Two weeks ago, France accused Turkey of harassing a French frigate off the coast of Libya while it carried out checks on a Turkish ship that it suspected of breaking the UN arms embargo. Turkey denied the charge. A week later, President Macron said, “I have already had the opportunity to say very clearly to President Erdogan I consider today that Turkey is playing a dangerous game in Libya and is in breach of all commitments it took during the Berlin conference.” Turkish officials reacted. NATO is now investigating the incident at sea.
Some Western news outlets also said France has previously given military support to Khalifa Haftar to fight Islamist militants but denies supporting him in the civil war; President Macron has not criticized countries allied to his Libyan National Army, even though he has often rebuked Turkey.
I have been consistently critical of Turkish Government’s interventionist policies, its involvement in proxy wars in Syria and Libya. I find them detrimental to Turkey’s national interests. However, President Macron is in no position to lecture others on Libya unless he erroneously believes that he inherited a clean Libya slate when he won the presidency in 2017. Because, it was it was President Sarkozy who led the disastrous Libya intervention.
This is a time when some Western countries are reckoning with their colonial past and one cannot conveniently ignore what has transpired in the past two decades.
Starting in the early 2000s, Qaddafi sought to improve his international image and Libya’s relations with the West. In August 2003 Libya signed a deal worth 2.7 billion dollars to compensate families of the Lockerbie bombing victims. A month later Libya abandoned programs to develop weapons of mass destruction. In January 2004, Libya agreed to compensate families of victims of the 1989 bombing of French passenger aircraft over the Sahara. In October 2007, Libya was elected to the UN Security Council. In September 2008, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the highest-level US visit to Libya since 1953. She said the relations between the two countries entered a “new phase”. Western countries continued competing for their economic interests in oil-rich Libya.
French President Sarkozy met Qaddafi towards the end of July 2007 in Tripoli in a push to deepen ties. This is what Reuters reported at the time:
“Ministers of the two countries signed agreements on a military-industrial partnership, a nuclear energy project and cooperation in science research and education, officials said.
“Sarkozy, who met Gaddafi in a tent in the compound of his Tripoli residence, has said he wants to help Libya return to the “concert of nations” after it freed six foreign medics convicted of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV.
“The medics — five Bulgarians and a Palestinian — left Libya on Tuesday on a French plane accompanied by Sarkozy’s wife and hours of energetic telephone diplomacy by her husband, clearing the way for his visit to Tripoli.
“I am happy to be in your country to talk about the future,” Sarkozy wrote in a book at Gaddafi’s residence. He is seeking to further French business interests in Libya and boost diplomatic ties before flying on to Senegal and Gabon…”
Reporters were told that nuclear cooperation was related to the installation in Libya of a nuclear plant to supply drinking water from desalinated sea water.
In December 2007 Leader Qaddafi began a five-day official visit to France on the invitation of President Sarkozy. This was Libyan strongman’s first to France in more than three decades. His French hosts pitched his Bedouin-style tent for receiving guests in the garden of the official guest residence and one-time mansion of Baron Gustave de Rothschild, the Hotel Marigny.
Deals signed with Libya during the visit were expected to total $14.7 billion. They included Libya’s purchase of 21 Airbus aircraft and a nuclear co-operation accord.
President Sarkozy defended the visit and welcome granted to Qaddafi in the face of domestic criticism.
Despite the warmth on the surface, Western countries continued to see Qaddafi a thorn on their side. It was just that they were prepared to pay a small political price for their economic interests until an opportunity of a different kind presented itself.
Four years later came the Arab spring. Qaddafi’s reaction to the protests gave President Sarkozy an opportunity to lead an effort for his ouster. He and Prime Minister David Cameron succeeded in convincing a hesitant President Obama that it was time for action. Thus, the three countries presented a draft resolution to the Security Council to pave the way. The lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan military interventions led them to seek other instruments of international legitimacy as well. Under pressure, the Arab League timidly adopted a resolution asking the Security Council to declare a “no-fly zone” over Libya. African Union and Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned Qaddafi for the violence.
On March 18, 2011, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1973. Five countries (Russia, China, Brazil, Germany, and India) abstained. The next day a conference in Paris, held under French, British and US leadership, decided to start air operations against Qaddafi’s forces “to protect the civilians”. Within hours air strikes began. It soon became clear that the purpose was regime change.
In a joint op-ed published in mid-April in the International Herald Tribune, Le Figaro and the Times of London, President Obama, President Sarkozy, and Prime Minister Cameron confirmed this.
Operations launched by a “coalition of the willing” were later taken over by NATO.
Clearly, Resolution 1973’s implementation went beyond its letter and spirit. This is one of the reasons why Russia and China did not give the West another opportunity in Syria.
