In February, President Joe Biden announced that he was ending America’s “offensive” support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, six years into the conflict that has killed around 230,000 people and triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Instead, the US role would be limited to “defensive” operations “to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.”
There’s just one problem: The line between “offensive” and “defensive” support is murky, and critics argue even the limited support the US is providing still helps Riyadh carry out its offensive bombing campaign in Yemen.
Since 2015, the US has supported the Saudi-led coalition’s fight against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Until November 2018, that support included refueling Saudi warplanes that dropped bombs on Yemen — many of which killed civilians, including children. The Trump administration ended that practice after increased pressure from activists and lawmakers about Riyadh’s brutal conduct in the conflict.
But the US continued to provide logistical and intelligence support for the Saudi war effort and planned to sell billions in advanced weapons like precision-guided missiles to the Saudis.
With Biden’s new policy, the US would stop all of the above and solely help Saudi Arabia defend its territory against threats from the Houthis and elsewhere. As an example of the danger Riyadh faces, a Pentagon spokesperson told reporters that the Saudis have suffered over 100 cross-border air attacks with missiles and drones since January.
Biden’s policy sounds straightforward enough. For the past few months, the US made a clean break and no longer provides assistance to Riyadh’s ongoing strikes inside Yemen, right?
Not quite. That’s because the “defensive” support the US is still providing includes greenlighting the servicing of Saudi aircraft.
Multiple US defense officials and experts acknowledged that, through a US government process, the Saudi government pays commercial contractors to maintain and service their aircraft, and those contractors keep Saudi warplanes in the air. What the Saudis do with those fighter jets, however, is up to them.
The US could cancel those contracts at any time, thus effectively grounding the Saudi Air Force, but doing so would risk losing Riyadh as a key regional partner.
The reality of the situation, then, is squishy enough that the administration says it’s following Biden’s directive and securing its interests in the Middle East, while critics say that Biden’s team is indirectly supporting the Saudi-led coalition’s offensive operations inside Yemen.
The issue isn’t really a he-said/she-said or who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s a question of how you look at the entirety of America’s role in the war.
“It’s a definitional and kind of theological argument,” said David DesRoches, a professor at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, a Pentagon-funded school.
The Biden administration finally clarified its support of Saudi’s military
It took a long time to get a straight answer as to how, exactly, the US was assisting Saudi Arabia after Biden’s February announcement.
Lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee asked Tim Lenderking, the State Department’s special envoy for Yemen, last Wednesday about the new policy. His response was wanting. He said he was “not totally in the loop” and that the panel should ask the Pentagon for specifics.
A reporter the next day asked Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, who oversees all US troops in the Middle East, to provide some clarity. He responded that, when possible, the US military provides the Saudis with warning of any incoming attacks on Saudi Arabia that the US has detected coming from Yemen.
“The principal thing I do with the Saudis is I give them advanced notice when I’m able to do that,” he said, adding that the US provides no intelligence, surveillance, or reconnaissance support inside Yemen. “I would characterize our support as essentially defensive in nature.”
I wanted to know specifically whether the US provides any maintenance, logistical, or refueling support for Saudi warplanes, so on Friday, I asked chief Defense Department spokesperson John Kirby those questions during a regular briefing. His staff got back to me with an answer over the weekend.
“The United States continues to provide maintenance support to Saudi Arabia’s Air Force given the critical role it plays in Saudi air defense and our longstanding security partnership,” said Navy Commander Jessica McNulty, a Pentagon spokesperson.
While more specific than the administration had been to date, that statement still wasn’t entirely clear. Was the US military directly providing that support? And did the maintenance go to Saudi fighter jets, its missile defense system, or both?
So I asked McNulty to clarify her statement, which she did on Monday in an email. “[The] Department of Defense supports Saudi aircraft maintenance through Foreign Military Sales to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for which Saudi Arabia bears the costs and implementation is conducted by DoD contractors,” she wrote.
That means Riyadh, with its own money and at no cost to the US taxpayer, uses a US government program to procure maintenance for its warplanes. (That service likely was included when the Saudis bought the American-made warplanes.) It may not be the US military providing direct support, then, but the service was still greenlit by the US.
This doesn’t please critics of the war and America’s role in it. A Democratic congressional aide complained, “Oh, great, the ‘they’re civilian contractors’ line,” adding that a US-approved service to provide maintenance and spare parts for Saudi aircraft is tantamount to America backing Riyadh’s offensive plans.
Others agreed. “The recent admission by the Department of Defense that US companies are still authorized to maintain Saudi warplanes … means that our government is still enabling the Saudi operations, including bombings and enforcing a blockade on Yemen’s ports,” Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative manager for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation lobbying group, told me. “The administration should use its existing authority to block US military contractors from aiding the Saudi war effort in Yemen.”
Later on Monday, I asked Kirby, the top Pentagon spokesperson, to address those concerns.
“What the president has decided is that the support we’re giving [Saudi Arabia] will be primarily for their self-defense, and not further participating in the Saudi-led coalition’s offensive operations inside Yemen,” he told me and other reporters in a regular briefing.
“I understand where the question’s going,” he continued, “that maintenance support for systems could be used for both purposes” — that is, offensive and defensive operations. But, he said, the US is doing what it’s doing because “we have a military-to-military relationship with Saudi Arabia that is important to the region and to our interests, and we have a commitment to help them defend themselves against what are real threats.”
Okay, so what does this all mean? Is the US participating in Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen or not? The unsatisfying answer: possibly, but if so, not directly.
The US probably supports some Saudi offensive operations. But canceling the maintenance contract has drawbacks.
There are two main issues here: 1) How do you define an offensive versus defensive operation? and 2) what would the US government canceling the maintenance contract actually mean?
The first question is extremely hard to answer, experts say. “I haven’t heard anybody clearly explain the difference between offensive and defensive operations,” the National Defense University’s Des Roches told me.
That makes sense, especially when you consider that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an Offensive Air Force and a Defensive Air Force. It just has the one aerial service that the US supports.
Still, the offensive part is relatively straightforward: The Saudis find a Houthi target inside Yemen they want to hit, and they bomb it.
But it gets more complicated when you consider what “defensive” might mean. As the Houthis continue to launch missile and drone attacks inside Saudi Arabia, Riyadh might decide to strike a few of the Houthis’ launch points to dissuade further assaults.
Would such a move be defensive or offensive? It’s unclear.
What is clear is that without the US-approved maintenance of Saudi fighters, Riyadh wouldn’t really have the option of launching such retaliatory responses. “They’d be able to fly two out of every 10 aircraft,” said Des Roches. That would give the Houthis an edge in the ongoing fight.
Which leads to the second question: What if the US canceled the maintenance contract?
The Biden administration has the right to do that, experts say, but the consequences of that decision might lead Riyadh to no longer consider the US a reliable partner. That outcome could see Washington lose a key regional friend, a bulwark against Iran, and a nation that lets America station troops in its territory.
Would potentially losing Saudi Arabia as a partner be worth essentially grounding its air force? The Biden administration seems to have calculated that it’s not.
Put together, it seems likely that US-authorized contractors maintaining Saudi warplanes are indirectly involved in helping the Saudis carry out “offensive” operations, however one defines them. “If we’re servicing the planes that are fighting the war, we’re still supporting the war,” said the Democratic congressional aide. That the contract remains in place, after all, is a policy decision. The US could also decide to maintain other equipment and provide training instead of keeping Saudi aircraft in the sky.
But it’s also true that without the maintenance support, Saudi Arabia would be further exposed to all kinds of attacks from the Houthis (and others). And after nixing the contract, the decades-old ties between Washington and Riyadh might not just spiral downward but sever entirely.
Biden’s definitive line between offensive and defensive support isn’t as clean as he may have hoped. The question is if he’ll do anything about it.
President Joe Biden’s pick to be the third-highest civilian leader at the Pentagon is already facing a tough confirmation challenge a week before his hearing — and it’s mostly because he staunchly supports the Iran nuclear deal.
A spokesperson for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me the lawmaker is concerned about Colin Kahl assuming the position of undersecretary of defense for policy. The person in that job oversees and develops how the Defense Department handles military threats from China, Russia, terrorist groups, and, yes, Iran.
However, the spokesperson added that “it’s still early in the process and there are still many steps before Sen. Inhofe makes a final decision.” When I asked if the senator would vote “no” if the confirmation vote were held today, the spokesperson reiterated that it’s “too early to say.” Politico was first to report Inhofe’s stance.
This whole situation is bigger than a lawmaker standing against the president’s nominee, though in a 50-50 Senate, any Republican opposition — especially from a prominent senator — spells trouble.
It’s really about how the 2015 Iran deal will be a perpetual source of tension between Republicans, some Democrats, and the White House for the next four years.
Political fights over the Iran deal have already begun
Congressional sources say Inhofe is following through on his threat, made in a Foreign Policy op-ed this month, to make Biden nominees favorable to the Iran deal sweat their confirmations.
The president should “reconsider his nomination to senior national security positions of former Obama administration officials who were directly involved in negotiating the original Iran deal, as well as those who promoted it,” the senator wrote.
Kahl is the exact kind of person Inhofe was talking about.
As a top Middle East official at the Pentagon and Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration, Kahl helped shape the nuclear pact known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal, simply put, had the US lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe curbs on Tehran’s nuclear work.
Out of government, Kahl spent time blasting the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to withdraw from the agreement in pursuit of a maximum pressure policy toward Iran.
“This a dangerous delusion,” Kahl wrote in a 2018 Foreign Affairs article. The Trump administration believed they could “force Iran to accept a better deal—one that eliminates the JCPOA’s sunset clauses, dismantles a significant portion of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, ends Iranian support for terrorism and regional militancy, and addresses the regime’s systematic violation of human rights at home.”
“It won’t,” Kahl continued. “Trump may hope to isolate Tehran, but it is Washington that finds itself largely alone.”
Kahl’s advocacy, and general Democratic support for the nuclear accord, has rankled Republicans for the past six years. Their overall view is that the Iran deal made Tehran stronger after sanctions were lifted, and that it did nothing to curtail the regime’s support for terrorist groups or its missile program.
In myriad conversations I’ve had, congressional Republicans cite these and other reasons for why they’re skeptical of Kahl’s nomination. (They also note Kahl was at the Pentagon serving in a key Middle East policy position when ISIS surged in Iraq in 2015, shortly after US troops left the country.)
But Democrats, including top members of the Biden administration, say the JCPOA was a targeted accord that put Iran’s nuclear work “in a box.” Only then, with the threat of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon off the table, could the US begin to try to convince Tehran to end the other aggressive aspects of its foreign policy.
The general belief was that the Biden administration would work quickly to rejoin the deal, especially since the president promised America’s reentry on his watch. But so far the US has been cagey in the process, holding firm that it won’t lift sanctions Trump reimposed until Iran stops enriching uranium beyond the pact’s caps.
Experts say that’s for two reasons. One is a clear-eyed assessment by Biden’s team that it can’t just lift financial penalties and hope Iran comes back into compliance with the accord, though they’re willing to talk to Tehran about a way forward. The other is that holding firm signals to Republicans that the Democrats in charge aren’t too eager to rejoin the agreement.
That underscores just how rancorous the policy debate over that issue remains and how the yawning gap between the two parties will continue to color America’s Iran policy in the years to come.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the Senate Armed Services Committee chair, told reporters on Wednesday that he’s “hopeful” Kahl can get through the confirmation process. “The committee hearing will be absolutely critical and crucial because he’ll have an opportunity to explain his positions, and then my colleagues will make a judgment.”
But that judgment won’t be about Kahl personally or his experience to do the job. It’ll be about what he represents.
This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook.Explore all the stories here.
DAEGU, South Korea — Jo Hye-min stepped off the train and into a situation she had only seen in movies: a completely, and eerily, empty station.
It was February 2020, when the threat posed by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was only starting to become clear in much of the world. But the situation in Daegu was already dire: Hospitals were overwhelmed and on the brink of collapsing. Hundreds of people believed to have been exposed to the virus were being isolated in private rooms. A nurse’s association in Daegu issued a plea for volunteers to help.
“It felt like war had broken out,” Jo says, and the 28-year-old nurse enlisted. The national disease control agency called her at 10 pm, asking if she could be in Daegu by 9 am the next morning. She dropped off her cat with a friend and made the 60-mile trip from her home in Busan. When she arrived at the isolation facility, she was told it would be at least a month before she could leave.
Jo was joining a frantic, all-out effort by South Korean officials to contain a burgeoning epidemic.
A woman in her 60s, who would later become known as Patient 31, had tested positive for Covid-19. Public health authorities learned she was a member of a secretive religious movement and attended services in the days before being diagnosed, potentially exposing more than 1,000 people.
South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the infected and the potentially exposed — to isolate themselves to prevent the virus from spreading any further.
It was a three-step protocol: test, trace, and isolate. And it worked. Within a week of Patient 31’s diagnosis, the country was performing the most Covid-19 tests in the world; it implemented perhaps the most elaborate contact tracing program anywhere; and it set up isolation centers so thousands of patients could quarantine.
As other countries saw their outbreaks spiral out of control, measures like these helped South Korea keep Covid-19 in check. On March 1, South Korea had about 3,700 confirmed cases; Italy, the first hot spot in Europe, had 1,700 and the US had just 32 cases, though its dismal testing meant the virus was likely spreading unsurveilled. By the end of April, Italy had topped 200,000 cases; confirmed cases in the US were already above 1 million. South Korea still had fewer than 11,000. Adjusted for population, South Korea’s first wave of coronavirus cases was about one-tenth as big as that in the United States.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the US was considered better prepared than any country in the world to stop an infectious disease outbreak. But the first months of the pandemic response in the US were marked by now-familiar stumbles. The virus escaped containment. While South Korea tested, traced, and isolated, the US struggled, a critical early failure that cost lives.
No country had a perfect response to the pandemic. Every approach came with trade-offs and caveats, and even success stories can go awry in the face of global, exponential growth. But around the world, nations took successful steps to limit the pandemic’s damage. We talked to Jo and other South Koreans as part of Vox’s Pandemic Playbook series, which will explore the successes — and setbacks — in six nations as they fought the virus.
South Korea’s early, decisive action was crucial. South Korea was one of the first countries where Covid-19 was seen outside of China, before much was known about the virus at all. It seemed at high risk for an unstoppable outbreak — and instead, it staved off disaster. To date, the US ranks 10th in its total cases per capita; South Korea ranks 145th. Though it has been slower to vaccinate its population than world leaders like the US, South Korea is still seeing fewer than 700 new cases per day on average; the United States, meanwhile, is averaging more than 70,000.
“South Korea was able to flatten the epidemic curve quickly,” researchers from Harvard and Seoul National University wrote in a review of the country’s response. Among the top reasons for its success: “conducting comprehensive testing and contact tracing and supporting people in quarantine to make compliance easier.”
