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Brexit shows how direct democracy can be dangerous

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Competing Brexit demonstrations on Thursday outside Parliament. Credit Credit Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

[ This article has been updated to reflect the results of the vote in Parliament on Jan. 15.]

LONDON - After delays, stumbles and negotiations, Prime Minister Theresa May finally presented her plan for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union to Parliament. Then, on Tuesday, British lawmakers resoundingly rejected it, 432 to 202.

It was one of the biggest defeats in the House of Commons for a prime minister in recent British history, and the humiliating margin has put Mrs. May's government on the verge of collapse

Supporters of Brexit, as the withdrawal is known, had once promised that leaving the European bloc would be quick and simple. It has turned out to be neither. To understand why, it helps to understand the origins of the plan, and how that history is playing out today.

Britain joined the forerunner of the European Union in 1973, but British politicians have always been ambivalent about the bloc. The issue has long divided both of the country's major parties, the Conservatives and Labour, and it became especially divisive among the Conservatives. In June 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron decided to settle the question with a yes-or-no national referendum.

Mr. Cameron bet that the country would not risk leaving the European Union. He was wrong. Britons voted 52 percent to 48 percent to leave.

They then faced a predicament: The campaign to quit the bloc had promised to "take back control" from Europe but never explained how. Embittered Remainers who lost the vote accused the Leavers of lies and xenophobia.

Mrs. May replaced Mr. Cameron and was charged with negotiating a Brexit deal with the European Union. Her biggest challenge was building support at home. One pro-Brexit faction has championed a clean break, so Britain would regain sovereignty over trade and immigration, while breaking free of the European Union's institutions, including its Court of Justice, a particular concern for them.

Others preferred to maintain close economic ties with the bloc, even if that meant sharing some control with the European Union.

With Britain scheduled to leave on March 29, Mrs. May has been trying to broker a compromise to avoid a chaotic "cliff edge" withdrawal that could leave ports blocked, airlines grounded, and food and drugs running short. That was the draft she presented on Wednesday.

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A road forming part of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The Achilles' heel of a Brexit deal is the border between Ireland, a member of the European Union, and Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. For years, this border was militarized because of sectarian violence that left more than 3,500 people dead. But with the 1998 Good Friday peace accord, free trade was allowed.

This was possible because Ireland and the United Kingdom were members of the European Union. But when Britain voted to leave, the Irish border again became an issue. Reintroducing customs controls would pose many problems.

Mrs. May's draft agreement proposes keeping Northern Ireland, and the rest of the United Kingdom, in a European customs union until a trade plan that does not require checks at Ireland's border is ready - so perhaps indefinitely. But this means Britain would also still be subject to some of the bloc's trading rules and regulations.

In short, while paying a $50 billion divorce bill, Britain would remain bound by many European Union rules without any say in the making of them. This infuriates the hard-line Brexit crowd, who say it would leave Britain as a "vassal state."

They aren't the only ones offended. The Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which provides a crucial 10 seats to Mrs. May's minority government, is also furious, partly because the plan would impose more European rules on Northern Ireland than on the rest of the United Kingdom.

And don't forget Scotland, which wants to remain in the European Union and is wondering why it cannot have the same deal as Northern Ireland.

With Britain scheduled to leave the European Union on March 29, Prime Minister Theresa May has been trying to broker a deal to avoid a "cliff edge" withdrawal. Credit Leon Neal/Getty Images

No one really knows.

With the defeat of her plan, Mrs. May is fighting for her political life amid a call for a no-confidence vote.

But factions in the Conservative and Labour parties have no clear path to command a majority in Parliament.

Like most everyone else, the prime minister has no easy answers about the way forward. She signaled before the vote that if she lost in Parliament, she would go back to the European Union in Brussels to seek concessions - but the bloc is unlikely to grant her any.

Some cabinet members are pressing for a different course, calling for nonbinding " indicative votes," in which members of Parliament can freely express their preferences for the various Brexit plans being bandied about.

The hope is that Mrs. May's plan might emerge from that process with the highest level of support.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition Labour Party, has asked for a vote of no confidence, which if successful could lead to a general election. Few analysts believe that he can muster the numbers to win.

One group of lawmakers is campaigning for a repeat referendum, which could overturn the mandate to leave, and another favors leaving the European Union on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement. That, experts warn, could lead to shortages of some foods and an economic downturn.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: For the Non-Brit, Why The Debate Never Ends. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Brexit, Explained: Not a Brit? Not a Problem! Here's What It All Means

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This article has been updated to reflect the results of the vote in Parliament on Jan. 15 .] LONDON - After delays, stumbles and negotiations, Prime Minister Theresa May finally presented her plan for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union to Parliament. Then, on Tuesday, British lawmakers resoundingly rejected it, 432 to 202.

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With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine.

By Pankaj Mishra

Mr. Mishra is the author, most recently, of "Age of Anger: A History of the Present."

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Earl and Countess Mountbatten, behind naval and military members of the governor-general's staff, descending the steps of Government House in New Delhi on June 21, 1948. Credit Credit Associated Press

Describing Britain's calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British "came to the end of themselves as they were" - that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a "mendacious, intellectually limited hustler," came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Britain's rupture with the European Union is proving to be another act of moral dereliction by the country's rulers. The Brexiteers, pursuing a fantasy of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency, have repeatedly revealed their hubris, mulishness and ineptitude over the past two years. Though originally a "Remainer," Prime Minister Theresa May has matched their arrogant obduracy, imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years on Brexit and laying down red lines that undermined negotiations with Brussels and doomed her deal to resoundingly bipartisan rejection this week in Parliament.

Such a pattern of egotistic and destructive behavior by the British elite flabbergasts many people today. But it was already manifest seven decades ago during Britain's rash exit from India.

Mountbatten, derided as "Master of Disaster" in British naval circles, was a representative member of a small group of upper- and middle-class British men from which the imperial masters of Asia and Africa were recruited. Abysmally equipped for their immense responsibilities, they were nevertheless allowed by Britain's brute imperial power to blunder through the world - a "world of whose richness and subtlety," as E.M. Forster wrote in "Notes on the English Character," they could "have no conception."

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From left seated at the table, Jawaharlal Nehru, vice president of India's interim government; Earl Mountbatten, viceroy of India; and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, president of the Muslim League, discuss Britain's plan for India, June 2, 1947. Credit Max Desfor/Associated Press

Forster blamed Britain's political fiascos on its privately educated men, callow beneficiaries of the country's elitist public school system. These eternal schoolboys whose "weight is out of all proportion" to their numbers are certainly overrepresented among Tories. They have today plunged Britain into its worst crisis, exposing its incestuous and self-serving ruling class like never before.

From David Cameron, who recklessly gambled his country's future on a referendum in order to isolate some whingers in his Conservative Party, to the opportunistic Boris Johnson, who jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to secure the prime ministerial chair once warmed by his role model Winston Churchill, and the top-hatted, theatrically retro Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose fund management company has set up an office within the European Union even as he vehemently scorns it, the British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.

Even a columnist for The Economist, an organ of the British elite, now professes dismay over "Oxford chums" who coast through life on "bluff rather than expertise." "Britain," the magazine belatedly lamented last month, "is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and self-confidence above expertise." In Brexit, the British "chumocracy," the column declared, "has finally met its Waterloo."

It is actually more accurate, for those invoking British history, to say that partition - the British Empire's ruinous exit strategy - has come home. In a grotesque irony, borders imposed in 1921 on Ireland, England's first colony, have proved to be the biggest stumbling block for the English Brexiteers chasing imperial virility. Moreover, Britain itself faces the prospect of partition if Brexit, a primarily English demand, is achieved and Scottish nationalists renew their call for independence.

It is a measure of English Brexiteers' political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security checks along the British-imposed partition line.

The re-imposition of a customs and immigration regime along Britain's only land border with the European Union was always likely to be resisted with violence. But Brexiteers, awakening late to this ominous possibility, have tried to deny it. A leaked recording revealed Mr. Johnson scorning concerns about the border as "pure millennium bug stuff."

Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Businesspeople everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.

The malign incompetence of the Brexiteers was precisely prefigured during Britain's exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in the lack of orderly preparation for it. The British government had announced that India would have independence by June 1948. In the first week of June 1947, however, Mountbatten suddenly proclaimed that the transfer of power would happen on Aug. 15, 1947 - a "ludicrously early date," as he himself blurted out. In July, a British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was entrusted with the task of drawing new boundaries of a country he had never previously visited.

Given only around five weeks to invent the political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan, Radcliffe failed to visit any villages, communities, rivers or forests along the border he planned to demarcate. Dividing agricultural hinterlands from port cities, and abruptly reducing Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the new border to a religious minority, Radcliffe delivered a plan for partition that effectively sentenced millions to death or desolation while bringing him the highest-ranked knighthood.

Up to one million people died, countless women were abducted and raped, and the world's largest refugee population was created during the population transfers across Radcliffe's border - an extensive carnage that exceeds all apocalyptic scenarios of Brexit.

In retrospect, Mountbatten had even less reason than Mrs. May to speed up the exit clock - and create insoluble and eternal problems. Just a few months after the botched partition, for instance, India and Pakistan were fighting a war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. None of the concerned parties were pushing for a hasty British exit. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann points out, "the rush was Mountbatten's, and his alone."

Mountbatten was actually less pigheaded than Winston Churchill, whose invocation stiffens the spines of many Brexiteers today. Churchill, a fanatical imperialist, worked harder than any British politician to thwart Indian independence and, as prime minister from 1940 to 1945, did much to compromise it. Seized by a racist fantasy about superior Anglo-Americans, he refused to help Indians cope with famine in 1943 on the grounds that they "breed like rabbits."

Needless to say, such ravings issued from an ignorance about India as intractable as that of the Brexiteers about Ireland. Churchill's own secretary of state for India claimed that his boss knew "as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies." Churchill displayed in his long career a similarly imperial insouciance toward Ireland, sending countless young Irishmen to their deaths in a catastrophic military fiasco at Gallipoli, Turkey, during World War I and unleashing brutal paramilitaries against Irish nationalists in 1920.

The many crimes of the empire's bumptious adventurers were enabled by Britain's great geopolitical power and then obscured by its cultural prestige. This is why images cherished by the British elite of itself as valiant, wise and benevolent could survive, until recently, much damning historical evidence about these masters of disaster from Cyprus to Malaysia, Palestine to South Africa. In recent years, such privately educated and smooth-tongued men as Niall Ferguson and Tony Blair could even present the British as saviors of suffering and benighted humanity, urging American neoconservatives to take up the white man's burden globally.

Humiliations in neo-imperialist ventures abroad, followed by the rolling calamity of Brexit at home, have cruelly exposed the bluff of what Hannah Arendt called the "quixotic fools of imperialism." As partition comes home, threatening bloodshed in Ireland and secession in Scotland, and an unimaginable chaos of no-deal Brexit looms, ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britain's bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans. More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cosseted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was.

Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of "Age of Anger: A History of the Present."

Correction:

An earlier version of this article erroneously attributed a distinction to the 1998 peace agreement. It did not result in the removal of customs checks on the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland border; those had been removed previously, in 1993, with the introduction of the European Single Market.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Mr. Mishra's most recent book. It is "Age of Anger," not "Age of Extremes."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Malign Ineptitude of the British Elite. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class

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With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine. By Pankaj Mishra Mr. Mishra is the author, most recently, of "Age of Anger: A History of the Present."

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As youth anger over climate change mounts, protests spread around the globe

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January 25 SYDNEY - As urban temperature records were broken in Australia on Thursday amid a years-long drought that has turned farms into wastelands across parts of the country, high school students on the opposite side of the world rallied against the driving force behind rising temperatures: climate change.

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By Kori Schake

Ms. Schake is the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

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President Trump deplaning in Maryland after his meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

Decades from now, we may look back at the first weeks of June 2018 as a turning point in world history: the end of the liberal order.

At a summit in Canada, the president of the United States rejected associating the country with "the rules-based international order" that America had built after World War II, and threatened the country's closest allies with a trade war. He insulted the Canadian prime minister, and then, just a few days later, lavished praise on Kim Jong-un, the world's most repressive dictator. Without consulting America's allies in the region, he even reiterated his desire to withdraw American troops from South Korea.

Such reckless disregard for the security concerns of America's allies, hostility to mutually beneficial trade and willful isolation of the United States is unprecedented. Yet this is the foreign policy of the Trump administration. Quite explicitly, the leader of the free world wants to destroy the alliances, trading relationships and international institutions that have characterized the American-led order for 70 years.

The administration's alternative vision for the international order is a bare-knuckled assertion of unilateral power that some call America First; more colorfully, a White House official characterized it to The Atlantic as the " We're America, Bitch " doctrine. This aggressive disregard for the interests of like-minded countries, indifference to democracy and human rights and cultivation of dictators is the new world Mr. Trump is creating. He and his closest advisers would pull down the liberal order, with America at its helm, that remains the best guarantor of world peace humanity has ever known. We are entering a new, terrifying era.

According to the president, the liberal world order is a con job - he insists America is paying too much and being swindled by its friends. He wants the United States to pull back from its alliances and let its partners fend for themselves, and devote its money to its domestic needs.

Those criticisms resonate in a time when Americans are fearful of how the world is changing, and when the country's leaders have done a poor job of explaining those changes and easing their impact on workers and their families.

Widening disparity of outcomes and fewer avenues of opportunity call the fundamental fairness of the current system into question. Terrible, costly mistakes like the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis destroyed the credibility of experts who are culpable for the failures but insulated from the consequences. And America's allies celebrate the generosity of their social welfare systems and disparage ours, while spending less than America does to defend their countries.

These are all fair points, and they help explain the rise of Mr. Trump and the declining appreciation for a liberal order. But none of these things invalidates the importance of sustaining a system in which America benefits more than other geometries of order will permit.

Let's review what, exactly, that order is. Beginning in the wreckage of World War II, America established a set of global norms that solidified its position atop a rules-based international system. These included promoting democracy, making enduring commitments to countries that share its values, protecting allies, advancing free trade and building institutions and patterns of behavior that legitimize American power by giving less powerful countries a say.

That last point is critical, and it is the genius of the system. America benefits from supporting others. The American security umbrella enables friendly governments to attract investment and grow peacefully. It encourages cooperation. The system allows America and other countries to share the costs of preserving common defense and the free movement of goods and people (although sometimes others put in less than Americans would like).

The world has never seen anything like this - a superpower constraining itself to such a degree - or the peace and stability it brings. America doesn't always get it right; often it's clumsy, fails to live up to its ideology, and breaks its own rules.

But the results speak for themselves. It has been over 70 years since the last great-power conflict. Democracies fight lots of wars, but they do not fight other democracies. The wars they fight are about enlarging the perimeter of security and prosperity, expanding and consolidating the liberal order.

The global economy has grown about sevenfold since 1960, adjusted for inflation. Free people and free markets have produced most of the strongest and most prosperous states in the international order, and those states have linked themselves through alliances, institutions and trade regimes that are mutually beneficial.

Contrary to the president's core complaint, the American-led order isn't that expensive, especially as compared with the alternatives. About 40 percent of America's gross domestic product was allocated to the military during World War II. It now stands at less than 4 percent - not an unreasonable price for a tried-and-true insurance policy.

The president and his fellow critics argue that if America does less, others will do more - that its largess facilitates free riders. That hasn't proved true with its closest friends: Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States has reduced its military forces in Europe by about 85 percent. But Europeans have even more significantly cut their defense spending, and become more tentative about the use of military force. Far from emboldening allies, the American drawdown has made them less likely to act.

And if others do more, they may not be the right others, and what they do may not serve America's interests. Russia has been doing more in Europe since the United States drew down, and more in Syria as a result of America's doing so little.

China is doing more in the South and East China Seas, and its activities will greatly complicate American military operations in defense of allies, in preserving the free flow of commerce and even in protecting its own territory.

The Islamic State in part grew out of the United States doing too little to consolidate the gains of the surge in Iraq and caring too little about the Syrian government's depredations against its people. None of these are outcomes that advance American interests.

Now imagine the longer term. China is already demonstrating that not only will it not play by the rules of the American-led order, but it also intends to write and enforce new rules. Absent American opposition, it will continue to force smaller, weaker states in East Asia into submission and expand its control over sea traffic. It will use technology to monitor, restrain and penalize critics worldwide. A Chinese-led world order would be one of privileges rather than rights, power rather than law, tribute rather than alliance.

That's a very costly peace - if it even succeeds at sustaining peace. More likely, if the United States does not sustain the order, a rising power will eventually force it to defend its interests or succumb. That is what happened in every power transition except the one between Britain and the United States - an exception born of their democratic similarities, and one unlikely to be repeated with the United States and China.

Mr. Trump's attack on the liberal world order is not just about the price America pays for it. He seems bent on destroying the friendships and respect that bind America and its allies. If he succeeds, America will be seen as - and may even become - no different from Russia and China, and countries will have no reason to assist America's efforts rather than theirs.

America has been dominant for so long that it takes for granted outcomes that support its policies and interests, and undervalues the systemic advantages of institutions and norms. Yet Mr. Trump may end up proving an illiberal preserver of the liberal international order. By calling into question so many fundamental elements of the system that the United States built in the devastated aftermath of World War II, he is forcing Americans to imagine a world in which the United States does not tend the garden of international order, as George Shultz describes foreign policy.

Americans want an international order that makes them safe and prosperous. And no doubt this fall, when Mr. Trump gets his military parade in Washington, we will hear no end of boasts about American power. And during the midterm elections, we will hear all sorts of talk about how the president has made America great again.

But those boasts will ring hollow if, at the same time, America lets go of the world order that is its greatest achievement. Tending the garden that the hard men who fought World War II labored to create is a much less expensive undertaking than allowing it to fall into disrepair and having to recreate it.

Kori Schake is the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the author of "Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony."
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Is the American World Order Over?. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | The Trump Doctrine Is Winning and the World Is Losing

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By Kori Schake Ms. Schake is the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Decades from now, we may look back at the first weeks of June 2018 as a turning point in world history: the end of the liberal order.

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Credit Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren't cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely.

What do these stories have in common? Obviously they're all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst human being ever to hold his position. But there's also a larger context, and it's not just about Donald Trump. What we're witnessing is a systematic rejection of longstanding American values - the values that actually made America great.

America has long been a powerful nation. In particular, we emerged from World War II with a level of both economic and military dominance not seen since the heyday of ancient Rome. But our role in the world was always about more than money and guns. It was also about ideals: America stood for something larger than itself - for freedom, human rights and the rule of law as universal principles.

Of course, we often fell short of those ideals. But the ideals were real, and mattered. Many nations have pursued racist policies; but when the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote his 1944 book about our "Negro problem," he called it "An American Dilemma," because he viewed us as a nation whose civilization had a " flavor of enlightenment " and whose citizens were aware at some level that our treatment of blacks was at odds with our principles.

And his belief that there was a core of decency - maybe even goodness - to America was eventually vindicated by the rise and success, incomplete as it was, of the civil rights movement.

But what does American goodness - all too often honored in the breach, but still real - have to do with American power, let alone world trade? The answer is that for 70 years, American goodness and American greatness went hand in hand. Our ideals, and the fact that other countries knew we held those ideals, made us a different kind of great power, one that inspired trust.

Think about it. By the end of World War II, we and our British allies had in effect conquered a large part of the world. We could have become permanent occupiers, and/or installed subservient puppet governments, the way the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe. And yes, we did do that in some developing countries; our history with, say, Iran is not at all pretty.

But what we mainly did instead was help defeated enemies get back on their feet, establishing democratic regimes that shared our core values and became allies in protecting those values.
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The Pax Americana was a sort of empire; certainly America was for a long time very much first among equals. But it was by historical standards a remarkably benign empire, held together by soft power and respect rather than force. (There are actually some parallels with the ancient Pax Romana, but that's another story.)

And while you might be tempted to view international trade deals, which Trump says have turned us into a " piggy bank that everyone else is robbing," as a completely separate story, they are anything but. Trade agreements were meant to (and did) make America richer, but they were also, from the beginning, about more than dollars and cents.

In fact, the modern world trading system was largely the brainchild not of economists or business interests, but of Cordell Hull, F.D.R.'s long-serving secretary of state, who believed that "prosperous trade among nations" was an essential element in building an "enduring peace." So you want to think of the postwar creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as part of the same strategy that more or less simultaneously gave rise to the Marshall Plan and the creation of NATO.

So all the things happening now are of a piece. Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs, and breaking up trade agreements are all about ending American exceptionalism, turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations.

And rejecting our ideals won't make us stronger; it will make us weaker. We were the leader of the free world, a moral as well as financial and military force. But we're throwing all that away.

What's more, it won't even serve our self-interest. America isn't nearly as dominant a power as it was 70 years ago; Trump is delusional if he thinks that other countries will back down in the face of his threats. And if we are heading for a full-blown trade war, which seems increasingly likely, both he and those who voted for him will be shocked at how it goes: Some industries will gain, but millions of workers will be displaced.

So Trump isn't making America great again; he's trashing the things that made us great, turning us into just another bully - one whose bullying will be far less effective than he imagines.

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The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, literally ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren't cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead.

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One of the two pillars of the West is in jeopardy.

ROME - I've found lately that I can ruin any dinner party. It's like magic. Just get me going on Trump or Putin or climate change and I can put a frown on every face and a furrow in every brow. I do weddings and bar mitzvahs, too.

So I thought I'd come to Italy for a little sun and risotto. I made the mistake, though, of spending a few days with Italian government and international experts trying to understand the refugee crisis that is fracturing the European Union, much of which originates in Italy. And guess what? Now I can ruin your dinner party - and breakfast!

