate what the slower pace of demographic change might push along.

In my new book, “State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future,” I suggest that the U.S. can draw lessons from California’s political and social shifts.

Term limits, for example, opened up opportunities for new politicians of color. Easier voter registration helped lower the barriers for new and young voters. The power to “redistrict” – to draw the lines for state and congressional seats – was taken from a state legislature eager to protect incumbents and given to a citizen commission less invested in the past.

However, such structural reforms are only effective if there is a citizenry ready to take advantage of them. To make that happen, a new generation of community-based organizers became more adept at linking together communities, mobilizing voters and promoting winnable policy change.

to get there, the nation will need to overcome the tension between what journalist Ron Brownstein has called the “coalition of restoration” – older Trump voters seeking a way back to what they see as American greatness – and a “coalition of transformation” that consists of younger and more diverse constituents.

Closing that social distance will be crucial. The California Dream was never just about one person (or one generation) and their route to individual success. It was about the promise of a state that welcomed newcomers, confidently invested in its children and looked forward to its future. That’s a recipe for progress in the Golden State and America alike.

but also the mom & pop shops on the South and the West sides of Chicago who he says "are hanging on by a thread right now because of the pandemic."

"They cannot afford to be looted. They cannot afford destruction, because if that happens, they very well may close and not reopen,"

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says the city has been planning and preparing for potential election-related protests and civil unrest for months.

Chicago has been running tabletop exercises and gaming out how, when and where violence might erupt.

the city will flood certain areas with a highly visible police presence to deter violence. The city will also be using snow plows, dump trucks and other heavy vehicles to block certain streets and expressway exit ramps to keep demonstrators away.

Chicago police will respect people's rights to peacefully protest and will work first and foremost to de-escalate any confrontations, but he hastens to add that his officers will take swift action against anyone intent on spreading chaos.

Groups on all sides of the political spectrum are planning election night demonstrations and the very real possibility that the results might not be known for days or weeks after Election Day could escalate tensions.

mass organized political violence is not a part of the American psyche.

but in terms of actual massive violence, this is not something we have done before."

2020 is already a year of political tension and unrest unlike anything seen in the country since the 1960s

Phil Brach spent the weekend putting huge sheets of plywood up over the massive glass windows of the store where he works, Rodman's Food and Drug in Washington, D.C., in preparation for Election Day.

Across the country, there are growing concerns that the bitterness and animosity over the presidential election will not end when the polls close Tuesday night. From coast to coast, cities are preparing for possible protests, civil unrest and violence, regardless of the election's outcome.

Nolan says he went to the store the night of the looting along with a police officer who advised him to leave.

"We put some film on these windows so that they're not easily broken, if they're smashed, they'll stay in place. And we're hoping that no one can break into the store, at least not easily," Roy says. Nolan adds, "The film makes the glass shatterproof so it doesn't just explode upon contact."

While the nation's capital city is certain to be a focal point of post-election demonstrations, other cities are bracing for possible chaos too.

Workers were busy boarding up store windows while supporters of President Trump held a "freedom rally" that was briefly disrupted by counter protesters.

"Coming off of the summer, seeing the looting that occurred, there's a lot of anxiety," says Elliott Richardson who heads the Small Business Advocacy Council in Chicago.

Superintendent David Brown says Chicago police will respect people's rights to peacefully protest and will work first and foremost to de-escalate any confrontations, but he hastens to add that his officers will take swift action against anyone intent on spreading chaos.

In Beverly Hills, Calif. tensions felt high already this weekend.

The National Retail Federation has held training webinars for members on crisis prevention and de-escalating conflict and hired security consultants to help store owners prepare.

Groups on all sides of the political spectrum are planning election night demonstrations and the very real possibility that the results might not be known for days or weeks after Election Day could escalate tensions.

Today’s unstable world, however, looks more like that of the 1910s or the 1930s, when social and economic unrest were widespread and multiple powerful players crowded the international scene, some bent on upending the existing order. Just as China is challenging the United States today, the rising powers of Germany, Japan, and the United States threatened the hegemonic power of the British Empire in the 1910s. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an economic downturn reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The history of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates all too vividly that unchecked or unmoderated tensions can lead to extremism at home and conflict abroad. It also shows that at times of heightened tension, accidents can set off explosions like a spark in a powder keg, especially if countries in those moments of crisis lack wise and capable leadership.

If the administration that succeeds Trump’s wants to repair the damaged world and rebuild a stable international order, it ought to use history—not as a judge but as a wise adviser.