Testing capacity quickly expanded. Contact tracing began. And at the isolation center, Jo settled into a new routine, calling up to 50 patients a day to check on them. If they fell sick, she had no treatment to offer. Nobody knew what would work. They had one option: test, trace, and isolate.
Patients lapsed into depression. They had nothing to do but watch TV and eat out of their lunchboxes; some people would vomit when they took their daily Covid-19 tests, administered through the nose. In the most extreme cases, a patient would stop responding to the nurses’ calls. A nurse in protective gear would enter the room and try to provide the person with more direct emotional support.
“I could see the patients started to lose it mentally and emotionally,” Jo said. “I was always on alert, and the emotional care was really difficult for me.”
The strategy was not without its costs, and not all of its components may be universally applicable; Americans especially already have a deep distrust of the government and government surveillance. And South Korea has made mistakes. In some cases, public officials leaked patients’ personal information. Civil rights advocates say the government unconstitutionally overreached to track people’s locations. Clusters continue to pop up, and businesses still operate at limited capacity.
But the country’s response saved lives. Thousands of health care workers and millions of everyday South Koreans made the sacrifices necessary to prevent the kind of mass death seen in much of the Western world. To date, fewer than 2,000 South Koreans have died from Covid-19. The country has never issued an official stay-at-home order; subway trains and buses have been mostly packed with commuters, and people have been working in their offices as usual since last spring. Masks are commonplace, but otherwise, Covid-19 has not altered the fabric of everyday life in South Korea the way it has in much of the Western world.
Five years earlier, an outbreak of the MERS virus, which appeared to be even more lethal than Covid-19, led to strict social distancing protocols. The country took action after that crisis so it would be better prepared for the next outbreak.
“I think back then, Koreans didn’t realize that new infectious diseases can be a threat to all of us,” Park Young-joon, a top official at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), says. “These experiences led to a change in attitude.”
They were determined never to be caught off guard again.
After a deadly failure, South Korea reformed its public health system
In December 2019, about two dozen of South Korea’s top epidemiologists and health officials gathered at the KDCA for a training exercise. The scenario: A hypothetical coronavirus had originated in China, and a family of four was bringing the new respiratory virus into South Korea from Hong Kong.
After the exercise, an internal review singled out the importance of using GPS and credit card data to track contacts with the infected patients. Another idea proposed during the simulation would also prove prescient: The country should develop testing materials that could be quickly adapted to any new coronavirus.
The country committed to running these pandemic war games after it was threatened by two of the most frightening respiratory pathogens to appear in the 21st century.
During SARS-1, in 2003, South Korea was considered a model for its decisive response. Just three people died.
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Then came MERS, an even deadlier coronavirus, in 2015.
A man in his late 60s visited several Seoul-area hospitals and health clinics before he was diagnosed with MERS. He was likely the country’s patient zero, and he infected other patients and medical workers over a 10-day period. The outbreak, the largest outside the Middle East, led to 186 confirmed cases and 38 deaths, and highlighted weaknesses in the country’s contact tracing and quarantine programs.
A year earlier, a very different disaster — the sinking of the Sewol ferry that killed more than 300 people — sparked outrage at government incompetence. South Koreans were losing faith in the government’s ability to handle a crisis. In the wake of MERS, public officials were criticized for failing to apply the lessons of SARS-1. People wanted something done.
“People freaked out,” Kelly Kim, general counsel at Open Net Korea, a civil rights group, says. “If something bad happens, they always blame the government and ask the government to do something about it. The easiest thing is making a law.”
The government passed a total of 48 reforms after MERS, all toward the goal of being better prepared for the next pandemic. The country committed to a playbook: test, trace, and isolate. Crucial changes were made to the system for contact tracing — the process where health workers talk to infected people and get a list of those they were in recent contact with, and then work outward, asking those contacts to get tested and isolate themselves.
But that system only works if the patients are forthcoming. During the MERS outbreak, one man had reportedly lied to health workers about his presence at a conference attended by 1,000 other people.
“It put the whole country into this crisis,” Park Kyung-sin, a professor at Korea University Law School, says. “The lesson was clear: Location tracking has to be done on a mandatory basis.”
The post-MERS changes passed by the national legislature authorized federal agencies to access credit card transactions, cellphone location data, even CCTV footage if needed. People could be fined for breaking quarantine. The number of infection control staff and isolation units was increased.
There was a culture change, too. Public health officials started running the periodic outbreak simulations to test their readiness. And Park Young-joon read daily status updates on emerging diseases.
A few weeks after the pandemic simulation, one of those reports came from Wuhan, China, noting an outbreak of aggressive pneumonia. At first, he didn’t take the reports of an unknown respiratory virus too seriously. But then he learned the Chinese government was locking down the entire city. That was when he first believed it would spread to South Korea.
“I realized this disease was different,” he says. “We felt it was just a matter of time.”
When Covid-19 hit, South Korea put its new protocols in action
There were still only four confirmed Covid-19 cases in South Korea on January 27, 2020, when government health officials gathered representatives from more than 20 medical companies in a conference room in Seoul’s biggest train station.
The message was simple: We need tests for this dangerous new virus, as soon as humanly possible, and we will approve yours quickly if it works.
After the MERS scare, the government budget for infectious diseases nearly tripled in five years, spurring a boom in the biotech sector. Some of that new funding was spent on research and development for testing kits.
A week after the train station meeting, on February 4, South Korea approved its first Covid-19 test. The same day, in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration okayed a testing kit designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US test would prove unreliable, setting efforts back by weeks. South Korea’s was swiftly validated at more than 100 laboratories. Companies were soon shipping thousands of test kits to labs and hospitals across the country.
By March 1, South Korea was performing more than 10,000 tests every day. The US couldn’t even manage 100. When adjusting for population, it wouldn’t be until mid-April — when South Korea’s outbreak was under control — that the US would finally overtake Korea in total tests performed.
The surge in testing capacity came just in time. Patient 31 was about to figure into the country’s first known superspreader event, which would stretch Korea’s ability to rapidly test for Covid-19, trace the contacts of infected people, and isolate them.
On February 17, the patient, a woman in her 60s, tested positive for Covid-19 and was interviewed about her recent movements. Korean officials quickly realized they had a crisis in the making.
The woman had traveled between Seoul and Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city, in the days before testing positive. She also attended services at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, an insular Christian group based in Daegu.
Park Young-joon, as the head of epidemiological investigations at the KDCA, was quickly dispatched to Daegu. The government set up testing centers all across the area, including drive-through sites that could perform three times as many tests as regular clinics. After public pressure, the church group handed over a list of its members for contact tracing. Conscripted military personnel were called in to help.
Within days, hundreds of church members had tested positive. Park Young-joon decided the best way to contain the outbreak was to isolate everyone who may have been exposed. Thousands of people, tracked down through security footage and phone data, were urged to self-quarantine. The government struck a deal with Samsung and LG to transform their training dormitories into isolation centers for people deemed at higher risk. Noncompliance came with a hefty fine: more than $8,000 US.
The call went out to nurses like Jo Hye-min, pleading for volunteers to staff the isolation centers. More than 3,000 patients would enter the facilities during the month of March.
The country’s outbreak quickly leveled off. After averaging more than 500 new cases every day during the first week of March, the rate of daily new cases slowed dramatically. Over the first week of April, South Korea saw about 500 new cases total.
“We did an impossible task,” Jo says. “It was as though we built the Great Wall in a week.”
But Covid-19 wasn’t gone.
The next big scare arrived a month later, in early May: a cluster of infections linked to the Itaewon nightclub district. The clubs had reopened on April 30 — and by May 6, several cases were confirmed among people who had partied at one of them.
Jang Hanaram, a member of the military doing contact tracing work in Seoul, was put on the case. Jang says he was soon working 24 hours a day while sleeping in the bunk bed in his office. His days were a blur of phone interviews: He estimates that at the height of the effort, he was making more than 200 calls without a break.
Tracing contacts from the Itaewon outbreak added an extra degree of difficulty: Some of the nightclubs were favored by the LGBTQ community. There is still a lot of discrimination against LGBTQ people in South Korea, and people were not always forthcoming about where they’d been and whom they’d been in close contact with for fear of being outed or outing others.
One man, Jang says, lied to him during a contact tracing interview. But he and his team had other options. He could pull the man’s credit card and GPS data instead.
“Even when people weren’t so cooperative, we can find out where this person went and when,” Jang says.
By the end of May, using cellphone location data, South Korean authorities had identified nearly 60,000 people who had spent at least 30 minutes in the vicinity of the Itaewon nightclubs between April 30 and May 6.
Those people were simply urged to get tested. But another 1,200 deemed to be at higher risk of exposure were required to self-quarantine while being monitored by the government. Those patients checked in with health workers over a smartphone app; the government also sent them groceries and toiletries, and offered them psychological counseling.
Ultimately, the Itaewon cluster was linked to just 246 cases, and overall caseloads stayed well below what was seen in Daegu. The country didn’t see a second significant wave until late August, ignited by the protests of another church group.
But the extraordinary phone surveillance required to identify the 60,000 possible contacts in Itaewon has come under scrutiny from civil rights advocates, who saw some of their fears about the powers granted to the government in 2015 coming true.
“This was not the use envisioned by the people who passed the law after the MERS outbreak,” Park Kyung-sin says.
Privacy advocates worry about how much information the government can get — but it’s a “lonely fight”
South Korea’s epidemic response is distinct from that of the US and almost every other country in the world in one important way.
In the US, disease investigators must rely on interviews and, in theory, opt-in phone tracking apps, though those have struggled to attract enough users to be effective. In South Korea, cooperating with contact tracing isn’t done out of altruism, though everybody we spoke to stressed that South Koreans do feel a strong sense of civic responsibility. It’s the law — and if you refuse to comply, the authorities can get your financial or location data anyway. No such legal obligation exists in the US.
“The right to collect and use very personal information was an essential part of the [2015] legislation,” Park Young-joon says.
South Korea’s government has stretched that authority as far as it can go during the current emergency — beyond what is legally permissible, according to some civil rights lawyers we spoke with.
During the Itaewon outbreak, for example, the public health authorities didn’t just notify the people who had come into close contact with the patients who later tested positive. They used phone location data to alert anybody who was in the area of their potential exposure, which South Koreans focused on privacy rights saw as a serious overreach.
Park Kyung-sin explains the difference with an analogy about how police might investigate a crime: Normally, investigators get a warrant to follow specific people, targeting specific phone numbers.
But what South Korea did in Itaewon, he says, was more comparable to the National Security Agency surveillance exposed by Edward Snowden. Anybody who was within a certain area, no matter the individual risk of exposure, had their location data scooped up by the government.
“When that’s done against your consent, that is a problem,” Park Kyung-sin says. “We are not really fighting the law but the use of the law.”
One man who lied to contact tracers after the Itaewon outbreak was a teacher who worried about the consequences if people found out he was gay. Because he misled investigators, he was arrested and sentenced to six months in jail.
A couple of months after the Itaewon outbreak, Park Kyung-sin and his colleagues at Open Net Korea filed a constitutional challenge against the government’s use of the 2015 laws, asking for restrictions on mandatory location tracking and clear commitments from the government about deleting information.
And yet, broadly speaking, the public has accepted the measures. About nine in 10 South Koreans said in May 2020 that they supported disclosing patient location information. Attitudes may be changing as the pandemic drags on — Park Young-joon said he and his colleagues have noticed a decline in support — but most people continue to comply.
“Most Koreans are willing to compromise their privacy for their life,” Kelly Kim at Open Net Korea, the civil rights group, says. For privacy advocates, “it’s been a really hard fight, a kind of lonely fight.”
South Korea’s system worked because it acted early
South Korea’s citizens don’t regard the country’s response as perfect. They have endured their share of strife.
Park Jeong-uk, a pub owner in Seongnam, saw his monthly revenue drop by 50 percent during a small wave of cases in August. A winter surge that necessitated more social distancing measures was even harder. He had to let two part-time workers go, and has taken out bank loans he’ll have to start paying back soon. He lost a lot of sleep.
But he’s feeling pretty optimistic these days.
“Despite the shortcomings, I agree the Korean government did their best, given the circumstances,” Park Jeong-uk says. “And Koreans did an excellent job cooperating with the government. Most people trusted the government and followed the protocols.”
In some ways, South Korea simply may have lucked out. It is almost like an island, sharing only a militarized land border with North Korea, making it easier to isolate and monitor incoming travelers. Its people were better acquainted than most with social distancing measures, having lived through MERS. There is generally a lot of government surveillance that may have inured people to their private actions being fodder for public health monitoring.
Contact tracing alone isn’t a panacea. The US struggled on the first step in the test-trace-isolate process, when the first CDC testing kit failed, and that allowed the virus to spread undetected. By the time testing was closer to adequate levels, infections were so widespread it would have been extremely difficult to conduct comprehensive contact tracing, especially without the extraordinary tools available in South Korea.
Testing, tracing, and isolating is a good way to put out small fires, as the preferred metaphor among epidemiologists goes. Once the whole forest is ablaze, it loses its utility.
But that is also the point. South Korea saw a small fire spring up in Daegu in February 2020 and focused the full power of the government on stamping it out — then watched to ensure no new sparks would create a conflagration. Those efforts succeeded.
“We’ve been training for this,” Jang Hanaram says. “We are in this together; our community comes first. Koreans have really stepped up.”
Jun Micheal Parkis a documentary photographer and filmmaker from Seoul. He has extensively covered South Korea’s Covid-19 response.
This project was supported by the Commonwealth Fund, a national private foundation based in New York City that supports independent research on health care issues and makes grants to improve health care practice and policy.
The United States has an aggressive new commitment for fighting climate change: cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels in less than a decade.
The announcement came at the White House’s Earth Day summit on Thursday, where 40 world leaders met virtually to discuss and announce their new ambitions for curbing greenhouse gases.
“The United States isn’t waiting; we are resolving to take action,” said President Joe Biden on Thursday, highlighting his plans for investing in agriculture to store carbon in soil, making electric vehicles, capping pipelines that leak methane, and building green hydrogen plants. “By maintaining those investments and putting these people to work, the United States sets out on the road to cut greenhouse gases in half by the end of this decade.”
The new target is a step forward for the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after China. And it’s meant to signal to the rest of the world that the US is jumping back into the 2015 Paris climate accord with both feet after withdrawing in late 2020.
Some climate change activists and analysts are arguing that it’s not enough. And there are already some misleading claims about the target that have taken root.
To put it in context, here are some key things to know.
What is an NDC? And what makes the new US climate target so special?
Under the 2015 Paris agreement, countries agreed to limit warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to average global temperatures before the industrial revolution in the 1800s. The agreement also has a secondary target of limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees C.
To achieve that goal, every signatory to the accord (nearly every country in the world) is required to act. But it’s voluntary, and every country gets to set their own targets.