In August 2013, PM Cameron suffered a major blow to his leadership when he lost the House of Commons vote on military action against the Assad regime. Failed interventions in Iraq and Libya were no doubt in the minds of the members of parliament.
In August 2014 President Obama questioned the wisdom of the Libya intervention in an interview he gave Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.
“… Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions… So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?”
And, Qaddafi’s ghost continues to haunt Mr. Sarkozy.
The world is yet to witness one successful external military intervention, be it outright military action or intervention through proxies. Today, those who have sown the wind are reaping the whirlwind. Yes, Qaddafi was a tyrant, but Libya is now a battle zone and a refugee route to Europe. France is still trying to bring to power a regime which would serve its economic/political interests. Russia is seeking another foothold in the Mediterranean. Turkey is after installing the Muslim Brotherhood in power to make up for its failure in Syria and economic interests as well. The Gulf states and Egypt appear determined to prevent this because they hate the Brotherhood. And, Fayez al-Sarraj’s Government of National Accord and Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army are fighting each other. They are both Libyans, but they cannot have a conversation.
In brief, the suffering of the Libyan people hardly matters.
The fundamental question seems to be whether a nation at crossroads can overcome its internal divisions and produce a leader who can lead his/her country forward.
How lucky we the people of Turkey were to have Ataturk when the question facing the nation was “to be or not to be?” We are eternally grateful to him.
A Health and Human Services staff member shows a coronavirus outbreak map in Washington, D.C., February 2020
Carlos Barria / Reuters
In 1900, the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit Galveston, Texas. The storm, estimated to have been a Category 4, all but washed the city away. An estimated 8,000 people died, and even more lives would likely have been lost if Isaac Cline, the chief of the Texas section of the U.S. Weather Service, had not spent the day before the hurricane’s arrival walking around and urging people to seek higher ground. He did so on little more than a hunch based on the fact that a bad storm had recently passed over Cuba. The science of weather forecasting had yet to emerge; guesswork was the best anyone could do.
Over a century later, hurricane forecasts are a central feature of summer and fall for millions of Americans. Such forecasts, along with those predicting winter storms, tornadoes, and floods, have saved an untold number of lives and many billions of dollars. Even fair-weather forecasts play an important role in modern life. Take the airline industry, for example. “Even when you’ve got clear skies, that has an economic benefit,” explained Greg Romano of the National Weather Service, “because then you don’t necessarily need to plan to reroute as much, so you can perhaps take on less fuel; you know that you can have tighter schedules.”
With the world moving quickly toward an age of pandemics, the story of how weather forecasting in the United States improved deserves attention. Because when it comes to modeling the likely course of contagious outbreaks, the country is in some ways closer to the bad old days of deadly, no-notice hurricanes than to the current era of precision storm tracking and multiday weather forecasts.
Today, if a hurricane was barreling down on Florida, no one would suggest that an arbitrary assortment of academics gather data, quickly develop models to predict the storm’s course, anticipate its landfall, tell agencies where to preposition response teams, and craft warnings for the public. That, however, is essentially what the U.S. government has done during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of course, sophisticated disease modeling has contributed a great deal to the response to the pandemic. Early in the outbreak, modelers estimated that the new coronavirus would prove more deadly than influenza. Others concluded that rapid containment of the virus in China was unlikely, based on the unusually high number of infected international travelers. And when the United States was in the throes of the worst outbreak in the world, it was modelers whose work informed the White House task force that coordinated the federal response, including the decision to begin (and later extend) the “Slow the Spread” campaign of social-distancing measures and business closures.
Unfortunately, however, the full force of epidemiological expertise in the United States is not being brought to bear. Despite some successes, serious gaps remain in the ability of infectious disease models to inform public health policy. That is because the country has no centralized system for disease forecasting; there exists no epidemiological equivalent of the National Weather Service. That is precisely what the country needs to succeed in the fight against COVID-19 and to avoid future failures and missteps of the sort that has marred the U.S. response to the current pandemic.
MODEL CITIZENS
This is hardly the first time that academics have filled the disease-modeling vacuum. In 2009, during the H1N1 pandemic, officials in Pennsylvania consulted modelers as they deliberated about whether to shut down schools. During the Ebola outbreak of 2014, modelers helped the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services calculate the risk that travelers would import cases into the United States, how many hospital beds would be needed domestically, and how many future cases could be expected under varying scenarios.
But after those outbreaks ended, the ad hoc and informal ties that had developed between modelers and decision-makers were not institutionalized; no formal system emerged for centralizing expertise within the government. So it should have been no surprise that the few modeling experts who do this work within government agencies were quickly overwhelmed by the enormous number of consequential decisions demanded by the COVID-19 pandemic. And once again, academic modelers have stepped in to fill the gap.