Because what you find when you take a close look at the situation here is something profoundly worrying. I was born in 1953 and have been living my entire life inside the community of democracies that came to be known as "the West" and eventually spread to include democracies around the world, such as Japan, Brazil, South Korea and India. At the core of this community were two pillars: the U.S. and the group of European democracies that became the European Union.

"The West" was not just a state of mind. It was an association of countries with shared interests, institutions and values - particularly the values of liberty, democracy, free markets and the rule of law - which made the post-World War II world, though far from perfect, a steadily more prosperous, free and decent place for more and more people. This community of democracies was also a beacon, a refuge and a magnet for those who wanted to embrace its values but were denied them where they lived.

But the European pillar of this community of democracies has never been more under assault - so much so that for the first time I wonder if this European pillar will actually crumble.

From Italy you can see all the lines of attack: Donald Trump coming from the West, Vladimir Putin from the East and environmental and political disorder from the south - from Africa and the Middle East, where the reckless 2011 French-British-U.S. decision to topple Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and not stay on to help build a new order in his place, now haunts Italy.

Toppling Qaddafi without building a new order may go down as the single dumbest action the NATO alliance ever took.

It took the lid off Africa, leading to some 600,000 asylum seekers and illegal migrants flocking to Italy's shores in recent years, with 300,000 staying there and the rest filtering into other E.U. countries. This has created wrangles within the bloc over who should absorb how many migrants and has spawned nationalist-populist backlashes in almost every E.U. country.

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West African migrants who had fled Libya because of its armed groups then failed in their attempt to reach Italy by crossing the Mediterranean. Credit Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Democracy was never the dominant driver of the uprising against Qaddafi. It was much more a revolt by anti-Qaddafi tribes in eastern Libya. But when you just let a tribal revolt rage in a country with few real institutions, you end up with what you have in Libya today: multiple tribes and militias all competing for power and control of oil, creating vast zones of disorder, which both African and Arab refugees and economic migrants can take advantage of to reach the Libyan coastline to try to catch a human trafficking boat to Italy.

Italian officials will tell you that Libya now really has only three effective institutions: a state-owned oil company; a central bank that distributes its proceeds to the government and indirectly to various tribal militias; and a coast guard that the Italians have propped up to help stop refugee boats from leaving Libya for Italy. Human trafficking is the second-largest industry in Libya today, after oil.

In 2017, the biggest migrant groups to arrive in Italy mostly via Libya were from Nigeria, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Bangladesh and Eritrea.

An Italian official expressed great disgust to me over the fact that Italy's economy has lost hundreds of millions of euros by participating in E.U. sanctions on Russia - to help deter Russia from encroaching on Central Europe - while Central European E.U. countries, like Hungary, have refused to take a single one of the migrants who have sailed to Italy's shores.

Italy has the anti-immigrant government it has, an Italian refugee expert explained, because the world and the rest of the E.U. "turned its back on Italy," where unassimilated migrants are now visible in the streets, squares and train stations.

"There have to be shared E.U. migration quotas," he added, consistent E.U. "legal pathways" for immigration and a strategy to improve effective and accountable governance in Africa, not just paying off warlords there to collar refugees.

"The movement of people will happen," said another Italian official. "The question is: Do we manage it or not?"

That's for sure. The total population of Europe/Russia today is about 740 million people, according to the United Nations, and Africa's is 1.2 billion. By 2050, Europe-Russia will shrink to around 700 million and Africa will double to 2.4 billion. If disorder spreads in Africa, the current crisis will seem tame and manageable by comparison.

Mind you, countries like Italy actually need more workers and should welcome them. Some 60 percent of Africans are under age 24, while 27 percent of Europeans are. But the latest African/Arab flow has come faster than Italian and other European societies can absorb them culturally and politically, and politicians have risen up to take advantage of the backlash and create hysteria.

Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that Putin, who has long had a foreign policy goal of weakening and discrediting the E.U. - in order to diminish it as a vibrant alternative to his kleptocratic, nationalist autocracy or as an inspiration for former Soviet satellites like Ukraine - has encouraged the rise of anti-E.U. parties in Italy as well as the U.K.'s Brexit.

In March, Italy's annual security report warned of foreign online "influence campaigns" in its elections then. The vote brought to power the most pro-Putin, anti-immigrant, anti-E.U. coalition ever to rule Italy: the League and the Five-Star Movement.

As for Trump, he has no appreciation for how important the E.U.-U.S. partnership has been to catalyzing the global cooperation and rule-making that has made America, Europe and the world as a whole steadily freer, more stable and more prosperous since World War II.

Trump actually pressed British Prime Minister Theresa May to make a sharp Brexit from the E.U., if she wanted to have a free-trade agreement with the U.S., and he characterized the E.U. not as a partner on trade but as a "foe." Trump seems to prefer that the E.U. fracture so he can try to strike better trade deals with the countries individually. How else to explain these irrational moves?

One of the first foreign visitors to come to Italy to high-five its new government of Euro- and NATO-skeptics and anti-immigrant populists was Trump's former brain, Steve Bannon, who reportedly said of the ruling coalition: "If it works in Italy, it is going to work everywhere. ... It is going to break the backs of the globalists."

This is such foolish talk. It was the U.S. and what became the E.U. that took the lead in not only repelling communism but in shaping the rules and catalyzing institutions that managed the key global issues after W.W. II - like trade, migration, environment and human rights - helping more people around the globe grow out of poverty faster than ever before.

We need the U.S. and the E.U. - joined by the other Group of 20 nations - to play a similar role today. The change in the pace of change in the climate, globalization and technology has thrown up a whole set of new challenges very fast - extreme weather, cybercrime, crypto-currencies, social networks, deepfake technologies, self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence, biological design tools and questions of how to distinguish among refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers. These can be managed only through global cooperation and new rules.

If the community of democracies fractures, and we return to a more 19th- and 20th-century great power competition, who will write the new rules for the 21st century? Who will help Libya or the struggling countries of sub-Saharan Africa create governance and nurture their human capital to escape disorder, so their people don't feel the need to emigrate to survive or thrive. Russia? China? I don't think so. There will be a global leadership vacuum, a free-for-all, with terrible consequences.

It will be hard enough dealing with these issues with a community of democracies leading the way again, but it will be impossible to do so if Trump, Bannon and Putin, and their fellow travelers, succeed in breaking it up. So sorry to ruin your breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including "From Beirut to Jerusalem," which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman * Facebook

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One of the two pillars of the West is in jeopardy. ROME - I've found lately that I can ruin any dinner party. It's like magic. Just get me going on Trump or Putin or climate change and I can put a frown on every face and a furrow in every brow.

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The many ways that the president, his family and his aides are lining their own pockets.

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President Trump, his family and many of the people he has hired are profiting from his presidency. Credit Credit Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times

They don't even try very hard to hide it.

President Trump, his family and more than a few of his appointees are using his presidency to enrich themselves. They are spending taxpayer dollars for their own benefit. They are accepting sweetheart deals from foreigners. And they are harnessing the power of the federal government on behalf of their businesses.

There's a word for this: corruption.

Given how widespread Trumpian corruption has become, we thought it was time to make a list. It's meant to be a definitive list of self-dealing by the president, his family, his staff or his friends - since he began running for president. To qualify, an incident needs to seem highly credible, even if it remains unresolved, and needs to involve making money.

Compiling the list made us understand why some historians believe Trump's administration is the most corrupt since at least Warren Harding's, of 1920s Teapot Dome fame. Trump administration officials and people close to them are brashly using power to amass perks and cash. They are betting that they can get away with it. So far, Congress has let them.
[Listen to "The Argument" podcast every Thursday morning with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

Here's the list, sorted into thematic categories:

A few days after the 2016 election, the government of Kuwait canceled a planned event at the Four Seasons Hotel. It instead held the event - a celebration of Kuwait's National Day - at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

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That celebration fits a pattern. Officials from foreign governments have realized they can curry favor with Trump by spending money at his properties. The list of governments includes Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Turkey, China, India, Afghanistan and Qatar. Some may have done so even if he were not the president, but others are well aware of what they are doing.

The Constitution forbids federal officials from accepting gifts, known as emoluments, from foreign powers, unless they have received congressional approval. Congressional Democrats have sued Trump for violating this clause, and the case is now in federal court.

American officials and business leaders have also spent money at Trump properties, sometimes in an apparent effort to please the president. Gov. Paul LePage of Maine last year stayed at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Other Republicans have held campaign fund-raisers and party events at the properties. So have corporate lobbyists.

"National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association Dinner at the Trump Hotel where I am drinking Trump coffee," Senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, posted on Instagram last year.

During Trump's presidency, his companies have pushed to expand overseas, with help from foreign governments. One example: In May, an Indonesian real-estate project that involves the Trump Organization reportedly received a $500 million loan from a company owned by the Chinese government. Two days later, Trump tweeted that he was working to lift sanctions on a Chinese telecommunications firm with close ties to the government - over the objections of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. He ultimately did lift the sanctions.

Trump's businesses have also moved to expand in India, the Dominican Republic and Indonesia, using deals directly with foreign governments.

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a top aide, has also reportedly been using his position to help his family business - Kushner Companies, also a real-estate company. Kushner's sister, Nicole Meyer, has bragged about the company's high-level ties when trying to attract Chinese investment in a New Jersey apartment complex. The Kushners have wooed Chinese investors despite warnings from American counterintelligence officials that China is using the investments to sway Trump administration policy.

The Kushner company also successfully lobbied the Qatari government to invest in 666 Fifth Avenue, a financially troubled luxury building. The company's dealings with Middle Eastern countries are especially problematic because Jared Kushner is one of the administration's top policymakers for the region and has played a central role in policy toward Qatar.

The president has played golf at his properties dozens of times since taking office. He refers to his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, as the winter White House. Shortly after his election, he celebrated New Year's along with 800 guests there, with tickets costing more than $500. And Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, once encouraged people to buy clothes from Ivanka Trump's line - while Conway was giving a television interview from the White House.

These moves are intended, at least partly, to bring attention and ultimately customers to Trump's businesses. Of course, some of Trump's critics have responded in kind, refusing to stay at or live in a Trump-branded property since he won the election. But in other ways, the presidency has clearly helped his bottom line. One example: The Mar-a-Lago club has doubled its membership rates.

Trump has visited or stayed at one of his properties almost one out of every three days that he has been president, according to both The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. Like previous presidents, Trump travels with a large group of staff and security personnel, and American taxpayers typically foot at least part of the bill for the trips. Unlike previous presidents, Trump is directing money to his own business on his trips.

In one three-month period last year, the Secret Service spent about $63,000 at Mar-a-Lago and more than $137,000 on golf carts at Trump's Florida and New Jersey clubs.

The president personally intervened in a plan to relocate the F.B.I.'s Washington headquarters, apparently to protect Trump International Hotel, which is about a block away. If the F.B.I. had moved, its current site would most likely have been turned into a commercial development, and the long construction process - as well as potential for a new hotel on the site - could have hurt the Trump hotel.

Trump stopped this plan, and the White House has instead decided to build a new F.B.I. headquarters on the current site. A report by the inspector general found that officials gave misleading answers to Congress about Trump's role and the project's cost.

The Education Department during the Obama administration aggressively regulated for-profit colleges - many of which have miserable records, often taking money from students without providing a useful education. Trump chose Betsy DeVos, a longtime advocate of these colleges and an investor in them, as his education secretary. She, not surprisingly, has gone easy on for-profit colleges. Among other moves, she has reassigned the members of an department team investigating potentially fraudulent activities at for-profit colleges.

DeVos is the most blatant example of administration officials protecting companies where they once worked, but there are many others. More than 164 former lobbyists work in the administration, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, including several who regulate the industries that once paid their salaries. Geoff Burr, who pushed for more lax workplace safety laws when he was the chief lobbyist for a construction group, now works at the Department of Labor. Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was previously a lobbyist whose firm was paid millions of dollars by companies whose industries he now regulates.

The president and his aides have repeatedly shown they are willing to use the government's prestige and power to help their friends and relatives make money.

Among the examples:

Trump suggested to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February 2017 that Abe grant a coveted operating license to a casino company owned by Sheldon Adelson, who donated at least $20 million to Trump's presidential campaign.

Ben Carson, the housing and urban development secretary, let his son help organize an official department event and invite people with whom the son had potential business dealings.

Scott Pruitt, the former E.P.A. head, asked his staff members to contact Republicans donors with the goal of helping his wife find a job. Pruitt also rented a condo on Capitol Hill for $50 a night, well below market value, from the wife of an energy lobbyist whose project the E.P.A. approved last March. Pruitt's many scandals led to his resignation in July.

Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, used interviews with Chinese and Chinese-American media to raise her father's profile. He is a shipping magnate whose business transports goods between the United States and Asia, and he sat next to her during the interviews.

And although it doesn't quite rise to the same level of the other examples here: White House staffers receive a discount of up to 70 percent on Trump-branded merchandise at the president's Bedminster, N.J., golf club, reportedly at the president's recommendation.

Several Trump officials - current and former - have traded stocks while serving in top government positions. In some cases, they appear to have made policy decisions benefiting the companies in which they owned a stake.

Tom Price, Trump's first secretary of health and human services, epitomized this form of corruption. Trump chose him despite his history of using his seat in Congress to make money. Price had a long record of putting the interests of drug companies above those of taxpayers and patients - and then investing in those drug companies on the side.

Brenda Fitzgerald, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, committed a more mild version of this sin. She purchased shares in food, drug and tobacco companies after taking charge of an agency that regulates them - and that aims to reduce smoking. After her purchases became public, she resigned.

Finally, Wilbur Ross, Trump's commerce secretary, has mixed government business and his own business in multiple ways. He held on to investments - and then appears to have lied to government ethics officials about those investments. He shorted the stock of a company about which he appeared to have advance notice of bad news. He also met with the chief executive of Chevron, even though his wife owned a substantial investment - which, according to Forbes, "put himself at risk of violating a criminal conflict-of-interest law."

Michael Cohen - Trump's former lawyer and fixer, who has since turned on him - received at least $1 million from AT&T, Novartis and Korea Aerospace Industries shortly after the 2016 election. They were supposedly paying for his insight into the Trump administration.

Corey Lewandowski, the former manager of Trump's campaign, is paid for work that looks very much like lobbying - such as participating in a lobbying firm's phone calls with clients and doing work on behalf of T-Mobile, the telecommunications company firm. But Lewandowski has not registered as a lobbyist and says he does not need to do so.

Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, reportedly used his position to offer private briefings to a Russian oligarch to whom he owed millions of dollars. Manafort saw the briefings as a way to "get whole."

Trump officials have made a habit of billing American taxpayers for their personal travel. Ryan Zinke, Trump's secretary of the interior, chartered a $12,000 flight to fly out of Las Vegas, where he had given a 12-minute speech to a hockey team owned by a businessman who donated to his congressional campaign.

David Shulkin, the secretary of veterans affairs, charged taxpayers for a trip to Europe that included stopovers at Wimbledon and Westminster Abbey, plus a river cruise for him and his wife. The resulting outcry appears to have played a role in his departure.

Pruitt, the former head of the E.P.A., chartered flights for questionable travel, among many other things. He also pushed to fly Delta rather than the government's contract carrier, to accrue frequent flier miles. He flew first class and stayed in hotels that were more expensive than those allowed by government standards. And he let lobbyists help arrange foreign trips for him.

Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, spent $151,000 on government vehicles without authorization, including to travel to his North Carolina home. He was ordered to repay the government.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, looked into whether he could use a military plane to fly him to Europe for his honeymoon. Later, he used military planes for several trips. The Treasury Department's inspector general concluded that Mnuchin broke no laws by doing so, but criticized Mnuchin's insufficient explanation for why he needed to spend $800,000 on the trips.

And Price, the former health secretary, spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on private planes. His history of unethical stock trading didn't keep Trump from naming Price to the cabinet. But the private-plane scandal received enough attention that the White House eventually forced Price to resign.

The pettiest kind of Trumpian corruption takes the form of interior decorating.

Zinke, the interior secretary, spent $139,000 in taxpayer money on new doors for his office. Carson, the secretary of health and human services, picked out a dining set for his office that cost $31,000 - and then gave Congress contradictory explanations for the purchase and blamed it on his wife. Pruitt ordered a $43,000 soundproof phone booth installed in his office and appears to have violated federal law by failing to inform Congress about it.
It has shirked its constitutional duty.
The biggest scandal of all, however, is not even the corruption of the Trump administration. It's the inaction of Congress.

The founders were well aware that the government they were creating could end up with corrupt or unethical leaders, all the way up to the president. That's why the Constitution gives Congress tremendous power to investigate and even remove officials in the executive branch.

Yet the current congressional leaders - the Republican leaders - have refused to do so. They have shirked their duty to act as a check on the president and his appointees. They have instead defended Trump and made excuses on his behalf. They have enabled the most corrupt administration of our lifetimes.
What's missing from this list? If you think there are other examples that should appear on this list, email us at leonhardt@nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt * Facebook

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Opinion | Trump's Corruption: The Definitive List

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The many ways that the president, his family and his aides are lining their own pockets. They don't even try very hard to hide it. President Trump, his family and more than a few of his appointees are using his presidency to enrich themselves. They are spending taxpayer dollars for their own benefit.

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Viktor Orban didn't like what the press was reporting, so he took it over.

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Protesters demanding a free press at a rally in Budapest in April. Credit Credit Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images

BUDAPEST - If you're wondering what attacks on the news media around the world mean for the future of democracy, it's worth a trip to Budapest. Consider it a cautionary-tale vacation.

When I visited Hungary recently, I knew I was entering a waning democracy that's become increasingly authoritarian. I knew that Prime Minister Viktor Orban won a third term in April by convincing voters that a phantasmic combination of Muslim migrants, the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros and European Union bureaucrats was coming to get them.

But I only understood how Mr. Orban pulled this off when I spoke to Hungarian journalists. They explained that Mr. Orban first criticized the press for being biased against him. Then he and his allies took over most of it, and switched to running stories that promote Mr. Orban's populist agenda and his party, Fidesz.

This happened fast. The investigative website Atlatszo estimates that more than 500 Hungarian media titles are now controlled by Mr. Orban and his friends; in 2015, only 23 of them were. Loyalty trumps experience: Hungary's biggest media mogul is a former pipe fitter from Mr. Orban's hometown.

In some cases, Orban allies bought publications and shut them down. One morning in 2016, journalists at Nepszabadsag, one of Hungary's biggest dailies, were simply locked out of their offices. Its new owner, an Austrian businessman, claimed financial problems; the paper had just run a series of articles exposing government corruption.

Other news organizations were bought and transformed from within. Some now reportedly take their talking points directly from the government. Recent headlines at Origo - once a respected online news site - were a numbing assortment of articles about migrants wreaking havoc on various European cities and conspiracies about Mr. Soros.

Headlines were strikingly similar on the website of Lokal, co-founded in 2015 by one of Mr. Orban's top advisers. Its free print version, handed out at train and bus stations, is now Hungary's highest-circulation newspaper.

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A copy of Nepszabadsag, one of Hungary's biggest opposition newspapers, held aloft during a protest in Budapest in 2016, after the paper was suddenly shut down. Credit Attila Kisbenedek/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

There's still independent news online, but most Hungarians don't see it. And when one of these websites exposes corruption, Orban-friendly publications align to attack it.

"This is what the government would like to teach society - that there are no reliable sources at all among those who criticize the government," explained Attila Batorfy, who tracks the Hungarian media for Atlatszo.

Hungary was especially vulnerable to this kind of takeover. The country became a democracy only in 1989. And government advertising for everything from the national lottery to the state opera is still a key source of revenue for media companies, and has long been doled out to friends.

Still, journalists I met in Budapest were struck by how quickly the press had changed, and that all it took to break this pillar of democracy was a combination of money and fear. "It's not Russia," Csaba Lukacs told me. "No one thinks that someone will be shot. Everyone thinks that he will lose his job. It's enough."

Mr. Lukacs was a senior reporter at Magyar Nemzet, an 80-year-old daily newspaper that closed in April. (Its government advertising evaporated after its owner broke with Mr. Orban.)

In May, Mr. Lukacs and two dozen former colleagues started a weekly called Magyar Hang (Hungarian Voice), which operates out of a one-room Budapest storefront. Most of its issues have no advertisements, because companies fear drawing the government's ire by association, Mr. Lukacs said. The paper is printed across the border in Slovakia, because no Hungarian printer would do it. "One of the biggest problems is that people are afraid to be subscribers," he added. Its journalists worked unpaid for the first two months. Now they sell enough copies - just under 10,000 per week, mostly at newsstands - to pay themselves the minimum wage.

Magyar Hang is a conservative, center-right newspaper - no more radical than The Wall Street Journal. Some of its writers, including Mr. Lukacs, used to support Fidesz. But because they're willing to criticize the ruling party and report on official malfeasance, the government hasn't credentialed its reporters, so they can't attend its news conferences and question officials there, Mr. Lukacs said. And no state entity responds to their calls.

"If we ask someone from the governmental hospital, 'How many cases of infections?' they will not answer us," he said. "For Fidesz, it's not enough to be loyal, you have to be servile. You have to follow their instructions without questions, without any doubt."

The news media isn't Mr. Orban's only victim. Last week, Central European University, co-founded by Mr. Soros, announced that, barring a last-minute deal, it will move its main operations from Budapest to Vienna, because of the government's attacks.

But the media is a special target for autocracies and waning democracies everywhere. Brazil's president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, has threatened to pull state advertising from Folha de São Paulo. The Brazilian newspaper ran an exposé describing how supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro financed a WhatsApp misinformation campaign to help him win. Donald Trump regularly claims that articles critical of him are simply made up, and calls journalists the "enemy of the people." And Saudi Arabia's government apparently masterminded the murder of its critic Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post.