Those self-imposed targets are known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. From the outset, it was clear that the first round of NDCs that countries came up with wouldn’t be enough to meet the Paris goals. But the idea was that over time, as technology improved and as urgency mounted, countries would become more ambitious.
The United States plays an outsize role in the process as the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, but also as the country that played a dominant role in shaping the Paris agreement to begin with. Previous attempts at organizing international climate agreements fell apart for many reasons, but a major hurdle was US objections to setting binding greenhouse gas reduction targets. The US also opposed letting some countries, particularly developing countries, off the hook for their emissions. Hence why every country has to produce an NDC but gets to set its own target.
But when the US officially exited the Paris climate agreement in November, it became the only country to back out, which was particularly frustrating for countries that joined and came up with targets at the US’s behest. So the new, more ambitious commitment from the US (following Biden’s reentry into the agreement in January) is an important way to rebuild trust.
The US issued its first NDC back in 2015. It aimed to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below the level of emissions produced in the year 2005. The new target aims to bring the US 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
According to the White House, these new goals are in line with keeping average warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“As we look at the trajectory, the question for us very much has been: How can you make it consistent with getting on track to hold a temperature increase to less than 2, well less than 2, and to try to keep 1.5 degrees in sight alive? And that looks like it is consistent,” said a senior administration official on a call with reporters on Wednesday.
Beyond the impact on warming, the goal could spur countries that don’t already have comparable goals to step up their own ambitions.
“That is an extraordinary step that should be commended, and emulated by everyone,” said Christiana Figueres, one of the main negotiators of the Paris climate agreement, in a statement on Thursday.
US officials, however, were vague about exactly how the country is mapping its route to its new climate goals. But a key component is going to be Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan. The proposal aims to ramp up clean energy and electric vehicles, and facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels, but it still needs to become bills that can be approved by Congress.
The US’s new climate target is not a doubling of ambition or halving of current emissions
While Biden framed the new commitment as cutting US emissions in half, there are some critical caveats.
Again, this is not the first US commitment to curb greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris agreement. The initial pledge made under President Obama was aimed at 2025. The new NDC is aimed at 2030.
If the US were to simply meet its previous commitment, it would be on track to reduce emissions roughly 38 percent by 2030. So the new target is actually a 12 to 14 percent increase from the previous goal, not a doubling. And, to be clear, the US is currently not on track to meet its previous NDC, let alone the new one.
The other thing to keep in mind is the baseline. The US target is pegged to 2005, a year when annual US greenhouse gas emissions peaked above 6 gigatonnes. By 2020, emissions had fallen by roughly 21 percent compared to 2005, to 5.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, although the Covid-19 pandemic fueled the unprecedented drop in emissions last year.
Emissions are expected to rise again in 2021 as the economy recovers. All of this is to say that the 50 to 52 percent reduction target is relative to where the US was 16 years ago, not where it is today, when emissions are lower. The new target is closer to a 42 percent reduction from 2021.
It’s the biggest US commitment yet, but it still may not be big enough
On one hand, if the US were to meet these new goals, it would still likely be the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter by the end of the decade. On the other hand, the new target represents an enormous reduction in emissions, about 2.1 gigatonnes in nine years. This is almost the entire output of India in a given year. It’s a vast financial, technological, and political challenge.
While meeting this goal will help bring the world closer to limiting global warming this century, it doesn’t fully match the US contribution to the problem. The US currently produces about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions but is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions.
Climate change is a cumulative problem; if one were to add up all the greenhouse gases the US has emitted, the US would top every other country. The largest share of human-produced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now came from the US.
The energy that created those emissions helped the US become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The US also continues to have some of the highest per capita emissions of any country. Now the impacts of climate change are here, raising sea levels, fueling extreme weather, and wreaking havoc across economies, and the countries that contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most.
That’s why some activists are arguing that the new NDC doesn’t go far enough. “As the world’s biggest historical emitter, the US has a responsibility to the most vulnerable nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, in a statement. He added that a fairer US target would be closer to a 70 percent cut in emissions, coupled with financial support to developing countries suffering under climate change.
US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry envoy acknowledged on Thursday that there is still more the country could do to limit warming beyond the new NDC. “Is it enough? No. But it’s the best we can do today and prove we can begin to move,” Kerry said.
The US could pull this off, but it won’t be easy or cheap
The US has already seen a general decline in its greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade, but that came largely from replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas, which produces about half of the emissions per unit of energy. And before the Covid-19 pandemic, US emissions were beginning to creep up again.
President Biden, however, has set a target of making the entire US economy carbon neutral by 2050. In the meantime, he wants an entirely carbon-free power grid by 2035. That means even the natural gas plants will have to go, or will have to add carbon dioxide scrubbers. And to curb emissions by 50 percent relative to 2005 by 2030, the US would have to start taking drastic action right away.
A number of researchers and environmental groups have already analyzed whether such a target is feasible (see this Twitter thread highlighting the various papers out there looking at the new target). Almost all of them show that it is possible with our current technologies.
For example, an analysis by Energy Innovation found that the US would have to phase out all of its remaining coal power plants and halve its natural gas use over the next decade. The country would also have to dramatically increase its energy efficiency and electrify vehicles. The analysis doesn’t lay out a figure for the outlay but estimates that these changes would add $570 billion per year to the US economy via creating new jobs and avoiding pollution and health problems associated with fossil fuels.
According to a December study by researchers at Princeton University, the US is poised to spend $9.4 trillion over the next decade on energy infrastructure on its current trajectory. But getting on a path of net-zero emissions would just add an additional $300 billion to the price tag, raising it by 3 percent.
Other research has shown that the health benefits alone from getting off of fossil fuels are massive and would more than pay for the transition toward clean energy.
However, while there are massive health and economic benefits in switching toward clean energy, those benefits are dispersed over the whole population and spread out over years. To start on the journey toward the new 2030 target, the US would have to start making major investments and changes now — phasing out coal, building electric vehicle chargers, restoring ecosystems that can sequester carbon, pricing carbon, funding research and development to solve thorny technology problems, and setting new efficiency standards. That’s a political challenge, and it remains to be seen whether Biden has enough political capital to start this process.
The United States is not the only game in town
To limit climate change, the whole world needs to act not only to zero out greenhouse emissions but also to begin withdrawing them from the air by the middle of the century.
At the Earth Day summit, other world leaders highlighted their own new targets. Canada is now aiming to reduce its emissions 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Japan is aiming for 44 percent under the same benchmarks. And China is expecting that its emissions will continue to rise over the next decade but will peak before 2030 and decline thereafter, reaching net-zero emissions by 2060.
These new commitments will be formalized at the next major international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, later this year. In total, about 59 countries have set some sort of benchmark for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
But the total global commitments to date are still not enough to reach the 1.5-degree target, and that target is slipping further out of reach every day. That’s going to be even more challenging as lower-income parts of the world develop. About 13 percent of the planet’s population, 940 million people, still don’t have access to electricity. They desperately need energy, and fossil fuels are often the only sources available to them.
And many of these targets are set decades in the future. It’s the interim targets where the rubber will meet the road and more tangible results will be visible, yet many countries are reluctant to commit to specific climate benchmarks over the next five to 10 years.
So a fresh round of more ambitious targets for limiting emissions has to be met with real-world action and meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. There is intense global momentum for action on climate change, but that has yet to bear out in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have now crossed 420 parts per million, the highest levels in human history. The planet has already warmed by at least 1 degree Celsius, and those effects are already visible in the ice caps, torrential rainfall, and wildfires. Some countries are certainly more responsible for climate change than others, but as Biden said, “no nation can solve this crisis on their own.”
The greatest challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule is a man whose name the dictator won’t say and whom he has tried to kill: Alexei Navalny.
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Having defiantly returned to Russia after surviving a brazen assassination attempt only to be immediately detained and thrown in jail upon arrival, the opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has rallied tens of thousands of supporters to his cause like never before — a real sign of trouble for Putin’s hold on power.
Alexei Navalny has spent over a decade trying to overthrow Putin. Through slick videos, public mobilization, and even an ill-fated presidential run against the autocrat, Navalny has aimed to expose Kremlin corruption and malfeasance.
While Navalny’s ultimate goal seems to be to take Putin’s place, not just depose him, few believe he will actually succeed. Still, his campaign has inspired tens of thousands across the country to take to the streets to express their frustration with the regime — many for the first time — posing an existential threat to Putin.
The problem for the president is, try as he might, he can’t keep the 44-year-old dissident quiet.
Last year, Kremlin operatives tried to assassinate the opposition leader with a highly toxic nerve agent planted in his underwear, a bold operation that most experts say likely would have required Putin’s approval to launch.
Navalny lived, but he spent five months recuperating from a coma in Germany. Yet despite being threatened with immediate arrest upon arrival back in Russia, he vowed to return to his homeland to continue the fight against Putin. Navalny met that fate on January 17 shortly after his flight from Berlin landed in Moscow, and he’s now imprisoned for at least 2.5 years.
But even that attempt to silence Navalny hasn’t worked so far: Navalny has remained in the headlines even while in custody.
He started a hunger strike on March 31, protesting the lack of medical care he said he’d received while in prison, and his lawyers continued to publicize his plight throughout his ordeal.
His condition had gotten so bad that not even Russian authorities could ignore it. They transferred Navalny to a hospital earlier this week for treatment, though questions remained about the quality of care he’d get. Navalny’s aides were concerned that the pro-democracy leader was on death’s door.
“Alexei is dying … it’s a question of days,” Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh, said on Facebook this week.
Physicians close to Navalny made the same case, leading the dissident to end his hunger strike on Friday. But Navalny claimed victory in an Instagram post, saying pressure his supporters placed on the regime led independent doctors to check on his condition.
“Doctors, whom I fully trust, published a statement yesterday stating that you and I had achieved enough for me to end the hunger strike. And I will say frankly — their words that the tests show that ‘in a minimum time there will be no one to treat…’ seem to me worthy of attention,” he wrote. However, he added that he’s “losing sensitivity” in sections of his arm and legs and still wants to know “what it is and how to treat it.”
What happens to Navalny going forward is a serious matter of international concern, with US national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently promising “there will be consequences” if the Putin opponent dies in prison.
Putin is now on the defensive. He’s receiving calls from President Joe Biden and other leaders to release Navalny, even as Russian authorities round up members of the dissident’s team and family. He’s also under pressure at home from Russians who support Navalny.
“Putin was an untouchable, a god above everything else. But that’s no longer the case,” Maria Snegovaya, an expert on Russian politics at George Washington University, told me.
Putin broke an implicit promise to Russians. Activists pounced.
Little initially bothered Putin after he became president for the first time in 2000. The economy doubled and living standards rose during his first decade in charge, muting critiques from dissidents of the regime’s repression of free speech and civil rights.
Experts say Russians implicitly understood there was a grand bargain: If Putin could keep the money flowing and not act in an openly corrupt way, then the citizenry would abide by his iron-fisted leadership.
But two events in 2011 ended the fragile deal.
First, Putin that September announced he would reassume the presidency after serving one term as Russia’s prime minister, the No. 2 role. Simply put, Putin was still in charge of the country, but he accepted a technically inferior position to keep up democratic appearances. The president, Dmitri Medvedev, was viewed as little more than a puppet.
By effectively stating “I will be president again” — without giving Russians any real say in the matter — Putin defied the unspoken “don’t be openly corrupt” rule.
Second, Putin’s party, United Russia, got caught rigging the December 2011 legislative elections. Fraud in Russian elections was normal, and there wasn’t more than usual during that particular vote, “but examples of fraud were spread quickly on the internet for the first time,” said Timothy Frye, a Columbia University professor and author of the forthcoming Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia.
That provided ammunition to a growing cadre of opposition activists looking for a catalyzing cause — Alexei Navalny among them.
Who is Alexei Navalny?
Navalny, who grew up about 60 miles southwest of Moscow, made his name in 2008 as a blogger. His earliest posts centered on corruption at state-owned companies, and sometimes he’d get extraordinary access by becoming a minority shareholder in the company in order to ask probing questions.
His readership grew, and his platform turned him into one of the main leaders of the 2011 protests in Moscow. Featuring roughly 50,000 people, they were the biggest in the capital city since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I’d like to thank Alexei Navalny,” a young activist shouted in a room of organizers the day before demonstrations began. “Thanks to him, specifically because of the efforts of this concrete person, tomorrow thousands of people will come out to the square. It was he who united us with the idea: all against ‘the Party of Swindlers and Thieves.’”
Navalny rode that wave of popularity to a run for Moscow’s mayor in 2013. It’s more than a prestigious municipal job; whoever runs the capital is viewed by many in Russia as a future top federal official. To win the election, then, would mean more than just getting to lead a global city. It’d mean Navalny was clawing his way into Russia’s inner circle of power.
Navalny ran on an unapologetically nationalist platform, most notably calling for restrictive immigration policies to keep Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia out of the country and supporting Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia. Duke University’s Irina Soboleva told me that the candidate’s hardline stances during the campaign alienated members of Navalny’s young, urban base.
“I consider Aleksei Navalny the most dangerous man in Russia,” Engelina Tareyeva, who worked with Navalny in a Russian liberal party until he was expelled from it in 2007, wrote of him. “You don’t have to be a genius to understand that the most horrific thing that could happen in our country would be the nationalists coming to power.”
Navalny didn’t win the mayoral race, finishing second with 27 percent of the vote behind incumbent and Putin ally Sergei Sobyanin, who won with over half the votes (four other candidates split the remaining count). But Navalny’s strong showing — despite very long odds — gave him the legitimacy and standing to seek more power.
“His ambitions were greater than just being the leader of the urban middle class,” Soboleva said.
Putin regained popularity. Navalny organized against him.
In 2014, Putin sent forces to invade the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. He then annexed the territory because he wanted it returned to Russia’s fold and because Kyiv was on the verge of an economic pact with the European Union. For Putin, such a deal meant Ukraine — long in Russia’s sphere of influence — was tilting away from Moscow. The incursion, then, was both punishment and raw geopolitics.
But there was an added benefit for the autocrat: Russians celebrated the risky invasion. They rewarded Putin with record approval ratings, numbers he desperately needed to muddle through a brutal economic downturn wracking his country.
“Crimea bought the regime four years of wiggle room,” Columbia’s Frye told me.
That period was mostly a quiet one for Russia’s opposition. Just like in the 2000s, it was hard to find a receptive audience for the anti-Putin cause when most people were happy with the leader.
Navalny, then, used the lull to organize against his chief rival. Part of his animus turned personal after Russian law enforcement charged him in 2013 and 2014 with embezzlement, which most experts say was meant to discredit him. After the second charge, Navalny was placed under house arrest and only given permission to speak with his family.
But the opposition leader wasn’t discouraged. Instead, experts told me he developed a three-pronged strategy to prepare for whenever Putin was vulnerable again.