This is part of a familiar pattern. During contagion crises, modeling becomes a priority. However, as the sense of urgency fades, attention shifts to other issues and relationships between experts and decision-makers fade. The chief danger is that as the results of modeling shift, those changes won’t get on the radar of policymakers. “The projections provide information at a particular moment but unfortunately will change all the time. It’s important to communicate that uncertainty,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. Shaman’s research has been consulted by the White House task force on COVID-19, but Shaman says that the working relationship has been limited.
During contagion crises, modeling becomes a priority. However, as the sense of urgency fades, attention shifts to other issues.
The CDC’s epidemiology task force hasconvened weekly meetings with pandemic experts. These meetings are a marked improvement in coordination and information exchange over such efforts in previous outbreaks. However, the connection to key decision-makers, including the White House task force, has not been clear.
One result has been a proliferation of models without enough people to make sense of them. “It’s really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, without someone or a group of people evaluating the assumptions and form of each model,” said Shaman. “There are a lot of teams who want to contribute to modeling efforts, but we don’t have a clear game plan for separating and combining the various projections.”
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF PANDEMIC
To better integrate disease forecasting into decision-making, the CDC and other public health agencies should look to the history of the National Weather Service for inspiration. Americans take for granted the elaborate, highly detailed weather information they can easily access. But such tools developed only after decades of sustained public investment.
Numerical weather forecasting emerged in the 1920s in the wake of mathematical advances that helped describe atmospheric physics. Decades later, computers allowed meteorologists to apply more elaborate models. Other new technologies—aircraft, weather balloons, satellites, and digital communications—made it possible for scientists to add ever more data to the models, creating a virtuous cycle that led to progressive improvements in forecasting over time.
National Weather Service employees monitor storm maps and data in Norman, Oklahoma, April 2019
William Widmer / The New York Times / Redux
But technological change is only part of the story; the other part involves organizational change. During the Civil War era, tracking and anticipating weather was a largely academic effort. Later, disparate independent efforts emerged in multiple federal agencies, including the Department of War, the Department of Agriculture, and the Navy. Finally, in the late 1960s, what would eventually become the National Weather Service was established as an integrated office in the Department of Commerce. This unification and centralization was crucial: it allowed for significant investment over time and created a stable point of contact between forecasters and policymakers by giving weather experts a permanent seat at the table.
NUMBERS GAME
Outbreak modeling and analytics should be centralized in a similar way. Over the last decade or so, public investments in disease forecasting have yielded some progress. Programs funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Homeland Security have advanced modeling capabilities, generated excellent research, and helped to develop a cadre of well-trained experts.
These programs, however, are largely focused on developing basic science, as opposed to helping public health officials navigate difficult decisions about outbreak control. And they rarely receive the kind of reliable, sustained funding that has long supported weather forecasting. Generally, funding takes the form of grants to principal investigators that typically last only three to five years and must result in academic publications—the kind of research that is necessary but not sufficient to the task at hand.
“Everyone is on grants,” noted Cécile Viboud, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health. “So if you don’t have a particular dedicated line of funding to work on the [outbreak], then you do it on your own time. You just run those estimates because maybe it can help.”
Making matters worse, private-sector innovation and advanced data technologies have hardly made an appearance when it comes to contagion modeling, in part because there is usually not a great deal of market demand, public health agencies are ill-equipped to evaluate new data technologies, and new technologies must pass through a torturous regulatory path before gaining approval.
Health data are fragmented across the U.S. health-care system in silos that cannot talk to one another.
Roni Rosenfeld, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, pointed out another problem. “By far the biggest obstacle is the data,” he lamented. Health data are fragmented across the U.S. health-care system in silos that cannot talk to one another. And public health agencies are not known for being forward leaning on data technology. This hampers their ability to acquire, process, share, analyze, and communicate data that would inform an outbreak response.
“There is no systematic report format for individual locations to provide data in,” said Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University who led the team that built the university’scoronavirus map, which has become one of the most reliable sources of data on the spread of COVID-19. “Even when data is provided, it may not be in a usable format. Together these issues substantially limit the capabilities of disease models to be able to inform policy in real time.”
Unfortunately, the pandemic is laying bare these data challenges. The White House task force announced last month that all 4,700 or so hospitals in the United States would beasked to send daily emails to the task force with data on their capacities. It’s baffling that in the country that sparked the digital revolution, hospitals must rely on such a rudimentary, unreliable tool in order to transmit vital information.
It’s also striking that the most timely and detailed data on new cases of COVID-19, diagnostic testing, and personal protective equipment have been available mostly through websites set up and run by volunteers or journalists. It is wonderful that so many skilled individuals have been motivated to help out in a time of crisis. But the country’s pandemic response cannot rely on volunteers. And although journalism is crucial during an outbreak, responsibility for tracking the spread of contagions can hardly be outsourced to media organizations.