Hungary shows that under the right circumstances, attacks on the press can keep getting worse. And voters might respond by just tuning everything out. A Pew survey this year that looked at 10 European countries found that Hungarians were least likely to closely follow local and national news.

Near the end of my trip I spoke with Gyorgy Zsombor, the editor in chief of Magyar Hang. "We couldn't imagine 10 years ago that it would happen in Hungary," he told me. "We thought democracy was stronger."

Pamela Druckerman is a contributing opinion writer who lives in Paris and the author of "There Are No Grown-Ups: A Midlife Coming-of-Age Story."
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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Viktor Orban didn't like what the press was reporting, so he took it over. BUDAPEST - If you're wondering what attacks on the news media around the world mean for the future of democracy, it's worth a trip to Budapest. Consider it a cautionary-tale vacation.

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The West was sure the Chinese approach would not work. It just had to wait. It's still waiting.

In the uncertain years after Mao's death, long before China became an industrial juggernaut, before the Communist Party went on a winning streak that would reshape the world, a group of economics students gathered at a mountain retreat outside Shanghai. There, in the bamboo forests of Moganshan, the young scholars grappled with a pressing question: How could China catch up with the West?

It was the autumn of 1984, and on the other side of the world, Ronald Reagan was promising "morning again in America." China, meanwhile, was just recovering from decades of political and economic turmoil. There had been progress in the countryside, but more than three-quarters of the population still lived in extreme poverty. The state decided where everyone worked, what every factory made and how much everything cost.

The students and researchers attending the Academic Symposium of Middle-Aged and Young Economists wanted to unleash market forces but worried about crashing the economy - and alarming the party bureaucrats and ideologues who controlled it.

Late one night, they reached a consensus: Factories should meet state quotas but sell anything extra they made at any price they chose. It was a clever, quietly radical proposal to undercut the planned economy - and it intrigued a young party official in the room who had no background in economics. "As they were discussing the problem, I didn't say anything at all," recalled Xu Jing'an, now 76 and retired. "I was thinking, how do we make this work?"

The Chinese economy has grown so fast for so long now that it is easy to forget how unlikely its metamorphosis into a global powerhouse was, how much of its ascent was improvised and born of desperation. The proposal that Mr. Xu took from the mountain retreat, soon adopted as government policy, was a pivotal early step in this astounding transformation.

China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.

An epochal contest is underway. With President Xi Jinping pushing a more assertive agenda overseas and tightening controls at home, the Trump administration has launched a trade war and is gearing up for what could be a new Cold War. Meanwhile, in Beijing the question these days is less how to catch up with the West than how to pull ahead - and how to do so in a new era of American hostility.

The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China's rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

But neither happened. Instead, China's Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

In late September, the People's Republic of China marked a milestone, surpassing the Soviet Union in longevity. Days later, it celebrated a record 69 years of Communist rule. And China may be just hitting its stride - a new superpower with an economy on track to become not just the world's largest but, quite soon, the largest by a wide margin.

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China's success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world - and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China's leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear - a sense of crisis among Mao's successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as they put the disasters of Mao's rule behind them, China's Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace "reform" to survive - but "reform" must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

Many people said that the party would fail, that this tension between openness and repression would be too much for a nation as big as China to sustain. But it may be precisely why China soared.

Whether it can continue to do so with the United States trying to stop it is another question entirely.

None of the participants at the Moganshan conference could have predicted how China would take off, much less the roles they would play in the boom ahead. They had come of age in an era of tumult, almost entirely isolated from the rest of the world, with little to prepare them for the challenge they faced. To succeed, the party had to both reinvent its ideology and reprogram its best and brightest to carry it out.

Mr. Xu, for example, had graduated with a degree in journalism on the eve of Mao's violent Cultural Revolution, during which millions of people were purged, persecuted and killed. He spent those years at a "cadre school" doing manual labor and teaching Marxism in an army unit. After Mao's death, he was assigned to a state research institute tasked with fixing the economy. His first job was figuring out how to give factories more power to make decisions, a subject he knew almost nothing about. Yet he went on to a distinguished career as an economic policymaker, helping launch China's first stock market in Shenzhen.

Among the other young participants in Moganshan were Zhou Xiaochuan, who would later lead China's central bank for 15 years; Lou Jiwei, who ran China's sovereign wealth fund and recently stepped down as finance minister; and an agricultural policy specialist named Wang Qishan, who rose higher than any of them.

Mr. Wang headed China's first investment bank and helped steer the nation through the Asian financial crisis. As Beijing's mayor, he hosted the 2008 Olympics. Then he oversaw the party's recent high-stakes crackdown on corruption. Now he is China's vice president, second in authority only to Xi Jinping, the party's leader.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China's success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Bureaucrats who were once obstacles to growth became engines of growth. Officials devoted to class warfare and price controls began chasing investment and promoting private enterprise. Every day now, the leader of a Chinese district, city or province makes a pitch like the one Yan Chaojun made at a business forum in September.

"Sanya," Mr. Yan said, referring to the southern resort town he leads, "must be a good butler, nanny, driver and cleaning person for businesses, and welcome investment from foreign companies."

It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach "crossing the river by feeling the stones" - allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in "special economic zones," while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

"There was resistance," Mr. Xu said. "Satisfying the reformers and the opposition was an art."

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party's strategy "an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency."

But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation's long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao's eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.

That included sending generations of young party officials to the United States and elsewhere to study how modern economies worked. Sometimes they enrolled in universities, sometimes they found jobs, and sometimes they went on brief "study tours." When they returned, the party promoted their careers and arranged for others to learn from them.

At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy. Many critics focus on the weaknesses of the Chinese system - the emphasis on tests and memorization, the political constraints, the discrimination against rural students. But mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state's hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs - a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government's annual military budget.

Another explanation for the party's transformation lies in bureaucratic mechanics. Analysts sometimes say that China embraced economic reform while resisting political reform. But in reality, the party made changes after Mao's death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant.

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability - and competition - into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. "China created a unique hybrid," she said, "an autocracy with democratic characteristics."

As the economy flourished, officials with a single-minded focus on growth often ignored widespread pollution, violations of labor standards, and tainted food and medical supplies. They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.

The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation's economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs, a senior official said in a speech last year. As often as not, the bureaucrats stay out of the way.

"I basically don't see them even once a year," said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. "I'm creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?"

In recent years, President Xi has sought to assert the party's authority inside private firms. He has also bolstered state-owned enterprises with subsidies while preserving barriers to foreign competition. And he has endorsed demands that American companies surrender technology in exchange for market access.

In doing so, he is betting that the Chinese state has changed so much that it should play a leading role in the economy - that it can build and run "national champions" capable of outcompeting the United States for control of the high-tech industries of the future. But he has also provoked a backlash in Washington.

In December, the Communist Party will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the "reform and opening up" policies that transformed China. The triumphant propaganda has already begun, with Mr. Xi putting himself front and center, as if taking a victory lap for the nation.

He is the party's most powerful leader since Deng and the son of a senior official who served Deng, but even as he wraps himself in Deng's legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by "hostile foreign forces."

In other words, he appears to have less use for the "opening up" part of Deng's slogan.

Of the many risks that the party took in its pursuit of growth, perhaps the biggest was letting in foreign investment, trade and ideas. It was an exceptional gamble by a country once as isolated as North Korea is today, and it paid off in an exceptional way: China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world's factory. China's embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.

The party prefers a different narrative these days, presenting the economic boom as "grown out of the soil of China" and primarily the result of its leadership. But this obscures one of the great ironies of China's rise - that Beijing's former enemies helped make it possible.

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise. The real game changers, though, were people like Tony Lin, a factory manager who made his first trip to the mainland in 1988.

Mr. Lin was born and raised in Taiwan, the self-governing island where those who lost the Chinese civil war fled after the Communist Revolution. As a schoolboy, he was taught that mainland China was the enemy.

But in the late 1980s, the sneaker factory he managed in central Taiwan was having trouble finding workers, and its biggest customer, Nike, suggested moving some production to China. Mr. Lin set aside his fears and made the trip. What he found surprised him: a large and willing work force, and officials so eager for capital and know-how that they offered the use of a state factory free and a five-year break on taxes.

Mr. Lin spent the next decade shuttling to and from southern China, spending months at a time there and returning home only for short breaks to see his wife and children. He built and ran five sneaker factories, including Nike's largest Chinese supplier.

"China's policies were tremendous," he recalled. "They were like a sponge absorbing water, money, technology, everything."

Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China - and gave it a leg up on other developing countries. Without this diaspora, some economists argue, the mainland's transformation might have stalled at the level of a country like Indonesia or Mexico.

The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan's money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.

Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar. Mr. Lin tried opening factories in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia but always came back to China.

Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island's future is uncertain.

There are echoes of Taiwan's predicament around the world, where many are having second thoughts about how they rushed to embrace Beijing with trade and investment.

The remorse may be strongest in the United States, which brought China into the World Trade Organization, became China's largest customer and now accuses it of large-scale theft of technology - what one official called " the greatest transfer of wealth in history."

Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. "Opening up" ended up strengthening the party's hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China's rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.

In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.

Over lunch at a luxurious private club on the 50th floor of an apartment tower in central Beijing, one of China's most successful real estate tycoons explained why he had left his job at a government research center after the crackdown on the student-led democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.

"It was very easy," said Feng Lun, the chairman of Vantone Holdings, which manages a multibillion-dollar portfolio of properties around the world. "One day, I woke up and everyone had run away. So I ran, too."

Until the soldiers opened fire, he said, he had planned to spend his entire career in the civil service. Instead, as the party was pushing out those who had sympathized with the students, he joined the exodus of officials who started over as entrepreneurs in the 1990s.

"At the time, if you held a meeting and told us to go into business, we wouldn't have gone," he recalled. "So this incident, it unintentionally planted seeds in the market economy."

Such has been the seesaw pattern of the party's success.

The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao's death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to "reform and opening up" once more.

Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation's transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.

Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?

The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China's rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.

The party has always been vigilant about crushing potential threats - a fledgling opposition party, a popular spiritual movement, even a dissident writer awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But with some big exceptions, it has also generally retreated from people's personal lives and given them enough freedom to keep the economy growing.

The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.

In 2011, it confronted a crisis. After a high-speed train crash in eastern China, more than 30 million messages criticizing the party's handling of the fatal accident flooded social media - faster than censors could screen them.

Panicked officials considered shutting down the most popular service, Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, but the authorities were afraid of how the public would respond. In the end, they let Weibo stay open but invested much more in tightening controls and ordered companies to do the same.

The compromise worked. Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties - and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.

"The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet," said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. "We still get the information we need for economic progress."

China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.

The trade war has only just begun. And it is not just a trade war. American warships and planes are challenging Chinese claims to disputed waters with increasing frequency even as China keeps ratcheting up military spending. And Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing's growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.

The two nations may yet reach some accommodation. But both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades - and how it should do so now.

Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration's policies as proof of what they have always suspected - that America is determined to keep China down.

At the same time, there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party's formula for success may be faltering.

Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.

"The basic problem is, who is growth for?" said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. "We haven't solved this problem."

Growth has begun to slow, which may be better for the economy in the long term but could shake public confidence. The party is investing ever more in censorship to control discussion of the challenges the nation faces: widening inequality, dangerous debt levels, an aging population.

Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a "new era" requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. "Opening up" has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence - or interfere - in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.

In effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture - and that to survive and surpass the United States it must.

Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump's America is in retreat while China's moment is just beginning.

Then again, China has a way of defying expectations.

Philip P. Pan is The Times's Asia Editor and author of "Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China." He has lived in and reported on China for nearly two decades.

Jonathan Ansfield and Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing. Claire Fu, Zoe Mou and Iris Zhao contributed research from Beijing, and Carolyn Zhang from Shanghai.

Design: Matt Ruby, Rumsey Taylor, Quoctrung Bui Editing: Tess Felder, Eric Nagourney, David Schmidt Photo Editing: David Furst, Craig Allen, Meghan Petersen, Mikko Takkunen Illustrations: Sergio Peçanha

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The West was sure the Chinese approach would not work. It just had to wait. It's still waiting. In the uncertain years after Mao's death, long before China became an industrial juggernaut, before the Communist Party went on a winning streak that would reshape the world, a group of economics students gathered at a mountain retreat outside Shanghai.

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An open pit mine in Burdwan, West Bengal, India. Coal is the single largest source of electricity worldwide. Credit... Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
HANOI, Vietnam - Coal, the fuel that powered the industrial age, has led the planet to the brink of catastrophic climate change.

Scientists have repeatedly warned of its looming dangers, most recently on Friday, when a major scientific report issued by 13 United States government agencies warned that the damage from climate change could knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century's end if significant steps aren't taken to rein in warming.

An October report from the United Nations' scientific panel on global warming found that avoiding the worst devastation would require a radical transformation of the world economy in just a few years.

Central to that transformation: Getting out of coal, and fast.

And yet, three years after the Paris agreement, when world leaders promised action, coal shows no sign of disappearing. While coal use looks certain to eventually wane worldwide, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency, it is not on track to happen anywhere fast enough to avert the worst effects of climate change. Last year, in fact, global production and consumption increased after two years of decline.

Cheap, plentiful and the most polluting of fossil fuels, coal remains the single largest source of energy to generate electricity worldwide. This, even as renewables like solar and wind power are rapidly becoming more affordable. Soon, coal could make no financial sense for its backers.

So, why is coal so hard to quit?

Because coal is a powerful incumbent. It's there by the millions of tons under the ground. Powerful companies, backed by powerful governments, often in the form of subsidies, are in a rush to grow their markets before it is too late. Banks still profit from it. Big national electricity grids were designed for it. Coal plants can be a surefire way for politicians to deliver cheap electricity - and retain their own power. In some countries, it has been a glistening source of graft.

And even while renewables are spreading fast, they still have limits: Wind and solar power flow when the breeze blows and the sun shines, and that requires traditional electricity grids to be retooled.

"The main reason why coal sticks around is, we built it already," said Rohit Chandra, who earned a doctoral degree in energy policy at Harvard, specializing in coal in India.

The battle over the future of coal is being waged in Asia.

Home to half the world's population, Asia accounts for three-fourths of global coal consumption today. More important, it accounts for more than three-fourths of coal plants that are either under construction or in the planning stages - a whopping 1,200 of them, according to Urgewald, a German advocacy group that tracks coal development. Heffa Schücking, who heads Urgewald, called those plants "an assault on the Paris goals."

Indonesia is digging more coal. Vietnam is clearing ground for new coal-fired power plants. Japan, reeling from 2011 nuclear plant disaster, has resurrected coal.

The world's juggernaut, though, is China. The country consumes half the world's coal. More than 4.3 million Chinese are employed in the country's coal mines. China has added 40 percent of the world's coal capacity since 2002, a huge increase for just 16 years. "I had to do the calculation three times," said Carlos Fernández Alvarez, a senior energy analyst at the International Energy Agency. "I thought it was wrong. It's crazy."

Spurred by public outcry over air pollution, China is now also the world leader in solar and wind power installation, and its central government has tried to slow down coal plant construction. But an analysis by Coal Swarm, a U.S.-based team of researchers that advocates for coal alternatives, concluded that new plants continue to be built, and other proposed projects have simply been delayed rather than stopped. Chinese coal consumption grew in 2017, though at a far slower pace than before, and is on track to grow again in 2018, after declining in previous years.

China's coal industry is now scrambling to find new markets, from Kenya to Pakistan. Chinese companies are building coal plants in 17 countries, according to Urgewald. Its regional rival, Japan, is in the game too: nearly 60 percent of planned coal projects developed by Japanese companies are outside the country, mostly financed by Japanese banks.

That contest is particularly stark in Southeast Asia, one of the world's last frontiers of coal expansion.

Nguy Thi Khanh has seen the contest close-up in Vietnam. Born in 1976, a year after the end of the war, she remembers doing homework by the light of a kerosene lamp. In her northern village, the electricity failed several hours a day. When it rained, there was no power at all. When it came, it came from a coal plant not far away. When her mother hung laundry to dry, ash settled on the clothes.

Today, pretty much every household in Vietnam, population 95 million, has electricity. Hanoi, the capital, where Ms. Nguy now lives, is in a frenzy of new construction, with soaring demand for cement and steel - both energy guzzlers. The economy is galloping. And, up and down the coast, 1,600 kilometers in length, foreign companies, mainly from Japan and China, are building coal plants.

One such project is in Nghi Son, a onetime fishing village south of Hanoi and now home to a sprawling industrial zone. The first power plant opened here in 2013. Japan's overseas aid organization, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, paid for it. The Japanese trading house Marubeni developed it.

A second coal-fired power plant, far bigger, is under construction next door. Marubeni is building that too, along with a Korean company. The Japan Bank for International Cooperation, an export credit agency meant to lower financial risk for private lenders, is helping to fund it.

In the shadow of the smokestack, Nguyen Thi Thu Thien was drying shrimp on the side of the road and complaining bitterly. She had moved out of her house after the power plant built an ash pond right in front. "The coal dust has blackened my house," she said. "Even the trees are dying. We can't live there."

She and the others drying shrimp on the road were doubly angry that the new plant would need a new port, and that would displace their husbands, who tie up their fishing boats there.

Trucks rumbled by, throwing up dust, as the women emptied their baskets of shrimp. They kept every bit of themselves covered: wide brimmed hats, face masks, gloves.

Coal accounts for 36 percent of the country's power generation capacity now; it is projected to grow to 42 percent by 2030, according to the government. To feed those plants, Vietnam will need to import 90 million tons of coal by 2030.

But coal projects are also sparking community opposition rare in a country that squelches dissent. Villagers blocked a highway in 2015 to protest a Chinese project in the southeast. The provincial authorities quashed another proposed plant in the Mekong Delta.

Most plants in Vietnam use old, polluting technologies that many investors, including Marubeni, have recently promised not to back in future projects. A company spokesman said by email that it would continue with the Nghi Son project "to contribute to stable power supply and to economic growth."

Vietnam says it is on track to meet its emissions reductions targets under the Paris accord. So, too, China and India, with far bigger carbon footprints. But those targets were set by the countries themselves, and they will not be enough to keep global temperatures from rising to calamitous levels. The United States has said it will exit the Paris climate pact.

Those sobering facts loom over the next round of international climate negotiations, starting Dec. 3 in the heart of Poland's coal country. The American delegation plans to promote coal at the event, just as it did at last year's talks in Bonn, Germany.

In the public imagination, the coal miner has long been a symbol of industrial virility, a throwback to an era when hard labor - particularly men's labor, rather than robots - fueled economic growth.

That idea has been central to politics. German coal miners have lifted the fortunes of that country's far-right party. Poland's right-wing government has promised to open new coal mines. Australia's prime minister, Scott Morrison, rose to power as a champion of coal.

President Trump has promised, unsuccessfully so far, to revive coal mining jobs and instructed his Environmental Protection Agency to roll back rules to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants.

That message might be welcome in American coal country, but the industry's future in the United States is not promising. There are cheaper fuels, including natural gas; gas now accounts for around 31 percent of total power generation in the United States, the same share as coal. China has imposed tariffs on coal imports from the United States, in the tit-for-tat trade dispute. More than 200 coal plants have closed since 2010, and coal consumption has continued to decline, contrary to Mr. Trump's false claims. Coal mining jobs have plummeted over the last decade, despite a modest increase of about 4 percent in the first 18 months of the Trump presidency.

The economics, and the political calculus, are very different in the world's biggest democracy: India, population 1.3 billion.

Ajay Mishra, the career civil servant in charge of energy in the central Indian state of Telangana, knows firsthand.

Five years ago, he said, daily power cuts cursed his state. Ceiling fans cut out on stifling summer afternoons. Factories ran on diesel-guzzling generators. The people of Telangana were furious.

State officials had to do something to fix the electricity problem. They harnessed the sun, briefly making Telangana a leading solar power producer in India. They also turned to what government officials have relied on for over a century: the vast vein of coal that sat underground, stretching across the hills and forests of central India.

Telangana now has round-the-clock electricity. Its farmers get it free to pump water. It sweetens the re-election bid of Telangana's top elected official, K. Chandrashekar Rao, in state polls later this year.

"We have coal," Mr. Mishra said. "We are producing more every year. For the next 100 years we have it."

On a warm Tuesday in October, about a four-hour drive from Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, an army of men in indigo shorts went underground to dig it out.

A simple pulley drew them in, a bit like a ski lift, except here, it took them deeper and deeper down a shaft. The creak of the pulley was all you could hear, and water, drip-dripping inside the earth. Here and there, off to the side, stood miners, their forms barely visible in the darkness, except for the belted flashlights that snaked across their bodies.

At about 900 feet below the surface, where the air was black and cool and the coal under our feet was squishy, a burst of explosives broke down a wall of coal. Small, sooty chunks were piled into tubs and wheeled out, then loaded onto coal trucks that hurtled down the country roads, sprinkling a layer of ash everywhere.

So deeply is India invested in coal, this, like other mines, is state owned. So are most power plants. Coal subsidizes the country's vast rail network.

That person at the top of that system, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has sought to cast himself as a champion of clean energy.

But Mr. Modi has been inaugurating new coal mines, too. His government has made it faster for industry, including mining, to get environmental clearances, rankling environmentalists. India's state-owned companies are building new coal-fired plants across the country, almost all of them financed by public sector banks.

In an interview in the capital, New Delhi, India's energy secretary, Ajay Bhalla, said some 50 gigawatts of additional coal capacity were under construction. That's a fraction of what was under development even a decade ago, when India's energy demand was projected to soar. Many of those plants are meant to replace older, more polluting ones. But coal would not sunset anytime soon, he predicted, not until there's a cheap and efficient way to store energy from solar and wind energy.