The first part was straightforward: He had to make his politics more appealing to a wider Russian audience. The Islamophobia and hardline nationalism might garner support from ethnic Russians, but certainly not the masses. Without disavowing his previous views, Navalny zeroed in on one core message: corruption.
“It was a sound political strategy,” said Angela Stent, who directs the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European studies at Georgetown University. After all, Russia was (and remains) one of the world’s most corrupt countries, and the problems this corruption has wrought have impacted nearly every Russian’s life. No other issue, the thinking went, would be as universally understood and enraging.
Getting his message out there would be difficult, though, as the Kremlin held a tight grip over the media. To get around that problem, Navalny made building a large social media presence the second pillar of his plan. “He saw the political utility of YouTube before other opposition leaders,” said George Washington University’s Snegovaya.
The opposition leader has posted video after embarrassing video exposing the corruption of Russia’s elites on his YouTube channel, which today has 6.25 million subscribers. One particularly famous upload from 2017 alleged that former President Medvedev took bribes from oligarchs disguised as charitable donations, a charge he denies.
When the Russian government succeeds in blocking access to the exposés, Navalny and his team place the videos elsewhere — including on pornography sites — so anyone can see them.
The success of his YouTube channel bolstered Navalny’s reputation as an anti-corruption crusader, and his audience grew. “He sensed that corruption would be accessible enough to build a large following on the internet,” Snegovaya noted.
That allowed him to undertake the third part of his strategy: forming a national network of opposition politicians. Instead of focusing all of his efforts in major cities like Moscow, Navalny opened offices around the country to help local politicians defeat members of Putin’s United Russia party. Providing candidates with financing and know-how, Navalny’s team has helped dissidents take power away from Putin cronies in regional elections across the country.
“There’s no opposition figure in Russia that has the network that Navalny does,” said Columbia’s Frye.
The main goal, of course, was to weaken the president’s party nationwide. But experts told me the side effect — Russians suddenly being able to see politicians without ties to Putin actually working in citizens’ interests — was equally important for Navalny’s movement.
Putin fought back. Navalny withstood the onslaught.
Navalny didn’t get to do all of that without pushback, especially after he announced in 2016 that he would run for president in two years.
In 2017, the opposition leader was attacked with an antiseptic known as “brilliant green” outside his Moscow office, covering half of his face in what looked like paint. “It looks funny but it hurts like hell,” he tweeted at the time, adding that he lost 80 percent of the vision in his right eye.
Reports later confirmed he suffered a chemical burn. It’s still unclear who was responsible, but Navalny, unsurprisingly, blamed the Kremlin.
Later that year, 12 of Russia’s 13 election commissioners voted to bar Navalny from standing against Putin in the presidential race, citing his embezzlement charges from years prior. Navalny was never likely to win — the vote was already rigged in Putin’s favor, and reliable polls showed the dissident failed to attract much support — but the decision once again ended the pretense of a functioning democracy in Russia.
The government’s interest in Navalny didn’t end there. Moscow’s police force detained him in the summer of 2019 for planning what authorities said was an unauthorized protest. While in jail, he suffered a severe skin reaction that required him to seek medical attention at a hospital. He went back behind bars after his recovery, but he claimed the skin reaction was the result of having been poisoned.
The increased harassment made clear that Navalny was a prime Putin target. The worst, though, was yet to come.
Putin got scared. Navalny paid the price.
Navalny boarded a flight from Siberia to Moscow last August. He became ill on the aircraft; a video shows him moaning and needing immediate medical attention.
The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, near Kazakhstan, where an ambulance waited to take him to a local hospital. But Navalny’s condition worsened, and he fell into a coma before he arrived at the facility.
Russia’s Omsk Emergency Hospital No. 1, where Navalny was first treated, became the site of a frustrating standoff between Navalny’s family and supporters and the doctors overseeing his care. Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and team alleged the doctors were controlled by the Kremlin and tried to cover up the poisoning attack instead of properly treating their patient.
The physicians at the time said Navalny wasn’t poisoned but instead suffered from a “metabolic disorder” that led to low blood sugar. “Poisons or traces of their presence in the body have not been identified,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the Omsk emergency hospital, told reporters at the time. “The diagnosis of ‘poisoning’ remains somewhere in the back of our minds, but we do not believe that the patient suffered poisoning.”
But Navalny’s team — including Navalnaya, who was barred from seeing her husband in the hospital — suspected foul play. They had good reason to believe that: The Kremlin has a long, sordid history of poisoning political dissidents, defectors, and other enemies of the state.
“The medics are being totally commanded by the FSB and hardly release anything,” Vladimir Milov, a close Navalny associate, told me while Navalny was in the Russian hospital, using the acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB responsible for internal security.
“We of course cannot trust this hospital and we demand for Alexei to be given to us, so that we could have him treated in an independent hospital whose doctors we trust,” Navalnaya said in another press conference on August 21.
A medical plane sent by the Berlin-based humanitarian group Cinema for Peace Foundation later arrived in Omsk to take Navalny to Germany for treatment. The Russian doctors initially blocked the transfer, saying Navalny wasn’t stable enough to travel, before finally allowing the German physicians to take a look at the patient’s condition.
Luckily, doctors in Berlin successfully treated Navalny, leading to his release from the hospital on September 23 after a full recovery.
The next month, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the world’s top chemical weapons watchdog — concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with Novichok, a highly lethal nerve agent. It was developed by the Soviet Union, leading many to conclude that the Kremlin was behind the attack on its longtime adversary.
Navalny confirmed that himself while he remained in Germany. Working with CNN last December, Navalny tricked a Russian agent — part of an elite FSB toxin team that had trailed him for three years — to reveal secret aspects of the operation to kill him. The operative, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, told Navalny during a phone call that Novichok had been placed on “the insides, the crotch” of the dissident’s underpants.
When asked about the Kremlin’s involvement in the assassination attempt, Putin denied it, claiming instead that Navalny was getting help from US intelligence services to make a big fuss out of nothing. If Russian agents had really wanted to finish the job of killing Navalny, Putin told reporters during his annual press conference in December, “they would’ve probably finished it.”
There are no concrete answers as to why the regime would want Navalny dead now after all this time, but experts have two main theories.
The first is that United Russia’s supermajority in the nation’s legislature — the Duma — is under threat in September’s elections. Navalny’s organizing and Putin’s unpopularity due to a flatlining economy and worsening pandemic could lead some Putin-allied lawmakers to lose. If that’s the case, Putin would no longer be able to ram whatever he wants through the governing body.
Putin could try to rig the election, of course, but George Washington University’s Snegovaya told me that “it’s impossible to rig the election completely.” Fewer people actually support the president right now, she said, and international observers watch the vote closely. The dictator’s brutal calculation therefore might have been that killing Navalny would hurt the opposition’s chances ahead of the crucial election.
The other possibility experts floated was that Putin is worried about the revolution in neighboring Belarus. A strong opposition formed against Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest-serving dictator and a staunch Putin ally, and revolts started last year after an election many believe he rigged. Demonstrations haven’t stopped, and Putin, who is notoriously concerned about being toppled in a revolution, might fear a similar phenomenon in his country.
“Putin definitely follows what’s going on in Belarus closely, and he takes what’s happening very personally,” Duke’s Soboleva told me. Putin might be thinking “if you don’t eliminate your political opponents and rivals early, they might be a big problem for you later,” she said.
But instead of eliminating Navalny, Putin made him stronger.
Putin tried to silence his rival. Navalny just gained a larger audience.
After Navalny recovered from the poisoning, the Kremlin did everything possible to try to dissuade him from returning to Russia.
Late last year, the Kremlin placed him on the government’s federal wanted list, claiming he avoided Russian federal authorities while abroad. As part of a probation sentence from the 2014 embezzlement case, Navalny had to check in with inspectors regularly — but that’s hard to do while you’re in a coma.
Even with the threat of arrest hanging over him, Navalny flew to Moscow on January 17 while downplaying widespread fears that he’d be detained upon arrival. “It’s impossible,” he told people aboard his flight. “I feel like a citizen of Russia who has every right to return to my home.”
But, of course, it proved completely possible: Video showed an official approaching Navalny at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport near passport control. Navalny then kissed his wife, Yulia, before going with the official and other guards. He’s been held by the federal prison service ever since as he awaits his February trial.
But Navalny and his team have fought back. They released the “Putin Palace” video — alleging that the Russian leader has used bribe money to build an estate on land 39 times larger than the principality of Monaco — which had the president answering questions raised by the man he wants silenced.
“Nothing that is listed there as my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and never did,” Putin said during a video call at the time, as always refusing to say Navalny’s name. But many people didn’t buy his denial.
Russians erupted in protest after the video’s release and Navalny’s detention. The nation’s citizens, suffering an economic downturn and an unrelenting coronavirus outbreak, occupied the streets of more than 100 Russian cities on January 23, some braving temperatures as low as minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Demonstrators tussled with law enforcement more than they had in the past — ranging from snowball fights to physical violence — culminating in the arrest of nearly 4,000 people.
“It’s probably the most nervous he’s been in his 21 years in power,” Georgetown’s Stent, who served as the US national intelligence officer for Russia from 2004 to 2006, said of Putin at the time.
Moscow police’s responded forcefully. They arrested Navalny’s brother and harassed multiple members of Navalny’s team. In one stunning video, Navalny’s doctor was seen playing the piano as law enforcement searched her home. The goal, experts said, is to stop the opposition from inciting more protests and continuing their leader’s work while he remains in custody.
So far that plan hasn’t worked, and Navalny’s hunger strike kept him in the global spotlight even as Putin has tried to push him out of it.
The hunger strike may be over, but it’s still possible that Navalny dies in Russian custody. If that happens, it’s possible the pro-democracy movement he built will suffer. At that point, Putin may have won his long game with Navalny in the cruelest fashion possible. Or, ironically, turned Navalny into a powerful martyr, potentially threatening his rule long after the dissident is gone.
This story is one in our six-part series The Pandemic Playbook.Explore all the stories here.
Every January or February, Le The Linh and his wife pack their children into their car and drive 80 miles to visit family in Haiphong, a port city east of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, for Lunar New Year. But this time, as they reached the last stretch of the Hanoi-Haiphong Highway, a police officer approached and pointed them toward a group of guards in face masks under a makeshift tent. It was one of 16 checkpoints erected around Haiphong to control travel into and out of the city ahead of the Tet Festival holiday.
They joined a lineup of other travelers, nervously waiting for their turn in the rain. When they reached the front, the officials asked for proof of their travel plans, residency, and Covid-19 status.
“Don’t worry!” Linh exclaimed tensely. He could show, with his identity card, that they lived in an area that had no coronavirus cases recently.
The family was among the lucky ones let through. Travelers from areas near Haiphong that had recently recorded Covid-19 cases got turned away; a group of young people on motorbikes who tried to circumvent the checkpoint were arrested; still others chose not to travel at all, opting to meet family over FaceTime or Zalo (Vietnam’s answer to WhatsApp).
As the pandemic took hold last year, travel restrictions quickly proliferated — they were the second-most-common policy governments adopted to combat Covid-19. According to one review, never in recorded history has global travel been curbed in “such an extreme manner”: a reduction of approximately 65 percent in the first half of 2020. More than a year later, as countries experiment with vaccine passports, travel bubbles, and a new round of measures to keep virus variants at bay, a maze of confusing, ever-changing restrictions remains firmly in place.
But few countries have gone as far as Vietnam, a one-party communist state with a GDP per capita of $2,700. The Haiphong checkpoints timed for Tet were the equivalent of closing off Los Angeles to Americans ahead of Thanksgiving — within a country that was already nearly hermetically sealed. Last March, the government canceled all inbound commercial flights for months on end, making it almost impossible to fly in, even for Vietnamese residents.
Today, flights are limited to select groups, like businesspeople or experts, from a few low-risk countries. Everybody who enters needs special government permission and must complete up to 21 days of state-monitored quarantine with PCR tests. (Positive cases are immediately isolated in hospitals, regardless of disease severity.)
This strict approach to travel, global health experts say, is directly connected to Vietnam’s seeming defeat of Covid-19. Thirty-five people have reportedly died in total, and a little more than 2,700 have been infected with the virus during three small waves that have all been quickly quashed. Even on the worst days of the pandemic, the country of 97 million has never recorded more than 110 new cases — a tiny fraction of the 68,000 daily case high in the United Kingdom, which has a population one-third smaller than Vietnam, or the record 300,000-plus cases per day only the US and India managed to tally.
Last year, Vietnam’s economy even grew 2.9 percent, defying economists’ predictions and beating China to become the top performer in Asia.
In this series, the Pandemic Playbook, Vox is exploring the Covid-19 strategies used by six nations. Vietnam’s travel restrictions — supported by other measures, including enforced quarantining and contact tracing — help explain the country’s apparent mastery over the virus. And while the political leverage of a single-party government might have helped Vietnam respond faster and more unilaterally than others, “I don’t think this is simply about totalitarianism versus Western democracies,” said Kelley Lee, a Simon Fraser University global health professor who has been studying the impact of travel restrictions.
That’s why Vietnam is now among a few countries upending the global health community’s “almost religious belief that travel restrictions are bad,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health law professor who helped write the international law governing how countries should deal with outbreaks.
“I have now realized,” Gostin added, “that our belief about travel restrictions was just that — a belief. It was evidence-free.”
Covid-19 changed the thinking about travel restrictions in a pandemic
At a time when people still thought diseases originated with imbalances in the “four humors” and doctors routinely used treatments like bloodletting, governments tried to manage travel to prevent outbreaks. In 1377, quarantine measures were introduced in Dubrovnik, on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast, to keep out sailors potentially carrying the bubonic plague.
The law stipulated that anyone from “plague-infested areas shall not enter [Dubrovnik] or its district unless they spend a month on the islet of Mrkan … for the purpose of disinfection.” For land travelers, the disinfection period lasted even longer — 40 days.
But in the age of mass travel and globalization, it seemed virtually impossible — counterproductive, even — for cities or countries to isolate themselves. The mantra in global health became “diseases know no borders.” Just before the pandemic, 2019 was a record year for tourist arrivals. The travel and tourism sector had generated a tenth, or US $8.9 trillion, of global GDP. “It [was like] the cat’s out of the bag,” Gostin said.
Many of the measures countries tried in recent years, after the first SARS virus emerged in 2002 — including banning flights or visas for particular cities or countries, and screening for disease at airports — didn’t seem to deliver much protection.
Research on SARS, Ebola, and the seasonal flu found these targeted restrictions merely delayed infections and carried a slew of social and economic costs. They unfairly punished the economies of places that were unlucky enough to be plagued by disease, interfered with the global flows of people and goods, drove infections underground, and made it hard for aid workers and supplies to reach those who urgently needed them.