WARNING SIGNS

A knowledge of history offers insurance against sudden shocks. World wars and great depressions do not come out of the clear blue sky; they happen because previous restraints on bad behavior have weakened

In the nineteenth century, enough European powers—in particular the five great ones, Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—came to believe that unprovoked aggression should not be tolerated, and Europe enjoyed more peace than at any other time in its troubled history until after 1945

Further hastening the breakdown of the international order is how states are increasingly resorting to confrontational politics, in substance as well as in style.

Their motives are as old as states themselves: ambition and greed, ideologies and emotions, or just fear of what the other side might be intending

Today, decades of “patriotic education” in China’s schools have fostered a highly nationalist younger generation that expects its government to assert itself in the world.

Public rhetoric matters, too, because it can create the anticipation of, even a longing for, confrontation and can stir up forces that leaders cannot control.

Defusing tensions is possible, but it requires leadership aided by patient diplomacy, confidence building, and compromise.

Lately, however, some historians have begun to see that interwar decade in a different light—as a time of real progress toward a strong international order.

Unfortunately, compromise does not always play well to domestic audiences or elites who see their honor and status tied up with that of their country. But capable leaders can overcome those obstacles. Kennedy and Khrushchev overruled their militaries, which were urging war on them; they chose, at considerable risk, to work with each other, thus sparing the world a nuclear war.

Trump, too, has left a highly personal mark on global politics. In the long debate among historians and international relations experts over which matters most—great impersonal forces or specific leaders—his presidency surely adds weight to the latter.

His character traits, life experiences, and ambitions, combined with the considerable power the president can exert over foreign policy, have shaped much of U.S. foreign policy over the last nearly four years, just as Putin’s memories of the humiliation and disappearance of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War have fed his determination to make Russia count again on the world stage. It still matters that both men happen to lead large and powerful countries.

When Germany fell into the clutches of Adolf Hitler, in contrast, he was able to start a world war.

THE NOT-SO-GOLDEN AGE

In relatively stable times, the world can endure problematic leaders without lasting damage. It is when a number of disruptive factors come together that those wielding power can bring on the perfect storm

By 1914, confrontation had become the preferred option for all the players, with the exception of the United Kingdom, which still hoped to prevent or at least stay out of a general European war.

Although they might not have realized it, many Europeans were psychologically prepared for war. An exaggerated respect for their own militaries and the widespread influence of social Darwinism encouraged a belief that war was a noble and necessary part of a nation’s struggle for survival. 

The only chance of preventing a local conflict from becoming a continent-wide conflagration lay with the civilian leaders who would ultimately decide whether or not to sign the mobilization orders. But those nominally in charge were unfit to bear that responsibility.

In the last days of peace, in July and early August 1914, the task of keeping Europe out of conflict weighed increasingly on a few men, above all Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. Each proved unable to withstand the pressure from those who urged war.

THE MISUNDERSTOOD DECADE

With the benefit of hindsight, historians have often considered the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to be a failure and the 1920s a mere prelude to the inevitable rise of the dictators and the descent into World War II.

Preparing for conflict—or even appearing to do so—pushes the other side toward a confrontational stance of its own. Scenarios sketched out as possibilities in more peaceful times become probabilities, and leaders find that their freedom to maneuver is shrinking.

The establishment in 1920 of his brainchild, the League of Nations, was a significant step, even without U.S. membership: it created an international body to provide collective security for its members and with the power to use sanctions, even including war, against aggressors

Overall, the 1920s were a time of cooperation, not confrontation, in international relations. For the most part, the leaders of the major powers, the Soviet Union excepted, supported a peaceful international order.

The promise of the 1920s was cut short by the Great Depression.

Citizens lost faith in the ability of their leaders to cope with the crisis. What was more ominous, they often lost faith in capitalism and democracy. The result was the growth of extremist parties on both the right and the left.

The catastrophe that followed showed yet again how important the individual can be in the wielding of power. Hitler had clear goals—to break what he called “the chains” of the Treaty of Versailles and make Germany and “the Aryan race” dominant in Europe, if not the world—and he was determined to achieve them at whatever cost.

The military, delighted by the increases in defense spending and beguiled by Hitler’s promises of glory and territorial expansion, tamely went along. In Italy, Mussolini, who had long dreamed of a second Roman Empire, abandoned his earlier caution. On the other side of the world, Japan’s new rulers were also thinking in terms of national glory and building a Greater Japan through conquest.

Preoccupied with their own problems, the leaders of the remaining democracies were slow to realize the developing threat to world order and slow to take action

This time, war was the result not of reckless brinkmanship or weak governments but of powerful leaders deliberately seeking confrontation. Those who might have opposed them, such as the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, chose instead to appease them in the hope that war could be avoided. By failing to act in the face of repeated violations of treaties and international law, the leaders of the democracies allowed the international order to break.

