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One possible solution is that the credible threat of force can persuade Iran not to resume its nuclear program if the deal is killed. Bolton has of course explicitly advocated using military force to stop an Iranian bomb, and Pompeo as a member of Congress asserted it would not be difficult to take out Iran’s nuclear capabilities with military strikes. If Iran does resume its suspended nuclear activities or kick out inspectors, will they conclude the use of force is necessary?

Finally, there is the question of regime change, since that’s what many Iran hawks really think is necessary to solve not just the nuclear program but to ensure security in the Middle East.

Washington publicly accused the Kremlin of cyberattacks on election systems and the democracy itself last Friday.

US officials suggested Russia be investigated for war crimes in the besieged city of Aleppo.

The whole hysteria is aimed at making the American forget about the manipulation of public opinion,"

We have not seen a single fact, a single proof,"

Hillary Clinton has pointed to the hacks as evidence that Russia favors her GOP opponent,

Putin dismissed that charge

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was a baseless accusation.

very real possibility of a building tit-for-tat dynamic

openly raised the possible use of nuclear weapons

"I think the world has reached a dangerous point,"

"It's a much more dangerous and unpredictable situation."

Putin wants to limit America's world leadership role, curb what he sees as an American inclination for "regime change," and show that Russia too can use military force to achieve foreign policy goals.

Moscow abruptly left a nuclear security pact, citing US aggression, and moved nuclear-capable Iskandar missiles to the edge of NATO territory in Europe

"you have the impression they are escalating by themselves and going to the extreme."

Recent incidents include harassment of US diplomats in Moscow and Russian claims that its foreign service officers are badgered in the US, several occasions

quality of relations between us is certainly at the lowest point since the Cold War,

aggressive anti-Russia tendencies at the basis of the US policy on Russia."

"the unacceptability of interference with democracy in the United States of America,"

Gorbachev urged a "return to the main priorities" between Russia and the US.

"These are nuclear disarmament, the fight against terrorism, the prevention of an environmental disaster,

Russian president is a former KGB agent and that means "by definition he doesn't have a soul."

Lavrov called it "ridiculous" to suggest that "Russia is interfering in the United States' domestic matters."

but there's clearly concern on some level

Putin "really believes the US is responsible" for the December 2011 demonstrations against him

ollowed a typical pattern of a slow escalation and a mutual understanding on both sides when it was time to stop. 

'if we are not getting what we want on one front, we will escalate on other fronts.' "

Russians "have signaled in a couple of ways that they are willing" to use nuclear weapons.

Russia understands they have another couple of months until January where nothing much is going to happen, and why not take advantage of that

In 1958, the U.S. military strategist Bernard Brodie didn’t taunt the rising nuclear power at the time, Russia, by tweeting “my Button works!” But he did write that deterrence in the Atomic Age operated on a “sliding scale” in which any functional nuclear weapon provided considerable deterrence and the “maximum possible deterrence” required “‘decisive superiority’ over the enemy.” When the Cold War ended, a Defense Department committee didn’t recommend that America’s deterrence policy be “I too have a Nuclear Button.” But it did declare that the “essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence” and that the United States should convey to adversaries in ambiguous terms that it “may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked.” It praised Bill Clinton for informing the North Koreans that if they ever used nuclear weapons, “it would be the end of their country.”

“Any threat to the United States, or its territories … or our allies will be met with a massive military response—a response both effective and overwhelming. … We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country—namely, North Korea. But, as I said, we have many options to do so,”

Even Trump’s reference to the mythical nuclear button—to the U.S. president’s largely untrammeled authority to order the use of nuclear weapons—has roots in deterrence theory.

“Once you start thinking ‘this person is appropriate for this weapon but not that person,’ then maybe it’s the weapon that’s the problem.”

“We’re not to the tipping point yet,” he noted, but “if they test another [nuclear] weapon, then all bets are off.”

