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But the American middle class is neither stable nor self-reliant. Recognizing this is the prerequisite to determining what we need to weather this storm.

The American middle class long has been presented as evidence that self-reliance leads to stability, even prosperity. The very existence of a middle class appears to prove the notion that if we work hard enough and make the right choices, everything will be OK — and also its corollary: that the poor must have somehow brought poverty upon themselves and that we, industrious workers that we are, will surely never be one of them

Before the pandemic, Americans saved approximately 8 percent of their income, which would cover a fraction of their living expenses. American households carry an average of $111,198 in debt. Even in flush times, this kind of financial exposure can be stressful. During long spells of unemployment and underemployment, it can lead to ruin.

virtually every American has benefited from some form of public aid, from programs widely recognized as ‘‘welfare,’’ like food stamps, to more hidden subsidies issued through the tax code, like government-subsidized retirement benefits

the average middle-class American family (with a before-tax household income of $66,400) receives more help from the government than it pays in federal taxes and collects more aid than the average American family in the lowest income quintile (with a before-tax household income of $24,600).

We’re all on the dole, however meager it may be.

countries with more robust welfare states have been able to respond to the recent economic downturn with a high level of competence and the kind of deep investment that the Covid-19 pandemic demands.

In nations like Britain and Germany, workers have been allowed to keep their jobs even as businesses shuttered because their governments are paying all or most of their wages.

Because Germany already had a system, known as Kurzarbeit, in place to pay workers whose hours are reduced during economic crises, it didn’t need to reinvent the wheel when the coronavirus began to spread. Other countries that didn’t have such a system in place, including Ireland and Denmark, quickly fashioned one.

it’s not just the design of a nation’s welfare infrastructure that matters but also its level of commitment to protecting basic human needs.

just as states go to war with the army they have, in a recession they tend to catch the unemployed with the safety net they have

America not only lacks many programs that buffer workers from economic calamity — such as the right to housing or universal health care — it is also bereft of a national culture characterized by social solidarity and faith in government.

About a third of Americans express trust in the government, unlike most Germans, Norwegians and Swiss.

countries that have been able to bend the curve of Covid-19 cases, both in Europe (Switzerland, France) and Asia (South Korea, Taiwan), have been those where citizens recognize the importance of strong government.

Countries that have yet to respond as effectively — including Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States — have publics deeply skeptical of their governments as well as current heads of state (Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) who share, and stoke, that sentiment.

‘‘The American public consistently expresses a desire for more government effort and higher levels of spending for almost every aspect of the welfare state,’’

The New Deal erected an institutional scaffolding designed to provide unprecedented stability and predictability for the American economy,’

The quarter century of prosperity that followed World War II was rooted in the profound structural reforms of the New Deal. A strong market was made possible by strong government intervention.

It is now widely acknowledged that the federal government should have acted sooner and spent bigger when addressing the 2008 financial crisis. In March, Neel Kashkari, who oversaw the rescue package (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) and is now president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, wrote, ‘‘My experience underscores that if there is a principle policymakers need to keep in mind going forward, it’s this: Err on the side of helping as many workers and businesses as possible rather than on prudence.’’

In 2008, the government hobbled the rescue package by trying to make sure that only ‘‘deserving’’ Americans received help, slowing and narrowing relief. ‘‘The American people ultimately paid more because of our attempts to save them money,’’ Kashkari wrote with hindsight.

‘‘Adding $3 trillion in spending,’’ as the HEROES Act would, ‘‘is necessary for spending after the summer and most importantly to start helping states.’’ J. W. Mason, an associate professor of economics at John Jay College in New York, pointed out that $3 trillion corresponds to a 20 percent decline in private demand, which, based on what happened in the 2008 recession, we should prepare for.

Dole announced in February 2021 that he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. During his 36-year career on Capitol Hill, Dole became one of the most influential legislators and party leaders in the Senate

Dole could be merciless with his rivals, whether Democrat or Republican.

Long gone from Kansas, Dole made his life in the capital, at the center of power and then in its shadow upon his retirement, living all the while at the storied Watergate complex.

He tried three times to become president. The last was in 1996, when he won the Republican nomination only to see President Bill Clinton reelected.

He sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1980 and 1988 and was the 1976 GOP vice presidential candidate on the losing ticket with President Gerald Ford.