Analysts say India must retool its electricity grid for the post-coal era. Battery technology is fast advancing. Microgrids can replace traditional electricity systems. Many existing coal plants are now running below capacity, several are idle, and new energy efficiency standards could slow down demand to the point where there may be a glut of costly coal-fired plants. Left holding this bundle of stranded assets: The public sector banks that financed them.

For now, though, coal accounts for 58 percent of India's energy mix.

"It's not that I'm using the coal very willingly," Mr. Bhalla said. "But I have to."

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The World Needs to Quit Coal. Why Is It So Hard? (Published 2018)

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. HANOI, Vietnam - Coal, the fuel that powered the industrial age, has led the planet to the brink of catastrophic climate change.

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Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds (Published 2019)

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An analysis concluded that Earth’s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago, a finding with dire implications for climate change.

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Climate change

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October 5
When sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein surfaced last year, they ignited the #MeToo movement in the United States - a phenomenon that would soon reverberate around the planet in surprising, sometimes profound, often disappointing ways.

In the year since, the global conversation about sexual harassment - and worse - has shifted, but the lasting impact of the moment remains unclear.

From Stockholm to Seoul, from Toronto to Tokyo, a torrent of accusations has poured forth. Survivors spoke out, and many were taken seriously. Powerful men lost their jobs. A few went to prison. How diverse societies - some liberal, others conservative - saw sexual harassment seemed to be changing.

On Friday, a year after the New York Times and the New Yorker published their stories about Weinstein, two activists who have sought to end sexual violence in conflict zones - Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege and Yazidi assault survivor Nadia Murad - were awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

But for all the early anticipation that things had changed forever, in many countries the #MeToo movement either fizzled or never took flight.

'Handsy' at parties

In Britain, attention quickly turned from Weinstein to the Palace of Westminster, or "Pestminster," as the press dubbed it. Claims were made against British politicians, including Michael Fallon, who resigned as defense secretary, and Damian Green, who stepped down as the de facto deputy prime minister.

Public figures in London who drank too much and got "handsy" at parties were called out. Politicians vowed to take action, but campaigners have questioned the commitment.

"Have the two main political parties sufficiently changed their structures, rules and culture to stamp out sexual harassment? I am not so sure," wrote Jane Merrick, a British journalist who went public with a charge of sexual harassment against Fallon.

Media brand names, celebrities and members of the power elite all came under scrutiny. Most notably, in January, the Financial Times sent an undercover reporter to the black-tie Presidents Club Charity Dinner, where all-male guests harassed the female "hostesses," pulling the women onto their laps and demanding they drink more.

The high brought low

Politicians elsewhere also fell as a result of the #MeToo reckoning.

In South Korea, An Hee-jung, a regional governor and presidential contender, sensationally resigned after his secretary accused him of raping her on business trips. He was recently found not guilty of sexual assault, but prosecutors said they would appeal. After the verdict, An apologized and said he'd try to be "born again."

In Japan, a journalist accused a top Finance Ministry bureaucrat of harassment. He resigned but denied the accusation. Equally telling was how the journalist was ignored by her own TV network.

Japan's newspaper workers union complained, "Female reporters have had to suffer silently, despite being subjected to humiliating and mortifying treatment."

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman, David Keyes, left his post last month after a New York City politician, Julia Salazar, publicly accused him of sexually assaulting her.

Keyes denied the allegations, but they spurred more than a dozen other women to come forward.

"It had an impact here," said Galia Wolloch, president of Na'amat, Israel's largest nongovernmental organization working for the advancement of women. A former Israeli president, Moshe Katsav, served five years in prison for rape, but until #MeToo, such cases were the exception, Wolloch said.

Cultural figures toppled, too. In Sweden, Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of a member of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize for literature, was convicted of rape and sentenced to two years in prison.

Mixed feelings in France

The phrase #MeToo, which was first used by the American activist Tarana Burke in 2006, was translated and tweaked in some countries. In Italy, it was #QuellaVoltaChe, in Spain it was #YoTambien, in Arab-speaking countries it was #AnaKaman.

In France, the campaign was known as #BalanceTonPorc, which loosely translates to "squeal on your pig."

The French government was quick to take action. Marlène Schiappa, President Emmanuel Macron's minister for gender equality, successfully introduced a provision to ban catcalling and verbal harassment in the streets. Last month, the law was used for the first time, when a panel of judges fined a man $347 for making lewd remarks to a woman on a bus and slapping her bottom.

Yet there has been a backlash, too, with some questioning whether the #MeToo movement has gone too far.

The pushback came from surprising sources. In January, nearly 100 women - including writers, academics and actresses such as Catherine Deneuve - penned an open letter in the newspaper Le Monde, defending what they called "the right to annoy."

Uphill battles

In Russia, sub-Saharan Africa and China, the #MeToo movement has struggled to take off.

Feminism has a complicated history in Russia. For decades, the very word has been scorned as a Western-derived attack on Russian women's notions of femininity. Women's rights movements have also felt superfluous in a country where women gained many freedoms during the Communist era - including the right to vote and access to legal abortion - decades ahead of their Western counterparts.

When the Weinstein scandal broke last year, the reaction from Russians, including women, was largely one of victim-shaming. A slew of Russian actresses of all ages came out in support of Weinstein, and a group of women stripped naked in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, hoisting a sign saying "Harvey Weinstein Welcome to Russia."

There have been some fledgling attempts at a Russian #MeToo. Earlier this year, at least five female journalists and a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman accused lawmaker Leonid Slutsky of sexual harassment. But the parliamentary ethics committee dismissed their claims, and Slutsky later boasted of how he had kept #MeToo out of the country.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the only high-profile accusations explicitly inspired by #MeToo have been in South Africa, a liberal outlier on the continent, and haven't resulted in investigations.

Yet cases of femicide and abuse have made headlines in countries such as Kenya. Last month, a regional governor was accused of organizing the killing of a young woman with whom he was having an affair. But local media coverage - which focused on the woman's alleged promiscuity and on the governor's pitiable diet in jail - convinced many feminists in Kenya that much remains to be done before a #MeToo-like movement can take hold there.

That is partly because the movement for women's rights faces different battles in Africa than in the West. Studies find that most sexual abuse against women on the continent is perpetrated by intimate partners rather than strangers or acquaintances. In some African cultures, genital mutilation, child marriage and polygamy are still practiced, and in conflict zones, trafficking and rape as a tool of war have been well-documented.

"Kenyan women are not waiting for #MeToo to bring them liberation, because we are responding to a totally different context," said Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan political analyst. "Our struggles will be different."

Bollywood shrugged

In India, where stories of sexual abuse in the glamorous Bollywood industry have emerged, some allegations have been given renewed attention since #MeToo.

A decade ago, the former Bollywood star Tanushree Dutta publicly claimed that her co-star, the much older Nana Patekar, tried to force her to perform in a dance sequence where he would touch her inappropriately. Dutta quit movies after the incident and moved to the United States, and the story fizzled out.

But when Dutta spoke out again this summer, her story went viral. She has since become the face of an anti-harassment campaign in Indian cinema, drawing support from contemporary witnesses of the alleged incident and a handful of Bollywood stars.

Patekar denied the accusations, however, and few expect him to suffer serious consequences. In India's multibillion-dollar movie industry, accusations of sexual abuse, harassment and even rape are often viewed as a concoction by attention-hungry actresses or, if true, as the price of fame.

What next?

Women's rights campaigners say that women coming forward and telling their stories can accomplish only so much and that governments and businesses must do more to stamp out harassment.

"A year on, we are seeing a lot of people questioning the movement and whether it's changed anything," said Laura Bates, the British author of " Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism."

"Instead," she said, "the question we really need to be asking is: Who takes the baton from the brave survivors who have done such a great service in speaking out?"

James McAuley in Paris, Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem, Amie Ferris-Rotman in Moscow, Vidhi Doshi in New Delhi and Max Bearak in Nairobi contributed to this report.
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A year after it began, has #MeToo become a global movement?

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October 5 When sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein surfaced last year, they ignited the #MeToo movement in the United States - a phenomenon that would soon reverberate around the planet in surprising, sometimes profound, often disappointing ways.

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"THE political nightmare that has faced my colleague," said Mark Hatfield on September 7th 1995, "is coming to an end." The colleague was Bob Packwood, his fellow senator from Oregon, who was resigning. The "nightmare" was a Senate Ethics Committee investigation that found Mr Packwood had been sexually harassing subordinates since the 1960s. Mr Packwood battled the committee for three years, destroying evidence and appearing "perplexed or confused...about what actually constituted sexual harassment". When he resigned, he won praise from senator after senator-not one of whom managed a single word of concern for his many victims.

In one sense, times have changed. Over the past year-ever since the #MeToo hashtag went viral in the wake of gruesome allegations of sexual assault levelled against Harvey Weinstein, a film producer-nine members of Congress have resigned or declined to run for re-election after facing credible charges of sexual misconduct. Two White House officials left after being accused of spousal abuse (they deny the charges) and three congressional candidates lost or quit their campaigns.
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But that change is unevenly distributed across the political spectrum. Republicans remain devoted to President Donald Trump, who has been recorded boasting about sexual assault and whom at least 19 women have accused of sexual misconduct. His second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least four women. The furore surrounding his nomination has become a partisan referendum on the #MeToo movement, which itself has become the defining cultural phenomenon of the Trump era.

That movement may have begun after the allegations against Mr Weinstein, but those were petrol poured on a fire kindled by Mr Trump's election. On January 21st 2017, one day after his inauguration, millions of people across America (and the world) took to the streets for the Women's March. Many of those who marched said that watching the first major-party female presidential candidate lose was painful; watching her lose to a man who has referred to several women as "dogs" and "piece[s] of ass" was infuriating.

It has also been inspiring. During the previous election cycle, 920 women contacted EMILY's List, a political action committee devoted to electing pro-choice Democratic women, about running for office. Since Mr Trump's election, more than 42,000 have. Half the Democrats' first-time House candidates this year are women, up from 27% in 2016 (and far higher than the Republican share of less than 20%). From a field that includes Senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic presidential ticket in 2020 will probably include at least one female candidate.

And as quickly as women are flocking to the Democrats, many appear to be fleeing Republicans. The 2016 gender gap of 24 points (women supported Hillary Clinton by 13; men went for Mr Trump by 11) was already the largest on record. According to an average of three recent polls compiled by National Public Radio, the same gap exists for this year's mid-terms, but with a stronger leftward lean. Women favour Democrats by 21; men favour Republicans by 3.

Since women vote at greater rates than men, that swing should worry Republicans. In 2016, despite his claims to the contrary, Mr Trump won narrowly. For Republicans to prevail this year and in 2020, he needed to expand his coalition. Instead he is driving away marginal supporters. His approval rating seems to have a ceiling in the low 40s, and has fallen even further among women, particularly non-white and educated women.

That is not entirely due to sexual harassment, of course. But because polling shows that voters in both parties care about the issue, the Republican response to #MeToo represents a failure of opportunity. As the movement gathered strength late last year, Democrats pressed Senator Al Franken to resign his seat amid claims of groping and unwanted sexual advances. Republicans backed Roy Moore in a Senate race in Alabama, despite multiple allegations that he had molested teenage girls when he was a grown man.

Mr Trump has loudly defended multiple men accused of sexual misconduct, including Mr Moore; Rob Porter, one of his aides accused of spousal abuse; and Bill O'Reilly, who left Fox News amid sexual-harassment claims. Bill Shine also left Fox News after being accused in multiple lawsuits of abetting sexual harassment; Mr Trump hired him to be White House communications director.

Mr Trump has defended Mr Kavanaugh and cast doubt on his accusers. Unsurprisingly, the rest of his party has followed suit. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, vowed to "plough right through it", promising to confirm Mr Kavanaugh "in the very near future". Several other Republican senators also appear to have made up their minds before hearing from the judge's accusers, the latest of whom has multiple security clearances and signed an affidavit, under penalty of perjury, that she was gang raped at a party that Mr Kavanaugh attended.

Others seem to think that sexual assault is no big deal. Kevin Cramer, a Senate candidate in North Dakota, called the incident "an attempt or something that never went anywhere". Gina Sosa, who ran for Congress in Florida, wondered, "What boy hasn't done this in high school?"

Some have wondered why Mr Trump does not withdraw Mr Kavanaugh's nomination in favour of an equally conservative judge, such as Amy Coney Barrett. But to ask that is to misunderstand contemporary Republican politics which, under Mr Trump's leadership, has become less about ideals than about power and dominance. Withdrawing Mr Kavanaugh would mean admitting that historical accusations of sexual assault can be disqualifying, which leads back to the president.

In his book about the Trump White House, Bob Woodward quotes the president advising a friend accused of sexual misconduct: "You've got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women...If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you're dead." If such attitudes lead the Republicans to mid-term losses on the back of energised female turnout (and candidacy), that may start to push the party towards a reckoning with Trumpism.

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American politics after a year of #MeToo

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"THE political nightmare that has faced my colleague," said Mark Hatfield on September 7th 1995, "is coming to an end." The colleague was Bob Packwood, his fellow senator from Oregon, who was resigning. The "nightmare" was a Senate Ethics Committee investigation that found Mr Packwood had been sexually harassing subordinates since the 1960s.

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UNTIL Brett Kavanaugh sat bristling before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week the most prominent objects of #MeToo vilification were not easy for conservative men to rally behind. They included Hollywood moguls, liberal journalists and comedians-plus President Donald Trump, whose self-confessed pussy-grabbing is not something most conservatives admire him for. This presented an obvious vacancy. For what could Mr Trump's followers desire more than to stand athwart history yelling "stop!" at a crowd of finger-jabbing women? Mr Kavanaugh has now filled the opening. Whether or not he makes it onto the Supreme Court bench, the 53-year-old judge already symbolises the patriarchal riposte to #MeToo.

His testimony, in response to Christine Blasey Ford's allegation that he had sexually assaulted her 36 years ago, might almost have been designed with that intent. In her earlier performance Ms Blasey Ford had seemed modest and almost painfully obliging. By contrast Mr Kavanaugh, who was flushed from the start and dripping with sweat and tears by the end, trembled with righteous anger. While claiming to bear Ms Blasey Ford no ill-will, he fulminated against his Democratic interrogators, whom he accused of bad faith, slander, vengefulness and "totally and permanently" destroying his family. When the senators suggested that, to the contrary, they were only interested in hearing his response to Ms Blasey Ford's specific allegations, including that he had drunk much more in his youth than he had previously admitted to under oath, Mr Kavanaugh got even angrier.
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The senators were not really interested in what he had done (which was nothing bad), he suggested. They hated him for the privileges he had earned through hard work. Asked about a reference to vomiting in his high-school yearbook, he shot back: "Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt...got into Yale Law School." He also suggested the killjoy lefties hated him for the simple pleasures he enjoyed as a free American man. "If every American who drinks beer or every American who drank beer in high school is suddenly presumed guilty of sexual assault, [it] will be an ugly new place in this country," he fumed. Mr Kavanaugh has been heavily criticised for the partisan bias he showed. But that was the least of his politicking. He met almost every concrete allegation with a culturally rooted defence both impassioned and evasive. If he was guilty, so was every man who liked the odd beer! Thereby he managed to avoid answering question after question, about his teenage chauvinism, boozing and puking, even as he rallied fellow partisans to his side.

They did not hear Mr Kavanaugh's complaints as self-righteous whining. (Even after it emerged that he was a legacy student at Yale, where his grandfather studied.) Rather, Republican senators, having previously looked stricken by the force of Ms Blasey Ford's testimony, seized on the judge's cultural grievances with relish. "I know I'm a single white male from South Carolina and I'm told I should shut up, but I will not shut up," said Lindsey Graham, whose victim complex was perhaps surprising after 23 years in Congress. Mr Trump's subsequent attacks on Ms Blasey Ford's account, though cruder, continued this tactical ploy. "Where's the house? I don't know. Upstairs, downstairs-where was it? I don't know," the president jeered at a rally in Mississippi, mocking her testimony to hoots of laughter. (Four days earlier he had described Ms Blasey Ford as a "very credible witness.")

Riling half of America is risky. But you can see why Mr Trump is having a go at it. The growing insecurity many men feel about their diminished gender role is equivalent to the anxiety many whites feel about their dwindling racial privileges. In fact they are often the same Americans: millions of white men, mostly but not all working class, who prefer the comforting past to the present and are the engine of Mr Trump's base. Lambasting Hillary Clinton, for her womanhood as well as her alleged corruption, was a big part of Mr Trump's opening pitch to them. And though she is not around now, the riposte to #MeToo should keep some of that spirit alive. Conservative controversialists such as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro have been predicting a backlash from "emasculated" males almost since the movement began. At Mr Trump's rallies it takes a familiar form. After he finished attacking Ms Blasey Ford, the crowd started chanting: "Lock Her Up!"

With the mid-terms coming, Mr Trump must think he can rally more people with this bile than he will repel. That could only be possible if he has already discounted the large numbers of women he and his party have already driven away since the last election. Recent polls suggest the Democrats could be on course to capture over 60% of college-educated women, a group that used to be evenly split between the Republicans and Democrats. Having an alleged sex pest in the White House, who endorsed an alleged ephebophile in Alabama's Senate race, who now mocks a woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted as a teenager by his own Supreme Court nominee will do that. Yet working-class women, who seem less politically motivated by #MeToo, have left the Republicans in smaller numbers. If Mr Trump's latest burst of misogyny delights more working-class men than it repels their wives, it could pay off.

Lux et veritas

The electoral impact is uncertain. But the continued degradation of conservatism under Mr Trump is not. The president's political strategy has long rested on a combination of divisiveness and shoving conservative judges onto the Supreme Court bench to fight the culture wars. The Kavanaugh debacle has connected these two prongs for the first time. In effect, Mr Trump has found inspiration for his latest effort to divide America in a partisan judge, whom he is at the same time trying to ram onto the court, in a bid to prevent his party from relinquishing its hold on power. Not even he could have made that up.

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UNTIL Brett Kavanaugh sat bristling before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week the most prominent objects of #MeToo vilification were not easy for conservative men to rally behind. They included Hollywood moguls, liberal journalists and comedians-plus President Donald Trump, whose self-confessed pussy-grabbing is not something most conservatives admire him for.

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The Guardian view on the press and Trump: speaking truth to power | Editorial

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Editorial: On Thursday, hundreds of US news organisations are publishing editorials opposing the president's attacks on the press. The Guardian stands with them

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IN A glass case at the Diyarbakir Bar Association are a striped shirt, dark coat and coiled belt. They belonged to the former chairman, Tahir Elci, a lawyer who was murdered in 2015 amid clashes between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatists. He was standing by the Four-Legged Minaret, a 500-year-old landmark in the ancient city, calling for peace. Someone shot him in the head. No one knows who killed him. The government blames Kurdish terrorists. Many Kurds blame the government. After Elci's death, the army pounded the rebel-held part of Diyarbakir to rubble. The debris, including body parts, was heaped onto trucks and dumped by a river. Locals are scared to talk about any of this.

Barely a decade ago, Turkey was a budding democracy and aspired to join the European Union. Now it is galloping towards dictatorship. In 2016 army officers tried to mount a coup, putting tanks in the streets, bombing parliament and nearly assassinating the president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was quickly scotched. Mr Erdogan launched a purge. Over 200,000 people, mostly suspected members of the Gulen movement-the Islamist sect said to have led the failed putsch-were jailed or sacked. Anyone could be arrested for having attended a Gulenist school, holding an account at a Gulen-owned bank, or even possessing $1 bills, which the government says were a mark of Gulenism.
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Millions of Turks are now terrified of their president. However, plenty admire him for protecting them from the Gulenists. Adem, an estate agent in Istanbul, congratulates Mr Erdogan for "cleaning away the enemies within"-echoing a government slogan. He says, of the purge's victims: "They've been arrested because they've done something wrong." He adds: "In America if you steal state secrets they put you in the electric chair, don't they?"

At an election on June 24th, Mr Erdogan is expected to consolidate his power. Despite double-digit inflation and a tottering currency (see article), he is likely to win re-election (though his party may struggle). And his office will become much more powerful, thanks to a constitutional change he pushed through last year. As "executive" president, he will be able to issue decrees with the force of law and pack the judiciary with loyalists.

Turkey exemplifies a dismal trend. The world has grown far more democratic since the second world war. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies; by 2000 only eight states had never held a serious election. But since the financial crisis of 2007-08, democracy has regressed.

Most watchdogs concur. The latest survey by Freedom House, an American think-tank, is called "Democracy in Crisis". In 2017, for the 12th consecutive year, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains, it says (see chart 1). According to the Democracy Index from The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, 89 countries regressed in 2017; only 27 improved. The latest "Transformation Index" from the Bertelsmann Foundation, another think-tank, which looks at emerging economies, finds that the "quality of democracy...has fallen to its lowest level in 12 years." What these indices measure is not simply democracy (ie, rule by the people), but liberal democracy (ie, with a freely elected government that also respects individual and minority rights, the rule of law and independent institutions).

This distinction is important. In "The People v Democracy", Yascha Mounk of Harvard University stresses that liberalism and democracy are separable. Voters often want things that are democratic but not liberal, in the most basic sense, which has nothing to do with left- or right-wing policies. For example, they may elect a government that promises to censor speech they dislike, or back a referendum that would curtail the rights of an unpopular minority.

At the same time, plenty of liberal institutions are undemocratic. Unelected judges can often overrule elected politicians, for example. Liberals see this as an essential constraint on the government's power. Even the people's chosen representatives must be subject to the law. In a liberal democracy, power is dispersed. Politicians are not only accountable to voters but also kept in line by feisty courts, journalists and pressure groups. A loyal opposition recognises the government as legitimate, but decries many of its actions and seeks to replace it at the next election. A clear boundary exists between the ruling party and the state.