“I don’t know how to say it any more direct: If nothing changes, Trump’s gonna have to use the military option, because time is running out,” Graham said. “I don’t care if North Korea becomes a Chinese protectorate. … I don’t care who [the Chinese] put in charge of North Korea, as long as that person doesn’t want to create a massive nuclear arsenal to threaten America. There are a couple ways for this to end: The Chinese could kill the guy if they wanted to, or they could just stop oil shipments [to North Korea], which would bring [Kim Jong Un’s] economy to [its] knees.” Graham’s scenarios for resolving the crisis short of war, along with his vision for war, notably conclude with regime change in North Korea, which the Trump administration claims to not be pursuing.

As the conflict devolves further, events are almost certain to spin out of the Kremlin’s control. After the Deir ez-Zor attack, the newspaper Kommersant cited a source saying that the Russian command group in Damascus had not authorized this “dangerous initiative.” This could just be a case of retrospective amnesia. But if true, it illustrates the dangers of messy, multi-player conflicts, in which an imperial power must deal with the fallout when its notional clients and proxies take the initiative. When this extends to picking fights with U.S.-backed forces and potentially even threatening U.S. personnel, it’s a dangerous matter. The odds of this escalating into an outright confrontation remain low, but the risk that Moscow might be forced to back down to avoid one is much greater.

The term “nuclear button” might have outlived the Cold War, the fear of global destruction, “duck-and-cover” drills, and even its original antagonists, the U.S., the Soviet Union, but as other countries, such as India and Pakistan, began developing their own nuclear-weapons programs, the metaphorical “nuclear button” entered their lexicon of war, as it did in countries like Israel, which does not confirm or deny the existence of a nuclear program.

It’s not known if Kim Jong Un possesses an actual nuclear button, as he claimed, or a metaphoric one—but he, like his father and grandfather before him, enjoys absolute power.

Even if he doesn’t have an actual button to order a nuclear strike, it’s quite possible he has something like it—with fewer safeguards in place than in the more established nuclear-weapons states. It’s that uncertainty that enhances the dangers of a “nuclear button”—the idea that annihilation can be unleashed with such ease by simply pressing a button.

But that’s little comfort for tens of millions of people if a nuclear warhead is hurtling toward a major city on the Korean Peninsula or the United States.

Together, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump are enabling the North Korean nuclear program to evolve into a mighty diplomatic weapon against U.S. interests, separating South Korea from the United States, incentivizing the South to placate the North. Together, Kim and Trump are depriving the U.S. of conventional military options—because there is no non-nuclear option against the North without the support of the South.

White House senior advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster sought to assure the world that “America First” does not mean “America alone.” In the Korean peninsula, however, increasingly that’s just what Trump has wrought. Trump’s warlike boasting is steadily leading the United States toward the starkest and most extreme dilemma: The only policies remaining will be a unilateral nuclear strike upon the North—or humbly submitting to a new Chinese-led security order in Northeast Asia.  

This means that China perceives its security threatened from several different directions—not just from the North Koreans. “North Korea’s continuous provocation directly undermines China’s security interest, [and] provides an excuse, from the Chinese perspective, for U.S., South Korea, and Japan to strengthen their security alliance,” Zhao said.

Still, even if  China is willing to take more steps against the North, Zhao said, “but realistically I don't think there’s much left for China to do.”

The hunger for revolutionary change, the fear that some people were being left behind in America and that no one in Washington cared, was an animating force at the boisterous rallies for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Yet Obama, who had surfed a boisterous wave into the Oval, ignored the restiveness — here and around the world. He threw his weight behind the most status quo, elitist candidate.

“I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming,” Rhodes writes about the “darkness” that enveloped him when he saw the electoral map turn red. “Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to change.”

Where were the next Barack Obamas? Obama had never been about party building. He was the man alone in the arena.

Obama did not like persuading people to do what they didn’t want to do. And that is the definition of politics. He wanted them simply to do what he had ascertained to be right.

President Obama could be deliberative, reticent and cautious to a fault, which spurred an appetite for a more impulsive, visceral, hurly-burly successor.

“It’s a project for a generation; it’s going to take till 2040 or 2050, and it’s hard,” said Gerd Rosenkranz, a former journalist at Der Spiegel who’s now an analyst at Agora Energiewende, a Berlin think tank. “It’s making electricity more expensive for individual consumers. And still, if you ask people in a poll, Do you want the energiewende? then 90 percent say yes.”