I knew these costs intimately. I grew up in Toronto, where a rare travel advisory imposed on the city by the World Health Organization in the wake of the first SARS outbreak cratered tourism to the entire province — so much so that the Rolling Stones eventually intervened with a charity concert (dubbed “SARSStock”). The measures also failed to avert outbreaks. According to a Canadian government report, putting arriving passengers through health assessments and thermal scanners didn’t root out a single case.
During the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic and early in the Covid-19 pandemic, I co-wrote popular stories detailing this evidence and arguing against the use of such restrictions. And I wasn’t alone.
Bill Gates pointed out that then-President Donald Trump’s approach to Covid-19 travel bans probably made the US epidemic worse. The WHO’s International Health Regulations, an international law governing 196 countries’ responses to outbreaks, says countries should “avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade” and follow the WHO’s expert advice. With every global health emergency declared after SARS, the WHO has not recommended travel restrictions.
At the same time, speaking out against travel bans had become synonymous with opposing nationalism and wall-building, said Lee. “There were these progressive, human rights values that were upheld by not using travel measures.”
But it’s now clear that the well-meaning advice and previous research findings didn’t match up with the situation the world was facing in early 2020. The new virus was different — more contagious and harder to stop. SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted prior to the onset of symptoms, if they ever occur — while with SARS and Ebola, for example, people are only contagious when they are very ill or symptomatic.
The new coronavirus contagion inspired drastic measures. After China locked down Wuhan in January 2020, a move many called “draconian,” countries around the world scrambled and experimented with their own travel restrictions.
Only a few, though, did something that “seemed unfathomable” prior to the pandemic, said University of Hong Kong public health professor Karen Grépin: They completely closed their borders. It was an approach experts had no evidence for. “No one [had] modeled out a scenario in which borders would be shut,” she said, and stay shut.
Yet that’s essentially what happened in Vietnam — and in a few states or regions, mostly islands including Taiwan and New Zealand, that have virtually eliminated the virus.
Vietnam started building a “wall” to the world in January
Early last year, when the US and European countries still focused on keeping out travelers from places with known Covid-19 cases, Vietnam closed its borders to the world.
It was the culmination of months of escalating travel restrictions. On January 3, the same day China reported a mysterious cluster of viral pneumonia cases to the WHO, Vietnam’s Ministry of Health issued a directive to increase disease control measures on the border with China. By the end of January, Vietnam’s then-Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc banned all flights to and from Wuhan and other areas where the virus was spreading in China and shut off every transport link between the two countries, making it the first place in Southeast Asia to close out Chinese travelers.
By mid-March, Vietnam suspended visas for all foreigners and then stopped all commercial flights. Only diplomats, citizens, and other officials could get in or out on repatriation flights, and they needed authorization from the government to enter.
Limited air travel has now resumed with other low-risk neighbors — such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan — but only for Vietnamese people and foreign businesspeople and experts. And while Vietnamese nationals can cross land borders from Laos or Cambodia, everybody who does get into the country — by air, land, or sea — has to submit to PCR tests and wait out a mandatory 14- to 21-day quarantine period under state supervision in a military-run facility or designated hotel.
So where Western countries introduced travel restrictions late, targeted their measures at countries with confirmed Covid-19 cases (or variants now), made quarantine optional or didn’t enforce it, and allowed loopholes (like excluding certain groups from travel restrictions, or letting people arriving over land avoid quarantine), Vietnam walled itself in. While Western countries continue to roll measures back whenever case counts come down, Vietnam has kept its wall up — even during periods when the country recorded zero new coronavirus cases.
“This is the lesson about border measures that’s changed,” Grépin said. “The value of border restrictions goes up the fewer cases you have.”
The restrictions also appear to work best if they’re implemented when they most seem like overkill, said London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine epidemiologist Mark Jit. That is, before (or after) community transmission takes place, he added.
“The natural thing is to think, ‘When we have a big problem, there are many Covid cases, that’s the point when we need to start doing a lot of things.’ But for travel restrictions — these are the solution to stop the problem from happening in the first place,” Jit explained. “It seems obvious in retrospect, but it’s very paradoxical.”
Vietnam saw China’s epidemic as a threat right away
So why did Vietnam take this early and comprehensive approach when so many other countries didn’t? The short answer: The country’s fraught relationship and porous border with China — which put it at higher risk for outbreaks — may have been its savior.
“[The] two countries taking the quickest action are Taiwan and Vietnam — they shared the same reasons: geographical proximity to and distrust in China,” explained Nguyen Xuan Thanh, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Group, which is composed of experts who counsel the government on economic development strategy and policy. (Vietnam may have had information that other countries didn’t early on: A cybersecurity firm, FireEye, has said that since at least January, Vietnamese hackers spied on the Chinese government to collect intelligence about Covid-19 — reports the government has denied.)
Whatever the reason, officials in Vietnam didn’t entertain the possibility that the coronavirus was just like the seasonal flu, nor did they consider herd immunity. When China locked down Wuhan last January and bought other countries time to react, Vietnam was one of only a handful of countries that used that time wisely.
“Outside of the Asia-Pacific region, most of the world did very little to prepare for the real possibility that this virus was about to spread globally,” Grépin said. In January, the Vietnamese government set up a national task force specialized in handling Covid-19, headed by the deputy prime minister, and defined a “double goal” of combating the virus and growing the economy.
The country’s officials and Communist Party made battling Covid-19 a patriotic act. “Fighting this epidemic is like fighting the enemy,” the prime minister said in a government meeting last January.
They transmitted health messages to the public using creative tactics, like texts to mobile phones or a viral pop song about hand-washing. They ramped up testing (starting in January 2020) and shortly thereafter began checking even asymptomatic people for the virus. By the end of last year, Vietnam was processing 1,000 tests per Covid-19 case, compared to 12.8 in the US or 21.7 in the UK.
Contact tracing became so widespread that the population now speaks the language of epidemiologists: It’s not unusual to hear Vietnamese people refer to the “F1” through “F5” system — how contact tracers denote a person’s proximity to an “F0,” or index case. (And, yes, where Western governments largely abandoned contact tracing or didn’t even seriously attempt it, Vietnam continues to ferret out potential cases by testing all F1s — a patient zero’s immediate contacts — and quarantining them in a state facility, while also asking F2s to quarantine at home.)
When a single person tests positive, it can trigger a targeted lockdown, “isolating a large area when the fire is big, isolating a small area when the fire is small,” Mai Tien Dung, the chair of the Office of the Government, said.
In practice, this meant that last February, just as Lunar New Year travel and Vietnam’s third wave was picking up, a Hanoi apartment block, where more than 1,000 people live, closed down one evening after a woman tested positive for the virus. The entrances were barricaded and guarded by police as hundreds of residents spilled out, masked and social distancing, waiting for a free Covid-19 test.
Only those who tested negative were allowed to leave, and results took at least six hours to come in — a fact that frustrated those who weren’t prepared to spend the night, like gym staff members. By the next morning, everyone who had been tested got a negative result, and the barricades were removed — but everybody living on the two floors around the index patient was asked to quarantine for two weeks.
Vietnam also bet that the early overreaction, including closing down international borders, might save the domestic economy and prevent the health system from becoming overwhelmed, Thanh said. Just before SARS-CoV-2 started spreading in China, Vietnam ranked 73 out of 195 countries on epidemic response and mitigation, according to the Global Health Security Index from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (The US, meanwhile, ranked No. 2 after the UK; the top 10 included the Netherlands and Brazil.)
Vietnam had another vulnerability to contend with. “The reality [is] that Vietnam does not have enough budget to sacrifice the economy and support businesses and individuals who had to cease operation,” Thanh said.
More than a year later, Vietnam’s success with keeping case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths low laid bare the arrogance and faulty assumptions that went into determining which countries would win or lose in their battles with the virus. With the exception of short-lived, targeted lockdowns, life in Vietnam today largely resembles the Before Times in a way many Westerners can only envy. People go to bars, share drinks with friends, and enjoy live music. Restaurants and cafes are open. Children attend school and see their grandparents in person.
The population never experienced the disorientation, economic pain, and mental health toll of rolling national lockdowns. Hospitals never buckled under the strain of masses of coronavirus patients. Kids didn’t miss a year of school. (There was a brief nationwide social distancing order last April when all schools were shut for three weeks.)
Vietnam is also one of a handful of countries whose economies grew in 2020 — the same year the country introduced three trade deals and saw per capita income rise. “At the beginning of the crisis, if you asked an economist what would happen here, most of us were pessimistic because of the [cutting off of] connections to the rest of the world,” said Jacques Morisset, the World Bank’s lead economist for Vietnam.
But because the virus was quickly contained internally, the domestic economy rebounded, just as Thanh and his colleagues had hoped. Manufacturing continued, and exports grew by 6.5 percent — not far off from the usual export turnover increase of 8 percent, according to Thanh.
That growth more than made up for losses in the shrinking tourism and transport sectors. The successes also helped foster public support for the anti-virus measures. Whenever the tourism or travel industries lobbied for open borders, the economic pressure didn’t crack the borders open. According to a survey released in December by the UN Development Program and the Mekong Development Research Institute, 89 percent of Vietnamese respondents said they supported the government’s approach — higher than the global average of 67 percent.
“Politicians make decisions based on the pressure from the society and inner political system,” Thanh said. “Vietnam had no such pressure. Vietnamese people supported the government to continue having strict measures.”
Vietnam’s state security apparatus bolstered its public health response
In a one-party system like Vietnam’s, there are few avenues to voice opposition. This political context has arguably strengthened certain anti-virus measures, like the country’s extensive contact tracing program. The Communist Party has for decades employed “surveillance, physical monitoring, and censorship to manage the population,” Foreign Policy reported in May last year. These “tools of Communist Party control … have now been repurposed in the service of health protection.”
Local officials and busybody neighbors also exert social pressure on others to conform, said Carl Thayer, a Southeast Asia specialist and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales. “Vietnam has block wardens, village wardens, household registration, and inquisitive locals that intrude on people’s lives. They have a society where people report people.”
The government can and does share details with the public about positive cases (including the age, gender, and neighborhood where the person lives, as well as a flight number for travelers), sometimes leaking additional information for use as cautionary tales.
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Perhaps the most infamous example: Vietnam’s case number 17, a socialite who traveled to Italy without disclosing it at the border and faced severe public shaming. Her Covid-19 experience was the subject of government press conferences, and social media users tracked her down. Her story scared people who didn’t want to be responsible for others’ infections, said Hanoi-based American health economist Sarah Bales. “Everybody knows her,” she said. “She was notorious, and people hated her.”
This heavy-handedness would not be tolerated in many Western countries, where concerns about personal freedom and privacy have often trumped public health throughout the pandemic, Thayer said. The Foreign Policy authors also pointed out that the country’s human rights violations have repeatedly been overlooked in examinations of Vietnam’s Covid-19 response: “While the international community has criticized Vietnam’s security apparatus in the past for violating its citizens’ rights, the country has received near-unanimous praise for its successful handling of the current pandemic. But the tools used are the same.”
Yet to reduce Vietnam’s Covid-19 success to its system of authoritarian governance is a mistake, Lee said, pointing out that democracies, like South Korea, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have employed similar tactics as Vietnam. And analysts have repeatedly struggled to link a country’s political system to its Covid-19 success.
Vietnam’s is “a very scientific approach and has merit on its own no matter which regime chooses to apply these types of measures,” said Bales, who has lived and worked in Vietnam since 1992. “They did extensive contact tracing. … They did massive testing. They closed down the provinces so if there was transmission, it would stay local. Most people are living a normal life, and the few people who have been exposed or infected have to bear the brunt of quarantine, testing, and isolation.”
Watching the pandemic unfold in the US and Europe, Bales was among several Vietnam-based Westerners who told Vox they believe the privacy and personal liberty costs during the pandemic were worth the benefits of living a relatively free life.
“You don’t have to worry and be afraid like you do in the West — where every time you go out, it must be stressful [wondering] about if you’re exposed, and if you’re exposed, will you have long Covid or die,” Bales said. “On a day-to-day basis, I don’t worry.”
When Vietnam’s wall comes down
One morning in early March, a taxicab pulled up to the international terminal at Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport. The last time the driver took someone there was half a year ago, he said, when a Vietnamese customer wanted to fly to Taiwan for work. Today, though, a repatriation flight had just landed — one of 16 arriving in Vietnam so far this year.
Inside, the airport is a skeleton of its former self. There are no crowds waiting to greet friends and family. Cafes and restaurants are closed, and the terminal halls are quiet and dark. A group of the newly arrived passengers waiting at the luggage conveyer belt look distinctly like they’ve come from a biosafety hazard lab: wearing blue full-body protection suits and masks, provided by Vietnam Airlines staff when they boarded their flight in Paris.
The only loud noise echoing across the terminal is a voice broadcasting instructions for what the passengers need to do next: Everybody will be transported to state-supervised quarantine facilities. One by one, their names and year of birth are called out before they walk to buses to be ferried off. When they arrive, they’ll be tested for Covid-19 — and, if positive, forwarded directly to the hospital for isolation and treatment.
“We will try our best to organize so that families, parents, and children can stay together,” the voice on the speaker says, “but with friends, we may not be able to do so. We are sorry for that.”
This scene feels unimaginable in Western cities like New York or Paris — but so did ubiquitous mask-wearing and lockdowns over a year ago. With travel set to boom as the pandemic eases, and the next outbreaks on the horizon, I wondered what the rest of the world should take away from Vietnam.
Lee — and the other global health researchers I spoke to — advised caution. This pandemic showed travel restrictions can be helpful, but we should not make the same mistake we did in the past and assume what worked for the coronavirus will work for other health threats. “We don’t want countries to automatically control borders whenever a cluster of atypical pneumonia occurs,” Lee said. “Not all outbreaks require borders to be closed.”
Shutting borders comes with costs — all the people who lost travel and tourism jobs in Vietnam over the past year, or those who have been stranded far from home. Because of the very limited access to repatriation flights, thousands are waiting for their applications to get approved, and a black market for repatriation flight access sprang up. The wealthy agree to pay as much as $10,000 US for seats, while some have been scammed.
“Even if we conclude that travel restrictions and trade restrictions and migration restrictions — under certain targeted circumstances — can be an effective part of the package,” Gostin said, “we still have to take into account the fact that by implementing [them], you’re causing harms in other regards.”
Grépin also warned that the border closures countries like Vietnam put in place were “very extreme,” and pointed out that less intensive measures might prevent cases and carry fewer costs. Places like South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, for example, have shown that “if you quarantine incoming travelers you can limit public health risk without border closure,” she said. But she also noted the approach isn’t foolproof. Hong Kong, for example, is currently struggling with the virus because of its travel links with India: A single April 4 flight from New Delhi has led to more than 50 Covid-19 cases.