Today’s accessible government offices and national parks, sidewalk ramps and the sign-language interpreters at official local events are just some of the more visible hallmarks of his legacy and that of the fellow lawmakers he rounded up for that sweeping civil rights legislation 30 years ago.

But when Bush died in December 2018, old rivalries were forgotten as Dole appeared before Bush’s casket in the Capitol Rotunda. As an aide lifted him from his wheelchair, Dole slowly steadied himself and saluted his one-time nemesis with his left hand, his chin quivering.

For all of his bare-knuckle ways, he was a deep believer in the Senate as an institution and commanded respect and even affection from many Democrats. Just days after Dole announced his dire cancer diagnosis, President Joe Biden visited him at his home to wish him well. The White House said the two were close friends from their days in the Senate.

Biden ordered that U.S. flags be flown at half-staff at the White House and all public buildings and grounds until sunset Thursday.

He served as a committee chairman, majority leader and minority leader in the Senate during the 1980s and ’90s. Altogether, he was the Republicans’ leader in the Senate for nearly 11½ years, a record until Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell broke it in 2018.

After Republicans won Senate control, Dole became chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee and won acclaim from deficit hawks and others for his handling of a 1982 tax bill, in which he persuaded Ronald Reagan’s White House to go along with increasing revenues by $100 billion to ease the federal budget deficit.

Relegated to private life, Dole became an elder statesman who helped Clinton get a chemical-weapons treaty passed.

He also tended his wife’s political ambitions. Elizabeth Dole ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, then served a term as senator from North Carolina.

Several who switched their vote between 2019 and now objected to measures they said did not specifically address strengthening NATO to help Ukraine. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) found it particularly problematic that the resolution instructed NATO to be involved when a country has “internal threats from proponents on illiberalism,” which he says could be interpreted as conservatism.

Similarly, from Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.): “I am wholeheartedly, unequivocally, without reservation, supportive on NATO.”

Aderholt said he worried that the resolution “had some language in that I thought went on the political side. And I don’t want to see NATO go political. I want to see NATO stand up for, you know, what’s going on in Ukraine — stand up for Ukraine against Russia.”

Another sign of the party’s isolationist wing emerged Thursday, as the House passed an update to a World War II-era military bill creating a lend-lease program intended to make it easier for the United States to supply Ukraine with military aid. Only 10 lawmakers — all Republicans — voted against the measure.

For some foreign policy experts and international allies, the mere fact that nearly one-third of the Republican conference voted against a bill that fundamentally seeks to support both NATO and Ukraine highlights a marked foreign policy evolution in the Republican Party.

“We now are really seeing the true impact of deep, deep political polarization, where it is better to harm the other side than do what’s right for the country,” said Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund. “This deep domestic polarization has now crept into foreign and security policy. There has always been strong bipartisan support for NATO, but everything now has become polarized and can be weaponized against the other side, even if it supports U.S. national security interests.”

The answer, however, is existential in Europe, where the fallout from the war in Ukraine has showcased the importance of the United States and the limits of aspirations for European autonomy on matters of technology and defense, according to lawmakers and diplomats.

Flash points are already coming into view. In 2020, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg started a working group aimed at strengthening NATO. The group’s final product, “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” included proposals, such as the creation of a Center for Democratic Resilience, that have been scorned by pro-Trump Republicans, including many of the 63 Republicans who recently voted against the House resolution affirming support for NATO.

A diplomat from a Baltic state, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating U.S. partners, called the vote a “Trump effect.”

But for some, the changes are not enough. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), who voted against the recent resolution, said he objected not to NATO but to its future direction, which in his view places too large a burden on the United States and involves too much promotion of specific values.

Disagreements have broken out among member nations over the erosion of democracy within the alliance, with criticism directed in particular at Turkey, Hungary and Poland. A Central European diplomat said objections to the democracy center reflect admiration for the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in other Western nations.

De Maizière echoed that view, saying his primary concern about upcoming U.S. elections was that “right-wing Republicans are drifting away from this common path of Western values.”

Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish member of the European Parliament who chairs the body’s delegation for relations with the United States, said Ukraine “is the second big issue on which Republicans and Democrats agree, after China.”