The Germans have an origin myth: It says they came from the dark and impenetrable heart of the forest

. The forest became the place where Germans go to restore their souls—a habit that predisposed them to care about the environment.

So in the late 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions were blamed for killing German forests with acid rain, the outrage was nationwide. The oil embargo of 1973 had already made Germans, who have very little oil and gas of their own, think about energy. The threat ofwaldsterben, or forest death, made them think harder.

I came away thinking there would have been no energiewende at all without antinuclear sentiment—the fear of meltdown is a much more powerful and immediate motive than the fear of slowly rising temperatures and seas.

energy researcher Volker Quaschning put it this way: “Nuclear power affects me personally. Climate change affects my kids. That’s the difference.”

NG STAFF; EVAN APP

Demonstrators in the 1970s and ’80s were protesting not just nuclear reactors but plans to deploy American nuclear missiles in West Germany. The two didn’t seem separable. When the German Green Party was founded in 1980, pacifism and opposition to nuclear power were both central tenets.

Chernobyl was a watershed.

The environmental movement’s biggest mistake has been to say, ‘Do less. Tighten your belts. Consume less,’ ” Fell said. “People associate that with a lower quality of life. ‘Do things differently, with cheap, renewable electricity’—that’s the message.”

It was 1990, the year Germany was officially reunified—and while the country was preoccupied with that monumental task, a bill boosting the energiewende made its way through the Bundestag without much public notice. Just two pages long, it enshrined a crucial principle: Producers of renewable electricity had the right to feed into the grid, and utilities had to pay them a “feed-in tariff.” Wind turbines began to sprout in the windy north.

The biogas, the solar panels that cover many roofs, and especially the wind turbines allow Wildpoldsried to produce nearly five times as much electricity as it consumes.

In a recent essay William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who has spent decades studying the problem of addressing climate change, identified what he considers its essence: free riders. Because it’s a global problem, and doing something is costly, every country has an incentive to do nothing and hope that others will act. While most countries have been free riders, Germany has behaved differently: It has ridden out ahead. And in so doing, it has made the journey easier for the rest of us.

Fell’s law, then, helped drive down the cost of solar and wind, making them competitive in many regions with fossil fuels. One sign of that: Germany’s tariff for large new solar facilities has fallen from 50 euro cents a kilowatt-hour to less than 10. “We’ve created a completely new situation in 15 years

Germans paid for this success not through taxes but through a renewable-energy surcharge on their electricity bills. This year the surcharge is 6.17 euro cents per kilowatt-hour, which for the average customer amounts to about 18 euros a month—a hardship for some

The German economy as a whole devotes about as much of its gross national product to electricity as it did in 1991.

Ideally, to reduce emissions, Germany should replace lignite with gas. But as renewables have flooded the grid, something else has happened: On the wholesale market where contracts to deliver electricity are bought and sold, the price of electricity has plummeted, such that gas-fired power plants and sometimes even plants burning hard coal are priced out of the market.

Old lignite-fired power plants are rattling along at full steam, 24/7, while modern gas-fired plants with half the emissions are standing idle.

“Of course we have to find a track to get rid of our coal—it’s very obvious,” said Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry. “But it’s quite difficult. We are not a very resource-rich country, and the one resource we have is lignite.”

Vattenfall formally inaugurated its first German North Sea wind park, an 80-turbine project called DanTysk that lies some 50 miles offshore. The ceremony in a Hamburg ballroom was a happy occasion for the city of Munich too. Its municipal utility, Stadtwerke München, owns 49 percent of the project. As a result Munich now produces enough renewable electricity to supply its households, subway, and tram lines. By 2025 it plans to meet all of its demand with renewables.

Last spring Gabriel proposed a special emissions levy on old, inefficient coal plants; he soon had 15,000 miners and power plant workers, encouraged by their employers, demonstrating outside his ministry. In July the government backed down. Instead of taxing the utilities, it said it would pay them to shut down a few coal plants—achieving only half the planned emissions savings. For the energiewende to succeed, Germany will have to do much more.