This system is now under siege. In many countries, voters are picking leaders who do not respect it, and gradually undermine it, creating what Viktor Orban, Hungary's prime minister, proudly calls "illiberal democracy". Eventually, when enough checks and balances have been removed, a would-be autocrat finds it easier to neuter democracy itself, by shutting down the opposition (as in Turkey) or neutering the legislature (as in Venezuela, where the government staged a sham election on May 20th).

The mature democracies of the West are not yet in serious danger. Donald Trump may scorn liberal norms, but America's checks and balances are strong, and will outlast him. The real threat is to less mature democracies, where institutions are weaker and democratic habits less ingrained. Nonetheless, what happens in the West affects these places. America once inspired subjugated people and sought to promote democracy. It now has a president who openly admires Vladimir Putin and claims a "special bond" with Kim Jong Un.

Meanwhile, China supplies an alternative model. Having grown much less dictatorial after the death of Mao Zedong, it is reconcentrating power in one man, Xi Jinping, whose term limits as president have just been removed. Some would-be autocrats cite China as evidence that authoritarianism promotes economic growth-though what they often mean is that they too want to be presidents for life.

Globally, public support for democracy remains high. A Pew poll of 38 countries found that a median of 78% of people agreed that a system where elected representatives make laws was a good one. But hefty minorities approved of non-democratic alternatives. A worrying 24% thought that military rule would be fine, and 26% liked the idea of "a strong leader" who "can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts" (see chart 2). In general, autocracy was more popular among the less educated.

With such large majorities favouring it, leaders cannot openly admit that they plan to abolish democracy. However, many have grown adept at subverting its essence while maintaining its outward appearance. The details vary from country to country, but it is striking how much the new autocrats have in common and how attentively they learn from each other.

To oversimplify, a democracy typically declines like this. First, a crisis occurs and voters back a charismatic leader who promises to save them. Second, this leader finds enemies. His aim, in the words of H.L. Mencken, a 20th-century American wit, "is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Third, he nobbles independent institutions that might get in his way. Finally, he changes the rules to make it harder for voters to dislodge him. During the first three stages, his country is still a democracy. At some point in the final stage, it ceases to be one. All four stages are worth examining.

In Hungary, two shocks undermined faith in the old order. First came the financial crisis. Before it, many Hungarians took out absurdly risky foreign-currency mortgages. When the Hungarian forint crashed against the Swiss franc and they lost their homes, they were furious. Fidesz, a party that was once quite liberal but has become dramatically less so, won an election in 2010 by blaming the previous government and vowing to make borrowers whole.

The second shock was the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-16. Hardly any Syrians settled in Hungary, but thousands passed through on the way to Germany, so Hungarians saw them on television. They gave Fidesz's leader, Mr Orban, two handy enemies: the Muslim hordes and the liberal elite who wanted to let them in.

Mr Orban built a fence that largely stopped the flow of refugees. But still, he continued to play up the threat. His government ordered a poll asking voters what they thought of a fictitious plan by George Soros, a Hungarian-American billionaire, to bring 1m Middle Eastern and African migrants to Europe. A campaign poster showed Mr Soros grinning evilly and embracing opposition leaders holding wire cutters. "They would remove the fence together" ran the slogan. On April 8th Mr Orban's party was re-elected with a thumping majority. In May Mr Soros's foundation closed its office in Budapest. "Hungary disproves the notion that when you reach an income per head of $14,000 your democracy is safe," says Mr Mounk of a theory popular with political scientists.

Picking the right enemies is crucial. Migrants are good, because they cannot vote. Mr Soros is even better, because he is rich, funds liberal causes and is, you know, Jewish. He can be painted as all-powerful; but because he is not, he cannot harm the demagogues who demonise him.

Stirring up ethnic hatred is incredibly dangerous. So rabble-rousers often use dog-whistles. South Africa's former president, Jacob Zuma, denounced "white monopoly capital" rather than whites in general. Many leaders pick on small, commercially successful minorities. Zambia's late president, Michael Sata, won power after railing against Chinese bosses.

Criminals make ideal enemies, since no one likes them. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency of the Philippines in 2016 on a promise to kill drug dealers. An estimated 12,000 extra-judicial slayings later, the country is no safer but his government has an approval rating of around 80%.

Would-be autocrats need a positive agenda, too. Often they pose as defenders of an identity that voters hold dear, such as their nationality, culture or religion. Poland's ruling party, for example, waxes lyrical about the country's Catholic way of life, and lavishes subsidies on big families, who are likely to be rural and religious.

Parties of the nationalist right have learned from the left how to exploit identity politics. Both sides tend to favour "group rights" over those of individuals. The "Hungarian nation is not a simple sum of individuals," Mr Orban said in 2014, "but a community that needs to be organised, strengthened and developed." Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's nationalist guru, calls him "a hero".

To remain in power, autocrats need to nobble independent institutions. They do this gradually and quietly. The first target is often the justice system. Poland's ruling party passed a law in December forcing two-fifths of judges into retirement. On May 11th Mr Duterte forced out the chief justice of the Philippines, who had objected to his abuse of martial law.

The media must be nobbled, too. First, an autocrat in waiting puts his pals in charge of the public broadcaster and accuses critical outlets of spreading lies. Rather than banning independent media, as despots might have done a generation ago, he slaps spurious fines or tax bills on their owners, forcing them to sell their businesses to loyal tycoons. This technique was perfected by Mr Putin in Russia, and is now widely copied. In Turkey, the last big independent media group was in March sold to a friend of Mr Erdogan.

Getting the security forces on side is essential. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's former president, took their loyalty for granted and was thrown out. Other strongmen are less complacent. To keep the men with guns happy, Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, lets them loot the national food-distribution system. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the president of Egypt, who won 92% of the vote in March, lets the police top up their salaries by robbing civilians.

With the courts, press and armed forces in his pocket, a strongman can set about neutering every other institution that counts. He can sideline parliament, redraw the electoral map and bar serious opponents from politics.

Whatever ideology they profess, autocrats are often opportunistic. President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua started as a revolutionary Marxist, seizing power in 1979. He lost an election in 1990 partly because he was anti-Catholic. So he rebranded himself as a devout Catholic-pushing a ban on abortion even if the mother's life is at risk-and was re-elected in 2006 against a divided opposition. Last year his wife, Rosario Murillo, became vice-president, thus establishing a dynasty resembling the dictatorship he once overthrew.

Mr Ortega and his Sandinistas have commandeered the supreme court, which abolished presidential term limits, and created shell "opposition" parties to simulate choice while repressing genuine opponents. Critical media find themselves under new ownership, often that of Mr Ortega's family.

None of this chipping away at democracy sparked unrest. It was only when Mr Ortega tried to grab Nicaraguans' pensions that they rioted. The ruling Sandinistas' mismanagement and graft has left the public-pension pot all but empty. Mr Ortega told workers to top it up. In response, tens of thousands took to the streets in April and tore down hideous statues erected in honour of Ms Murillo. The regime has clung to power only by shooting people.

Autocrats who plan to stay in power for ever need to indoctrinate children. "Most countries don't have events from two years ago in their school history books. We do," says a Turkish liberal, aghast that Turks as young as four are taught that their president saved the nation from the Gulenists. Venezuela's Bolivarian University offers free tuition to students who submit to lectures blaming America for food shortages.

Liberalism and its discontents

Much has been said about the failures of liberal democracies. Although they are typically rich and peaceful, many of their citizens are disgruntled. Globalisation and technology have made them fear for their jobs. The culture wars ensure that more or less everyone feels disrespected by someone. The rise of autocracy is in part a reaction to these big historical trends. But it is also because power-hungry leaders have learned how to exploit them. You cannot have autocracy without an autocrat.

Many people crave power. Some, because they want to change the world. Some, for its own sake. Some, because power brings adulation, money and sex. Many who attain power have all these motives. Small wonder they cling to it.

Most authoritarian regimes are filthy. Of the countries and territories in the dirtiest third of Transparency International's corruption perceptions index, not one is rated "free" by Freedom House. Of those in the cleanest 20, only Singapore and Hong Kong fail to qualify as free.

Autocracy and graft create a vicious circle. Power with few constraints enables those who wield it, or their friends, to get rich. The more they steal, the more incentive they have to rig the system to remain in charge. If they lose power, they risk prosecution, as Mr Zuma is discovering in South Africa. Thus, whenever an autocrat makes a stirring speech about national pride, his real aim may be to deflect attention from his own skulduggery. Mr Orban's opponents would love to discuss why his friends are now among the richest people in Hungary, or why there is a huge football stadium in his tiny hometown. But his friends control the media, and would rather talk about immigrants.

Democrats can fight back. Five recent examples stand out. In Sri Lanka, the opposition united to beat a spendthrift, vicious autocrat. In the Gambia, the threat of an invasion by neighbouring countries forced a strongman to accept that he had lost an election. In South Africa, an elected leader who subverted institutions and let cronies loot with impunity was tossed out by his own party in January. In Armenia, an autocrat was ousted in April by mass protests.

And in Malaysia, the prime minister, Najib Razak, tried to steal an election in May but failed. Despite gerrymandering, censorship and racist appeals to the Malay majority, voters dumped the ruling party of the past 61 years. Its sleaze had grown too blatant. America's justice department has accused Mr Najib of receiving $681m from 1MDB, a state fund from which $4.5bn disappeared. He says the money was a gift from an unnamed Saudi royal. The opposition gleefully contrasted the vast sums Mr Najib's wife spends on jewellery with the difficulty ordinary folks have making ends meet. "Najib just makes up his own rules," says a taxi-driver who switched sides to back the new government.

That strongmen make up their own rules is why liberal democracy is worth defending. And in the long run, it seems to deliver better material results. A study by Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that switching from autocracy to democracy adds 20% to income per head over 30 years, though some economists dispute these findings. Guillermo Vuletin of the World Bank argues that autocrats fall when economies slump, and the democrats who succeed them take credit for the inevitable recovery.

What is certain, however, is that freely elected governments bound by the rule of law have less power to abuse citizens. "Little by little they took away our rights," says a journalist in Diyarbakir, who was recently arrested for five innocuous tweets. "Every day I check the news to see which of my friends has been detained."

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After decades of triumph, democracy is losing ground

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IN A glass case at the Diyarbakir Bar Association are a striped shirt, dark coat and coiled belt. They belonged to the former chairman, Tahir Elci, a lawyer who was murdered in 2015 amid clashes between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatists.

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IS DEMOCRACY in trouble? Nearly 30 years after Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy, this question is no longer outlandish. America, long a beacon of democracy, has a president who tramples on its norms. Xi Jinping is steering authoritarian China towards one-man rule. And across the emerging world, strongmen stride tall. Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, having locked up or purged more than 200,000 Turks for political reasons, will probably prevail in elections that start on June 24th and assume sultan-like powers. Nicaragua's regime is pulling out protesters' toenails. Vladimir Putin is about to reap a huge propaganda coup from the World Cup.

Indices of the health of democracy show alarming deterioration since the financial crisis of 2007-08. One published by The Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister firm, has 89 countries regressing in 2017, compared with only 27 improving. Some surveys find that less than a third of young Americans think it is "essential" to live in a democracy. Small wonder that this year has seen a boom in books with frightening titles such as "How Democracy Ends" and "The People vs. Democracy".
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This pessimism should be put in context. It is a recent reversal after remarkable progress in the second half of the 20th century. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies; by 2000 only eight countries had never held an election. A broad poll of 38 countries shows that typically four out of five people prefer to live in a democracy. And not all threats to pluralism are of the same order. In mature democracies such as America, strong checks and balances constrain even the most power-hungry president. In immature democracies, such institutions are weaker, so a strongman can undermine them quickly, often without much fuss. That is why the most worrying deterioration, going by both the number of countries and the speed of retreat, is in the fragile, young democracies of the emerging world. From Venezuela to Hungary, these reversals reveal striking similarities (see International section). That suggests reasons for optimism-as well as lessons for the West.

How to undermine a democracy

Put crudely, newish democracies are typically dismantled in four stages. First comes a genuine popular grievance with the status quo and, often, with the liberal elites who are in charge. Hungarians were buffeted by the financial crisis and then terrified by hordes of Syrian refugees passing through en route to Germany. Turkey's pious Muslim majority felt sidelined by secular elites. Second, would-be strongmen identify enemies for angry voters to blame. Mr Putin talks of a Western conspiracy to humiliate Russia. President Nicolás Maduro blames America for Venezuela's troubles; Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orban, blames George Soros for his country's. Third, having won power by exploiting fear or discontent, strongmen chisel away at a free press, an impartial justice system and other institutions that form the "liberal" part of liberal democracy-all in the name of thwarting the enemies of the people. They accuse honest judges of malfeasance and replace them with stooges, or unleash tax inspectors on independent television stations and force their owners to sell.

This is the stage of "illiberal democracy", where individual rights and the rule of law are undermined, but strongmen can still pretend to be democrats since they win free-ish elections. Eventually, in stage four, the erosion of liberal institutions leads to the death of democracy in all but name. Neutral election monitors are muzzled; opposition candidates locked up; districts gerrymandered; constitutions altered; and, in extreme cases, legislatures emasculated.

The battle is not always to the strongman

This process is neither inevitable nor incurable. India has had a vibrant democracy for 70 years; Botswana for more than 50. Deteriorations can be stopped and even reversed. In recent weeks Malaysians voted out Najib Razak and the UMNO party that had ruled since independence; protesters in Armenia broke a decade of one-party rule. Last December South Africans forced out President Jacob Zuma, a would-be strongman who let his cronies loot the state. Even Turkey is not doomed: opposition parties have a good chance of winning control of parliament this month.

It is hard to say which democracies are at risk. Economic stagnation and surges in immigration are often precursors of trouble. But they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Few would have predicted that democracy would totter in Poland, a booming economy with few immigrants that has benefited hugely from European Union membership. More important than the underlying conditions is the degree to which would-be autocrats learn from each other-how to spread fake news, squash pesky journalists and play the populist card. Their weaknesses are remarkably similar, too. From Malaysia to South Africa, strongmen have eventually been felled by popular revulsion at the scale of their corruption.

These similarities hold some lessons. The main one is that institutions matter. Western democracy-promotion has often focused on the quality of elections. In fact, independent judges and noisy journalists are democracy's first line of defence. Donors and NGOs should redouble their efforts to support the rule of law and a free press, though autocrats will inevitably accuse those whom they help of being foreign agents. The second is that the reversals have been driven by opportunistic strongmen rather than the voters' embrace of illiberal ideology. That ultimately makes these regimes brittle. When autocrats steal too brazenly, no censor can stop people from knowing-and sometimes booting them out. The last, more uncomfortable lesson is that the example set by mature democracies matters. America's powerful institutions will constrain President Donald Trump at home. But they do not stop his contempt for democratic norms-the serial lying, the cosying with dictators-from giving cover to would-be autocrats.

Reports of the death of democracy are greatly exaggerated. But the least-bad system of government ever devised is in trouble. It needs defenders.

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Lessons from the rise of strongmen in weak states

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IS DEMOCRACY in trouble? Nearly 30 years after Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy, this question is no longer outlandish. America, long a beacon of democracy, has a president who tramples on its norms. Xi Jinping is steering authoritarian China towards one-man rule.

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calls for urgent action

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THREE years ago the world agreed in Paris to keep global warming below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and preferably no higher than 1.5°C. Scientists expecting a fuzzier climate-friendly commitment were astonished by the inclusion of the lower target, inserted at the insistence of low-lying island nations for which an additional half a degree could spell doom because of rising sea-levels. Since then researchers have explored the difference between the two scenarios in other areas, from biodiversity to frequency of natural disasters, as well as what it would take to achieve them.

On October 8th the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a survey of that literature. The much-anticipated report concludes that letting Earth warm beyond 1.5°C presents a serious danger to humans and other species. It also presents four different possible routes to achieving this more ambitious aim (see chart), three of which require removing considerable amounts of carbon from the atmosphere using technology like Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS)-burning crops and storing the resulting emissions deep underground (see our briefing on carbon capture). Governments, whose present Paris pledges put the planet on course for 3°C of warming, had better read it carefully.

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A climate change report calls for urgent action

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THREE years ago the world agreed in Paris to keep global warming below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and preferably no higher than 1.5°C. Scientists expecting a fuzzier climate-friendly commitment were astonished by the inclusion of the lower target, inserted at the insistence of low-lying island nations for which an additional half a degree could spell doom because of rising sea-levels.

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CONSEILS METHODOLOGIQUES POUR L’EPREUVE DE LANGUE 2018.docx

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Only 5 Nations Can Hit Any Place on Earth With a Missile. For Now. (Published 2018)

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North Korea is among a number of countries that have been working to improve the accuracy and range of their missiles.

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Watch the video!!!

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After 200 years of expansion, democracy's growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms.

That has left us and scholars who study democracy obsessed with a set of questions. Is this all just a blip, or is democracy in real trouble? Are the oldest and sturdiest democracies, like those of Europe and the United States, really as safe as they seem? And why would people voluntarily dismantle their own democracy from within?

No one knows the answers for sure. But we're starting to figure them out and it's not all good news. Here, in the first of what will become a regular series of videos exploring big questions and ideas about the world, we explain what we know about democracy's troubles, what's causing them and where it leads.

Follow our newsletter for more on the ideas behind major world events and updates on future videos.

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Is There Something Wrong With Democracy?

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After 200 years of expansion, democracy's growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms. That has left us and scholars who study democracy obsessed with a set of questions.

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AMERICAN presidents have a habit of describing their Chinese counterparts in terms of awe. A fawning Richard Nixon said to Mao Zedong that the chairman's writings had "changed the world". To Jimmy Carter, Deng Xiaoping was a string of flattering adjectives: "smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly". Bill Clinton described China's then president, Jiang Zemin, as a "visionary" and "a man of extraordinary intellect". Donald Trump is no less wowed. The Washington Post quotes him as saying that China's current leader, Xi Jinping, is "probably the most powerful" China has had in a century.

Mr Trump may be right. And were it not political suicide for an American president to say so, he might plausibly have added: "Xi Jinping is the world's most powerful leader." To be sure, China's economy is still second in size to America's and its army, though rapidly gaining muscle, pales in comparison. But economic heft and military hardware are not everything. The leader of the free world has a narrow, transactional approach to foreigners and seems unable to enact his agenda at home. The United States is still the world's most powerful country, but its leader is weaker at home and less effective abroad than any of his recent predecessors, not least because he scorns the values and alliances that underpin American influence.

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The president of the world's largest authoritarian state, by contrast, walks with swagger abroad. His grip on China is tighter than any leader's since Mao. And whereas Mao's China was chaotic and miserably poor, Mr Xi's is a dominant engine of global growth. His clout will soon be on full display. On October 18th China's ruling Communist Party will convene a five-yearly congress in Beijing (see Briefing). It will be the first one presided over by Mr Xi. Its 2,300 delegates will sing his praises to the skies. More sceptical observers might ask whether Mr Xi will use his extraordinary power for good or ill.

World, take note

On his numerous foreign tours, Mr Xi presents himself as an apostle of peace and friendship, a voice of reason in a confused and troubled world. Mr Trump's failings have made this much easier. At Davos in January Mr Xi promised the global elite that he would be a champion of globalisation, free trade and the Paris accord on climate change. Members of his audience were delighted and relieved. At least, they thought, one great power was willing to stand up for what was right, even if Mr Trump (then president-elect) would not.

Mr Xi's words are heeded partly because he has the world's largest stockpile of foreign currency to back them up. His "Belt and Road Initiative" may be puzzlingly named, but its message is clear-hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese money are to be invested abroad in railways, ports, power stations and other infrastructure that will help vast swathes of the world to prosper. That is the kind of leadership America has not shown since the post-war days of the Marshall Plan in western Europe (which was considerably smaller).

Mr Xi is also projecting what for China is unprecedented military power abroad. This year he opened the country's first foreign military base, in Djibouti. He has sent the Chinese navy on manoeuvres ever farther afield, including in July on NATO's doorstep in the Baltic Sea alongside Russia's fleet. China says it would never invade other countries to impose its will (apart from Taiwan, which it does not consider a country). Its base-building efforts are to support peacekeeping, anti-piracy and humanitarian missions, it says. As for the artificial islands with military-grade runways it is building in the South China Sea, these are purely defensive.

Unlike Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, Mr Xi is not a global troublemaker who seeks to subvert democracy and destabilise the West. Still, he is too tolerant of troublemaking by his nuke-brandishing ally, North Korea (see Schumpeter). And some of China's military behaviour alarms its neighbours, not only in South-East Asia but also in India and Japan.

At home, Mr Xi's instincts are at least as illiberal as those of his Russian counterpart. He believes that even a little political permissiveness could prove not only his own undoing, but that of his regime. The fate of the Soviet Union haunts him, and that insecurity has consequences. He mistrusts not only the enemies his purges have created but also China's fast-growing, smartphone-wielding middle class, and the shoots of civil society that were sprouting when he took over. He seems determined to tighten control over Chinese society, not least by enhancing the state's powers of surveillance, and to keep the commanding heights of the economy firmly under the party's thumb. All this will make China less rich than it should be, and a more stifling place to live. Human-rights abuses have grown worse under Mr Xi, with barely a murmur of complaint from other world leaders.

Liberals once mourned the "ten lost years" of reform under Mr Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao. Those ten years have become 15, and may exceed 20. Some optimists argue that we have not yet seen the real Mr Xi-that the congress will help him consolidate his power, and after that he will begin social and economic reforms in earnest, building on his relative success in curbing corruption. If he is a closet pluralist, however, he disguises it well. And alarmingly for those who believe that all leaders have a sell-by date, Mr Xi is thought to be reluctant to step down in 2022, when precedent suggests he should.