OMINOUS ECHOES

Led by Roosevelt, statesmen in the Allied countries were determined to learn from this mistake. Even as the war raged, they enunciated the principles and planned the institutions for a new and better world order.

Three-quarters of a century later, however, that order is looking dangerously creaky. The COVID-19 pandemic has damaged the world’s economy and set back international cooperation.

Tensions are building up as they did before the two world wars, with intensifying great-power rivalries and with regional conflicts, such as the recent skirmishes between China and India, that threaten to draw in other players.

Meanwhile, the pandemic will shake publics’ faith in their countries’ institutions, just as the Great Depression did.

Norms that once seemed inviolable, including those against aggression and conquest, have been breached. Russia seized Crimea by force in 2014, and the Trump administration last year gave the United States’ blessing to Israel’s de facto annexation of the Golan Heights and may well recognize the threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank that Israel conquered in 1967.

Will others follow the example set by Russia and Israel, as happened in the 1910s and the 1930s?

Russia continues to meddle wherever it can, and Putin dreams of destroying the EU

U.S.-Chinese relations are increasingly adversarial, with continued spats over trade, advanced technology, and strategic influence, and both sides are developing scenarios for a possible war. The two countries’ rhetoric has grown more bellicose, too. China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomats, so named by Chinese officials after a popular movie series, excoriate those who dare to criticize or oppose Beijing, and American officials respond in kind.

How the world copes will depend on the strength of its institutions and, at crucial moments, on leadership. Weak and indecisive leaders may allow bad situations to get worse, as they did in 1914. Determined and ruthless ones can create wars, as they did in 1939. Wise and brave ones may guide the world through the storms. Let us hope the last group has read some history.

Most jurisdictions are not planning to post uniformed police at polling stations, because tradition and local laws keep officers at a distance to avoid an impression of voter intimidation.

Given this year's tensions, and the fact that the police themselves are a major issue in the election, the question of their presence at polling places has become a partisan flashpoint in some places.

Democrats in Miami complained about a uniformed police officer wearing a Trump face mask at an early-voting location, and he faces potential discipline by his department.

New Jersey is considering last-minute legislation to restrict the presence of officers at polling places, a debate that quickly acquired partisan overtones. A similar dispute broke out in North Carolina, where the Board of Elections issued a memo reminding uniformed police officers to stay away from polling places, and state Republicans objected.

"We want to respect the concern [about voter intimidation]," Newton says. But he says because voters have other ways to cast ballots, "it's not a valid issue, that someone has to face down a uniformed law enforcement officer to vote in North Carolina."

One unresolved question in Michigan is whether private citizens will be allowed to carry firearms openly around polling places. The state's open carry law is generally quite permissive, but Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued a directive saying visible guns would not be allowed at the polls or other election-related offices this year. But police chiefs have cast doubt on whether they have the legal grounds to enforce such an order, and it's also attracted a lawsuit.

Away from the polls, police departments are planning to have more officers on hand on Election Day, especially in cities that saw unrest over the summer.

Chicago endured extensive looting and property damage over the summer, something police superintendent David Brown believes was coordinated by what he calls "agitators" embedded in legitimate protests.

"From those lessons learned over the summer, we are planning for that to be a feature of peaceful protests," on Election Day, Brown said at a press conference last week.

National Guard soldiers around the nation will take part in security operations for the election — but only for cybersecurity, assisting state officials by trying to prevent foreign governments and others from interfering with the vote. The National Guard, like the active military, does not want to get involved in physical security at the polls, leaving that up to poll workers and if need be local police.

Military officials tell NPR they want to maintain their apolitical stance, and not get involved in partisan politics, saying uniformed soldiers at the polls would lead to charges the military favors one candidate over another.

Military officials don't anticipate any particular problems of violence at the polls themselves, but they do say that with the bitter campaign, street protests and the rise of armed groups, violence could occur after the election, regardless of who wins.

If violence erupts and local police are unable to handle it, a governor could activate Guard units

Governors are in charge of their state Guard forces, but a president can "federalize" the Guard and take control from a governor. That has happened in rare occasions in the 1950s and '60s during school integration.

And a president can invoke the Insurrection Act and send in active troops. That, too, is rare. In 1992, California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush to send in active troops to deal with protests after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper in June publicly opposed using the Insurrection Act, saying Guard troops would make more sense since they come from the local communities they would protect. That angered the president, who sources say threatened to fire Esper but was talked out of such a move so close to the election.