HOW TO MOVE FORWARD
The best way to address these vulnerabilities would be the establishment of a National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Analytics (CEFA). The center would handle research and development in outbreak science, develop technology for producing disease forecasts, and provide guidance for preparedness and response to outbreaks. The center’s structure should resemble that of the National Weather Center, located at the University of Oklahoma. The NWC has a unique structure that enables academics to work closely with federal employees and develop a mutual understanding of respective challenges and capabilities. In the same manner, the new center would work with the CDC, nonprofit organizations such as the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, public health departments in all 50 states, and the National Governors Association to improve outbreak science and analytics, decision-making during outbreaks, and the data and technologies needed to support these efforts.
During an epidemic outbreak, CEFA scientists could help to forecast how many cases might emerge in a given place during a given period, which interventions would be most effective, and where to direct resources, and would assess progress in the fight against the pathogen.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, each jurisdiction has been on its own when it comes to finding modelers to help make those kinds of determinations. Sadly, those jurisdictions without access to world-class modelers or epidemiologists were left out in the cold. CEFA would change that by providing all governors and mayors access to high-level insights.
The pandemic is a stark reminder that Americans are vulnerable to the forces of nature.
Between outbreaks, CEFA scientists would develop new models and advance the science of forecasting and analyzing outbreaks, just as atmospheric scientists work constantly to improve the accuracy of weather models. Initially, the center would focus on improving the predictive analytics needed to produce forecasts of new cases and deaths. It would also work to improve visualizations and communication approaches to make as clear as possible the implications and uncertainties involved in all modeling.
To be successful, CEFA scientists would need the ability to directly advise decision-makers on preparedness and response, as forecasters do in other countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies brings together experts in various fields, including epidemiology and modeling, to advise the government. The United Kingdom has not always managed to successfully bring scientific expertise to bear on emergencies, but the fact that it has a formalized way of bringing experts together puts it in a better position than the United States. Other countries have similar mechanisms. In the Netherlands, for example, the Infectious Diseases Modelling team at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment is chaired by Jacco Wallinga, an esteemed modeling expert who also holds a prominent academic position.
In addition to working with officials, just as local meteorologists translate the complex weather models into forecasts that are easily understood by the public, CEFA science communicators could bring forecasts and analyses to the public to help individual decision-making. Just as people rely on weather reports to know when to bring an umbrella, CEFA forecasts could make it easier to decide whether to telework during flu season or whether to wear a face covering. People want to know how to keep themselves and their families safe, and providing information to help them do so would be an enormous advance for public health.
To meet its mission, the center would need to be able to identify, adapt, and adopt cutting-edge technology and attract the best data scientists, engineers, and technologists. That would require significant, sustained funding: approximately $1 billion over the next ten years. But it would be money well spent.
The COVID-19 pandemic should serve as the epidemiological equivalent of the Galveston hurricane. It is a stark reminder that Americans are vulnerable to the forces of nature. But as with weather forecasting, with sufficient vision and investment, the United States can develop the ability to anticipate and respond to such outbreaks. The country can do better—and it must do better, so that this never happens again.
CAITLIN RIVERS is Senior Scholar and an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
DYLAN GEORGE is Vice President, Technical Staff, at In-Q-Tel.
An anti-American mural in Tehran, Iran, January 2020
Wana News Agency / Reuters
Just before the novel coronavirus pandemic struck, the United States and Iran appeared to be set on a collision course. COVID-19 quickly displaced such concerns from international headlines. But as the world prepares for further outbreaks of the disease in the months ahead, it should similarly brace for tensions between the United States and Iran to flare up again. Domestic political dynamics in the two countries risk fueling a cycle of escalation. Each side is digging in and making decisions based on flawed assumptions. Meanwhile, the odds of a diplomatic resolution dwindle by the day.
A STRATEGY BACKFIRES
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump fundamentally miscalculated when it abandoned the Iran nuclear deal two years ago and opted for a policy of “maximum pressure.” The bet was that sanctions on Iranian oil exports would compel Tehran to come to the negotiating table, where it would agree to far-reaching concessions on its nuclear program and end its aggressive policies in the region.
The strategy backfired badly. Instead of capitulating, Iran responded with a policy it called “maximum resistance.” It has ramped up its nuclear program, slashing its breakout time—the window required to advance its nuclear program to weapons production—from at least a year under the agreement to as little as about three months today.
Iran attacked oil shipping and infrastructure in the region, roiling energy markets last year. It downed a U.S. drone, and Iranian-backed militias launched rocket attacks against American troops stationed in Iraq. An American defense contractor was killed in such an attack, which led the Trump administration to target Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani with an airstrike. Iran responded with a missile salvo that injured dozens of U.S. service members.
Tensions between the two sides have ratcheted up—and the Trump administration has found itself largely alone.