This raises another challenge: Travel restrictions are difficult to calibrate correctly, said Steven Hoffman, a global health professor and the director of York University’s Global Strategy Lab. “If we are going to make use of [total border closures,] we need to [acknowledge] the fact that it might be implemented for events that don’t go pandemic,” he said. “And there’s something like 200 events every year that could go pandemic.”
For now, as Vietnam weighs the benefits of Covid-19 vaccine passports and how to resume international travel, one thing is certain: The walls the country has built up will come down. People will hop on trains, planes, and buses, bringing their germs with them. The world will get smaller again, and proximity will be “more determined on the basis of the quantity of travel connections than kilometers,” Hoffman added.
Vietnam’s early, quick response to Covid-19 was inspired, in part, by the country’s shared border with China. But what other countries need to learn is that, in a globalized world, they share borders with China, too.
Since leaving government at the end of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has spent the last four years calling for Democrats to put climate change at the center of US foreign policy.
He and his colleagues at National Security Action, a now-closed progressive foreign policy group filled with former Obama officials, said doing so was imperative because it was the world’s biggest long-term threat.
Now some of those same colleagues are in the Biden administration, which just convened a successful two-day international climate summit during which nearly all 40 nations made important commitments to reduce emissions, among other things.
Which means Rhodes’s wish came true. Or did it?
I called up Rhodes to see how he’s feeling now that a Democratic administration has finally put climate change at the “center” of US foreign policy, as explicitly stated by Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines.
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But what Rhodes told me came as a surprise.
He’s not convinced yet that climate change is actually the central pillar of Biden’s foreign policy. It’s certainly a top priority, sure, but from Rhodes’s perspective, China is also taking up a lot of space in Biden’s foreign policy. So are democracy promotion and human rights.
Rhodes worries Biden may have to make some unpalatable trade-offs on climate change issues if he wants to make progress on those other priorities. Simply put, Rhodes believes Biden has many tough choices ahead, with traps awaiting him beyond the 100-day mark.
“If you’re a progressive who cares about both climate change and human rights in China, it’s a very difficult call as to which one you’re going to care about more. I don’t think we know how the Biden administration is going to answer that question,” he said.
It’s an important concern. Biden is only a few months into his presidency, and for now he has the wiggle room to push on his priorities. But eventually others (read: China) will push back and could force Biden into an uncomfortable situation.
It’s worth noting that Biden’s team rejects any suggestions that they would make any concessions to China solely for progress on climate change. “That’s not going to happen,” John Kerry, the special envoy for climate change, told reporters in January.
Yet Rhodes, who worked to sell the Iran nuclear deal to skeptics in Washington and now co-hosts the Pod Save the World podcast, firmly believes the hardest part — executing climate change policies while trying not to compromise on other priorities — is yet to come.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Alex Ward
When you were in the Obama administration, you worked with a lot of people who are currently in government. And you worked alongside some of those people, like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, to define foreign policy priorities for the next Democratic president while you all were out of power at National Security Action.
Help me understand why you settled on tackling climate change not only as a key pillar of a progressive foreign policy but also a key tenet of any administration’s national security strategy.
Ben Rhodes
In order to get to something like the Paris climate accord, you had to make the US government do things that it wasn’t designed to do on foreign policy. Two things stand out to me.
First, every bilateral or multilateral relationship increasingly became about climate change. If you were meeting with the leader of China or Brazil or South Korea, suddenly among the top three issues was a climate issue. For China, that’s obviously their overall emissions reduction plan; for Brazil, it’s the Amazon; for South Korea, it’s their financing of coal plants.
To deal with all that, you need an infrastructure in the US government to support everybody from the president of the United States all the way down to embassies. That’s the only way you’re going to prioritize climate change like we’ve prioritized terrorism or other vital US interests. That structure didn’t exist at the beginning of the Obama years; it was an ad hoc arrangement.
Second, similarly, was how to set up an interagency process to handle the climate. You had to make it a separate entity because you needed anyone from a global special envoy to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy around the table. Leading up to the 2015 Paris agreement, we set up an interagency process that was originally chaired by John Podesta and then was chaired by Brian Deese [who’s now the director of the National Economic Council in the White House].
This matters because it brings the international and domestic together, which you need when promoting clean energy and other things America is working on abroad.
Alex Ward
This sounds like “If you build it, they will come.” By building a federal government infrastructure, you begin to get the tools and processes in place to deal with climate change long term, somewhat independent of who sits in the White House.
Ben Rhodes
There’s also the resource question. How much money is the intelligence community putting into climate reporting? How much money is the Defense Department putting into transitioning their energy sources and scenario planning, contingency planning, around climate effects?
If climate is going to be an organizing principle of American foreign policy and America’s role in the world for the next 30 years — as I’m sure Jake Sullivan and Brian believe — what kind of government do you need to build to do that?
We built a post-9/11 government to fight terrorism. That’s had huge ramifications for all manner of national security agencies. In a way, you have to do something similar for climate change, even though it’s obviously a different challenge.
I think people shouldn’t lose sight of how big of a shift it is in terms of what kind of people you’re hiring, where you’re spending money, how you’re organizing yourself, how embassies are prepared for their relationships. It’s a huge thing to make this a real centerpiece and focal point of American foreign policy.
Alex Ward
With the climate summit, it feels like the work you, Jake, and others now in the administration did over the last four years paid off. Climate change, as you hoped for, is the centerpiece of US foreign policy, at least during the Biden years.
Ben Rhodes
Well, I’ll be totally honest with you, Alex, there are three main elements they’re proposing of a post-post-9/11 foreign policy, if you will.
The first is China, where everything has a China dimension and you’re kind of in a Cold War structure. Another is democracy, pushing back on the authoritarian trend. And the other is climate. I don’t know that they made a choice — I think they’re kind of doing all three of those things.
I couldn’t tell you whether climate or China is how they’re organizing themselves. I think they’re probably considering both, but it’s a little too early to say climate is the organizing principle for their foreign policy. To some extent, democracy is, too, but we’ll obviously have to see what comes out of their process.
Alex Ward
This is interesting, because to make all three “organizing principles” is to invite a ton of tension. Not that there’s a zero-sum problem, but I think it’s fair to say to make progress on one of these fronts, you probably have to sacrifice gains in another.
Ben Rhodes
Looking back on the Obama years, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement was happening right when we were getting the Chinese to be more ambitious on climate ahead of Paris. Whether you think about it or not, there must be a trade-off there — you know, prioritizing democracy might mean making it harder to deal with China on climate change.
Alex Ward
This is something I ask progressives about often. They consider climate change the existential national security threat of our times. If that’s the case, then you’re probably going to have to make concessions on China’s aggressive behavior or crackdown on democracy. Similar problems arise for other nations we want to take climate change seriously.
None of that is good, but at some point you have to prioritize because you can’t have it all. It seems to me that this is an obvious tension and one that’s going to be problematic for this administration or any other that follows a similar playbook.
Ben Rhodes
I think you’re right. And look, nobody in government would want to say that out loud. Having been in government, it’s inevitable that you will face some very uncomfortable decisions between, say, getting the Chinese [government] to stop investing in dirty infrastructure and placing sanctions on China over the mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims and labeling it a genocide.
If you’re a progressive who cares about both climate change and human rights in China, it’s a very difficult call as to which one you’re going to care about more. I don’t think we know how the Biden administration is going to answer that question. But over the course of the next year or two, it will probably become evident, though I couldn’t predict in which direction they’ll go.
In some ways, the US-China relationship is big enough and complex enough. The analogy might be the Soviet Union, where we confront them on a whole bunch of issues, but we still sit down and make arms control agreements together. That’s the ideal, but I have to think that at some point there will be trade-offs made.
Alex Ward
That seems like a tough, and some would say bad, spot for any administration to be in.
Ben Rhodes
It’s going to be difficult.
On the one hand, you could argue that the Chinese have to act on climate and environmental issues for their own sake. They have huge environmental problems of their own.
The problem with that is as China becomes a superpower, we need Beijing to do stuff not just within China but outside of China. They could fix the air quality in their cities while they still build dirty infrastructure along the Belt Road. So I don’t think just appealing to China’s self-interest is going to be sufficient on these climate issues.
That suggests that if you are really provoking the Chinese on really important issues like Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, I just have to think that makes it harder to reach big, multilateral agreements on climate change.
So, yeah, I’m watching the trade-off space of the Biden team over the next year and a half up through the midterm election. They seem pretty wedded to kind of drawing a firm line with the Chinese. I’m speculating, but the US may just be testing how much they can get on climate from Beijing while still being a hardass on everything else.
Alex Ward
I’m glad you mentioned the midterm elections because there’s a political side to all this. If Biden’s three priorities are climate change, China, and democracy, then that causes headaches because they’re long-term issues. It’s hard to show voters — the few who care about foreign policy, anyway — real-time progress being made on those fronts.
Sure, there’s the coronavirus pandemic response the administration can point to. That’s apart from these challenges. But in the long run, it’s hard to see how this administration can politically boast about progress. It’s hard to show success but easier to demonstrate failure.
Ben Rhodes
It probably doesn’t lend itself to obvious agreements you can trumpet. Climate change, though, is pretty measurable in the sense that you can look at commitments and if emissions are dropping, etc.
With China, you can invest more in technologies to compete with China, that’s good. Though the danger of engaging in long-term competition is that you’re fueling the fires by sending a lot more weapons to Taiwan or sparking attacks on Asian Americans. Ratcheting up too much can have unintended consequences.
They’re going to have to be skilled in how they lay out what success looks like three, five, 10 years on regarding climate change and other challenges. They need to show they’re hitting targets and people feel a sense of progress, even if the problem feels unsolvable.
Alex Ward
That requires disciplined focus. This administration is just working on so much stuff — everything, really. It’s already hard to show progress on a few items, let alone a lot of them.
Ben Rhodes
Absolutely. If these three items are your real focus, then you need to deprioritize other things.
Like, if you guys really want to deal with China and climate change, you can’t spend the same amount of bandwidth on issues like Iran in the way this country has done over the last five years. Iran is a medium-size country, and it just makes no sense that it’s occupying so much of our time. They need to clear the decks a little bit.
Alex Ward
I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if there’s anything the Biden team is doing that you wish you had done during the Obama years.
Ben Rhodes
We could have done more of the structural work inside the US government to embed climate into how the State Department and the Defense Department and the intelligence community operate. We did some of that, and I’m thrilled that the Biden team is being really ambitious in the space.
We could’ve done more on China. We were getting pushed in the South China Sea and couldn’t pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. The TPP would have been a very useful strategic framework for dealing with China right now, by the way. They could use it, but this administration isn’t going to try and revive it for political reasons — both parties don’t like it.
We could’ve done more on democracy. For me, the HR 1 voting rights bill is a foreign policy bill. There are a lot of countries that need HR 1. Thinking of democracy as something that is on a continuum from the US domestic political circumstance to the circumstances in other countries, that’s an area where, if I could go back to like Obama’s reelection in 2012, we should’ve done more on.
Correction, 6:20 pm: A photo caption in an earlier version of this story mis-titled Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The bodies of the two brothers were left for more than a day. Their families knew they were there, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them collect the bodies. The soldiers left behind witnesses, though: two boys, barely teens, tied to a tree nearby, after the soldiers forced them to spend the night on the ground, between the bodies of the murdered men.
The brothers were Kahsay and Tesfay, who both cared for young children and elderly parents in a small village in the northeastern corner of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, in an area home to the Irob, a small ethnic minority.
Their homeland, on the border with Eritrea, has known unrest for decades, from the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1998 and the years of tension that followed until a shaky peace deal was finally reached in 2018.
Nothing compares to what they’re seeing now.
“It was never like this,” said Fissuh Hailu of the Irob Advocacy Association. Before, he said, “We had places to run away.”
Hailu now lives abroad, but many members of his family are still in Tigray. He and his colleagues are relying on witness accounts to document the atrocities happening in their part of the region, including the story he told me of the two brothers, which they largely attribute to the Eritrean army. (The incident has not been independently verified by Vox.)
It’s one of many chilling reports that have emerged in recent months from Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia that has been engulfed in war since November.
Tensions churned for months between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that represents the Tigray region. That erupted into violence after the TPLF attacked a federal military facility in Tigray in what it said was “preemptive self-defense.” The Ethiopian government launched what it called a “law enforcement operation” in response, a justification for a full-scale invasion.
The situation has since turned into a protracted conflict with disturbing humanitarian implications. Tigrayan defense forces are fighting against the Ethiopian National Defense Force, who have partnered with troops from neighboring Eritrea and other militias within Ethiopia, specifically Amhara forces.
Telecommunications blackouts and limited access to parts of Tigray have made it difficult to fully assess what is unfolding there. But in recent months, credible reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity have started to trickle out, including evidence of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans.
An internal United States government report, which the New York Times reviewed in February, assessed that the Ethiopian military and their allies were “deliberately and efficiently rendering Western Tigray ethnically homogeneous through the organized use of force and intimidation.”
There have been massacres and mass executions. Jan Nyssen, a geography professor at the University of Ghent, and a team of researchers have compiled a list of 1,900 Tigrayans killed in approximately 150 mass killings since the fighting began.
“This is ongoing,” Nyssen told me earlier this month. “In the last month, we recorded 20 massacres, and it continues almost at the same speed.” There is a common pattern, he said: When the Eritrean or Ethiopian forces lose a battle, “they take revenge on civilians in the surrounding areas.”
Rape has been used as a weapon of war; a USAID report includes testimony from a woman who recalled her rapist saying he was “cleansing the blood lines” of Tigrayan women. Eritrean forces have been accused of mass looting, pillaging, and wanton destruction of everything from banks to crops to hospitals.
Most of the alleged atrocities point to Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Amhara forces, though Tigray People’s Liberation Front-linked groups have also been linked to at least one mass killing. The Eritrean government has denied involvement, and only just last week admitted to its presence in Tigray.
In March, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged that reports “indicate that atrocities have been committed in Tigray region.” He said those responsible should be held accountable, though he also blamed the “propaganda of exaggeration.”
The security situation is fueling other crises. More than 60,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Sudan since the fighting began in November, and humanitarian groups — many of which remain cut off from parts of Tigray — say the security situation has likely displaced thousands of people internally.
The United Nations estimates that of Tigray’s 6 million people, 4.5 million are in need of food aid. A recent report from the World Peace Foundation warns of the risk of famine and mass starvation as people are displaced and crops, livestock, and the tools needed to make and collect food are destroyed.
One witness in Tigray, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears for his safety, told me that Eritrean soldiers will kill an ox and eat just one leg, leaving the rest of the carcass to rot. “The people are either dying by blood or by hunger,” he said by phone from Mekele, Tigray’s capital, earlier this month.
Prime Minister Abiy, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who was once seen as the country’s peacemaker and a democratic liberalizer, is now leading a country that is beginning to turn on itself.