President Trump has added to the election tensions by suggesting on numerous occasions that he might not accept the results of the vote, unless it is "fair." And that has led to speculation the president might try to hold onto power, and the military might be called on to remove him. Such talk is strongly dismissed by the nation's top military officer, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

When I asked Jon Favreau, Obama’s lead speechwriter in the 2008 campaign, and a close friend of Rhodes’s, whether he or Rhodes or the president had ever thought of their individual speeches and bits of policy making as part of some larger restructuring of the American narrative, he replied, “We saw that as our entire job.”

I realize during our conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like “The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who create those shows

“I love Don DeLillo,” I answer.“Yeah,” Rhodes answers. “That’s the only person I can think of who has confronted these questions of, you know, the individual who finds himself negotiating both vast currents of history and a very specific kind of power dynamics. That’s his milieu. And that’s what it’s like to work in the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus in 2016.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“I immediately understood that it’s a very important quality for a staffer,” Hamilton explained, “that he could come into a meeting and decide what was decided.” I suggested that the phrase “decide what was decided” is suggestive of the enormous power that might accrue to someone with Rhodes’s gifts. Hamilton nodded. “Absolutely,” he said.

Rhodes’s opinions were helpful in shaping the group’s conclusions — a scathing indictment of the policy makers responsible for invading Iraq. For Rhodes, who wrote much of the I.S.G. report, the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.

when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers

Obama relies on Rhodes for “an unvarnished take,” in part, she says, because “Ben just has no poker face,” and so it’s easy to see when he is feeling uncomfortable. “The president will be like, ‘Ben, something on your mind?’ And then Ben will have this incredibly precise lay-down of why the previous half-hour has been an utter waste of time, because there’s a structural flaw to the entire direction of the conversation.”

The literary character that Rhodes most closely resembles, Power volunteers, is Holden Caulfield. “He hates the idea of being phony, and he’s impetuous, and he has very strong views.”

He became aware of two things at once: the weight of the issues that the president was confronted with, and the intense global interest in even the most mundane presidential communications.

The job he was hired to do, namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologie

As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by how naïve the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information environment that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about. “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now,” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

”This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time

Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why

, I brought up the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was “free” and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter

Axelrod, a former newspaperman, sighed. “It’s not as easy as standing in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million people like past presidents have been able to do,” he said. The bully pulpit by and large doesn’t exist anymore, he explained. “So more and more, over the last couple of years, there’s been an investment in alternative means of communication: using digital more effectively, going to nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue your constituencies are going to be found,” he said. “I think they’ve approached these major foreign-policy challenges as campaign challenges, and they’ve run campaigns, and those campaigns have been very sophisticated.

Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the publi

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false

Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the administration’s foreign-policy aims and priorities converged on Iran. “We don’t have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,” he said. “We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, ‘AIPAC doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the Israeli government doesn’t like this,’ or ‘the gulf countries don’t like it.’ It’s the possibility of improved relations with adversaries. It’s nonproliferation. So all these threads that the president’s been spinning — and I mean that not in the press sense — for almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.”

If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

By eliminating the fuss about Iran’s nuclear program, the administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural tension between the two countries, which would create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration would effectively begin the process of a large-scale disengagement from the Middle East.

Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.

we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.

The idea that there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making

During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”

I examine the president’s thoughts unfolding on the page, and the lawyerly, abstract nature of his writing process. “Moral imagination, spheres of identity, but also move beyond cheap lazy pronouncements,” one note reads. Here was the new American self — rational, moral, not self-indulgent. No longer one thing but multiple overlapping spheres or circles. Who is described here? As usual, the author is describing himself.

Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this

“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely

When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

Obama’s particular revulsion against a certain kind of global power politics is a product, Rhodes suggests, of his having been raised in Southeast Asia. “Indonesia was a place where your interaction at that time with power was very intimate, right?” Rhodes asks. “Tens or hundreds of thousands of people had just been killed. Power was not some abstract thing,” he muses. “When we sit in Washington and debate foreign policy, it’s like a Risk game, or it’s all about us, or the human beings disappear from the decisions. But he lived in a place where he was surrounded by people who had either perpetrated those acts — and by the way, may not have felt great about that — or else knew someone who was a victim. I don’t think there’s ever been an American president who had an experience like that at a young age of what power is.

The parts of Obama’s foreign policy that disturb some of his friends on the left, like drone strikes, Rhodes says, are a result of Obama’s particular kind of globalism, which understands the hard and at times absolute necessity of killing. Yet, at the same time, they are also ways of avoiding more deadly uses of force — a kind of low-body-count spin move

He shows me the president’s copy of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a revision of an original draft by Favreau and Rhodes whose defining tension was accepting a prize awarded before he had actually accomplished anything. In his longhand notes, Obama relocated the speech’s tension in the fact that he was accepting a peace prize a week after ordering 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. King and Gandhi were the author’s heroes, yet he couldn’t act as they did, because he runs a state. The reason that the author had to exercise power was because not everyone in the world is rational.