Tensions between the two sides ratcheted up—and the Trump administration found itself largely alone. The previous administration of President Barack Obama had assembled a broad coalition to successfully pressure Iran. That coalition is now in tatters. Today, even the closest American allies in Europe regularly voice their disapproval of U.S. policy.
Instead of trying to salvage a modicum of international support, the Trump administration is doubling down on its efforts to destroy the last vestiges of the nuclear deal, alienating the United States’ erstwhile partners even further. It has gone so far as to take the self-defeating step of revoking sanctions waivers, which it previously argued were necessary to advance U.S. nonproliferation objectives.
The Trump administration has added insult to injury by employing a controversial legal argument to seek an extension of a UN arms embargo on Iran that is set to expire in October under the terms of the nuclear deal. The United States’ major European allies agree that there is merit in extending the embargo. But the Trump administration has irritated them by threatening to invoke a “snap back” provision of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which enshrined the nuclear deal; the provision would force the reimposition of all UN sanctions and restrictions on Iran that were to be lifted as part of the 2015 agreement, including the arms embargo and many other provisions. Given that it formally withdrew from the deal in 2018, the United States will find it difficult to convince other parties to the agreement to reimpose sanctions, making it even harder to forge international unity.
MISREADING INTERNAL POLITICS
After more than 40 years without diplomatic relations, the United States and Iran don’t understand each other very well, and between them there is ample room for miscalculation. Neither side much appreciates how its actions may intersect with domestic political currents in the other country, potentially propelling both toward conflict.
The Trump administration believes it has Iran on the ropes. And Iran’s economy is indeed in deep trouble. The IMF reports that Iran’s GDP contracted 7.6 percent in 2019 and will decline another six percent in 2020. But bleak economic statistics don’t tell the full story. Ordinary Iranians may be hurting, but hard-liners in Iran’s ascendant Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their allies are tightening their grip on power. Sanctions may actually be playing into their hands, given their control over the smuggling networks that Iran increasingly relies upon for revenue.
In response to antigovernment protests last fall, the hard-liners brutally killed hundreds of demonstrators. In February, the hard-liners swept the parliamentary elections, which featured record-low turnout. Their sights are now firmly set on the presidential elections next year. Their highest strategic priority, however, is ensuring that the successor to Iran’s 81-year-old supreme leader will preserve the IRGC’s prerogatives.
Iran does not see negotiations with the United States as a prize.
The Trump administration appears to have underestimated the difficulty of restarting talks with Iran after withdrawing from the nuclear agreement. Iran’s hard-liners, including the supreme leader, remain ideologically hostile to the United States. Trump’s penchant for public spectacles such as the Singapore Summit with North Korea are anathema to them. Unlike North Korea, Iran does not see negotiations with the United States as a prize. A government forged in a revolution for which anti-Americanism was a core principle feels more threatened by the perception that it has capitulated to the United States than it does by economic hardship.
Iran’s authorities, too, risk basing policies on costly misreadings of their adversary’s intentions—particularly if they take Trump’s words literally. The U.S. president has promised to end “endless wars” and has often reiterated his desire to withdraw from the Middle East. He has even made repeated overtures to Iran—such as a recent tweet offering “a better deal” before the November election. Tehran takes such gestures as confirmation that its policies are succeeding.
Iran has sought to build leverage by advancing its nuclear program and attacking American partners in the Persian Gulf. It is also keen to avenge the slaying of Soleimani, an impulse that could lead it to contemplate dangerous gambles. Iran does not want war, but it may believe that Trump wants one even less. Iranian authorities may not fully comprehend that Trump can ill afford to look weak before his base, especially during an election year.
Officials in both capitals may assume that they can quickly contain a military skirmish, as they did in January, and perhaps even derive domestic benefit from a limited clash. Some of Trump’s top advisers reportedly advocated military strikes in March to push Iran into negotiations. Such fanciful thinking is dangerous and no substitute for a sober assessment of the situation.
The reality is that the Trump administration appears to lack a diplomatic strategy to halt Iran’s dangerous nuclear progress. And although sanctions have made Iran poorer, the country has escalated its aggression in the region through relatively low-cost operations. The two countries remain on a collision course.
A WAY OUT?
Is there a way out of this morass? Maybe, but only if the United States breaks from its current failed approach.
During the Obama administration, in 2012 and 2013, I played a central role in secret talks with Iran, the result of which was that Iran agreed to constrain and roll back its nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief. This agreement set the stage for the 2015 nuclear deal. Then, as now, pressure was a key component of our approach. But two additional elements also were critical to success and are missing today. The first was that we presented a realistic diplomatic proposal, centering on the recognition that Iran’s most significant threat to U.S. national security was its nuclear program. The second was that the United States had the backing of a largely unified front of major powers.