Reasons to be fearful

Mr Xi may think that concentrating more or less unchecked power over 1.4bn Chinese in the hands of one man is, to borrow one of his favourite terms, the "new normal" of Chinese politics. But it is not normal; it is dangerous. No one should have that much power. One-man rule is ultimately a recipe for instability in China, as it has been in the past-think of Mao and his Cultural Revolution. It is also a recipe for arbitrary behaviour abroad, which is especially worrying at a time when Mr Trump's America is pulling back and creating a power vacuum. The world does not want an isolationist United States or a dictatorship in China. Alas, it may get both.

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Xi Jinping has more clout than Donald Trump. The world should be wary

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AMERICAN presidents have a habit of describing their Chinese counterparts in terms of awe. A fawning Richard Nixon said to Mao Zedong that the chairman's writings had "changed the world". To Jimmy Carter, Deng Xiaoping was a string of flattering adjectives: "smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly".

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Real Americans understand that our nation was born in a rebellion against tyranny. They feel an instinctive aversion to tyrants everywhere, and an underlying sympathy for democratic regimes, even those with whom we may currently have disputes.

But the present occupant of the White House has made no secret of preferring the company, not of democratic leaders, but of authoritarian rulers - not just Vladimir Putin, but people like Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Rodrigo Duterte, the homicidal leader of the Philippines. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia, his commerce secretary exulted in the absence of hostile demonstrations, an absence ensured by the repressiveness of the regime.

Real Americans expect public officials to be humbled by the responsibility that comes with the job. They're not supposed to be boastful blowhards, constantly claiming credit for things they haven't done - like Trump bragging about job creation that has continued at more or less the same pace as under his predecessor - or which never even happened, like his mythical victory in the popular vote.

Real Americans understand that being a powerful public figure means facing criticism. That comes with the job, and you're supposed to tolerate that criticism even if you feel it's unfair. Foreign autocrats may rage against unflattering news reports, threaten to inflict financial harm on publications they dislike, talk about imprisoning journalists; American leaders aren't supposed to sound like that.

Finally, real Americans who manage to achieve high office realize that they are servants of the people, meant to use their position for the public good. In practice, human nature being what it is, many officials have in fact taken financial advantage of their office. But we've always understood that this was wrong - and presidents, in particular, are supposed to be above such things. Now we have a leader who is transparently exploiting his office for personal enrichment, in ways that all too obviously amount in practice to influence-buying by domestic malefactors and foreign governments alike.

In short, these days we have a president who is really, truly, deeply un-American, someone who doesn't share the values and ideals that made this country special.

In fact, he's so deeply alienated from the American idea that he can't even bring himself to fake it. We all know that Trump feels comfortable with white supremacists, but it's amazing that he won't even give them a light tap on the wrist. We all know that Putin is Trump's kind of guy, but it's remarkable that Trump won't even pretend to be outraged at Putin's meddling with our election.

Speaking of which: I have no more idea than anyone else what Robert Mueller's probe into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, questionable financial ties, possible obstruction of justice and more will find. Trump is acting very much like someone with something big to hide, but we don't yet know exactly what that something is.

Whatever role foreign influence may have played and may still be playing, however, we don't need to wonder whether an anti-American cabal, hostile to everything we stand for, determined to undermine everything that truly makes this country great, has seized power in Washington. It has: it's called the Trump administration.

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charlottesville  va  violence (august  2017)

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Opinion | When the President Is Un-American

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Real Americans understand that our nation was born in a rebellion against tyranny. They feel an instinctive aversion to tyrants everywhere, and an underlying sympathy for democratic regimes, even those with whom we may currently have disputes.

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Americans Can't Afford to Grow Used to This

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A year into the presidency of Donald Trump, the country is in danger of accepting the unacceptable.

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Tommy sits down with Michael Morell, the former acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. They discuss his experience as President Bush's briefer on 9/11, hunting Osama bin Laden, the state of ISIS, North Korea and the impending release of the JFK assassination files. It was sick.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Media

Dozens of newspapers, television stations, bloggers and radio stations around the United States - including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal - pursued reporting based on the hacked material, significantly increasing the effects of the cyberattack. In some cases, Guccifer 2.0 and DC Leaks took requests from reporters, releasing documents to them directly.

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russian interference in 2016 us elections and ties to trump associates

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Following the Links From Russian Hackers to the U.S. Election

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Media Dozens of newspapers, television stations, bloggers and radio stations around the United States - including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal - pursued reporting based on the hacked material, significantly increasing the effects of the cyberattack.

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Debate: democracy is threatening suicide

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Debate: democracy is threatening suicide

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Western Democracy Is Threatening Suicide

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Recent waves of populism and nationalism - including those that fueled Brexit and Donald Trump - have some fearing the end of Western democracy. But are these events really a threat to the liberal world order?

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In the United States, too, I found resistance to the idea that Brexit was a harbinger of a Trump victory. I was assured over and over by liberal friends that Trump would never be president. American voters were too sensible to fall for his hateful demagogy. Trump, I was told, was a product of peculiarly American strains of populism that flare up periodically, like the anti-immigrant nativism in the 1920s or Huey P. Long in 1930s Louisiana, but would never reach as far as the White House. Traditional American populism of this kind, directed at the rich, bankers, immigrants or big business, could, in any case, not be usefully compared with English hostility to the European Union, because there was no supranational political union the United States belonged to.

And yet Trump and Farage quickly recognized what they shared. In Scotland, where Trump happened to be reopening a golf resort the day after the Brexit vote, he pointed out the parallels. Brexit, Trump said to the Scots who voted overwhelmingly against it, was "a great thing": The British had "taken back their country." Phrases like "sovereignty," "control" and "greatness" fired up the crowds in both Trump's and Farage's campaigns. You might think they meant something different by those words. Farage and his allies, many of them English nationalists, wanted to wrest national sovereignty from the European Union. But from whom or what does Trump want to take his country back? Trump has gestured at the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization as noxious elements run by international elites to the detriment of the American working man. But I can't imagine that these institutions fill most of his followers with rage.

In fact, most international institutions, including the I.M.F. and NATO, were set up under American auspices, to promote the interests of the United States and its allies. European unification, and the resulting European Union, too, have not only been approved of but also vociferously encouraged by American presidents before Trump. But his America First sentiments - for that is what they are at this point, more than a policy - are hostile to these organizations. And so, by and large, are the likes of Nigel Farage.

So Farage and Trump were speaking about the same thing. But they have more in common than distaste for international or supranational institutions. When Farage, in his speech in Jackson, fulminated against the banks, the liberal media and the political establishment, he was not talking about foreign bodies but about the aliens in our midst, as it were, our own elites who are, by implication, not "real, "ordinary" or "decent." And not only Farage. The British prime minister, Theresa May, not a Brexiteer before the referendum, called members of international-minded elites "citizens of nowhere." When three High Court judges in Britain ruled that Parliament, and not just the prime minister's cabinet, should decide when to trigger the legal mechanism for Brexit, they were denounced in a major British tabloid newspaper as "enemies of the people."

Trump deliberately tapped into the same animus against citizens who are not "real people." He made offensive remarks about Muslims, immigrants, refugees and Mexicans. But the deepest hostility was directed against those elitist traitors within America who supposedly coddle minorities and despise the "real people." The last ad of the Trump campaign attacked what Joseph Stalin used to call "rootless cosmopolitans" in a particularly insidious manner. Incendiary references to a "global power structure" that was robbing honest working people of their wealth were illustrated by pictures of George Soros, Janet Yellen and Lloyd Blankfein. Perhaps not every Trump supporter realized that all three are Jewish. But those who did cannot have missed the implications.

When Trump and Farage stood on that stage together in Mississippi, they spoke as though they were patriots reclaiming their great countries from foreign interests. No doubt they regard Britain and the United States as exceptional nations. But their success is dismaying precisely because it goes against a particular idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism. Not the traditional self-image of certain American and British jingoists who like to think of the United States as the City on the Hill or Britain as the sceptered isle splendidly aloof from the wicked Continent, but another kind of Anglo-American exception: the one shaped by World War II. The defeat of Germany and Japan resulted in a grand alliance, led by the United States, in the West and Asia. Pax Americana, along with a unified Europe, would keep the democratic world safe. If Trump and Farage get their way, much of that dream will be in tatters.

In the years when most of Europe was overrun by the Nazis or fascist dictatorships, the Anglo-American allies were the last hope of freedom, democracy and internationalism. I grew up in the world they shaped. My native country, the Netherlands, was freed in 1945, six years before I was born, by British and North American troops (with the help of some very brave Poles). Those of us with no direct memories of this had still seen movies like "The Longest Day," about the Normandy landings. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Kenneth More and his bulldog were our liberating heroes.

This was, of course, a childish conceit. For one thing, it left out the Soviet Red Army, which liberated my father, who was forced to work in a factory in Berlin along with other young men who, under German occupation, refused to sign a loyalty oath to the Nazis. But the victorious Anglo-Saxon nations, especially the United States, largely shaped the postwar Western world we lived in. The words of the Atlantic Charter, drawn up by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941, resonated deeply throughout a war-torn Europe: Trade barriers would be lowered, peoples would be free, social welfare would advance and global cooperation would ensue. Churchill called the charter "not a law, but a star."

Pax Americana, in which Britain played the role of special junior partner, whose specialness was perhaps more keenly felt in London than in Washington, was based on a liberal consensus. Not only NATO, set up to protect Western democracies, chiefly against the Soviet threat, but also the ideal of European unification were born from the ashes of 1945. Many Europeans, liberals as well as conservatives, believed that only a united Europe would stop them from tearing their continent apart again. Even Winston Churchill, whose heart was more invested in Commonwealth and Empire, was in favor of it.

The Cold War made the exceptional role of the victorious allies even more vital. The West, its freedoms protected by the United States, needed a plausible counternarrative to Soviet ideology. This included a promise of greater social and economic equality. Of course, neither the United States, with its long history of racial prejudice and occasional fits of political hysteria, like McCarthyism, nor Britain, with its tenacious class system, ever quite lived up to the shining ideals they presented to the postwar world. Nonetheless, the image of exceptional Anglo-American liberty held up, not only in countries that had been occupied during the war but in the defeated nations, Germany (at least in the western half) and Japan, as well.

America's prestige was greatly bolstered not just by the soldiers who helped liberate Europe but also by the men and women back home who fought to make their society more equal and their democracy more inclusive. By struggling against the injustices in their own country, figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Freedom Riders or indeed President Obama kept the hope of American exceptionalism alive. As did the youth culture of the 1960s. When Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright and later president, hailed Frank Zappa, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones as his political heroes, he was not being frivolous. Under communist oppression, the pop music of America and Britain represented freedom. Europeans born not long after World War II often professed to hate the United States, or at least its politics and wars, but the expressions of their hostility were almost entirely borrowed from America itself. Bob Dylan received this year's Nobel Prize for literature, not least because the Swedish jury of baby boomers grew up with his words of protest.

The ideal of exceptional Anglo-Saxon liberties obviously goes back much further than the aftermath of Hitler's defeat, let alone Bob Dylan and the Stones. Alexis de Tocqueville's admiring account of American democracy in the 1830s is well known. Much less famous are his writings on Britain in the same period. Born soon after the French Revolution, Tocqueville was haunted by the question of why Britain, with its mighty aristocracy, was spared such an upheaval. Why did the British people not rebel? His answer was that the social system in Britain was just open enough to allow a person to hope that with hard work, ingenuity and luck, he could rise in society. The British version of the American dream: "The Great Gatsby" may be the great American novel, but Gatsby could have existed in Britain too.

In practice, there were probably not all that many rags-to-riches stories in 19th-century Britain. But the fact that Benjamin Disraeli, the son of Sephardic Jews, could become prime minister, and an earl, no less, provided the basis for many generations in Europe to believe in Britain as an exceptional country. Jews from Russia or Lithuania, or from Germany, like my own great-grandparents, flocked to Britain as immigrants in the hope that they, too, could become English gentlemen.

Anglophilia, like the American dream, may have been based on myths, but myths can be potent and long-lasting. The notion that sufficient effort and talent can beat the odds has been especially important in Britain and the United States. Anglo-American capitalism can be harsh in many ways, but because free markets are receptive to new talent and cheap labor, they have spawned the kind of societies, pragmatic and relatively open, where immigrants can thrive, the very kind that rulers of more closed, communitarian, autocratic societies tend to despise.

Wilhelm II, kaiser of Germany until 1918, when his country was defeated in the First World War, which he had done his best to unleash, was such a figure. Half English himself, he called England a nation of shopkeepers and described it as "Juda-England," a country corrupted by sinister alien elites, where money counted more than the virtues of blood and soil. In later decades, this kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric was more often aimed at the United States. The Nazis were convinced that Jewish capitalists ruled America, not just in Hollywood but in Washington and, naturally, New York. This notion is still commonly held, though less in Europe than in the Middle East and some parts of Asia. But talk about "citizens of nowhere," sinister cosmopolitan elites and conspiratorial bankers fits precisely in the same tradition. A terrifying irony of contemporary Anglo-American populism is the common use of phrases that were traditionally used by enemies of the English-speaking countries.

Yet even those who don't go along with the kaiser's loathsome words recognize that liberal economics, as practiced since the middle of the 19th century in Britain and the United States, has a darker side. It does not allow for much redistribution of wealth or protection of the most vulnerable citizens. There have been exceptions: Roosevelt's New Deal, for instance, or Britain's postwar Labor government under Clement Attlee, which created free national health care, built better public housing, improved education and guaranteed other blessings of the welfare state. British working-class men who risked their lives for their country during the war expected no less. On the whole, however, Britain and the United States have, compared with many Western countries, generally set greater store on individual economic freedom than on the ideal of egalitarianism. And nothing creates such swift and radical social change as unfettered free enterprise.

The Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s - deregulating financial services, closing down coal mines and manufacturing plants and hacking away at the benefits of the New Deal and the British welfare state - was regarded by many conservatives, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a triumph for Anglo-American exceptionalism, a great coup for freedom. Europeans outside Britain were more skeptical. They tended to see Thatcherism and Reaganomics as ruthless forms of economic liberalism, making some people vastly richer but leaving many more out in the cold. Nonetheless, in order to compete, many governments began to emulate the same economic system.

That this happened at the end of the Cold War was no coincidence. The collapse of Soviet communism was celebrated, rightly, as the final liberation of Europe. Countries, left behind on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain after World War II, were free at last. The first President Bush spoke about the "new world order," led by the only superpower left standing. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution appeared to have triumphed.

But the end of communism in the West also had other, less desirable consequences. The horrors of the Soviet empire tainted other forms of leftism, including social democratic ideals, which in fact had been anti-communist. Even as the "end of history" was declared and the Anglo-American liberal democratic model was expected to be unrivaled forever, many began to believe that all forms of collectivist idealism led straight to the gulag. Thatcher once declared that there was no such thing as society, just individuals and families. People had to be forced to take care of themselves.

Radical economic liberalism did more to destroy traditional communities than any social-democratic governments ever did. Thatcher's most implacable enemies were the miners and industrial workers. The neoliberal rhetoric was all about prosperity "trickling down" from above. But it never quite worked out that way. Those workers and their children, now languishing in impoverished rust-belt cities, received another blow in the banking crisis of 2008. Major postwar institutions, like the I.M.F., which the United States set up in 1945 to secure a more stable world, no longer functioned properly. The I.M.F. did not even see the crisis coming. Large numbers of people, who never recovered from the crash, decided to rebel and voted for Brexit - and for Trump.

Neither Brexit nor Trump are likely to bring great benefits to these voters. But at least for a while, they can dream of taking their countries back to an imaginary, purer, more wholesome past. This reaction is not only sweeping across the United States and Britain. The same thing is happening in other countries, including some with long liberal democratic traditions, like the Netherlands. Twenty years ago, Amsterdam was seen as the capital of everything wild and progressive, the kind of place where cops openly smoke pot (another myth, but a telling one). The Dutch thought of themselves as the world champions of racial and religious tolerance. Of all European countries, the Netherlands was the most firmly embedded in the Anglosphere. Now the most popular political party, according to the latest polls, is led practically as a one-man operation by Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union firebrand who hailed Trump's victory as the coming of a "patriotic spring."

In France, Marine Le Pen, who shares Wilders's enthusiasm for Trump, might be the next president. Poland and Hungary are already ruled by populist autocrats who reject the kind of liberalism that Eastern European dissidents once struggled so hard to achieve. Norbert Hofer, a man of the far right, could become the next president of Austria.

Does this mean that Britain and the United States are no longer exceptional? Perhaps. But I think it is also true to say that the very idea of Anglo-American exceptionalism has made populism in those countries more potent. The self-flattering notion that the Western victors in World War II are special, braver and freer than any other people, that the United States is the greatest nation in the history of man, that Great Britain - the country that stood alone against Hitler - is superior to any European let alone non-European country has not only led to some ill-conceived wars but also helped to paper over the inequalities built into Anglo-American capitalism. The notion of natural superiority, of the sheer luck of being born an American or a Briton, gave a sense of entitlement to people who, in terms of education or prosperity, were stuck in the lower ranks of society.

This worked quite well until the last decades of the last century. Not only were the fortunes of working- or lower-middle-class people in Britain beginning to dwindle compared with those of the rich, who were steadily getting richer, but it gradually became clear even to the most insular Britons that they were doing much worse than the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Dutch, worse even than the French, Britain's oldest rivals. One way of venting their rage was to fight in soccer stadiums, taunting German fans by mimicking British bombers and bellowing slogans about winning the war.

The so-called football hooligans remained an embarrassing minority, but there were other ways to express the same feelings. The European Union, for which most British people had never felt a great love, actually made many parts of Britain more prosperous. The blight of the old industrial cities and mining towns was not a result of European Union policies. But it was easy for "Euro-skeptics" to deflect popular attention from domestic problems by blaming foreigners who were supposedly running the show in Brussels. Europhobes liked to claim that "this was not why we fought the war." The specter of not just Hitler but also Napoleon was sometimes evoked. Spitfires and talk of Britain's finest hour made a rhetorical comeback in the UKIP campaign to leave Europe. Some pro-Brexit politicians even praised the greatness of the British Empire. "Taking back control" by leaving the European Union is not going to make most people in Britain more prosperous. The contrary is more likely to be true. But it takes the sting out of relative failure. It feeds the desire to feel exceptional, entitled, in short, to be great again.

Something similar has happened in the United States. Not only were even the least privileged Americans told that they lived in God's own country, but white Americans, however impoverished and undereducated, had the comforting sense that there was always a group beneath them, who did not share their entitlement, or claim to greatness, a class of people with a darker skin. With a Harvard-educated black president, this fiction became increasingly difficult to sustain.

Trump and the leaders of Brexit had a fine instinct for these popular feelings. In a way, Trump is a Gatsby gone sour. He played on the wounded pride of large communities and inflamed the passions of people who fear the changes that make them feel abandoned. In the United States, this brought out old strains of nativism. In Britain, English nationalism is the main force behind Brexit. But in both cases, "taking back our country" means a retreat from the world that the Anglo-Americans envisaged after 1945. English nationalists have opted for a modern version of Splendid Isolation (paradoxically, a term coined to describe British foreign policy under Benjamin Disraeli). Trump wants to put America First.

Brexit Britain and Trump's America are linked in their desire to pull down the pillars of Pax Americana and European unification. In a perverse way, this may herald a revival of a "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, a case of history repeating itself not exactly as farce but as tragi-farce. Trump told Theresa May that he would like to have the same relationship with her that Ronald Reagan had with Margaret Thatcher. But the first British politician to arrive at Trump Tower to congratulate the president-elect was not the prime minister or even the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, but Nigel Farage.

Trump and Farage, beaming like schoolboys in front of Trump's gilded elevator, gloated over their victories by repeating the same word that once made their respective countries exceptional: "freedom." In the privacy of Trump's home, Farage suggested that the new president should move Winston Churchill's bust back into the Oval Office. Trump thought this a splendid idea.

A month before Trump's election and three months after the Brexit vote, I visited the great military historian Sir Michael Howard at his home in rural England. As a young man, Howard fought the Germans as an officer in the British Army. He landed in Italy in 1943 and took part in the decisive battle of Salerno, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. John Wayne and Kenneth More were a fantasy. Sir Michael was the real thing. He is 95 years old.

After lunch at a local pub, just a few miles from where my grandparents used to live, we talked about Brexit, the war, American politics, Europe and our families. The setting could not have been more English, with the pale autumn sun setting over the rolling hills of Berkshire. Like my great-grandparents, Sir Michael's maternal grandparents were German Jews who moved to England, where they did very well. Like mine, his family of immigrants became utterly British. In addition to being Regius professor of history at Oxford University, Howard taught at Yale. He knows America well and has no illusions about the "special relationship," which he believes was invented by Churchill and was always much overblown.

Sitting in his drawing room, with books piled up around us, many of them about World War II, I wanted to hear his thoughts on Brexit. He replied in a tone of resigned melancholy more than outrage. Brexit, he said, "is accelerating the disintegration of the Western world." Contemplating that world, so carefully constructed after the war he fought in, he said: "Perhaps it was just a bubble in an ocean." I asked him about the special Anglo-American relationship. "Ah, 'the special relationship,' " he said. "It was a necessary myth, a bit like Christianity. But now where do we go?"

Where indeed? The last hope of the West might be Germany, the country that Michael Howard fought against and that I hated as a child. Angela Merkel's message to Trump on the day after his victory was a perfect expression of Western values that are still worth defending. She would welcome a close cooperation with the United States, she said, but only on the basis of "democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views." Merkel spoke as the true heiress of the Atlantic Charter.