The government’s goal is to have a million electric cars on the road by 2020; so far there are about 40,000. The basic problem is that the cars are still too expensive for most Germans, and the government hasn’t offered serious incentives to buy them—it hasn’t done for transportation what Fell’s law did for electricity.

“The strategy has always been to modernize old buildings in such a way that they use almost no energy and cover what they do use with renewables,” said Matthias Sandrock, a researcher at the Hamburg Institute. “That’s the strategy, but it’s not working. A lot is being done, but not enough.”

All over Germany, old buildings are being wrapped in six inches of foam insulation and refitted with modern windows. Low-interest loans from the bank that helped rebuild the war-torn west with Marshall Plan funds pay for many projects. Just one percent of the stock is being renovated every year, though

For all buildings to be nearly climate neutral by 2050—the official goal—the rate would need to double at least.

here’s the thing about the Germans: They knew the energiewende was never going to be a walk in the forest, and yet they set out on it. What can we learn from them? We can’t transplant their desire to reject nuclear power. We can’t appropriate their experience of two great nation-changing projects—rebuilding their country when it seemed impossible, 70 years ago, and reunifying their country when it seemed forever divided, 25 years ago. But we can be inspired to think that the energiewende might be possible for other countries too.

At the peak of the boom, in 2012, 7.6 gigawatts of PV panels were installed in Germany in a single year—the equivalent, when the sun is shining, of seven nuclear plants. A German solar-panel industry blossomed, until it was undercut by lower-cost manufacturers in China—which took the boom worldwide

Curtailing its use is made harder by the fact that Germany’s big utilities have been losing money lately—because of the energiewende, they say; because of their failure to adapt to the energiewende, say their critics. E.ON, the largest utility, which owns Grafenrheinfeld and many other plants, declared a loss of more than three billion euros last year.

“The utilities in Germany had one strategy,” Flasbarth said, “and that was to defend their track—nuclear plus fossil. They didn’t have a strategy B.”

In a conference room, Olaf Adermann, asset manager for Vattenfall’s lignite operations, explained that Vattenfall and other utilities had never expected renewables to take off so fast. Even with the looming shutdown of more nuclear reactors, Germany has too much generating capacity.

Huge nuclear arsenals made it necessary to consider both the instantaneous and the endless: the decisive moment when mutually assured destruction is potentially set in motion, the frozen stalemate of the superpower stand-off, and the long catastrophe of a post-nuclear future.

The power of an individual decision was now outrageously amplified – the finger on the nuclear button – yet, at the same time, radically diminished in the face of unfathomable forces,

The world had become too complex and too dangerous

During the second half of the 20th century, many fields of enquiry from anthropology, political theory and analytical philosophy to art, music and literature were influenced by the explosion in interdisciplinary thinking that emerged from developments in cybernetics and its relationship with Cold War military research and development.

The practice of engaging with the connections and interactions between disparate elements of a problem or entity conceived as a system, and between such systems, is now commonplace in areas such as corporate strategy, town planning and environmental policy.

The pervasiveness of a systems approach also influenced the arts.

attempts to grasp the complex interconnectedness of society, and often the effects of technology and progress upon it.

Systems thinking offered a means of conceptualising and understanding a world that had grown hugely more complex and dangerous.

Nuclear weapons demanded radical new ways of thinking about time, scale, power, death, responsibility and, most of all, control – control of technology, people, information and ideas.

We are now accustomed to thinking about the current moment in global terms – globalisation, global warming, global communications, global security.

Everyday life is firewalled and password-protected. We move under a canopy of invisible cameras and sensors, where our personal details and likenesses, our associations, preferences and transactions lie waiting to be called upon – by friends, strangers, employers or snoops. And so what? We all do it – we are already conscripted

This is a world produced by the Cold War, by the anxieties and energies that found expression in the laboratories, boardrooms, government offices, think-tanks and universities tasked with managing a permanent state of emergency. The geopolitics may be different, but the technology, infrastructure, and worldview that built up and hardened during the Cold War era are still with us, embodied in the everyday devices we take for granted, and the precarious identities they suggest.