Now, Iran refuses to talk with the Trump administration so long as U.S. sanctions remain in place. The only remaining diplomatic option is thus to work through an intermediary. French President Emmanuel Macron made progress last year toward brokering a deal. Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe of Japan and Imran Khan of Pakistan have also attempted to mediate. Trump could use these or other intermediaries to convey a proposal for an interim agreement in which Iran rolls back its nuclear advances, ends attacks against American troops and partners, and gains limited sanctions relief.
The only remaining diplomatic option is to work through an intermediary.
Such an agreement would not solve every problem with Iran, nor would it provide Trump with the kind of grand public spectacle he craves, but it could address the most urgent U.S. national security concerns. It could also put valuable time on the clock for broader discussions, which promise to be demanding.
Humanitarian gestures are morally justified and could help lower tensions. Trump should expand sanctions carve-outs for medical exports to help Iran battle COVID-19, as a group of former American and European officials and leaders has urged. Iran and the United States could further build on a recent prisoner exchange to make a broader deal that brings home all Americans held in Iran on bogus charges.
Taking these steps, and aligning them to a diplomatic path forward, would be the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, neither side is likely to embark on such a course, given the extraordinary level of mutual mistrust and the belief each country holds that its strategy is working. Instead, one should expect tensions between Iran and the United States to simmer—and intermittently boil over—in the months ahead.
PUNEET TALWAR is a Senior Fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute, former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, and former Senior Director on the National Security Council under President Barack Obama.
Accessory after the fact: pendants featuring Mao and Xi, September 2016
THOMAS PETER / REUTERS
The Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s “permanent revolution” destroyed tens of millions of lives. From the communist victory in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, through the upheaval, famine, and bloodletting of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until Mao’s death in 1976, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set segments of Chinese society against one another in successive spasms of violent class warfare. As wave after wave of savagery swept China, millions were killed and millions more sent off to “reform through labor” and ruination.
Mao had expected this level of brutality. As he once declared: “A revolution is neither a dinner party, nor writing an essay, painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely, gentle, temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
Today, even experts on Chinese history find it difficult to keep track of all the lethal “mass movements” that shaped Mao’s revolution and which the party invariably extolled with various slogans. Mao launched campaigns to “exterminate landlords” after the Communists came to power in 1949; to “suppress counterrevolutionaries” in the early 1950s; to purge “rightists” in the late 1950s; to overthrow “capitalist roaders” during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s; and to “rectify” young people’s thinking by shipping them off to China’s poorest rural areas during the Down to the Countryside Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The ideological rhetoric obscured the extremism of these official actions, through which the party permitted the persecution and even the liquidation of myriad varieties of “counterrevolutionary elements.” One of Mao’s most notable sayings was “the party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the party.” Long after his death, his successors carried on in that tradition, most visibly during the Tiananmen Square massacre and the ensuing crackdown that the CCP carried out in response to peaceful protests in 1989, which led to untold numbers of dead and wounded.
Today, China is enjoying a period of relative stability. The party promotes a vision of a “harmonious society” instead of class struggle and extols comfortable prosperity over cathartic violence. Someone unfamiliar with the country might be forgiven for assuming that it had reckoned with its recent past and found a way to heal its wounds and move on.
Far from it. In fact, a visitor wandering the streets of any Chinese city today will find no plaques consecrating the sites of mass arrests, no statues dedicated to the victims of persecution, no monuments erected to honor those who perished after being designated “class enemies.” Despite all the anguish and death the CCP has caused, it has never issued any official admission of guilt, much less allowed any memorialization of its victims. And because any mea culpa would risk undermining the party’s legitimacy and its right to rule unilaterally, nothing of the sort is likely to occur so long as the CCP remains in power.
(RE)WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS
Despite its truly impressive success in shepherding China’s economic development and rise to global power, the party remains insecure and thin-skinned, perhaps because its leaders are still so painfully aware of the party’s historical liabilities. The Central Propaganda Department—which, along with myriad other state organs, is tasked with censoring the media and making sure that all educational materials toe the party’s line—has sealed off entire areas of China’s past. Serious consequences flow from the manipulation of something as fundamental to a country’s identity as its historical DNA. Maintaining a “correct” version of history not only requires totalitarian controls but also denies Chinese the possibility of exploring, debating, understanding, and coming to terms with the moral significance of what has been done to them and what they have been induced to do to themselves and one another.