Germany, too, once thought it was the exceptional nation. This ended in a worldwide catastrophe. The Germans learned their lesson. They no longer wanted to be exceptional in any way, which is why they were so keen to be embedded in a unified Europe. The last thing Germans wanted was to lead other countries, especially in any military sense. This is the way Germany's neighbors wished it as well. Pax Americana seemed vastly preferable to a revival of German exceptionalism. I still think so. But looking once more at that photograph of the Donald and Farage, baring their teeth in glee, thumbs held high, with the gold from the elevator door glinting in their hair, I wonder whether Germany might not be compelled to question a lesson it learned a little too well.

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great britain withdrawal from eu (brexit)

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In the United States, too, I found resistance to the idea that Brexit was a harbinger of a Trump victory. I was assured over and over by liberal friends that Trump would never be president. American voters were too sensible to fall for his hateful demagogy.

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ON AUGUST 25th a group of militant Rohingya Muslims attacked police bases in northern Myanmar. The army retaliated with untrammelled fury, burning villages, killing civilians and raping women. More than 420,000 terrified Rohingyas have crossed the border into Bangladesh. The UN's International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has proclaimed the exodus "unprecedented in terms of volume and speed", and Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the UN's human-rights chief, called it a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

Myanmar's leaders deny they are conducting a campaign of repression against the Rohingyas. Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of the government and a winner of the Nobel peace prize, has repeatedly failed to condemn the attacks. Speaking on September 19th, she again avoided mentioning the Rohingyas by name, and flatly claimed that no violence or village clearances had occurred since September 5th. Amnesty International, a human-rights group, branded the speech "a mix of untruths and victim-blaming".

Despite widespread international criticism, Ms Suu Kyi's stance is widely shared in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. In 1982 the military government excluded the Rohingyas from a list of more than 130 officially recognised ethnic groups in the country, dismissing them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. That rendered them, in effect, stateless, and their mistreatment intensified. In 1991-92, around 600,000 Rohingyas fled across the border to escape violent persecution by the army.

The current exodus is unfolding much more swiftly. On average, 120,000 people have crossed the border per week, although the rate has recently started to slow. Aid agencies say they are overwhelmed and cannot provide enough food, water or shelter. Other refugee crises have involved a larger total number of refugees, but have stretched out over longer periods, sometimes lasting years, so the flow has been less intense than the exodus from Myanmar.

Data on weekly refugee flows are often unavailable. The Economist has attempted to estimate them by using UNHCR figures for selected crises and averaging the yearly flows over 52 weeks (when yearly data are available, eg, for Iraq and Syria), or by averaging the overall number of refugees over the relevant time period (eg, for Liberia and Afghanistan).

This suggests that the current refugee flow from Myanmar is swifter even than the exodus from Rwanda in 1994. Some 2.3m people fled the country, more than a third of the population. (Confusingly, the refugees were mostly not Tutsis (the targets of the genocide, who were largely unable to escape) but Hutus (the perpetrators). A Tutsi rebel army overthrew the genocidal Hutu government, and its leaders fled, taking a huge portion of their own tribe with them.) We have assumed that most of the Rwandan exodus occurred between April and August 1994. If so, an average of 111,000 Rwandans left the country every week.

The refugee crisis in Syria is the worst of the past decade. Some 5.5m people have left the country. But averaging yearly flows, about 33,000 people left the country every week in 2013, the worst year.

Until the most recent violence began in Myanmar, some 1m Rohingyas lived in Rakhine state. Nearly half have gone to Bangladesh, which already hosted around 400,000 Rohingyas from previous outflows. A further 700,000 live in other countries in Asia and the Middle East. Ms Suu Kyi has said her government is prepared to begin a verification process "at any time" that would allow some Rohingyas in Bangladesh to return home. How many will be allowed to come back remains to be seen.

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The Rohingya refugee crisis is the worst in decades

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ON AUGUST 25th a group of militant Rohingya Muslims attacked police bases in northern Myanmar. The army retaliated with untrammelled fury, burning villages, killing civilians and raping women. More than 420,000 terrified Rohingyas have crossed the border into Bangladesh.

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"I'm disappointed that you're here, and not your C.E.O.s," said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine.

Lawmakers also complained that the companies had taken months to acknowledge Russia's interference on their sites.

"I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were, frankly, blown off by the leadership of your companies," said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, spent Wednesday at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., talking to investors and analysts as they reported blockbuster quarterly earnings. The stocks of both Google and Facebook, which faced the most criticism in the hearings, are at record highs.

During the earnings call, Mr. Zuckerberg was unequivocal in his stance on the issue of Russian meddling in the election.

"I've expressed how upset I am that the Russians used our tools to sow mistrust," Mr. Zuckerberg said, noting that Facebook's profits will probably be affected by the amount of money the company will spend fighting abuse of its platform. Facebook said it plans to double the number of content reviewers it employs, to 20,000, and will try to add a greater degree of transparency into its advertising system.

"What they did is wrong, and we're not going to stand for it," Mr. Zuckerberg said.

The tech companies also provided new numbers on the reach of Russia's influence campaign. Facebook said an estimated 150 million users of its main site and its subsidiary, Instagram, were exposed to the posts, a larger figure than it provided even as recently as Monday.

During the last of the three hearings, members of the House Intelligence Committee spoke in front of posters displaying the content, complaining that it was divisive.

Representative André Carson, Democrat of Indiana, said an account called Being Patriotic, which amassed 200,000 followers, pushed out content that "cynically exploits grieving officers and their loved ones in order to pit Americans concerned about our law enforcement personnel against Americans concerned about African-American lives lost during police encounters."

The account was created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency.

"My concern is that a dictator like Vladimir Putin abused flaws in our social media platforms to inject the worst kind of identity politics into the voting decisions of at least 100 million Americans," Mr. Carson said, referring to the Russian president.

Facebook has found a particularly vocal set of critics on the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Mr. Carson is a member along with Representative Terri A. Sewell, Democrat of Alabama. Together, they pressed Facebook to grapple with its role in promoting racial animus.

Ms. Sewell cited figures showing few blacks in Facebook's work force and its leadership - a lack of diversity that she said made it hard to believe that those reviewing socially divisive ads could spot problematic posts.

The hearings exposed a growing rift between Silicon Valley and Washington, where sentiment toward big tech companies has drastically shifted.

While the lawyers showed humility and promised to beef up security and improve technology to prevent foreign interference in elections, they admitted they could not guarantee they would prevent future intrusions. Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said the company would work on creating new technologies to detect foreign actors and misinformation on its site. All three said they would build artificial intelligence tools to combat fake and problematic content.

Some lawmakers used the hearings to stake a position on the influence of the Kremlin's social media use in the election. The conclusions, particularly among senators, split along political lines. Republicans offered an implicit defense of the legitimacy of President Trump's victory and dismissed the effect of Russian meddling.

"A lot of folks, including many in the media, have tried to reduce this entire conversation down to one premise: Foreign actors conducted a surgically executed covert operation to help elect a United States president," said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "I'm here to tell you this story does not simplify that easily."

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, emphasized that the real intent of Russian propaganda was to broadly spread misinformation and create chaos.

"These operations - while we're talking about the 2016 presidential race - they're not limited to 2016, and they were not limited to the presidential race, and they continue to this day," he said. "They are much more widespread than one election."

Such comments offered a rare view into the Senate committee's investigation, which has largely played out over the past nine months in secured briefing rooms. Publicly and in private, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner have taken pains to preserve bipartisan comity, and their success has set the committee apart from the other panels investigating Russia's efforts.

But the difference in their emphasis on Wednesday also underscored the political realities buffeting their work. In advancing an investigation tied to Mr. Trump, Mr. Burr has been careful to make clear that the committee's work is larger than an individual candidate, and he has repeatedly tried to tamp down expectations about what it might find.

Democrats did not have such reticence.

"Whether the Russians and the campaign coordinated these efforts, we do not yet know, but it is true that the Russians mounted what could be described as an independent expenditure campaign on Mr. Trump's behalf," said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, also took aim at Mr. Trump's dismissal of the role of Russia-linked social media in his win. Mr. Heinrich challenged Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, to acknowledge such content and the role that fake accounts linked to Russia and other misinformation had in the election.

"Last month, President Trump called Russian-purchased Facebook ads a 'hoax,'" Mr. Heinrich said. "I've looked at those Russian-sponsored Facebook ads. I certainly hope you've had a chance to review them. Are they, in fact, a hoax?"

Mr. Stretch said no. "The existence of those ads were on Facebook," he said, "and it was not a hoax."

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russian interference in 2016 us elections and ties to trump associates

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Cecilia Kang, Nicholas Fandos and Mike Isaac

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Russia-Financed Ad Linked Clinton and Satan

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"I'm disappointed that you're here, and not your C.E.O.s," said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine. Lawmakers also complained that the companies had taken months to acknowledge Russia's interference on their sites.

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russian interference in 2016 us elections and ties to trump associates

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How do bots and trolls work to infiltrate social media platforms and influence U.S. elections? We take a closer look at these insidious online pests to explain how they work.

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President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines waved a thick sheaf of papers on live television, fanning the pages for the public and the national press corps to see. "This list of names, this is it," he said in the Oct. 27 appearance. "This is the drug industry in the Philippines."

Filipinos had been hearing for months about what is commonly called the "watch list" for drug suspects. After he entered office on June 30, Duterte began gathering names of suspects from local police officers and elected officials for a new national war on drugs. The list took many shapes in Duterte's various tellings, containing anywhere from 600,000 to more than a million suspects. He also once claimed that some three million Filipinos - 3 percent of the population - were drug addicts, and that he would be happy to kill them. "The human rights people will commit suicide," he said in October, "if I finish these all."

Duterte made a point of naming names across a broad swath of Philippine society, including 6,000 police officers and 5,000 local village leaders he called corrupt. How they ended up on the list, or even who exactly was on it, was a mystery that fascinated Filipinos. How you got off the list was even more mysterious.

Alvin Mañalac discovered that when, in mid-October, a local police officer warned him that he was on the list. Mañalac was surprised - he had been an enthusiastic foot soldier in Duterte's drug war. He is the barangay kapitan - a local elected official - in his part of Malabon City, a gritty district in north Manila, and had been assisting the police as they investigated drug suspects in his jurisdiction. Now, somehow, he himself was on what has become, for thousands of people, a death list. He supported the government, but "I'm worried," he said.

Mañalac looks much younger than his 40 years, a sharp dresser with one full-sleeve tattoo and an email handle that translates as "da pretty boy." But he is a diligent and effective local politician and a ubiquitous presence in Malabon City. His face beams from campaign posters along the streets, and his name is emblazoned on the door of a gleaming blue fire engine that services the community - even if one constituent teased him that the engine appeared at more parades than actual fires.

When I went to see Mañalac one morning in November, I found him sitting in his second-floor office with a handbag on the desk in front of him. It contained a Glock 17 pistol with an oversize clip. "This is what is keeping me safe," he told me, drawing the gun into his lap and stroking it as if it were a cat. "This and a rosary." The special clip held enough ammo to hold out here, defending the stairway against any attackers that came for him in the office. Maybe enough bullets to buy time, to let the local police respond. Two policemen had been assigned to look after him as bodyguards.

The killings began to increase after Duterte was elected president. As a long-serving mayor in the southern city of Davao, Duterte rose to national prominence by declaring war on a drug that has crippled the Philippines, the cheap variant of crystal meth that Filipinos call shabu. The drug offered the country's teeming poor an instant tonic against hunger, an illusion of strength during hard labor and a mental escape from hopeless slums. There are more than a million users in the Philippines, according to the country's Dangerous Drugs Board.

Duterte entered the presidential race at the last minute, vowing to go national with the no-holds-barred campaign he waged in Davao. He promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office. In May, he won the election with 6.6 million more votes than his nearest opponent.

Once in office, Duterte immediately ordered thousands of police raids across the archipelago. To date, these operations have killed more than 2,000 suspects, according to the Philippine National Police, in what have usually been reported as "shootouts" or attempts to take a police officer's gun. The fights seem to have been suspiciously lopsided - nationwide, in six months, 21 officers have died, and three soldiers. But another 4,000 people - many of them from Duterte's watch list - have died under even murkier circumstances. Late last year I visited 10 crime scenes where 18 individual homicides took place, and most of them appeared to have been the work of teams of efficient killers, encouraged by the president's inflammatory language.

The list was the distilled essence of Duterte's appeal, a raw and brutal effort at law and order, whatever the cost. As of October, the president enjoyed an 86 percent approval rating nationwide; his popularity was greatest among the poorest Filipinos surveyed. Family members of the drug war's casualties on several occasions told me they supported Duterte's violence, even as they insisted their sons and daughters were targeted inaccurately. The list was a promise to cleanse society, and surrendering to the police, or even being innocent, was no defense - not even for politicians who worked to support Duterte's drug war, as Mañalac had.

In the two weeks since Mañalac found out he was on the list, he had felt his life to be in doubt. Duterte had singled out barangay kapitans and small-town mayors in his public statements. Before dawn on Oct. 28, a southern mayor named Samsudin Dimaukom was stopped at a checkpoint by a unit of the National Police looking for a major drug shipment. They claimed Dimaukom opened fire first; the mayor and all nine of his aides and security guards were killed, while no police officers were injured. Days later, a team of elite officers from the criminal-investigation division entered the jail cell of another prominent mayor accused of drug offenses. They were supposedly there to deliver a warrant, but after a reported scuffle the mayor and his cellmate were shot dead, in what Senator Panfilo Lacson called "a clear case of extrajudicial killing."

At his desk, Mañalac held up his phone to show me a text message, one of dozens of death threats he had received. "You are a protector" of drug dealers, it said. Another message called him "a cuddler" of addicts. One threatening letter had been written carefully, then scanned and forwarded to him.

At 11 p.m. in Pasay City, a busy commercial district in greater Manila, a couple of bodies lay on the asphalt at the intersection of F. B. Harrison and A. Arnaiz. A pair of traffic policemen in high boots had unfurled yellow crime-scene tape, and a crowd of passers-by was squeezing in close. Shoeless children climbed on top of taxis for a better view. The right-turn signal on the scooter the men had been riding was still blinking, as the vehicle lay tilted over on the asphalt.

One body was lying on its back in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts. The man's eyes stared at the sky; his arms, stiff and opened wide, seemed to be offering a hug. He had been hit in the shoulder and head. Crumpled against the curb was another body in denim shorts, a T-shirt reading CALIFORNIA and a black helmet. The Scene of the Crime Operatives, or SOCO, arrived, navy-clad technicians who secured evidence. SOCO is often overwhelmed by the sheer number of killings - sometimes more than a dozen a night in Manila alone - but it was still early in the evening, and the technicians, wearing gloves, worked patiently to mark, inventory and photograph the evidence.

Pasay City is a center of the violence, enough so that Philippine reporters have taken to calling it Patay - "Dead" - City. This particular case was notable only because the dead men had been released from police custody shortly before their killing. They were picked up earlier in the day and questioned about internet gambling, according to police officers at the scene, but the official police report from that night listed one of the men as a "suspected drug personality." They had been released from custody and headed up F.B. Harrison on a red Honda Wave scooter. They were cut off around 10 p.m. by two motorcycles, each with a driver and a shooter.

In Duterte's drug war, death often arrives this way, in the form of two men riding in tandem on a motorbike. Over one night in October, The Philippine Star reported nine vigilante-style killings in greater Manila. Witnesses in five cases described "motorcycle-riding assailants," "two motorcycle-riding men" or someone "shot dead by motorcycle-riding" killers. Surveillance-video tapes from different nights show teams of men carrying out coordinated killings; in some cases the victims are seen being taken away alive, their bodies turning up only later. In one case, police officers on Mindoro island happened to spot and pursue four killers on two motorbikes. Two escaped, but two others were wounded in a shootout and surrendered while yelling out " tropa, tropa," or troops. They turned out to be local police officers.

Duterte has denied both the presence of death squads in the country and the involvement of the police in the killings, but he has also exhorted them openly, vowing to kill so many drug dealers that "the fish will grow fat" in Manila Bay from eating their bodies. "If they pull out a gun, kill them," he told army troops, who assist in police operations, in a speech in September. "If they don't, kill them, son of a whore, so it's over, lest you lose the gun. I'll take care of you." One officer of the National Police bragged anonymously to The Guardian that following Duterte's election, he had joined a clandestine kill team: Volunteer officers in plain clothes were issued a list of targets. A woman in one Manila slum told the BBC she was hired by a local police officer to kill five people on his list.

Duterte has called the existence of death squads "a myth," and the very few critics who challenge him are overwhelmed by his popular support. This has led to a wave of killings that are meticulously documented (by SOCO, surveillance cameras and the press) but fundamentally unsolvable.

Around the bodies in Pasay City, the SOCO team had dutifully drawn eight small circles on the pavement marking where the cartridges fell. Children worked the crowd, asking for money and picking up candy wrappers. Weeping relatives arrived, one at a time, howling with grief and then composing themselves, briefly, for the TV cameras.

Abundant theatricality accompanies most things in the Philippines, from religious processions to karaoke. Soap operas and melodramas rule the airwaves. The drug-war killings have taken on an edge of this performance culture. Bodies are often recovered bearing crude cardboard signs: "I AM A PUSHER" or "I AM A DRUG USER DON'T BE LIKE ME." Filipinos refer to the practice as "cardboard justice"; the signs now sometimes include Twitter hashtags, or riffs on popular Facebook memes. The killing teams have become bolder, sometimes not bothering to hide their faces and exploring more baroque forms of cruelty, like covering their victims' faces with masks of packing tape, occasionally decorated with cartoon eyes and mouths.

Duterte has called both Barack Obama and the pope "sons of whores," labeled the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights "an idiot" and attacked Human Rights Watch for documenting his long incitement of killings. When he ran for office, people saw a foulmouthed rule breaker, and Filipino and later American journalists dubbed him the "Donald Trump of the Philippines." Just before Trump's election, Duterte picked Trump's business partner on a Manila skyscraper deal as his envoy to Washington. And Trump placed a call to Duterte during the transition period in which they discussed not just international relations but the drug war; according to Duterte, Trump gave him a verbal thumbs-up, saying that he was going after drugs "the right way." (Trump's staff has confirmed that a conversation took place, but not what was discussed.)

In Talomo, a poor district insouthern Davao, Grecel Sagpang, a station commander with the Philippine National Police, was sitting in his small, steamy office in Police Station 3, the local precinct house. Many of Talomo's approximately 60,000 residents are squatters, according to Sagpang, and drug addiction is widespread.

I visited to ask Sagpang about the killing on Sept. 16 of Art Jimenez, a barangay kapitan who, like Alvin Mañalac, had found himself on Duterte's list. Sagpang, who was in charge of the investigation, told me that surveillance cameras had captured two men following the kapitan as he left an event downtown. Jimenez was shot dead in traffic in front of the Indonesian Consulate.

It was true that Jimenez was on the list, Sagpang said. But the killing "was not extrajudicial," he insisted. "It's murder," he said, "because the police and army are not involved." Drug-watch suspects were being killed "by their peers."

Duterte's reputation derives from what he did in Davao, building a clean and efficient city by Philippine standards. Davao was awash in violence when Duterte arrived, but he tamed both leftist and Muslim insurgents, who had battled the government for years. He banned smoking in public and went after speeders. He crushed street crime and humiliated corrupt officials. By the time he left, the city had drinkable tap water and approved business permits within 72 hours.

According to Human Rights Watch, while Duterte was mayor of Davao, elements of the local police and local government operated a death squad in a clandestine war that killed about 1,000 people, including suspected criminals, drug dealers, leftists and street children. Duterte denied the existence of a Davao death squad for years, although he has also said, in what he claims was only a taunt to his critics: "Am I the death squad? True. That is true."

In September, Leila de Lima, a former justice secretary who had recently been elected to the Philippine Senate, called Edgar Matobato to testify before the Senate's justice and human rights committee, of which she was chairwoman. A shaggy-haired, teddy-bear-shaped man in late middle age, Matobato confessed - out of guilt, he said - to working as an assassin for the Davao death squad. He described a large group of killers, organized by the police and local leaders. "We were tasked to kill criminals every day, including pushers and snatchers," Matobato testified.

Duterte didn't just inspire or incite the killings from afar, Matobato claimed, but was personally involved in selecting some victims, including Muslims targeted in revenge killings after a bombing. "We pounced on them, and later killed them, and buried them in a quarry," Matobato said. And Duterte, he said, had even participated in a killing in 1993, when he arrived just in time to unload two magazines of ammunition from an Uzi into a suspect.

The Matobato hearings, which aired live on national television, transfixed the nation. "What kind of a war is this?" De Lima asked when we spoke. But her investigation ended abruptly, at the hands of the world-champion boxer Manny Pacquiao. A national hero who, like De Lima, is serving his first term in the Senate, Pacquiao is a loyal supporter of Duterte. In September, Pacquiao introduced a motion to strip De Lima of her chairwomanship, which passed the Senate with an overwhelming majority. The investigation was shut down, and Matobato is now in a witness-protection program.

When I met Pacquiao outside the Senate chamber in October, he insisted that even with De Lima gone, the Senate would continue investigating Matobato's claims. "We will remain very active in this case," Pacquiao told me. The current wave of killings was the work not of the police or vigilantes, he said, but rather of criminals themselves - "drug lords, drug syndicates, drug poseurs." He said that "the massive campaign of the government against illegal drugs" was a success.