Normalised surveillance, generalised anxiety, an obsession with security, nationalised identities, pervasive suspicion and secrecy, spectacular military technology and proxy wars, spies, whistleblowers, and the enemy within.

Cold War marked the “end of history” – the great ideological struggles were over and Western liberal democracy had won, according to his thesis.

The world we are in is, in many ways, the world the Cold War made for us.

New technologies of war, such as heavy bombers and long-range missiles like the V-2 rocket, reduced distances of time and space. In recognition of this new state of affairs, in 1942 the

You wouldn't know it by watching them.

It was a flash of Washington normalcy, and it was jarring.

Like so many of us, the first and only time I felt a disturbance in the force here in Washington that came close to this was on September 11, 2001.

That plane was Flight 93, which never made it past a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, thanks to the bravery of passengers on board, who forced a crash-landing before their aircraft could be used as a missile hitting a landmark target -- like three other planes had that morning.

Still, the post-9/11 atmosphere in Washington was obviously also far different from what we are experiencing now with Covid-19.

This is usually the best time of year in DC, when these beautiful gifts from Japan in 1912 bloom and draw tourists and locals alike to the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. memorials.

I took my old convertible, put the top down before dusk one night, and my 8-year-old son, Jonah, and I got a quick peek at the fleeting beauty that is so quintessential DC. But we did it carefully, Covid-19 style.

The warmer Washington weather usually means that people flock to restaurants to sit outside and linger over an iced tea, or something stronger. But now there is none of that. Like cities all across the country, DC restaurants are takeout only

As she spoke to me from the Senate side of the Capitol, the House was passing the $2 trillion relief package to send to the President's desk.

A lot of House members were furious about having to return to Washington, arguing that the bill could have been approved by voice vote to avoid asking lawmakers to move around and get on planes -- the very thing leaders across the country are asking citizens not to do.

Unlike their colleagues in the Senate a few days earlier, House members did practice social distancing, spreading out and sitting about three seats apart from one another.

until now, the planet’s natural defense systems were better at fighting them off.

Today, climate warming is demolishing those defense systems, driving a catastrophic loss in biodiversity that, when coupled with reckless deforestation and aggressive conversion of wildland for economic development, pushes farms and people closer to the wild and opens the gates for the spread of disease.

ignoring how climate and rapid land development were putting disease-carrying animals in a squeeze was akin to playing Russian roulette.

the virus is believed to have originated with the horseshoe bat, part of a genus that’s been roaming the forests of the planet for 40 million years and thrives in the remote jungles of south China, even that remains uncertain.

China for years and warning that swift climate and environmental change there — in both loss of biodiversity and encroachment by civilization — was going to help new viruses jump to people.

. Roughly 60% of new pathogens come from animals — including those pressured by diversity loss — and roughly one-third of those can be directly attributed to changes in human land use, meaning deforestation, the introduction of farming, development or resource extraction in otherwise natural settings

Vector-borne diseases — those carried by insects like mosquitoes and ticks and transferred in the blood of infected people — are also on the rise as warming weather and erratic precipitation vastly expand the geographic regions vulnerable to contagion.

Climate is even bringing old viruses back from the dead, thawing zombie contagions like the anthrax released from a frozen reindeer in 2016, which can come down from the arctic and haunt us from the past.

It is demonstrating in real time the enormous and undeniable power that nature has over civilization and even over its politics.

it also makes clear that climate policy today is indivisible from efforts to prevent new infectious outbreaks, or, as Bernstein put it, the notion that climate and health and environmental policy might not be related is “a ​dangerous delusion.”

The warming of the climate is one of the principal drivers of the greatest — and fastest — loss of species diversity in the history of the planet, as shifting climate patterns force species to change habitats, push them into new regions or threaten their food and water supplies

What’s known as biodiversity is critical because the natural variety of plants and animals lends each species greater resiliency against threat and together offers a delicately balanced safety net for natural systems

As diversity wanes, the balance is upset, and remaining species are both more vulnerable to human influences and, according to a landmark 2010 study in the journal Nature, more likely to pass along powerful pathogens.

even incremental and seemingly manageable injuries to local environments — say, the construction of a livestock farm adjacent to stressed natural forest — can add up to outsized consequences.