The task of “correcting” or erasing entire segments of a country’s past is costly and exhausting. An example of the lengths to which propaganda officials go has recently been brought to light by Glenn Tiffert, a China scholar at the University of Michigan. Through dogged sleuthing, he discovered that two digital archives—the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, which is connected to Tsinghua University, and the National Social Sciences Database, which is sponsored by the Chinese government—were missing the same group of 63 articles published between 1956 and 1958 by two Chinese-language academic law journals. These articles had long been available via both archives, only to inexplicably disappear. (Tiffert is not sure when the erasure occurred.) His study revealed that certain scholars, especially those who had been influenced by the West and had run afoul of the party’s ever-changing political lines, almost always had their articles deleted. At the same time, certain topics, such as “the transcendence of law over politics and class, the presumption of innocence, and the heritability of law,” and certain terminology, such as the phrases “rule of law” and “rightist elements,” also seemed to serve as cause for removal. Tellingly, there was a striking uniformity in the writers and topics that were excised.
Students attend a history course at the China Executive Leadership Academy of Pudong in Shanghai, September 2012.
Carlos Barria / Reuters
Except for a few institutions abroad that maintain hard-copy collections of such journals, those articles are now unavailable to Chinese citizens and to the world. Such manipulation is made all the more pernicious owing to the fact that “even sound research practice may offer no defense,” as Tiffert points out. “Perversely, the more faithful scholars are to their censored sources, the better they may unwittingly promote the biases and agendas of the censors, and lend those the independent authority of their professional reputations.”
As the astrophysicist and dissident Chinese intellectual Fang Lizhi wrote in 1990 of such state-sponsored assaults on China’s historical memory:
[The policy’s] aim is to force the whole of society to forget its history, and especially the true history of the Chinese Communist party itself. . . . In an effort to coerce all of society into a continuing forgetfulness, the policy requires that any detail of history that is not in the interests of the Chinese Communists cannot be expressed in any speech, book, document, or other medium.
Despite all the anguish and death the CCP has caused, it has never issued any official admission of guilt.
Fang wrote those words just after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when he was trapped in the U.S. embassy and the CCP was undertaking one of its most audacious efforts at historical erasure—namely, wiping away all traces of the crimes it had just committed from archives, books, and electronic media. So successful was this censorship that, in 2004, the Chinese dissident and future Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo lamented that even though “the people of Mainland China have suffered some unimaginable catastrophes after the Communist accession to power, . . . the post-Tiananmen generation has no deep impression of them and lacks firsthand experience of police state oppression.” Ten years later, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei put it more bluntly: “Because there is no discussion of these events, Chinese still have little understanding of their consequences. Censorship has in effect neutered society, transforming it into a damaged, irrational, and purposeless creature.”
In this way, China has become “the People’s Republic of Amnesia,” in the words of Louisa Lim, a former BBC and NPR correspondent in Beijing, who used that phrase as the title of her 2014 book. As she wrote, “A single act of public remembrance might expose the frailty of the state’s carefully constructed edifice of accepted history, scaffolded in place over a generation and kept aloft by a brittle structure of strict censorship, blatant falsehood and willful forgetting.”
A man stands in front of a column of army tanks on Changan Avenue east of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, June 1989.
REUTERS/Arthur Tsang/Files
THE STONES SPEAK
But is it really better for societies or communities to collectively remember traumatic periods of their histories? Might not such retrospection reopen old wounds and revive old, murderous struggles? (That is what the writer David Rieff argues in his recent book In Praise of Forgetting.) The CCP would like the people it rules—and the rest of the world—to embrace such logic and accept that evasion of the brutal truth about the past is the best route to healing.
An entirely different school of thought grew out of the German experience of facing up to the crimes of the Nazis. The man who devised the road map for the expiation of German guilt was the philosopher and psychoanalyst Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 gave a series of influential lectures at the University of Heidelberg that were later collected in a book titled The Question of German Guilt. Even though what happened under Adolf Hitler precipitated something “like a transmutation of our being,” said Jaspers, Germans were still “collectively liable.” All of those “who knew, or could know”—including those “conveniently closing their eyes to events or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced, or bought with personal advantage, or obeying from fear”—shared responsibility. The “eagerness to obey” and the “unconditionality of blind nationalism,” he declared, constituted “moral guilt.” Human beings are, said Jaspers, responsible “for every delusion to which we succumb.” He put his faith in healing through “the cultivation of truth” and “making amends,” a process he believed had to be completely free from any state-sponsored propaganda or manipulation.
Security cameras in front of the giant portrait of former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, November 2012.
David Gray / Reuters
“There can be no questions that might not be raised,” he declared, “nothing to be fondly taken for granted, no sentimental and no practical lie that would have to be guarded or that would be untouchable.” In Jaspers’ view, only through historical awareness could Germans ever come to terms with their past and restore themselves to a semblance of moral and societal health.
Jaspers’ approach owed a great deal to psychoanalytic theory and the work of Sigmund Freud. For Freud, understanding a patient’s past was like “excavating a buried city,” as he wrote in 1895. Indeed, he was fond of quoting the Latin expression saxa loquuntur: “The stones speak.” Such mental archaeology was important to Freud because he believed that a repressed past inevitably infected the present and the future with neuroses unless given a conscious voice to help fill in what he called “the gaps in memory.” In this sense, history and memory were Freud’s allies and forgetting was his enemy.