Violence and ethnic tensions are flaring up in other parts of Ethiopia. Sudanese and Ethiopian troops have clashed in a disputed border territory, a sign of how Tigray’s unrest is spilling over into an already volatile neighborhood where Ethiopia had been viewed, at least by some international partners, as a stabilizing force.
The war in Tigray has no clear end, and the reports of killing and rape and looting are still happening. “Everybody is just waiting, just waiting — not to live, but waiting for what will happen tomorrow, or in the night,” the man in Mekele said.
“We never know what will happen,” he added. “You never know what will happen to anybody.”
A conflict that had been brewing finally breaks out
Tensions between Abiy’s government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front had been coursing for some time, and experts say anyone paying attention was warning of the possibility of war before it happened.
In 2018, Ethiopia’s government got a major shake-up. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a Marxist-Leninist party, had ruled the country for nearly three decades, having emerged victorious from a brutal civil war in 1991.
The party was a coalition representing four different regions or nationalities: the TPLF (made up of Tigrayans); the Amhara Democratic Party (representing the Amhara ethnic group); the Oromo Democratic Party (representing the Oromo ethnic group); and the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement, which represented a few ethnic groups.
But the Tigrayan wing of the party dominated.
The Tigrayan-led government presided over rapid economic growth, but not all of it was equal, and many Ethiopians felt left behind. In 2015 and 2016, after decades in power, the government faced popular protests over human rights abuses, corruption, and inequality.
Some, including members of the Amhara and Oromo ethnic groups, were particularly angry about the TPLF’s control of the most important positions in politics and the military, despite representing just 6 percent of the country’s population.
In 2018, Ethiopia’s prime minister resigned, and other members of the ruling EPRDF coalition united against the Tigrayan wing. They elected Abiy Ahmed, a relative newcomer from the Oromo, as the leader.
Abiy began to establish himself as a democratizer, releasing political prisoners and promising free and fair elections. He also pursued peace with neighboring Eritrea. The two countries had gone to war in 1998 over a disputed border in Badme (also in the Tigray region), and though they signed a peace deal in 2000, it had basically become a stalemate, with occasional skirmishes erupting for 20 years.
All of this made Abiy a star in Africa and around the world. In 2019, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for resolving the border war and “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation.”
At home, things were a bit more complicated. Abiy had promised to reform the EPRDF, but in late 2019 he created a new Prosperity Party (PP) meant to deemphasize the role of ethnic groups in the name of unity.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front opposed this move and what it saw as Abiy’s attempt to consolidate federal power at the expense of regional and ethnic autonomy. The TPLF declined to join the PP, and though the party still retained control of Tigray’s regional government, members generally saw Abiy as taking steps detrimental to their interests and their region — and to the vision of Ethiopia that the TPLF had championed since the 1990s.
“At the root of the war in Tigray is this ideological difference between TPLF and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for the future of the country,” Tsega Etefa, an associate professor of history and Africana and Latin American studies at Colgate University, wrote in an email.
Experts said Abiy rode the wave of anti-TPLF grievance to try to consolidate his own power, especially as it became a lot harder to deliver on some of the political promises he’d made when he took over.
“In a bid to deflect the growing criticism of him, now that he was formally in charge, he began increasingly confronting Tigrayans and blaming them for everything that had gone wrong,” Harry Verhoeven, of the Oxford University China-Africa Network, told me.
Abiy portrayed Tigrayans as “the Ethiopian equivalent of the ‘deep state,’ if you like,” Verhoeven added.
Experts noted this kind of rhetoric had the effect of blurring the lines between the TPLF leadership — which had earned legitimate criticisms after decades in power — and the Tigrayan people themselves.
Tensions persisted into 2020, which was supposed to be an election year, until Abiy (with Parliament’s approval) postponed elections, citing the coronavirus pandemic. Abiy’s critics, including those in the TPLF, accused him of an anti-democratic power grab.
The Tigray region held elections anyway in September in an act of defiance. Abiy’s government deemed those elections illegal.
Ethiopia’s Parliament then voted to cut funds from the regional Tigrayan government, a move the TPLF said violated the law and was “tantamount to a declaration of war.” In late October, the TPLF blocked an Ethiopian general from taking up a post in Tigray. The International Crisis Group warned that this standoff “could trigger a damaging conflict that may even rip the Ethiopian state asunder.”
Just a few days later, Abiy accused the TPLF of attacking its military base. “The last red line had been crossed,” he said, as Ethiopian troops entered Tigray and he declared a six-month state of emergency. Reports of airstrikes accompanied the federal government’s push into the region.
The federal government’s communications blackout, combined with competing accounts from both the government and Tigray officials, made it hard to fully account for the situation.
By the end of the month, Abiy had declared the Ethiopian government “fully in control” of the region’s capital, Mekele.
Six months later, the war grinds on.
Why Eritrea is embroiled in Ethiopia’s war
Tigrayan defense forces have since regrouped and are now fighting a guerrilla insurgency against Ethiopian federal troops and those backing them up — namely, Eritrean troops and Amhara militia fighters from the region south of Tigray.
The Eritrean government — led by President Isaias Afwerki, the country’s longtime brutal dictator — and Abiy repeatedly denied the presence of Eritrean troops in Tigray, despite mounting evidence of their involvement.
It took until the end of March 2021 for Abiy to publicly acknowledge that Eritrean troops were present in Tigray. Shortly after, the Ethiopian government said Eritrean troops were withdrawing, though the TPLF had said there were no signs of any exit.
A top United Nations officials also said last week that there was no sign Eritrea was leaving. In response, Eritrea did, officially, confirm its presence in Tigray in an April 16 letter to the UN Security Council. In it, Eritrea said it had “agreed — at the highest levels — to embark on the withdrawal of the Eritrean forces and the simultaneous redeployment of Ethiopian contingents along the international boundary.”
But both advocates and experts are skeptical that Eritrea will exit quietly, or quickly.
“There is no sign that the Eritrean forces are withdrawing,” Alex de Waal, a research professor and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, told me earlier this month. “If anything, they are inserting themselves more deeply into the Ethiopian military and intelligence structure.”
But Abiy’s pact with Eritrea is forged from a common goal: the desire to crush the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Ethiopia and Eritrea have a long and tangled history, but to understand it, it helps to start after World War II, when world powers decided the fate of Eritrea after its previous colonizer, Italy, lost control of its territory in East Africa.
In 1952, the UN General Assembly voted to make Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia. Ten years later, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea, leading to a protracted battle for independence that culminated in an Eritrean independence referendum in the early 1990s.
During that struggle, Ethiopia’s TPLF cooperated with members of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), the latter of whom were fighting for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia. They were both opposed to rule in Addis Ababa and had cultural and linguistic ties, but the two movements had ideological differences. It was, in some ways, a relationship of necessity, and tensions simmered — and sometimes spilled out into the open — even when they were partners.
After Eritrea gained independence in 1993, relations between the country and the TPLF-dominated Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front began to deteriorate.
At first, the disputes were minor. But in 1998, Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war over a disputed border town. The two signed a peace agreement in 2000, allowing an independent commission would settle the status of the area. That commission, however, ruled in favor of Eritrea, and the TPLF-led government in Ethiopia objected to the ruling. That led to two decades of tension and sporadic fighting.
When Abiy took over, he moved to make peace with Eritrea, agreeing to accept the commission’s decision. Meanwhile, the TPLF continued to try to thwart Abiy’s overtures to Eritrea.
Still, President Isaias of Eritrea accepted those Abiy’s olive branch. But in doing so, he didn’t exactly bury old grudges, and continued to criticize the TPLF as “vultures” for undermining Eritrea’s and Ethiopia’s normalization of relations.
“Today is payback time for a number of deeply felt historical injustices, real or perceived — but certainly deeply felt,” Verhoeven said of Eritrea’s involvement.
Isaias rules a repressive state on a constant war footing, and he sees an opportunity to finally vanquish his political rival and settle political scores. It’s also a chance to assert himself as the Horn of Africa’s most consequential leader, which Verhoeven said “is very much something he’s always aspired to.” And he may believe he can’t achieve that as long as a politically influential TPLF still resides on his border.
Isaias wanted freedom from the TPLF. So did Abiy, who saw the TPLF as a challenge to his agenda. Abiy fed that animosity by attacking the TPLF and blaming it for trying to destabilize Ethiopia.
Experts told me the TPLF also made miscalculations, such as trying to frustrate Abiy’s ability to implement the peace deal on the ground, which may have helped to push Abiy closer to Isaias. The Tigray elections provoked even more acrimony with Abiy, though the momentum toward conflict had already been set in motion.
“All the sides really wanted to go to war, and all the sides were making the wrong moves that made war possible,” Awet Weldemichael, a Horn of Africa expert at Queen’s University in Ontario, said.
Ethiopia’s civil war is exacerbating deep-seated ethnic tensions
Just as Abiy forged a political pact with an outsider, Eritrea, his reliance on ethnic Amhara militias to help fight his war in Tigray is accelerating Ethiopia’s internal strife.
Amhara militias have reportedly taken control of parts of western Tigray. Amhara officials say the TPLF annexed this territory when it came to power in 1991, and say it rightfully belongs to them and they are re-seizing it.
But Tigrayan civilians and officials claim that the militias are now forcibly driving out the Tigrayan civilians who live there through a campaign of threats and violence. Amharan officials have denied this, despite growing evidence of a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Abiy has also defended the militias, saying in March that “portraying this force as a looter and conqueror is very wrong.”
This piece of land has been a longstanding source of tension between Amhara leaders and the TPLF, which fits into a broader history of grievances between the two.
Each held power at some point — Amhara’s elites before the rise of the EPRDF, the TPLF after that. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front considered the Amhara to be “oppressors” during their revolutionary campaign, and Amhara elites were marginalized during the TPLF’s reign.
Amhara’s elites also tend to interpret the TPLF’s vision of a federal Ethiopia — where each nationality has a degree of autonomy and power — as antithetical to their own. Theirs is one of a more unified Ethiopia with one national identity, albeit with them in control.
Abiy, too, has adopted that more unified vision, so the Amhara and Abiy found a politically beneficial partnership. But in aligning with the Amhara, just as with the Eritreans, Abiy is also putting his political survival in their hands.
Asafa Jalata, a professor of Africana studies at the University of Tennessee, said that Abiy didn’t care what the consequences were; he was focused on the TPLF and hadn’t planned beyond that. He, as other experts I spoke to did, thought Abiy showed his ineptitude and inexperience.
All of this has put Abiy in a very perilous position. “It makes very little sense,” Verhoeven said. “But it’s the course that he’s chosen to pursue, and Ethiopia is paying its price.”
“The hallmarks of ethnic cleansing are there”
The bullet that killed the 14-year-old boy brought his father down with it. The father stayed still beneath his boy’s bleeding body until the soldiers departed, leaving him and more than a dozen others rounded up from their homes for dead.
The father escaped. “They saw him from afar,” the source from Tigray told me, recounting what the man, a farmer from the Gulomakeda district of Tigray, had told him about an incident at the end of November.
“When the soldiers saw that some were escaping, they came back to the bodies to check whether they’d died or not.” The soldiers, whom the farmer believed were Eritrean, went one by one, cutting the throats of the bodies that remained to make sure they were dead.
Researchers and human rights groups have slowly begun to compile accounts like this, piecing together a troubling picture of cruelty and violence happening inside Tigray.
Communications and electricity blackouts, especially outside the major cities, have made it difficult to get information. Witnesses and victims also fear speaking out will provoke reprisal; their attackers are still lurking, still a threat.
“We never know who is there, who’s listening to what,” Fissuh, of the Irob Advocacy Association, said.
Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Amhara forces have been linked to most of the attacks on Tigrayan civilians, though the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front are also implicated in mass killings during the conflict. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in March that “credible information also continues to emerge about serious violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law by all parties to the conflict in Tigray in November last year.”
Among those violations are extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, and widespread destruction of property. The UN and the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, an NGO affiliated with the government, have agreed to launch an investigation.
“There is active looting and destruction of public infrastructure and private businesses, there is weaponized rape, there is weaponized hunger happening everywhere,” Meaza Gebremedhin, a US-based international researcher with Omna Tigray, a Tigrayan advocacy group, told me. “And there are massacres happening in different pockets of Tigray.”
Those with connections on the ground have reported Eritrean soldiers rampaging through houses and destroying food sources. “They take everything from your house,” the witness from Tigray told me. “What they can’t carry, they burn.”
At least 500 women have self-reported rape to five clinics in Tigray, which the United Nations says is likely a low-range estimate given the stigma and general lack of functioning health services.
“Women say they have been raped by armed actors, they also told stories of gang rape, rape in front of family members, and men being forced to rape their own family members under the threat of violence,” Wafaa Said, deputy UN aid coordinator, said last month.
A USAID report included testimony from one woman who said she and five others were gang-raped by 30 Eritrean troops, as the soldiers laughed and took pictures.
There is also evidence of ethnic cleansing against Tigrayans. A recent report from the Associated Press spoke to Tigrayans who were issued new identity cards that erased their Tigrayan heritage. “This is genocide … Their aim is to erase Tigray,” Seid Mussa Omar, a Tigrayan refugee who twice fled to Sudan, told the Associated Press.
It coincides with reports of Tigrayans being driven from their homes in western Tigray by Amhara forces. “They said, ‘You guys don’t belong here,’” Ababu Negash, a 70-year-old woman fleeing Tigray, told Reuters in March. “They said if we stay, they will kill us.”
“The hallmarks of ethnic cleansing are there,” said Queen’s University’s Weldemichael, “and they’re not just allegations. They are a serious smoking gun to that charge.”
A top United Nations humanitarian official, Mark Lowcock, said in a closed-door meeting last week that the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate and that “the conflict is not over and things are not improving.”
More than 1 million people are believed to be internally displaced in Tigray, in addition to the 60,000 who have fled across the border to Sudan.
People are often fleeing from one place to another as violence erupts, taking shelter in schools and other overcrowded facilities — creating conditions that are especially worrisome amid the pandemic. In Tigray, just 13 out of 38 hospitals are functioning, and 41 out of 224 primary health facilities, according to Michele Servadei, UNICEF’s deputy representative in Ethiopia.
The region was already in a precarious position to begin with because of climate change and locusts. Ethiopia is approaching its rainy season — the traditional time for planting, to harvest food for the following year — but the destruction of property and the displacement of people from their lands may make this nearly impossible. Aid groups are trying to do what they can but are still unable to reach all parts of the region.
All of this has increased the very real possibility of famine in Tigray.
What happens now?
Ethiopian federal troops and their partners handed the Tigrayan Defense Forces early defeats. But the Tigrayan forces are now waging a war of attrition, and they have popular support. No one side really has the edge, so the prospects of a ceasefire look grim.