In Panetta’s telling, his own experience at the Pentagon under Obama sometimes resembled being installed in the driver’s seat of a car and finding that the steering wheel and brakes had been disconnected from the engine. Obama and his aides used political elders like him, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton as cover to end the Iraq war, and then decided to steer their own course, he suggests. While Panetta pointedly never mentions Rhodes’s name, it is clear whom he is talking about.

“Was it a point of connection between you and the president that you had each spent some substantial part of your childhoods living in another country?” I ask. Her face lights up.

“Absolutely,” she answers. The question is important to her. “The first conversation we had over dinner, when we first met, was about what it was like for both of us to live in countries that were predominantly Muslim countries at formative parts of our childhood and the perspective it gave us about the United States and how uniquely excellent it is,” she says. “We talked about what it was like to be children, and how we played with children who had totally different backgrounds than our own but you would find something in common.”

Barack Obama is not a standard-issue liberal Democrat. He openly shares Rhodes’s contempt for the groupthink of the American foreign-policy establishment and its hangers-on in the press. Yet one problem with the new script that Obama and Rhodes have written is that the Blob may have finally caught on

“He is a brilliant guy, but he has a real problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith,” one former senior official told me of the president. “He regards everyone on the other side at this point as being a bunch of bloodthirsty know-nothings from a different era who play by the old book

Another official I spoke to put the same point more succinctly: “Clearly the world has disappointed him.

When I asked whether he believed that the Oval Office debate over Syria policy in 2012 — resulting in a decision not to support the uprising against Assad in any meaningful way — had been an honest and open one, he said that he had believed that it was, but has since changed his mind. “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,”

“In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.” The comparison is a startling one — and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world.

He understands the president’s pivot toward Iran as the logical result of a deeply held premise about the negative effects of use of American military force on a scale much larger than drone strikes or Special Forces raids. “I think the whole legacy that he was working on was, ‘I’m the guy who’s going to bring these wars to an end, and the last goddamn thing I need is to start another war,’ ” he explains of Obama. “If you ratchet up sanctions, it could cause a war. If you start opposing their interest in Syria, well, that could start a war, too.”

“The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.

“There were staff people who put themselves in a position where they kind of assumed where the president’s head was on a particular issue, and they thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Well, this is where we want you to come out.’ And I’d say ‘[expletive], that’s not the way it works. We’ll present a plan, and then the president can make a decision

Perhaps the president and his aides were continually unable to predict the consequences of their actions in Syria, and made mistake after mistake, while imagining that it was going to come out right the next time

“Another read, which isn’t necessarily opposed to that,” I continue, “is that their actual picture is entirely coherent. But if they put it in blunt, unnuanced terms — ”Panetta completes my sentence: “ — they’d get the [expletive] kicked out of them.” He looks at me curiously. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “Did you present this theory to Ben Rhodes?

“Oh, God,” Rhodes says. “The reason the president has bucked a lot of establishment thinking is because he does not agree with establishment thinking. Not because I or Denis McDonough are sitting here.” He pushes back in his chair. “The complete lack of governance in huge swaths of the Middle East, that is the project of the American establishment,” he declares. “That as much as Iraq is what angered me.

Ben Rhodes wanted to do right, and maybe, when the arc of history lands, it will turn out that he did. At least, he tried. Something scared him, and made him feel as if the grown-ups in Washington didn’t know what they were talking about, and it’s hard to argue that he was wrong.

What has interested me most about watching him and his cohort in the White House over the past seven years, I tell him, is the evolution of their ability to get comfortable with tragedy. I am thinking specifically about Syria, I add, where more than 450,000 people have been slaughtered.

“Yeah, I admit very much to that reality,” he says. “There’s a numbing element to Syria in particular. But I will tell you this,” he continues. “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we’re there — nearly a decade in Iraq.

Iraq is his one-word answer to any and all criticism.

He mutters something about John Kerry, and then goes off the record, to suggest, in effect, that the world of the Sunni Arabs that the American establishment built has collapsed. The buck stops with the establishment, not with Obama, who was left to clean up their mess.