“Ukraine has given new credibility to the Atlanticist wing of the Republican Party, which I find encouraging,” said Sikorski, a member of his country’s centrist Civic Platform party and a prominent critic of the ruling, right-wing Law and Justice party. “There seems to be competition in being pro-Ukrainian and wanting to stop Putin.”

“We’re certainly going to have a lot of these talks with my colleagues, particularly next cycle, if there’s any assault on NATO that is launched,” Fitzpatrick said. “I will tell you that NATO needs to be reformed significantly. But it is absolutely critical that it be maintained because without NATO, dictators are going to, it’s going to be the Wild West internationally.”

Tommy Vietor, a National Security Council spokesman under Democratic President Barack Obama, said: “It’s a pretty shocking turn.”

“There’s an appropriate and important conversation to be had about the history of NATO expansion and whether it was well-thought-through,” said Vietor, now a co-host of “Pod Save America.” “But you didn’t see people in either party really fundamentally questioning the value of the alliance.

The agreement is based on the premise that Turkey, which hosts more than 2 million Syrian refugees, is safe for asylum seekers and that returning migrants to Turkish territory does not violate European or international law.

Last week, a Greek tribunal ruled that a Syrian national who had appealed his deportation from Europe could stay on the island of Lesbos. The court said there is no guarantee refugees will be provided full protection in Turkey.

More than 1 million refugees and migrants reached European shores in 2015 in one of the largest mass migration movements since World War II.

Most of the refugees had crossed the sea from Turkey to Greece to get to Europe, and E.U. leaders needed to strike a deal with the Turkish government.

The E.U. offered more than $6 billion in funds to help Turkey, a member of the NATO military alliance, cope with its refugee population.

And policymakers agreed that for every Syrian returned to Turkey under the E.U. deal, another Syrian refugee already residing in Turkey would be resettled to Europe.

“The management of the deal is inadequate . . . and the Greek government is reluctant to send anyone back who might have vulnerability,” Collett said. “The challenge now is predicting whether or not [the deal] will unravel.”

Collett’s concerns were echoed in a report released this month by a European parliamentary delegation that visited detention facilities in Turkey.

In Turkey, pro-government newspapers churn out anti-E.U. columns on a near-daily basis, calling on Erdogan to spurn a “hypocritical” Europe.

“The deal isn’t on hold,” a senior Turkish official said this week. He spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with government protocol. “Turkey maintains an open-door policy” toward refugees, he said.

Does Japan even want an apology?

Likely not. A secret 2009 state department cable published by Wikileaks in 2011 indicated Japan was cool to the idea and worried that it would only serve to energize anti-nuclear activists in the country.

the government’s official stance was that it would be more meaningful for the U.S. and Japan to “aim for a peaceful and safe world without nuclear weapons.”

An apology also could harden the opposition to using nuclear power in Japan, a sentiment that blossomed after the meltdown at Fukushima. The administration has made nuclear power a major part of its energy policy.

“Why doesn’t the Japanese government want Mr. Obama to apologize? Because it tears the scab off a much bigger wound that Japan wants healed,”

“If Obama apologizes at Hiroshima, it draws attention to Japanese behavior elsewhere in Asia during the ’30s and ’40s.

I think the American people should know that not only the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the firebombing of Tokyo in which thousands died, were illegal acts against humanity. They were civilian massacres.”

A 2015 opinion poll by a Russian news agency found that 60% of the Japanese public wanted an apology for the bombing.

But what the Japanese government and the public want aren’t always the same.

To refuse to discuss ideas such as types of capitalism deprives us of language with which to think about these problems. It makes it easier to stop thinking about what the economic system is for and in whose interests it is working.

Perhaps the protesters occupying Wall Street are not so misguided after all. The questions they raise — how do we deal with the local costs of global downturns? Is it fair that those who suffer the most from such downturns have their safety net cut, while those who generate the volatility are bailed out by the government? — are the same ones that a big-picture economic vision should address. If economists want to help create a better world, they first have to ask, and try to answer, the hard questions that can shape a new vision of capitalism’s potential.

the United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American lost. The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of "excess deaths" in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.

the fact that people died as a result of certain U.S. actions does not by itself mean that those policy decisions were wrong. I'm a realist, and I accept the unfortunate fact that international politics is a rough business and sometimes innocent people die as a result of actions that may in fact be justifiable.