For Mao, the historical record served chiefly to fortify his own reductive theories.
Mao, too, was fascinated by history, but he took a far more utilitarian view of it: for him, the historical record served chiefly to fortify his own reductive theories. Independent historians engaging in free-form explorations of the past represented a profound threat, and during Mao’s reign, many of them were dismissed from their official positions, charged as “counterrevolutionaries,” sent off for “thought reform” at labor camps, and in all too many cases persecuted to death.
DANGEROUS HISTORY
Given his own neo-Maoist predilections, it is hardly surprising that Chinese President Xi Jinping also views independent scholars as dangerous progenitors of what Chinese state media have termed “historical nihilism.” In 2015, the People’s Liberation Army Daily warned that China “must be [on] guard” against such malefactors because they are now “spreading from the academic realm into online culture,” where “capricious ideas are warping historical thoughts and leading discourse astray.”
Tiffert spells out what it means when Chinese historians run afoul of party censors. They confront, he writes, “a sliding scale of penalties, including harassment by the authorities, closure of publications and online accounts, humiliating investigations into personal affairs, business activities and tax status, and ultimately unemployment, eviction, and criminal prosecution.” Last year, Chinese civil law was even amended to punish “those who infringe upon the name, likeness, reputation, or honor of a hero, martyr, and so forth, harming the societal public interest,” writes Tiffert, which explains why “previously outspoken intellectuals and activists are going silent.”
Tiffert also reports that “the Chinese government is leveraging technology to quietly export its domestic censorship regime abroad . . . , by manipulating how observers everywhere comprehend its past, present, and future.” Indeed, last summer, Beijing hectored Cambridge University Press into sanitizing the digital archive of The China Quarterly, an important English-language academic journal, by removing over 300 articles the CCP found objectionable from its Chinese search function. (The publisher reversed its decision days after a number of news outlets reported on its initial capitulation.) Then, last November, Springer Nature, the publisher of such titles as Nature and Scientific American, eliminated from its Chinese websites a large number of articles that included politically sensitive references—more than 1,000 articles in all, according to the Financial Times.
China’s leaders seem to believe they can escape the party’s compromised history without penalty.
China’s leaders seem to believe they can escape the party’s compromised history without penalty, at least in the short run—and they might be right. After all, China’s economic progress and emergence as a significant global power do not appear to have been impeded, so far. The CCP is wagering that it can undo, or at least dodge, the long-term damage it has inflicted on the Chinese people by simply erasing history.
But hiding the crimes of the past sits uneasily alongside the CCP tenet that there is no such thing as “universal values,” which are invariably associated with democracy and human rights and which the party casts as something foisted on China by the West as a way to undermine China’s authoritarian one-party system. According to this view, human beings have no common bias against such things as persecution, forced confession, torture, and violent repression; no basic shared yearning for liberty or for freedom of expression, assembly, and religion; and no desire to live in a world where wrongs can ultimately be righted.
If that were true, however, the party would have no reason to fear an honest accounting of the past. After all, if universal values do not exist, then Mao’s attacks on his critics and enemies do not represent grave transgressions. And yet the CCP goes to great lengths to hide the truth about those deeds—a contradiction that suggests something like a guilty conscience, or at least embarrassment at being exposed. If that is the case, then perhaps some future Chinese regime will have to find a way to acknowledge and even come to terms with the full dimensions of what the CCP has done to China—the bad along with the good. For the foreseeable future, however, that seems unlikely.
In the wake of China’s Democracy Wall Movement of 1978–79, during which thousands of Beijingers gathered at an unprepossessing brick wall to hang political posters, deliver speeches, and hold political debates, Chinese writers began examining their country’s decades of political oppression. This writing came to be known as “investigative reportage” and “scar literature.” But such inquiries ended after 1989, and ever since Xi took office, in 2012, an ever-heavier shroud of censorship has cast China into an increasingly deep state of historical darkness. A recent study by the China Media Project, at the University of Hong Kong, searched 140 mainland Chinese publications for articles about the Cultural Revolution, a ten-year period during which countless millions of middle-class Chinese, intellectuals, and Western-trained professionals were persecuted and killed for having “bad class backgrounds.” The researchers found only three articles that dared delve into that decade in any detail. For publications to cover the subject more thoroughly “would mean running a foolish risk,” wrote the authors of the project’s report.
And even if such work were someday again welcomed in China, its impact might be less than dramatic, because so much has been suppressed and repressed. In the words of the dissident Liu: “Eyes kept too long in the darkness do not easily adapt to dazzling sunlight when it suddenly pours through a window.”
ORVILLE SCHELLis Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.