Rhodes walks me out into the sunlight of the West Wing parking lot, where we are treated to the sight of the aged Henry Kissinger, who has come to pay a visit. I ask Rhodes if he has ever met the famous diplomat before, and he tells me about the time they were seated together at a state dinner for the president of China. It was an interesting encounter to imagine, between Kissinger, who made peace with Mao’s China while bombing Laos to bits, and Rhodes, who helped effect a similar diplomatic volte-face with Iran but kept the United States out of a civil war in Syria, which has caused more than four million people to become refugees. I ask Rhodes how it felt being seated next to the embodiment of American realpolitik. “It was surreal,” he says, looking off into the middle distance. “I told him I was going to Laos,” he continues. “He got a weird look in his eye.

He is not Henry Kissinger, or so his logic runs, even as the underlying realist suspicion — or contempt — for the idea of America as a moral actor is eerily similar. He is torn. As the president himself once asked, how are we supposed to weigh the tens of thousands who have died in Syria against the tens of thousands who have died in Congo? What power means is that the choice is yours, no matter who is telling the story.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Saudi Arabia on Sunday of "divine revenge" over al-Nimr's death, while Riyadh accused Tehran of supporting "terrorism" in a war of words that threatened to escalate even as the U.S. and the European Union sought to calm the region.

It also illustrated the kingdom's new aggressiveness under King Salman. During his reign, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition fighting Shiite rebels in Yemen and staunchly opposed regional Shiite power Iran, even as Tehran struck a nuclear deal with world powers.

The mass execution of al-Nimr and 46 others - the largest carried out by Saudi Arabia in three and a half decades - laid bare the sectarian divisions gripping the region as demonstrators took to the streets from Bahrain to Pakistan in protest.

Al-Nimr was a central figure in Arab Spring-inspired protests by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority until his arrest in 2012. He was convicted of terrorism charges but denied advocating violence.

On Saturday, Saudi Arabia put al-Nimr and three other Shiite dissidents to death, along with a number of al-Qaida militants. Al-Nimr's execution drew protests from Shiites around the world, who backed his call for reform and wider political freedom for their sect.

While the split between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to the early days of Islam and disagreements over the successor to Prophet Muhammad, those divisions have only grown as they intertwine with regional politics, with both Iran and Saudi Arabia vying to be the Mideast's top power.

Iran accuses Saudi Arabia of supporting terrorism in part because it backs Syrian rebel groups fighting to oust its embattled ally, President Bashar Assad. Riyadh points to Iran's backing of the Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shiite militant groups in the region as a sign of its support for terrorism. Iran also has backed Shiite rebels in Yemen known as Houthis.

Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard said Saudi Arabia's "medieval act of savagery" would lead to the "downfall" of the country's monarchy. Saudi Arabia's Foreign Ministry said that by condemning the execution, Iran had "revealed its true face represented in support for terrorism."

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the Obama administration was aware of the Saudis' severing of ties with Tehran. "We believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences and we will continue to urge leaders across the region to take affirmative steps to calm tensions," Kirby said.

Earlier, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif by phone and urged Tehran to "defuse the tensions and protect the Saudi diplomats," according to a statement.

The disruption in relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran may have implications for peace efforts in Syria. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and others spent significant time trying to bring the countries to the negotiating table and they both sat together at talks aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the civil war. Last month, Saudi Arabia convened a meeting of Syrian opposition figures that was designed to create a delegation to attend peace talks with the Syrian government that are supposed to begin in mid-January.

"We are concerned that additional North Korean provocations could heighten tensions, lead to a cycle of escalation," he said

There could be firing by the North Koreans, which then could prompt South Koreans to retaliate very quickly," she said

In an additional provocation, South Korean soldiers on Wednesday found anti-South Korea and anti-U.S. propaganda leaflets

North Korea defends its nuclear ambitions

But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Wednesday defended his nuclear program, saying his country needs the capability to strike the United States if provoked.

Researchers with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury said that the heavily edited film seemed to show black smoke, several fireballs and even possibly falling debris

Weiss gets at something in her article, and it’s the tension between different trends underlying the modern Ideas Industry. On the one hand, all these people are thriving as thought leaders in a world in which there has been an erosion of trust in traditional intellectual gatekeepers. Neither the academy nor the New York Times op-ed page holds quite the power over the marketplace of ideas that it did 50 years ago.

the other way the IDW intersects with the Ideas Industry: deepening political polarization. It’s here that some internal tension starts to build. These intellectuals are most devout in attacking the political correctness of the left. But their relationship with the right is more fraught.

his is the tension that IDW participants cannot quite reconcile. Regardless of their own political preferences, most of their core audience consists of those on the right (or, rather, people who despise the left). But truly free thinkers need to criticize all sides for their errors. Some of these people have done this at times, but it is risky and threatens their feedlot. So they also cozy up with the cranks (Alex Jones), grifters (Mike Cernovich) and bigots (Milo Yiannopoulos).