Yet if you really want to know "why they hate us," the numbers presented above cannot be ignored. Even if we view these figures with skepticism and discount the numbers a lot, the fact remains that the United States has killed a very large number of Arab or Muslim individuals over the past three decades. Even though we had just cause and the right intentions in some cases (as in the first Gulf War), our actions were indefensible (maybe even criminal) in others. 

It is also striking to observe that virtually all of the Muslim deaths were the direct or indirect consequence of official U.S. government policy. By contrast, most of the Americans killed by Muslims were the victims of non-state terrorist groups such as al Qaeda or the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

the figures reported above omit the Arabs and Muslims killed by Israel in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Given our generous and unconditional support for Israel's policy towards the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular, Muslims rightly hold us partly responsible for those victims too.

our real problem isn't a fictitious Muslim "narrative" about America's role in the region; it is mostly the actual things we have been doing in recent years. To say that in no way justifies anti-American terrorism or absolves other societies of responsibility for their own mistakes or misdeeds. But the self-righteousness on display in Friedman's op-ed isn't just simplistic; it is actively harmful. Why? Because whitewashing our own misconduct makes it harder for Americans to figure out why their country is so unpopular and makes us less likely to consider different (and more effective) approaches.

When you kill tens of thousands of people in other countries -- and sometimes for no good reason -- you shouldn't be surprised when people in those countries are enraged by this behavior and interested in revenge. After all, how did we react after September 11? 

starting around the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, economic globalization accelerated and the gap between nations began to shrink. The period from 1988 to 2008 “might have witnessed the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution,”

While the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed — namely, between Asia and the advanced economies of the West — huge gaps remain. Average global incomes, by country, have moved closer together over the last several decades, particularly on the strength of the growth of China and India. But overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. (The Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality, improved by just 1.4 points from 2002 to 2008.)

So while nations in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as a whole, might be catching up with the West, the poor everywhere are left behind, even in places like China where they’ve benefited somewhat from rising living standards.

income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

With a few exceptions — France, Japan, Spain — the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.

Over these same years, countries like Chile, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and Hungary managed to reduce (in some cases very high) income inequality significantly, suggesting that inequality is a product of political and not merely macroeconomic forces.

Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.

Excessive financialization — which helps explain Britain’s dubious status as the second-most-unequal country, after the United States, among the world’s most advanced economies — also helps explain the soaring inequality

Mobile capital has demanded that workers make wage concessions and governments make tax concessions. The result is a race to the bottom

None of this is inevitable. Some countries have made the choice to create more equitable economies: South Korea, where a half-century ago just one in 10 people attained a college degree, today has one of the world’s highest university completion rates.

. It's with this reality in mind that on January 27, my subcommittee held a hearing on terrorists' use of social media. At those hearings, experts detailed how terrorist use of social media platforms has long been a problem.

The first -- and easiest to set aside -- is the claim that if the U.S. government were to shut down terrorists' social media accounts, these measures would be violating terrorists' free speech rights.

The second argument is that terrorists' use of social media provides the intelligence community with information that they would not otherwise be able to acquire. But while terrorists may slip up from time to time, they are also aware that by its very nature, social media is about sharing, which means what they say can easily become widely shared

Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that it is unlawful to provide a designated foreign terrorist organization with "material support or resources," including "any property, tangible or intangible, or services."

It is mindboggling to think that those who behead and burn others alive are able to use our own companies against us to further their cause. But that is exactly what is occurring. American newspapers would have never allowed the Nazis to place an ad for recruitment during World War II. Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations should not be allowed to use private American companies to reach billions of people with their violent propaganda in an instant, all for free.

upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.

Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”

Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.

While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.

previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.

Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.

The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.

the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.

In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.

The New Deal epoch didn't end because the public opposed the federal spending. It ended when millions of working-class White voters abandoned the Democratic Party because of the party's pro-civil rights stance in the 1960s.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the budget deficit in future years is expected to be around 4% of GDP. If we could trim that by one quarter, reducing it to 3% of GDP, we could prevent the debt from rocketing higher compared to size of the overall economy. Keeping the debt stable and also paying for that $600 billion in new spending will require higher taxes, amounting to 4% of GDP -- 1% to cut the deficit and 3% to fund the new spending.