Coronaviruses like COVID-19 aren’t likely to be carried by insects — they don’t leave enough infected virus cells in the blood. But one in five other viruses transmitted from animals to people are vector-borne

the number of species on the planet has already dropped by 20% and that more than a million animal and plant species now face extinction.

Americans have been experiencing this phenomenon directly in recent years as migratory birds have become less diverse and the threat posed by West Nile encephalitis has spread. It turns out that the birds that host the disease happen to also be the tough ones that prevail amid a thinned population

as larger mammals suffer declines at the hands of hunters or loggers or shifting climate patterns, smaller species, including bats, rats and other rodents, are thriving, either because they are more resilient to the degraded environment or they are able to live better among people.

It is these small animals, the ones that manage to find food in garbage cans or build nests in the eaves of buildings, that are proving most adaptable to human interference and also happen to spread disease.

Warmer temperatures and higher rainfall associated with climate change — coupled with the loss of predators — are bound to make the rodent problem worse, with calamitous implications.

As much as weather changes can drive changes in species, so does altering the landscape for new farms and new cities. In fact, researchers attribute a full 30% of emerging contagion to what they call “land use change.”

As the global population surges to 10 billion over the next 35 years, and the capacity to farm food is stressed further again by the warming climate, the demand for land will only get more intense.

Already, more than one-third of the planet’s land surface, and three-quarters of all of its fresh water, go toward the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock. These are the places where infectious diseases spread most often.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that fully three-quarters of all new viruses have emerged from animals

Almost every major epidemic we know of over the past couple of decades — SARS, COVID-19, Ebola and Nipah virus — jumped to people from wildlife enduring extreme climate and habitat strain, and still, “we’re naive to them,” she said. “That puts us in a dangerous place.”

A 2008 study in the journal Nature found nearly one-third of emerging infectious diseases over the past 10 years were vector-borne, and that the jumps matched unusual changes in the climate

Ticks and mosquitoes now thrive in places they’d never ventured before. As tropical species move northward, they are bringing dangerous pathogens with them.

by 2050, disease-carrying mosquitoes will ultimately reach 500 million more people than they do today, including some 55 million more Americans.

In 2013, dengue fever — an affliction affecting nearly 400 million people a year, but normally associated with the poorest regions of Africa — was transmitted locally in New York for the first time.

“The long-term risk from dengue may be much higher than COVID,

only 15% of the planet’s forests remain intact. The rest have been cut down, degraded or fragmented to the point that they disrupt the natural ecosystems that depend on them.

it’s only a matter of time before other exotic animal-driven pathogens are driven from the forests of the global tropics to the United States or Canada or Europe because of the warming climate.

it will also shape how easily we get sick. According to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Currents Influenza, warm winters were predictors of the most severe flu seasons in the following year

Even harsh swings from hot to cold, or sudden storms — exactly the kinds of climate-induced patterns we’re already seeing — make people more likely to get sick.

The chance of a flu epidemic in America’s most populated cities will increase by as much as 50% this century, and flu-related deaths in Europe could also jump by 50%.

Slow action on climate has made dramatic warming and large-scale environmental changes inevitable, he said, “and I think that increases in disease are going to come along with it.”

By late 2018, epidemiologists there were bracing for what they call “spillover,” or the failure to keep a virus locally contained as it jumped from the bats and villages of Yunnan into the wider world.

In late 2018, the Trump administration, as part of a sweeping effort to bring U.S. programs in China to a halt, abruptly shut down the research — and its efforts to intercept the spread of a new novel coronavirus along with it. “We got a cease and desist,” said Dennis Carroll, who founded the PREDICT program and has been instrumental in global work to address the risks from emerging viruses. By late 2019, USAID had cut the program’s global funding.

The loss is immense. The researchers believed they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, racing to sequence the genes of the coronaviruses they’d extracted from the horseshoe bat and to begin work on vaccines.

They’d campaigned for years for policymakers to fully consider what they’d learned about how land development and climate changes were driving the spread of disease, and they thought their research could literally provide governments a map to the hot spots most likely to spawn the next pandemic.