“We reject any accusations to this effect and would like to remind everyone that Russia has been the only country to demand an unbiased international inquiry into the circumstances of the use of toxic chemicals near Idlib from the very start,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Through an interpreter, Rida says that he used his share of his family's land to pay his passage to the islands — 2,000 euros ($2,380). But the people smuggler tricked him, taking his money and leaving him stranded.

"They eat in the camp, breakfast lunch and dinner. And us? We're hungry. Hungry and ashamed, because it can't go on like this," he says. Pockets of xenophobia have bubbled here since the crisis began. There have been anti-migrant marches and reports of organized groups attacking Moroccans.

As the Spanish government struggled to accommodate the surge of arrivals, hotels left empty because of the pandemic were used as temporary solution. Now it is opening six new migrant camps for 7,000 people on the islands.

Rida wants to earn money for his mom's diabetes medicine. He says the family is poor and there's no future for him in Morocco. He's not alone. Moroccans make up one of the largest immigrant groups in Spain. And according to a recent survey by Arab Barometer, an independent research group, 70% of young citizens consider emigrating due to frustrations over a lack of economic opportunities.

Aday Arbelo, an out-of-work welder from Gran Canaria, is also eating at the soup kitchen. "We're all afraid!" he says. "Every day there's police around here, every day there are fights and robberies." "It's awful. One day this is going to explode because there's no solution at all. The government promises and promises and nobody helps."

"The main problem is not the migrants arriving but the local authorities and the government," Carlsen adds, "the image they are giving in front of the Canarian people — they feel like they are abandoned."

"Life in Senegal is very hard. There's no work or money," he says. "We're fishermen, and the government has sold the sea to foreign boats. To European boats!"

Cristina Taisma Calderín, a 19-year-old student from Las Palmas, has come to offer food and friendship. "This country is not only for us, they are people!" she says. "They have the right to live well in good conditions. And if other people come, let them come."

Spain's Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has said that the government wants to minimize transfers to the mainland in order to "prevent irregular entry routes into Europe." The center-left government's junior coalition partner, the leftist United We Can party, demanded migrants urgently be allowed to travel, condemning what it considers the "repeated infringement of human rights" in the Canaries.

A spokesperson from Spain's Interior Ministry told NPR that all undocumented migrants without international protection under asylum law face deportation. After the pandemic halted repatriation flights for months, deportations to Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania are now underway.

There was no official announcement of the Liaoning's position

The Liaoning's reported arrival in the South China Sea came after a US Navy expeditionary strike group, fronted by the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island, conducted exercises in the South China Sea a day earlier.

The ships also carried hundreds of Marine ground forces from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit as well as their supporting helicopters and F-35 fighter jets.Read More

"This expeditionary strike force fully demonstrates that we maintain a combat-credible force, capable of responding to any contingency, deter aggression, and provide regional security and stability in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific,"

Exercises by the Chinese carrier "can establish wider maritime defensive positions, safeguard China's coastal regions, and keep US military activities in check," the report said, citing Wei.

US analyst described the Liaoning's presence in the South China Sea as normal for the spring when weather conditions are conducive to training.

On Monday, more than 1,700 US and Philippines troops were beginning two weeks of military exercises, Reuters reported, citing Philippine military chief Lt. Gen. Cirilito Sobejana.

The proposals included ways of "enhancing situational awareness of threats in the South China Sea" and come after "the recent massing of People's Republic of China maritime militia vessels at Whitsun Reef," in the Philippines' exclusive economic zone in the Spratly Islands, the statement said.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Saturday tweeted he will work to have any attack on Philippine civilian craft trigger mutual defense aid, CNN Philippines reported.

Beijing accuses Washington and other foreign navies of stoking tensions in the region by sending in warships like the current expeditionary group led by the carrier Roosevelt.

Tensions extend to the northeastern edges of the South China Sea, where the island of Taiwan sits

Beijing claims the democratic, self-governed island of almost 24 million people as its territory

the two sides have been governed separately for more than seven decades.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed that Beijing will never allow Taiwan to become formally independent

Before moving into the South China Sea at the weekend, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning had been putting on a show of military muscle around Taiwan for a week, according to Chinese state media. At one point the People's Liberation Army flanked Taiwan, with the Liaoning and its escorts operating in the Pacific Ocean to the east and PLA warplanes making forays into Taiwan's self-declared air defense identification zone to the west.