The real reason goes deeper. It lies in a risk-averse European culture marked, in several countries, by skepticism about vaccines. As a safeguard against public backlash, Europe’s leaders sought to secure as many guarantees as possible. Tellingly, one of the most difficult points in the negotiations with vaccine manufacturers was the degree of liability the bloc wanted them to accept if anything went wrong.

For one, it might allow Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who’s eager to erase his own failures in handling the pandemic, to claim that great advantages come from being outside the bloc — an argument that nationalists throughout Europe would be eager to hear

This pandemic is the first global crisis since World War II in which American leadership has been absent. Europe, united and purposeful, could have filled the vacuum — but so far the opportunity has been badly missed. It must learn from the experience.

U.S. natural gas is far less damaging to the environment than coal. It has become so cheap that it is displacing coal in electricity generation, driving down emissions. To others, Cove Point is an environmental catastrophe. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it releases lots of greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause climate change. Both arguments are right.

society must eliminate its carbon dependency. It cannot burn vast amounts of any fossil fuel for “decades and decades,” as Mr. Farrell hopes, unless there is a revolution in emissions capture technology. Even in the short term, U.S. emissions are rising, despite the restraint that stepped-up natural-gas burning has provided. The government must demand more change, more quickly.

One objection is that carbon pricing is not powerful enough. The European Union’s carbon pricing program has not worked well. But that is a failure of design and political will. A carbon price equal to the challenge would start high and rise higher, sending a much stronger price signal.

carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy

A high-enough carbon price would shape millions of choices, small and large, about what to buy, how to invest and how to live that would result in substantial emissions cuts. People would prioritize the easiest changes, minimizing the costs of the energy transition. With a price that steadily rose, market forces would steadily wring carbon dioxide out of the economy — without the government trying to dictate exactly how, wasting money on special-interest boondoggles.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found last year that an average carbon price between 2030 and the end of the century of $100, $200 or even $300 per ton of carbon dioxide would result in huge greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, could restrain warming to the lowest safety threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and would almost certainly prevent the world from breaching the traditional warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius

Republicans never embraced the market-based idea, even though conservative economists admit its appeal, because they never accepted the need to act at all. Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of carbon pricing. The Democrats’ Green New Deal, which is noncommittal on the policy, reflects the accelerating drift from the obvious.

A third objection is that carbon pricing is politically impossible, because it reveals the cost of fighting global warming in the prices people pay

Another criticism is that carbon pricing hurts the poor, who would suffer most when prices rose. But the revenue from carbon pricing could be recycled back to Americans in a progressive way, and most people would end up whole or better off.

This is a leadership challenge, not a policy challenge. More than 40 governments globally, including several states, have found the political will to embrace carbon pricing programs, which is the only option that would plausibly be bipartisan.

One objection does have merit: Though carbon pricing would spur huge change in infrastructure and power generation, that alone would not be enough. It would not stimulate all the innovation the nation needs in the climate fight, nor would it change behaviors in circumstances where the desired price signal is muted or nonexistent

Foreign aid to prevent deforestation could be among the most cost-effective climate-preserving measures. Helping other countries to replace archaic cooking stoves that produce noxious fumes would help cut emissions and improve quality of life across the developing world.

, economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work. Others benefit from their innovations without paying. Consequently, firms do not invest in research as much as society should want

It would take only a small fraction of the revenue a carbon pricing system would produce to fund a much more ambitious clean-energy research agenda. Basic scientific research and applied research programs such as ARPA-E should be scaled up dramatically

The government must also account for the fact that not all greenhouse-gas emissions come from burning the fuels that a carbon pricing program would reach — coal, oil and gas. How would the government charge farmers for the methane their cows emit or for the greenhouse gases released when they till their soil? How about emissions from cement, ammonia and steel production? The federal government would have to tailor programs to the agricultural and industrial sectors, which might include judicious use of incentives and mandates.

only government can ensure adequate mass transit options. Local governments could help with zoning laws to encourage people to live in denser, more walkable communities. The federal government should also press automakers to steadily improve fuel efficiency.

That starts with making sure that emissions-cutting efforts at home do not have unintended consequences. If the United States puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions, other countries would lure U.S. manufacturers with the promise of lax environmental rules. Relocated manufacturers could then export their goods to the United States. The net effect would be no benefit for the planet but fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs.

One response is a kind of tariff on goods entering the country from places with weaker carbon-dioxide policies. That would both eliminate the incentive to offshore manufacturing and encourage countries to strengthen their own rules.