The longer the conflict goes on, the more dire the humanitarian consequences will become — and the more unpredictable Ethiopia’s future will be. As Ethiopian forces are bogged down in Tigray, long-simmering unrest is brewing in other regions of Ethiopia. Tigray is “unfortunately serving as a bit of a domino effect throughout the country,” Sarah Miller, a senior fellow at Refugees International covering the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, said. These multiple frontiers of conflict put Abiy in an even more uncertain position, both at home and abroad.
The international community has also started to be more vocal about what’s happening.
Earlier this month, foreign ministers from the G7 group of nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) issued a joint statement demanding the “swift, unconditional and verifiable” withdrawal of Eritrean troops.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has also called on foreign forces to withdraw from Tigray and asked for an investigation into potential human rights abuses — which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken referred to as “acts of ethnic cleansing.” Sullivan also said USAID would be providing another $152 million to address humanitarian needs in the country. The United Nations Security Council this week finally expressed “deep concern” about the humanitarian situation in Tigray.
International pressure is critical, experts told me, especially as Abiy’s sheen as a peacemaker wears off. “He’s playing for time and trying to deal with the international community, which has become slowly but surely ever more critical, and salvaging what remains of his influence in international affairs,” Verhoeven said.
Indeed, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) met with Abiy in March. But after the visit, Abiy confirmed the presence of Eritrean troops, admitted to possible violations, and said Eritrean troops were withdrawing. Again, there’s reason to be skeptical about these statements, but experts said it certainly is a sign that Abiy is sensitive to how the rest of the world, particularly the West, sees him.
Which is why experts told me they think the US and allies in Europe may be able to use this leverage and influence with Abiy. Economic pressure, many said, was particularly important, including the possibility of sanctions.
Stopping the carnage is the immediate concern, but finding a political solution looks precarious, as the status quo was already untenable. The war has pushed Tigray to embrace the possibility of independence, for example.
“Ethiopia may not survive as a country,” Verhoeven said.
All of this has troubling implications for the wider region as well. Ethiopia was seen as the steadying force in the Horn of Africa, something that Weldemichael said perhaps was a bit of wishful thinking — a reputation gained mostly because of the chaos around it.
“Think of a ship exploding, right? And you find yourself on a flat plank or a piece of wood that’s sailing smoothly in this messy water. That’s Ethiopia,” Weldemichael said.
But an Ethiopia in a protracted civil war could drag even more neighbors into the conflict — and generate even deeper humanitarian and refugee crises.
President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally refer to atrocities committed against Armenians as a “genocide” on Saturday, 106 years after the 1915 start of an eight-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire that left between 1 million and 1.5 million Armenians dead.
Previous presidents have refrained from using the word “genocide” in connection with the mass atrocities committed against the Armenian people in the early 20th century, and Turkey categorically denies that a genocide took place. So Biden’s declaration marks a major break from precedent, and could signal an increase in tensions with Turkey, a longtime US and NATO ally.
“Each year on this day, we remember the lives of all those who died in the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide and recommit ourselves to preventing such an atrocity from ever again occurring,” Biden said in a statement Saturday. “And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms.”
The move is the fulfillment of a campaign promise for Biden, who pledged on April 24 last year to recognize the genocide if elected. It also comes on a symbolic date: April 24 is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, a holiday observed in Armenia and by members of the Armenian diaspora.
And it’s emblematic of the Biden administration’s desire to center human rights in its foreign policy agenda, even at the cost of worsening relations with Turkey.
Biden is the first US leader in decades to use the word “genocide” in connection with the events of 1915-1923. Previous presidents, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama, made similar campaign promises to recognize the Armenian genocide, but never followed through while in office, and Bush later called on Congress to reject such a designation. In 1981, Ronald Reagan made a passing reference to “the genocide of the Armenians” during a speech commemorating victims of the Holocaust.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, accidentally recognized the genocide last year when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made reference to an “Armenian Genocide Memorial” in Denver, Colorado — but rejected nonbinding resolutions by the House and Senate to declare it such.
Both the House and Senate measures, though not approved by Trump, passed overwhelmingly in 2019, paving the way for Biden’s action on Saturday.
With the addition of the US on Saturday, 30 countries — including France, Germany, and Russia — now recognize the genocide, according to a list maintained by the Armenian National Institute in Washington, DC.
Biden spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ahead of the official US announcement. It was the first conversation between the two allied leaders since Biden took office more than three months ago, which some regional experts have taken as a sign of cooling relations between the countries. According to a readout of the call released by the White House, the leaders agreed to hold a bilateral meeting “on the margins of the NATO Summit in June.” And according to news reports — but not the readout — Biden told Erdogan of his intentions to recognize the genocide.
Saturday’s statement officially recognizing the genocide nonetheless elicited a harsh response from Turkey.
“We reject and denounce in the strongest terms the statement of the President of the US regarding the events of 1915 made under the pressure of radical Armenian circles and anti-Turkey groups on April 24,” Turkey’s foreign ministry said in a statement Saturday that called on Biden to “correct this grave mistake.”
“This statement of the US … will never be accepted in the conscience of the Turkish people, and will open a deep wound that undermines our mutual friendship and trust,” the foreign ministry said.
Prominent Armenians, however, including Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, welcomed the news on Saturday. Pashinyan tweeted a brief statement, and, in a letter to Biden, said that the president’s words both paid “tribute” to victims of the genocide and also would help to prevent “the recurrence of similar crimes against mankind.”
“I highly appreciate your principled position, which is a powerful step on the way to acknowledging the truth, historical justice, and an invaluable of support for the descendants of the victims of the Armenian Genocide,” he wrote.
American lawmakers also welcomed Biden’s decision. New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, celebrated the statement in a tweet Saturday.
“Thankful that @POTUS will align with congressional & scholarly consensus,” Menendez wrote from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Twitter account. “As I said in 2019 when our resolution to recognize & commemorate the genocide passed the Senate, to overlook human suffering is not who we are as a people. It is not what we stand for as a nation.”
Former Sen. Bob Dole, who advocated for recognition of the Armenian genocide throughout his career, also tweeted his appreciation for Biden’s words — alongside documents showing his own attempts at gaining recognition of the genocide in Congress in the 1970s and ’80s.
“This is a proud and historically significant moment for the United States, for Armenia, and for Armenians around the globe,” the 97-year-old former presidential candidate wrote. “It’s been a long time coming.”
Biden is taking a new approach to the US-Turkey relationship
The vehemence of Turkey’s response to the US recognition of the Armenian genocide isn’t particularly surprising, as the topic has long been a point of international contention for Turkey.
Specifically, allegations of genocide are viewed as “insulting Turkishness” by Turkey — an offense that has elicited criminal charges in the past — because they implicate people who helped found the modern state of Turkey after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922.
Turkey’s aggressive efforts to push back on attempts to recognize atrocities committed against Armenians during World War I as genocide make Biden’s decision all the more exceptional.
Previously, Turkey has responded to countries acknowledging the genocide by recalling diplomats, including ambassadors to Germany and the Vatican. On Tuesday, in anticipation of a statement from Biden on the matter, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned that there could be consequences to Biden’s words.
“Statements that have no legal binding will have no benefit, but they will harm ties,” Cavusoglu said. “If the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs.”
As Vox’s Amanda Taub explained in 2015, such concerns over strategic interests in the region have long meant that the US and allies like the United Kingdom have avoided designating mass atrocities against Armenians as a genocide.
Turkey is a key US ally — especially now, as the US relies on Turkey’s cooperation in the fight against ISIS in Syria. US officials have compromised on how they refer to the killings. When Obama makes a speech to commemorate the anniversary of the genocide on Friday, White House officials say he will use the term “Meds Yeghern” instead of “genocide.”
Likewise, the United Kingdom has not recognized the genocide, apparently out of concern that doing so would jeopardize its relationship with Turkey. A leaked Foreign Office briefing from 1999 stated that Turkey was “neuralgic and defensive about the charge of genocide.” Therefore, the “only feasible option” was for the United Kingdom to continue to refuse to recognize the killings as genocide, because of “the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey.”
However, the Biden administration has already taken a harder line on the US relationship with Turkey than previous administrations. As a candidate, Biden labeled Erdogan an “autocrat” in an interview with the New York Times, and last month his administration condemned “significant human rights issues” in modern-day Turkey, including the jailing and alleged torture of journalists, activists, and political dissidents.
While it’s unclear exactly what the fallout from Saturday’s announcement will look like, other factors have already chilled the US-Turkey relationship. In December of last year, for example, shortly before Biden took office, the US imposed sanctions on Turkey for purchasing Russian military hardware. In 2019, the US also removed Turkey from its joint F-35 stealth fighter program over the same purchase.
On Saturday, former US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who is also Biden’s nominee to run the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, argued that the decision was an important step in pushing back on Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism.
“Turkey is a powerful country in a critical region,” Power wrote on Twitter. “It is part of NATO. Our relationship matters. But President Erdogan’s success in blackmailing & bullying the US (and other countries) not to recognize the Armenian Genocide likely emboldened him as he grew more repressive.”
Ethiopia’s Tigray region is facing a deepening hunger emergency, with about 350,000 people threatened by famine. It is the most severe starvation crisis in the world right now, and it is almost entirely manmade.
The region, located in the north of the country, has been engulfed in conflict since November, when a political dispute between Ethiopia’s central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that represents the Tigray region, erupted into open warfare. The Ethiopian National Defense Force has since partnered with troops from neighboring Eritrea and other militias within Ethiopia, specifically Amhara forces, in the battle against the Tigrayan defense forces.
The fighting has had horrific consequences. There have been credible reports of atrocities being committed by all parties in the conflict, including mass killings, mass rape, and destruction and looting of property. As of April, more than 1.7 million people had been internally displaced, and more than 60,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Sudan since November.
Aid access has been inconsistent, and in May the United Nations confirmed a CNN report that Ethiopian federal troops and allied forces were blocking humanitarian supplies from entering parts of Tigray — a charge the Ethiopian government has denied.
Taken together, experts and observers feared this would balloon into a crisis of mass starvation. Now that crisis has arrived.
What we mean when we say “famine”
What’s happening in Tigray is the world’s worst hunger crisis in a decade, since the devastating Somalia famine in 2011.
About 350,000 people in Tigray are facing a food “catastrophe,” which means they’re suffering from famine conditions. That classification is based on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global index that relies on assessments from United Nations agencies and other regional and international nongovernmental organizations.
“Catastrophe” is the highest classification, at Level 5. According to the IPC’s assessment, the risk of famine exists in several vulnerable pockets throughout Tigray, but millions of others across the region are at risk of falling into this category. Right now, more than 5.5 million people — about 60 percent of Tigray’s population — are facing acute food insecurity. As many as 2.1 million are in the “emergency” phase, a level below catastrophe, and 3 million people are in the “crisis” phase.
“We’re at the stage where it’s unavoidable that thousands, probably tens of thousands, of children will die of starvation in the next month,” said Alex de Waal, a research professor and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, who put out a report in April on the famine risks in Tigray.
“Food is definitely being used as a weapon of war”
The region was already in a precarious position, given the economic aftershocks of Covid-19 and the scourge of desert locusts, which disrupted agriculture in the past year. But when it comes to the current famine, “the biggest driver is conflict,” said Stanley Chitekwe, the chief of nutrition for Unicef in Ethiopia.
The fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands who have left behind their homes, their livelihoods, and any source of income they may have had. It has demolished roads, health care facilities, banks, water pumps, and much of the other infrastructure people and food systems rely on.
When the fighting broke out in November, it also disrupted the harvest season. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Office (FAO), about 80 percent of people in Tigray rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.
Even more concerning, though, are reports that farmers and food stocks have been deliberately targeted, mostly by the Eritrean forces allied with Ethiopia’s government. Witnesses have said troops have incinerated crops, looted farms and food stores, and killed livestock, like oxen — destroying not just potential food sources but also the tools people need to grow and collect food.
There are also reports that Eritrean soldiers are forbidding farmers from plowing their fields, and humanitarian aid workers have reported being threatened by armed forces, especially Eritrean forces, and having their supplies and vehicles confiscated.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock, in an interview with Reuters, specifically called out Eritrean forces for “trying to deal with the Tigrayan population by starving them,” namely by blocking supplies and looting. “Food is definitely being used as a weapon of war,” he said.
Aid is still getting through to millions of people; according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), aid agencies have reached more than 2.3 million people with food aid since May. But most of it is going to areas where the Ethiopian government is in control; those outside of it, especially in rural areas, do not have access.
Chitekwe of Unicef said the situation is very dynamic; as of Wednesday, they have access to about a third of the region’s 93 waredas, or districts, partial access to a bit more than another third, and the rest are inaccessible. Which areas groups can reach can change quickly depending on the conflict and who’s in control.
Anaol Dalle, a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida who is studying the Horn of Africa and who spoke to me from Addis Ababa, said this unequal access is deliberate. The Tigrayan defense forces have a lot of support among the population, and the Ethiopian government wants to erode that support. The Tigrayan forces are also blending in with the population, and Ethiopia and its allies believe that cutting off food and supplies is a way to weaken those forces, too.
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The Ethiopian and Eritrean governments both deny that their forces are preventing aid from reaching parts of Tigray. The Ethiopian government has also said most farmers in Tigray were planting crops on schedule.
In fact, the Ethiopian government has denied there is any hunger crisis at all. “There is no hunger in Tigray,” Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said this week. “There is a problem and the government is capable of fixing that.”
Given the historical echoes to previous famines the country has experienced, including one in the 1980s that killed an estimated 1 million people and captivated the world’s attention, it’s not surprising Abiy would downplay the specter of famine. Drought increased the hunger crisis in the 1980s, but then, as now, politics and war turned it into a catastrophe.
Abiy’s expected election win means the war — and the hunger — will likely continue
All of this is happening as Ethiopia holds elections. Though billed as the country’s first free and fair vote, that isn’t quite the reality. There is no voting in Tigray, and opposition parties in other regions are boycotting, arguing their leaders are facing threats and intimidation from Abiy and his ruling Prosperity Party. All of this makes it likely that Abiy and his party will win handily, despite the resistance at home and international criticism.
Abiy’s expected victory will allow him to claim an electoral mandate, despite the questions about the integrity of the elections. His win may also more deeply entrench Ethiopia’s civil war.
As experts told me, much of Abiy’s support comes from those who oppose the Tigrayan leadership, so they’re not exactly displeased with his decisions. Which means Abiy has less incentive to attempt to resolve the conflict in Tigray or respond to international pressure to do so.
All of this makes for a very uncertain future for Tigray and the humanitarian emergency unfolding there. The IPC has predicted that, if the situation continues as is, by September, more than 400,000 people will be at risk of famine in the region.
“We are witnessing a humanitarian nightmare,” US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said earlier this month. “This is not the kind of disaster that can be reversed.”