Analysts said the exercises were a warning to Taipei and Washington that Beijing would not brook any moves for Taiwanese independence

"What is a real concern to us is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan," Blinken said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"We have a serious commitment to Taiwan being able to defend itself. We have a serious commitment to peace and security in the Western Pacific. And in that context, it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change that status quo by force," Blinken said.

Warren and Sanders have had a nonaggression pact throughout the campaign, but that truce was broken following a report from Politico’s Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein that the Sanders campaign had given volunteers a script that attacked other candidates, including Warren.

The Warren campaign responded to this by saying Sanders told Warren during a private meeting that he didn’t think a woman could win the White House in 2020. Sanders and his surrogates said the Vermont senator said no such thing. Warren and her surrogates said he did.

But the peace and goodwill engendered by the debate itself was largely derailed — among the senators’ bases, at least — by the moment CNN captured after, when no handshake occurred.

Obviously, this little moment is getting so much attention because the Iowa caucuses are now about two weeks away. Voting in New Hampshire comes directly after that, then contests in Nevada and South Carolina. In other words, time is running out.

That hesitancy is reflected in polls on the issue, many of which show that individuals want — or at the very least have no problem with — a woman nominee, but that they don’t believe other voters feel the same.

haven’t swayed voters in favor of the Minnesota senator. Instead, Biden, who has lost elections, and who does not have as strong a record of winning in Republican areas, is seen as Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump, according to recent polls. And it is Biden who leads nationally.

In 2020, anything could happen: Trump enjoys the advantages of incumbency and the Electoral College system, but experts have said the Democratic base is incredibly energized and is expected to show a strong turnout. Respondents to polls may believe Biden has the best chance against Trump, but experts have told Vox that no research argues a woman would be destined to lose in November because of her gender.

President Donald Trump, who reportedly asked for military options to deal with Iran in November, tweeted last week that he will "hold Iran responsible" should any Americans be killed.

Those concerns come as some analysts in Washington speculate Trump could trigger a conflict with Iran to distract from his failing, baseless attempts to overturn his election loss and to complicate his successor's plans for the region.

The President-elect wants to ease Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran, resume engagement and return to the Iran nuclear deal, all steps that hawks in the Trump administration vehemently oppose

Nichols told CNN that tensions are climbing at a time when Trump has fired senior civilian leaders at the Pentagon, replacing them with acting officials "who really don't answer to anybody but Donald Trump."

The Iranian letter said that while "Iran does not seek conflict, our ability and resolute determination to protect our people, to defend our security, sovereignty, territorial integrity and vital interests as well as to respond decisively to any threat or use of force against Iran must not be underestimated."

“We want voters to know these sporadic incidents are being addressed, and we want them to be able to cast their ballot,” Ms. Clarke said.

Law enforcement authorities are increasingly worried, too — not just about what they have already seen, but also about what has been threatened, especially online.

Most of the internet threats have not migrated to the nation’s streets, according to a senior law enforcement official

Turmoil has defined 2020. More than 230,000 Americans have died of Covid-19; the economy has cratered, and racial tension has sparked unrest across the country.

Supporters waved Trump flags, leaned out of their vehicles wearing Make America Great Again hats and honked and cheered.

The supporters were spotted crossing the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge over the Hudson River in the city’s northern suburbs and bringing the busy Garden State Parkway in New Jersey at least partly to a standstill. Officials in New Jersey told a local newspaper that the motorcade stopped near the Cheesequake Service Area — about 30 miles outside New York City — and “backed traffic up for about five miles.”

All of this has created extraordinary uncertainty, with fears driven not only by the potential outcome of the election but by the tensions that might erupt in the days and weeks after Election Day.

“People are upset, and scared, and frustrated,” said Caitlin Foley, a physician in Philadelphia. “I think there will be unrest, regardless of whichever candidate is in the lead.”

A separate set of anti-Trump protesters marched in New York City to counter the pro-Trump caravans, leading to some scuffles and arrests.

In an interview on ABC, Jason Miller, an adviser to the Trump campaign, said that Republicans were ready for a legal battle over ballots that have not been counted by Tuesday. He claimed that Democrats expect President Trump to be ahead on election night, “and then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.”

In Harrisburg, Pa., Annie Bravacos, 17, said she had felt a creeping dread about the election, and since she and her friends were too young to vote, they decided to canvass on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

“It’s easy to just get terrified about that, so just doing this, I guess, is what makes us feel better,” she said. “It’s, you know, we’re actually doing something, even if it’s small.”

“My ballot getting messed with? Yes. Me afraid to go somewhere? No,” said Mr. Carlisle, a 58-year-old building contractor, explaining why he refused to vote by mail or vote early.