Participating in the agreement would give the United States a forum — and a basis — to press other nations to reduce emissions.

Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps.

There are a lot of bad ideas out there.

The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal

that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II.

At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions.

Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan.

Before the announcement of the recent mass conscription, which was followed by the declaration of martial law in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, about 30 percent of Russians who were asked by a pro-Kremlin pollster to describe the predominant mood of people around them said they were anxious. Since the decree, that number has risen to 69 percent.

as the invasion has dragged on, Mr. Putin has had to shout “Wolf!” ever more stridently.

With little experience of democracy, Russians have traditionally been content to entrust their government to a strong “khoziayin,” or master, so long as he provides stability and seems to know what he’s doing. But if that contract is violated, as Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, warned in a quote every Russia knows by heart, “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”

He has drawn liberally on his rewriting of Russian history and culture — as he did again in the Valdai speech, citing, among others, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky — to claim a spiritual superiority over a West he sees as decadent and decaying. Never mind that these two writers were both repressed by the state, Soviet and czarist, and that Russia is widely perceived as a kleptocracy.

There is no soft power in this equation, no appreciation of reasons Ukraine might be more attracted to Europe than to Russia, but only spheres of control parceled out according to rules of conquest and control that the West rejected after World War II. The longings of the Ukrainians have no part in this; Russia’s — Mr. Putin’s — mission is to return to Russia what is Russia’s by right of might

it is becoming evident that Mr. Putin, increasingly isolated during the Covid pandemic, was led to believe by his sycophantic lieutenants that a quick invasion would promptly topple the Kyiv government and herd Ukraine back into the fold, and that the West was too far gone to do anything about it.

this is the key part—people did not accept the reasonable expectations. They fought and organized and worked. They bent the curve of the future.

now is no time for celebration. To use a World War II analogy, we’ve survived Dunkirk, the Blitz and Pearl Harbor—but much damage has been done, the enemies of liberalism remain formidable, and we’ve only just begun the effort to regain ground. Even if victory is possible, there is a long and difficult road ahead.

Perhaps Churchill’s 1941 Christmas Eve address from the White House, where he was visiting Roosevelt, is apt.

“Let the children have their night of fun and laughter,” he remarked. And “Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasure.”But Churchill added that, after sharing that moment of pleasure, we will have to “turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.”

In Greece, an unlikely economic star since the pandemic, as many as 44% of all jobs are connected to tourism. 

Can Europe’s emerging “museum economy” support sustained wealth creation and the expansive welfare systems Europeans have become accustomed to since the end of World War II? And what happens if the dollar falls and the tourists leave?

Rent and other living expenses are rising in hot spots, making it harder for many locals to make ends meet. A heightened focus on tourism, which turns a quick profit but remains a low-productivity activity, tethers these economies to a highly cyclical industry

It also risks keeping workers and capital from more profitable areas, like tech and high-end manufacturing. 

some economists, residents and politicians are concerned about the boom’s long-term implications.

“It is literally, for Americans right now, the place to go,”

The strong dollar—and a powerful post-Covid recovery—has empowered millions of Americans who would have vacationed in the U.S. before the pandemic. They are now finding they can afford a lavish European holiday.

One reason is the brutal sovereign debt crisis that hit the continent’s south especially hard just over a decade ago. Unable to stimulate demand with public spending or to energize exports by devaluing their currency—the euro, which is shared by 20 states—those countries could only boost their competitiveness by lowering wages.

“Your dollar goes a lot further,” Cross said over coffee in the lobby of her five-star hotel. “You don’t feel you’re scrounging as much.”

Tourism now generates one-fifth of economic output in Lisbon and supports one in four jobs. That boom has reverberated far beyond the capital.

Portugal’s gross domestic product grew nearly 8% between 2019 and 2024, compared with less than 1% for Germany,

The government recorded a rare 1.2% of GDP budget surplus last year, and its debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to fall to 95% this year, the lowest since 2009

Portugal’s population is growing again after years of decline, thanks in part to an influx of migrant workers and to various tax incentives and investor visas that have attracted high-income workers. 

Moedas, Lisbon’s mayor, says there’s room for further growth. For a city that doubles in size to around one million every day, including commuters, only around 35,000 are tourists, he said. “We are very far from a situation of so-called overtourism.”