They also hoped the genetic material they’d collected could lead to a vaccine not just for one lethal variation of COVID, but perhaps — like a missile defense shield for the biosphere — to address a whole family of viruses at once

Carroll said knowledge of the virus genomes had the potential “to totally transform how we think about future biomedical interventions before there’s an emergence.

PREDICT’s staff and advisers have pushed the U.S. government to consider how welding public health policy with environmental and climate science could help stem the spread of contagions.

Since Donald Trump was elected, the group hasn’t been invited back.

What Daszak really wants — in addition to restored funding to continue his work — is the public and leaders to understand that it’s human behavior driving the rise in disease, just as it drives the climate crisis

“We turn a blind eye to the fact that our behavior is driving this,” he said. “We get cheap goods through Walmart, and then we pay for it forever through the rise in pandemics. It’s upside down.”

The unwillingness to anger China extends even to the United States, on which Taiwan has long depended for its defense.

Taiwan has relied on geography — a mountainous main island 80 miles across a windswept strait — and the support of the United States.

While Taiwan still has vocal support in Washington, especially in Congress, China’s economic and military rise has made it harder for the United States to ignore Beijing.

China has developed ballistic missiles on mobile launchers that, although untested in battle, would threaten American aircraft carriers. Denying the American military the ability to operate freely around Taiwan would undermine a core element of Taiwan’s strategy.

At the start of this trip, Trump administration officials denied the president was willing to make concessions on trade in the hope of extracting what was needed on North Korea. But the president is also not calling on China to make any significant moves to open its markets, preferring to put the spotlight on big-ticket deals for American companies.

Some Chinese call the relationship a “fake alliance.”

Officials in Beijing and Washington point out that China has taken some measurable steps on North Korea. After the North’s accelerating nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile launches, China approved tougher sanctions at the United Nations.It has agreed to sever banking ties, end joint-venture companies with North Korea and limit the export of diesel fuel. China shut down North Korea’s coal imports earlier this year.

For China, North Korea remains a valuable buffer against the possibility of a united Korean Peninsula that would probably be capitalist, democratic and allied with the United States, said Evans J. R. Revere, a former State Department official who dealt with Northeast Asia.

North Korea has launched two ballistic missiles over northern Japan in recent months, and has threatened to conduct a hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate it has developed the means to threaten the US mainland with nuclear weapons.Trump said the US-Japan alliance had been the cornerstone of regional security for the past six decades, adding: “We dominate the sky, we dominate the sea, we dominate the land and space.”

Trump’s bellicose rhetoric targeting Kim Jong-un has unsettled Moon, a liberal who this week said no military action should be taken on the Korean peninsula without his consent.Trump defended his provocative remarks about the North Korean nuclear crisis en route to Japan from Hawaii earlier Sunday.

Jonathan Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the trip comes “at a very inopportune time for the president. He is under growing domestic vulnerabilities that we all know about, hour to hour,” he said.

The days are “kind of like speed dating from hell,” as one analyst put it, and the evenings are “the world’s most tedious cocktail party.”

But when Mr. Trump attends the first United Nations session of his presidency this coming week, all eyes will be on him as counterparts from around the globe crane their necks and slide through the crowd to snatch a handshake — and, in the process, try to figure out this most unusual of American leaders.

“For a number of leaders, this is going to be their first chance to see him, to judge him, to try to get on his good side.”

In some places, there has been an instinct to dismiss Mr. Trump as a bombastic, Twitter-obsessed political and diplomatic neophyte. “But the fact is you can’t write off the American president,” Mr. Alterman said.

One of Mr. Trump’s primary tasks will be to define how his America First approach — which has led him to pull out of international agreements on free trade and climate change — fits into the world-first mission of the United Nations.

Mr. Trump arrives in New York at a time of crackling tension over North Korea’s provocative actions and deep uncertainty about what he will do with President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.

Mr. Trump is settling into a somewhat more conventional foreign policy than many had anticipated, analysts said.

The president has not launched an all-out trade war with China, ripped up the Iran deal or the North American Free Trade Agreement, or moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, at least not yet.