The trend is part of a global readjustment following the Covid-19 lockdowns. Spending on travel and hospitality worldwide grew roughly seven times faster than the global economy over the past two years, according to Oxford Economics. That pattern is expected to continue for the next decade, though to a lesser degree.

Europe, especially southern Europe, has benefited more than many other regions. Though it is home to just 5% of the world’s population, the European Union received around one-third of all international tourist dollars—more than half a trillion dollars—last year. This is up roughly threefold over two decades, and compares with about $150 billion for the U.S., where tourism has been slower to rebound.

In Portugal, a country of 10 million that juts out into the North Atlantic from Spain, Americans recently surpassed Spaniards as the biggest group of foreign tourists. 

This and a real estate collapse that left hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly available made the region’s tourist industry ultracompetitive, much cheaper than Caribbean beach destinations and on a par with Latin American destinations like Mexico. 

Once an owner of TAP, Neeleman increased the number of direct flights to the U.S. eightfold between 2015 and 2020, adding major hubs such as JFK and Boston Logan, betting that would open up an untapped market. As bookings soared, other U.S. airlines followed. 

“It was actually comical, because I went from knowing no one who had been to Portugal to everyone telling me they were going to Portugal,”

For Gonçalo Hall, a 36-year-old tech worker, the influx of foreign cash that has transformed Lisbon has been overwhelmingly beneficial for the city. When he lived in the capital 15 years ago, he wouldn’t walk in the historic downtown after 8 p.m. It was “full of homeless people, not safe. Lots of empty and abandoned buildings,” he said. 

“The quality of life in Lisbon doesn’t match the prices. Even expats are leaving,” said Hall, who moved to the Atlantic island of Madeira during the pandemic and continues to work remotely.  

The average Portuguese employee earns around €1,000 a month after tax, or around $1,100 a month, and only 2% earn more than €2,000. A one-bedroom apartment in Lisbon can easily cost more than €500,000 to buy, or over €1,200 a month to rent. Rents in nearby cities are also climbing as people leave the capital, squeezed out as lucrative short-term rentals transform the housing market. 

Jessica Ribeiro, a 35-year-old sociologist, pays around €490 a month for an apartment that she shares with her ex-husband in a town close to Lisbon. Neither can afford to leave. Both make a little more than the minimum wage of €820 a month, and soaring rents mean it is impossible to find an apartment in the neighborhood for less than €700, Ribeiro said. 

“The harm that tourism has brought is infinitely bigger than the benefits,” Ribeiro said. “It sends people away from their place of work, making their lives much harder.” 

A frequent complaint from residents and housing advocates is that some of the boom’s biggest winners are American companies, from Airbnb to Uber, which often pay little tax in the places where they do most of their business.

Lisbon is cracking down on Airbnbs and increasing taxes on tourists, doubling the nightly city tax from €2 to €4, which should raise €80 million a year. Airbnb has paid Lisbon and Porto, Portugal’s two biggest cities, more than €63 million after entering into voluntary tax collection agreements with local officials. Moedas said he is considering “a bit more regulation” of the city’s many Ubers, whose drivers he said don’t always respect traffic rules. 

Around nine in 10 Airbnb hosts in Portugal rent their family home and almost half say the extra income helps them afford to stay in their homes, according to a spokesperson for the company. “Guests using our platform account for just 10% of total nights booked in Portugal, and we follow the rules and only allow listings that are registered with local authorities,”

Higher rents are forcing many businesses and cultural and social spaces catering to locals to close, according to Silva. “This is not an economy that is serving the needs of the majority of people,” she said.

Signs of discontent are bubbling up across the region. Tens of thousands of local residents marched in Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands in recent months to protest mass tourism and overcrowding. On Mallorca, activists have put up fake signs at some popular beaches warning in English of the risk of falling rocks or dangerous jellyfish to deter tourists, according to social-media posts.

Serving foreigners is difficult to scale up and is more exposed to economic headwinds. Like the discovery of oil, southern Europe’s new focus on tourism can crowd out higher-value activities by hogging capital and workers, a phenomenon some economists have dubbed the “beach disease.”

“Portugal isn’t an industrialized country. It’s just the playground of the EU,” said Priscila Valadão, a 43-year-old administrative assistant in Lisbon. She makes €905 a month and rents a room from a friend for €250 a month. “The type of jobs being offered…are restricted to a type of activity that really doesn’t enrich the country,”

For Europe’s policymakers, having people open hotels or restaurants is easier than incentivizing them to build up advanced manufacturing, which is capital intensive and takes a long time to pay off, said Marcos Carias, an economist with French insurer Coface. 

“Tourism is the easy way out,” Carias said. “What is the incentive to look for ingenuity and go through the pain of creating new economic value if tourism works as a short-term solution?”

Proponents say tourism attracts capital to poor regions, and can serve as a base to build a more diversified economy. Lisbon’s Moedas said he is trying to leverage the influx of foreign visitors to build up sectors such as culture and technology, including by developing conferences and cultural events. 

“Some extreme left parties basically say we need to reduce tourism,” Moedas said, but that is the wrong approach. “What we have to do is to increase other sectors like innovation, technology…. We should still invest in tourism, but we should go up the ladder.”

While Dias, the hotel owner, is diversifying into nightlife, he refuses to envisage a future where the sector would have to rely heavily on visitors from elsewhere.

More than one-third of highly qualified Portuguese students leave the country after graduating,

Even higher-paid technology workers have started decamping to cheaper places. 

Tiago Araújo, chief executive of tourism tech startup HiJiffy, has held on to his employees but says many of them have been moving out of Lisbon. The trend, which started during Covid, is now being primarily driven by the housing crisis.

In Athens, Mayor Haris Doukas says he is working on extending the tourist season, increasing the average length of stay and promoting specific types of tourism, such as organizing conferences and business meetings, to attract visitors with higher purchasing power. He’s also called for new taxes to help the city accommodate the millions of additional tourists thronging to the ancient capital.

If Americans stop coming to Lisbon, he said, “I don’t think we can charge this kind of [price] because we will have to go to Europeans, and the Europeans, they don’t have money.”

World War II forced transformative market changes when supplies from Europe and elsewhere were cut off. Many companies expanded and moved across the Hudson to set up new factories

One of the newer breakthroughs to come along in the science of flavor is called taste modulation. About a decade ago, a biologist at the University of California at San Diego named Charles Zuker isolated, for the first time, the receptors on the tongue that are responsible for our perception of taste. He did this using tastebud cells from laboratory mice. What he found was that each cell was incredibly specific, containing receptors for just one taste — either sweet, sour, salty, bitter or savory (also called umami

Coupled with mass spectrometers, which identify what’s been isolated, this technology opened up a vast world of possibilities, allowing for a much more thorough (though still incomplete) map of nature’s aromas. The number of flavor chemicals known in orange peels, for instance, has gone from nine in 1948 to 207 today. In spearmint leaves, it’s leapt from 6 to 100, and in black peppercorns, from seven to 273.

In nature, flavor comes as a sophisticated mix of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of chemicals, each with its own unique taste and smell. Using early-20th-century chemistry tools, scientists could hope to identify perhaps a handful of these in any given plant

Some of the demand for flavoring is related to how plants and animals are grown and raised. Wright urged me to try a taste test at home if I was so inclined. Take three different whole chickens, she said — an average, low-priced frozen one from the supermarket; a mass-produced organic version like Bell and Evans; and what she termed a “happy chicken.” This was a bird that had spent its life outside running around and eating an evolutionary diet of grass, seeds, bugs and worms. Roast them in your kitchen and note the taste. The cheap chicken, she said, will have minimal flavor, thanks to its short life span, lack of sunlight and monotonous diet of corn and soy. The Bell and Evans will have a few “roast notes and fatty notes,” and the happy chicken will be “incomparable,” with a deep, succulent, nutty taste. Wright, as you might imagine, prefers consuming chickens of the happy variety, which her husband, who is also a flavorist (he works from home as a consultant), is generally the one to cook.

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.”

The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

the report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.

the Constitution Project study was initiated after President Obama decided in 2009 not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs, as proposed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others. Mr. Obama said then that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Aides have said he feared that his own policy agenda might get sidetracked in a battle over his predecessor’s programs.

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews.

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses;

“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases,” Mr. Jones said. “We lost our compass.”

it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

The report compares the torture of detainees to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “What was once generally taken to be understandable and justifiable behavior,” the report says, “can later become a case of historical regret.”