A few days after we spoke, Pacquiao left for Las Vegas, where he won another title belt. Duterte attacked De Lima, accusing her of taking money from drug dealers during her time as justice secretary. Duterte called her ugly and claimed to have watched a sex tape involving De Lima and her driver. Legislators released her private phone number on national television, and Duterte's fans left her more than 2,000 hostile calls and text messages, including death threats. She is now facing allegations of corruption.

The list grows longer. The names sometimes come via police posts like Police Station 3, and Sagpang described how he compiled them. "A confidential informant came, to say drugs are very prevalent in such-and-such area," he told me. "We have to dig deeper. We deploy detectives and intelligence operatives" to verify that "Mr. So-and-So is fiddling drugs in the community." In other words, the police counted on informants - impoverished squatters, terrified drug dealers and local politicians - telling the truth about one another.

The national watch list that Duterte waved on television was presumably a lot of these smaller lists, a registry of people who had been informed on. Duterte has asked local police departments and governments all over the country to generate information this way, squeezing names from criminals and cooperative neighbors.

Sagpang had personally led more than 100 antidrug raids - though only four of those led to shootouts, he said. There were no death squads in Davao, he insisted, and when Duterte made radical threats, like calling drug addicts "zombies" who should be killed even if they didn't resist, Sagpang said he did not take the president literally. "We are so used to him," he said. "More than 20 years. He isn't really meaning what he is saying." Duterte's threats were "psy-ops, like in war," designed to scare drug dealers into retreat or surrender. More than 1,500 "drug personalities" had surrendered at Sagpang's police station, he said. "Operation Double Barrel" - the official name of the drug war - "is really effective. It created a domino effect."

In the two holding cells of Police Station 3, a couple of dozen men were crowded into a space 15 feet long. Some were lying in improvised hammocks. A scrum of relatives and girlfriends passed bananas and orange soda through the bars. A short man explained that he was arrested two days before in a buy-bust operation. He admitted to using shabu for the last two years but insisted he wasn't an addict. Of Duterte, however, he expressed mixed admiration. "His way of eliminating drugs in our country is effective," he said. "But on the other hand, all the suspects were not given enough rights under law. Their way of capturing us is just from a list. Just because we are on a list. Just hearsay."

One night, I rode to the scene of a double homicide in Quezon City, in greater Manila, in a pickup with Raffy Lerma, a longhaired photographer for The Philippine Daily Inquirer, who covers the liquidations of the drug war five nights a week. His paper keeps an updated "kill list" on its website, which documents the drug war's casualties in exacting detail. And yet for all their thoroughness, just as the police never seem to actually solve a case, the Philippine media cannot put names to the killers. "We may have our suspects," the Filipino journalist Jose Dalisay Jr. wrote, "but we have no proof, and the breath that exhales those names could very well be one's last."

When Quezon City's streets became too narrow for the pickup, Lerma and I continued on foot, turning down increasingly decrepit alleys. We arrived at the murder scene after the National Police, who had taped everything off, but ahead of SOCO. Two patrol officers moved around slowly, bent over with flashlights and chalk, finding and circling nine shell casings. Two pairs of legs poked out from behind piles of debris.

The closer pair of legs belonged to a 17-year-old girl, who the neighbors said was named Angel. Nearby was another body, this one a 21-year-old male the onlookers identified as her boyfriend, Jerico. Neighbors, including a local shopkeeper with whom I spoke, described two men on a motorcycle following the couple home from a local restaurant. After pulling on masks, they cornered Jerico in a quiet back street and killed him. When Angel screamed, perhaps defending him, they shot her through the throat. After they left, someone threw down a cardboard sign that said "you are a pusher you are an animal."

Jerico appeared to have struggled; shards of pottery and ferns littered the scene where he was thrown against a rack of house plants. He died in shorts and a striped shirt. SOCO arrived and photographed and bagged the nine shell casings, inventorying the pockets of the dead. An officer carefully, almost tenderly, pushed Angel's hair aside, to better photograph her face. The girl's mother arrived and erupted in wails of grief, triggering a sympathetic storm of wailing among other women in the crowd, who had been stone-faced up to that moment. The TV crews directed bright lights in the mother's face, and soon she was giving a tear-choked interview.

Mythmaking by Duterte has its corollary in the journalists and the crowds that gather eagerly at the scenes of the killings, where rumor flies faster than facts. A Barbie doll, all blond hair and pink clothing, lay near Angel's body. After much discussion, the crowd, based on no actual evidence, settled on the theory that Jerico had given her the doll as a symbol of their romance.

Angel's open-coffin wake was held at the end of a tiny alley in Quezon City. A sister and one friend sat stoically on their own until a church group showed up to sing a hymn. Angel's real name, it turned out, was Ericka Fernandez, and she was the third of seven children. One of her sisters denied that Angel had ever used drugs - it was "a made-up story," she said. Likewise, she said the Barbie-doll romance was invented by neighbors - according to her, Angel and Jerico weren't a couple anymore at the time of their murders, and Angel had bought the doll herself as a gift for a family member. The coffin was half open, revealing a girl in a white dress with large, poorly concealed sutures holding her neck together. A few doors down, women played a raucous dice game.

Jerico's wake was held about a mile away, and better attended, if only because it took place in a busy footpath. The coffin stood on display in front of his uncle's house, as food vendors plied their offerings nearby and children skipped underfoot. A dog napped under the half-open coffin.

Jerico was innocent, said his father, Rommel Camitan. "He's not a pusher. Hundred percent, sir. Not a pusher. For me he is a good son. Ask our neighbors." Camitan sat on a plastic stool in the street, sheltered by a tarp that friends had strung overhead. Without enough cash on hand for a funeral, the family was buying another week by having Jerico's body injected with more preservative against the tropical heat. Inside the coffin, illuminated by a light-up Jesus, Jerico had been cleaned up, though the thick makeup could not conceal the zigzag split in his forehead. A week after death, one of his eyes was caving in.

Despite his anguish, Camitan endorsed Duterte's campaign. "All this talk of finishing drugs and the drug war is good," Camitan said. "But he has to be sure that their target is the right person." He added: "There have been cases around here. Usually they are pushers or addicts." Good people had nothing to fear, he told me. "The only ones who should feel afraid are the ones who did something wrong."

There is no certain or easy way to get off Duterte's list. The mayor who died in his jail cell had flown to Manila to clear his name, and the barangay kapitan Art Jimenez tried before he was gunned down in traffic. After learning that he was named as a "drug personality," Jimenez presented himself at Police Station 3. Sagpang, the National Police station commander, told me that a drug-screening team gave Jimenez a test: no trace of methamphetamines or cannabis in his system.

But Sagpang still insisted that Jimenez had been involved in the drug trade at a higher level, protecting two "Muslim drug pushers," according to his sources. The kapitan 's driver and bodyguard that day were also drug users, he said - he seemed surprised that both were wounded in the assassination but survived.

Mañalac tried the same tactics to get off the list. He went to the offices of his local police chief, where he, too, passed a drug test showing that he was clean.

When I emailed him in December, Mañalac replied that things were looking up. He was working with the police and the business community, he said, helping President Duterte "continue the crusade against drug personalities." The police chief for all of Malabon City had assured him he was no longer on the list. Nonetheless, Mañalac wrote, "I still have my two policemen as security."

Correction: January 22, 2017

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murders  attempted murders and homicides

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President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines waved a thick sheaf of papers on live television, fanning the pages for the public and the national press corps to see. "This list of names, this is it," he said in the Oct. 27 appearance. "This is the drug industry in the Philippines."

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The Trump doctrine is very simple: There are just four threats in the world: terrorists who will kill us, immigrants who will rape us or take our jobs, importers and exporters who will take our industries - and North Korea. Threats to democracy, free trade, the environment and human rights are no longer on our menu. Therefore, no matter how unsavory you are as a foreign leader, you can be the United American Emirate's best friend if you:

1.) Pay us by buying our weapons. I warn you, though, Saudi Arabia has set the bar very high, starting at $110 billion.

2.) Pay us in higher defense spending for NATO - not to deter Russia, which is using cyberwarfare to disrupt every democratic election it can, but to deter "terrorism," something that tanks and planes are useless against.

3.) Pay us in trade concessions. And it doesn't matter how lame those concessions are. All that matters is that Emir Trump can claim "concessions." See the recent "trade concessions" to Trump from China. (Pay no attention to that laughter from Beijing.)

4.) Pay us by freeing any U.S. citizen you arrested on trumped-up charges to annoy Barack Obama and to intimidate human rights activists. See Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's release of a U.S.-Egyptian charity worker, Aya Hijazi, who was working with homeless children.

5.) Pay us by grossly flattering our emir about how much of an improvement he is over Obama. See President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Bibi Netanyahu of Israel.

6.) Be Russia, and you pay nothing.

Now, if you do any one of these six things the United American Emirate's commitment to you - and it's ironclad - is that you can do anything you want "out back." You can deprive your people of whatever human rights you like out back. You can be as corrupt as you want out back. You can steal as many elections as you like out back. Just keep the arms purchases coming, the NATO dues rising, the phony trade concessions flowing and the compliments gushing - or be Vladimir Putin - and anything goes.

Too harsh? Not at all. Being in Korea and seeing how much this country has grown out of poverty over the last 50 years by adopting all of our values - so much so that it just impeached its president for corruption after a peaceful "candlelight" mass protest based entirely on American democratic software - it makes you weep to think that virtually the only thing Trump's had to say about Korea is that it's a freeloader on our army (not even true) and needs to pay up.

Does Trump have a point that German economic policies have dampened its imports and disadvantaged southern Europe? Yes, he does. And NATO members should fulfill the alliance's long-term spending targets. But how much is Germany spending to absorb one million Syrian refugees so they won't be joining ISIS? How much security is that buying the world? The U.S. took 18,000 Syrians. Trump's friend Putin took zero, but Trump never thinks about such things.

It took us decades to build the Atlantic alliance and it has brought us so many tangible and intangible benefits in the form of security, stability, growth and friendships. Trump could actually break it, not just crack it.

This week for the first time I saw the official photographs that now grace the entry halls of all U.S. embassies. Vice President Mike Pence is smiling warmly. Trump is actually scowling. If his picture had a caption, it would be: "Get off my lawn."

It could also say: "Let all who enter this embassy know: We don't do alliances any more. We only do Master Limited Partnerships. Interested? Call 1-202-456-1414. Operators are standing by."

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Opinion | Trump's United American Emirate

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The Trump doctrine is very simple: There are just four threats in the world: terrorists who will kill us, immigrants who will rape us or take our jobs, importers and exporters who will take our industries - and North Korea. Threats to democracy, free trade, the environment and human rights are no longer on our menu.

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I'm open to improving any of these accords or institutions. I'm even open to the possibility that by just tipping over all these accords at once, and throwing away his steering wheel, Trump will get people to improve the Iran deal or Obamacare out of sheer panic at the chaos that might ensue if they don't.

But I am equally open to the possibility that unraveling all of these big systems at once - health, energy, geopolitics - without a clear plan or a capable team will set in motion chain reactions, some of them long term, that Trump has not thought through in the least. Moreover, when you break big systems, which, albeit imperfectly, have stabilized regions, environments or industries for decades, it can be very difficult to restore them.

Question: We're told by our secretary of state that he's been engaged in some secret contacts with North Korea, exploring the possibility of a diplomatic solution that might dramatically reduce North Korea's nuclear arsenal in return for U.S. promises of regime security. If, at the same time, Trump unilaterally pulls out of the deal we've already signed with Iran to prevent it from developing nukes - and Trump moves to reimpose sanctions - how does that not send only one message to the North Koreans: No deal with the U.S. is worth the paper it's written on, so you'd be wise to hold on to all your nukes?

Question: Iran controls tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen in Iraq and Syria who were our tacit allies in defeating ISIS. Tehran also has huge influence over Iraq's government and over certain regions of Afghanistan as well. Can we stabilize Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan - post-ISIS - and keep our troop presence low and safe, without Iran's help - and will that help be coming after Trump rips up the nuclear deal? If you think so, please raise your hand.

And since our European allies as well as Russia and China have indicated that they will not follow us in backing out of the Iran deal or reimposing sanctions, Iran would have all the moral high ground and money it needs, and the U.S. would be isolated. Are we going to sanction E.U. banks if they deal with Iran?

Trump came into office vowing to end the trade imbalance with China - a worthy goal. And what was his first move? To tear up the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that would have put the U.S. at the helm of a 12-nation trading bloc built around U.S. interests and values, potentially eliminating some 18,000 tariffs on U.S. goods and controlling 40 percent of global G.D.P. And China was not in the group. That's called leverage.

Trump just ripped up the TPP to "satisfy the base" and is now left begging China for trade crumbs, with little leverage. And because he needs China's help in dealing with North Korea, he has even less leverage on trade.

Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and, at the same time, restricted U.S. government funding for birth control both at home and abroad. Question: What is driving so many immigrants and refugees in Africa, the Middle East and Central America to try to get out of their world of disorder and into America and Europe and the world order?

Answer: It is a cocktail of climate change, environmental degradation, population explosions and misgovernance in these countries. So Trump's policy is to throw away every tool we have to mitigate climate change and population growth and try to build a wall instead, while also trying to bully Mexico's unpopular president into trade concessions, which could help elect a radical populist in next year's Mexican election - a successor who would be anti-American - and destabilize its economy as well.

At a time when China has decided to go full-bore into clean tech and electric cars, at a time when all of the tech giants are building data centers that they want powered by clean energy, at a time when solar and wind power are growing increasingly competitive with fossil fuels (and America still has a technological lead in many of these areas), at a time when climate change may be stimulating bigger hurricanes and forest fires that are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars, Trump's central energy initiative is to reverse Obama's and bring back coal-fired power.

None of these dots connect. And we will pay for that. "Whiplash" was a great movie. But it's a terrible organizing principle for our foreign or domestic policy.

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I'm open to improving any of these accords or institutions. I'm even open to the possibility that by just tipping over all these accords at once, and throwing away his steering wheel, Trump will get people to improve the Iran deal or Obamacare out of sheer panic at the chaos that might ensue if they don't.

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Two years after countries signed a landmark climate agreement in Paris, the world remains far off course from preventing drastic global warming in the decades ahead. On Monday, the latest round of post-Paris international climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, to discuss how to step up efforts.

Under the Paris deal, each country put forward a proposal to curtail its greenhouse-gas emissions between now and 2030. But no major industrialized country is currently on track to fulfill its pledge, according to new data from the Climate Action Tracker. Not the European Union. Not Canada. Not Japan. And not the United States, which under President Trump is still planning to leave the Paris agreement by 2020.

Worse, even if governments do take further steps to meet their individual pledges, the world will still be on pace to warm well in excess of 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the threshold that world leaders vowed to avoid in Paris because they deemed it unacceptably risky.

"One year after the Paris Agreement entered into force, we still find ourselves in a situation where we are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future," said Erik Solheim, head of the United Nations Environment Program.

United States

Even before the election of Mr. Trump, the goal set by former President Barack Obama of slashing United States emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 would have been difficult to hit. While emissions from the United States power sector are falling rapidly - as hundreds of coal plants retire in favor of cleaner natural gas, wind and solar - other sectors, like transportation and heavy industry, have proven harder to clean up.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has disavowed his predecessor's pledge and is dismantling Obama-era regulations designed to push down emissions further, such as the Clean Power Plan. And while states like New York and California are still pursuing their own policies on renewable energy and electric vehicles, they may not prove sufficient to close the gap.

For now, analysts think the United States will fall well short of its Paris pledge. That, in turn, could make it harder for future administrations to pursue the deeper emissions cuts by mid-century needed to help keep the world below 2 degrees of global warming.

Climate Action Tracker provides a rough estimate of the cuts each country would need to make to avoid 2ºC of warming, with wealthier nations expected to do more. How to divide up the burden remains a major debate within climate talks.

European Union

The E.U. may fall slightly short of its promise to cut emissions 40 percent by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. While European officials have created a continent-wide cap-and-trade system to curb emissions from electricity and heavy industry, that regulation leaves out sectors like transportation and agriculture.

Progress among individual European countries has been mixed: Over the past two years, Britain has been rapidly phasing out coal power, aided by a national carbon tax and cheap natural gas. But Germany is expected to miss its near-term emissions goals, as recent rapid growth in renewables has been partly offset by the closure of nuclear power plants.

Outside experts say that China crafted a Paris pledge that was relatively easy to meet: overall emissions would peak around 2030 and the country would get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil sources.

Several recent studies suggest that China's emissions could now peak years ahead of schedule as the country's once-insatiable demand for energy has slowed (though other analysts have questioned the accuracy of China's emissions reporting). The central government has already canceled plans for a hundred coal plants and is investing heavily in cleaner sources like solar, wind, and nuclear. The country also plans to sell millions of electric vehicles in the years ahead.

Yet keeping the world below 2 degrees of warming would likely require China's coal emissions not just to flatten, but to fall sharply by 2030.

Because India is still relatively poor, with 240 million of its citizens lacking access to electricity, the nation has long argued that wealthier countries should take the lead on cutting emissions.

As such, India's pledge was less restrictive than pledges from Europe or the United States. The country vowed to install more clean energy and improve its carbon intensity - the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of gross domestic product - while still allowing total emissions to rise between now and 2030. India's per capita emissions would likely remain below those of China or the United States.

Some recent studies have suggested that India can achieve those modest goals, as the falling cost of renewables and shifting market conditions have allowed the country to scale back its plans for new coal plants after 2022. A recent report from the U.N. Environment Program argued that India had "ample room" to strengthen its emission pledges - as would likely be necessary to help keep the world below 2 degrees of warming. But the Indian government has asked for aid from wealthier countries to do so.

What happens next in climate talks?

Negotiators will meet in Bonn this month to discuss guidelines for making national pledges and policies more transparent, so that outsiders can gauge individual countries' progress (or lack thereof) more precisely.

In 2018, climate negotiators plan to embark on a major effort to assess the world's progress on climate change to date and measure it against the 2 degree goal. Countries can then revise their individual climate pledges accordingly - and will do so every five years thereafter.

Right now, many of the Paris pledges remain fairly opaque, and most nations have been vague on what specific policies they will take to meet them. There is no official mechanism for quantifying progress. As a result, groups like Climate Action Tracker have had to make rough estimates as to whether nations are on pace to meet their pledges - and how much further each country would need to go for the world to stay below 2 degrees of global warming.

Increasing the transparency of pledges would make it easier for countries to pressure each other do more, which is how the Paris Agreement was designed, said David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.

"Countries could come back and say, 'Here's what has worked, what didn't, what our progress is and what other countries can learn,'" Dr. Victor said. "We know from other areas of international cooperation that that dynamic actually works pretty well."

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Here's How Far the World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals

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Two years after countries signed a landmark climate agreement in Paris, the world remains far off course from preventing drastic global warming in the decades ahead. On Monday, the latest round of post-Paris international climate talks begin in Bonn, Germany, to discuss how to step up efforts.

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As Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the author of " Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy," warns in The New York Review of Books:

Liberal democracies are better equipped than authoritarian states to grapple with the inevitable conflicts that arise in diverse societies, including the threat of terrorist violence. But they also contain the seeds of their own destruction: if they fail to deal with these challenges and allow xenophobic populists to hijack the public debate, then the votes of frustrated and disaffected citizens will increasingly go to the anti-immigrant right, societies will become less open, nativist parties will grow more powerful, and racist rhetoric that promotes a narrow and exclusionary sense of national identity will be legitimized.

The threat to democracy posed by the current outbreak of populist nationalism has become a matter of concern for both scholars and ordinary citizens. The central topic at a conference at Yale earlier this month was " How Do Democracies Fall Apart," and the subject will be taken up again in November at a Stanford conference called " Global Populisms: A Threat to Democracy? "

I contacted several of the participants at the Yale gathering and was struck by their anxiety over the future prospects of democratic governance.

One of the most insightful was Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., who has written, but not yet published, his own analysis of current events under the title "What's Happening."

First and foremost, Przeworski stresses,

there is nothing "undemocratic" about the electoral victory of Donald Trump or the rise of anti-establishment parties in Europe.

These parties and candidates, he points out:

Do not advocate replacing elections by some other way of selecting rulers. They are ugly - most people view racism and xenophobia as ugly - but these parties do campaign under the slogan of returning to 'the people' the power usurped by elites, which they see as strengthening democracy. In the words of a Trump advertisement, "Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people."

In support of Przeworski's argument, it is clear that the success of the Trump campaign in winning the Republican nomination was the result of a classic democratic insurgency: the Republican electorate's rejection of its party's establishment.

The danger in the United States, in Przeworski's view, is the possibility that the Trump administration will use the power of the presidency to undermine the procedures and institutions essential to the operation of democracy:

That the incumbent administration would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own, that it would politicize the security agencies, that it would harass political opponents, that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms, that it would selectively enforce laws, that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear, that it would rig elections.

Przeworski believes that

such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression: the "Red Scare" of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, the Nixon presidency.

Along similar lines, Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:

My big worry is not simply that formal institutions have been eroded, but that the informal norms that underpin them are even more important and even more fragile. Norms of transparency, conflict of interest, civil discourse, respect for the opposition and freedom of the press, and equal treatment of citizens are all consistently undermined, and without these the formal institutions become brittle.

Trump, in Grzymala-Busse's assessment, "articulates a classic populist message that we see in Europe: the elite establishment is a collusive cartel uninterested in the problems of 'the people,'" and, she continued, he has begun to follow the path of European populist leaders:

Much of Trump's language and actions are also familiar: there is a standard authoritarian populist template, developed in Hungary and faithfully followed in Poland and in Turkey: first, go after the courts, then the media, then the civil society, churches, universities.

The attacks on the courts, media and universities

are not simply the ravings of a lunatic, but an established strategy for undermining democratic oversight and discrediting the opposition.

Margaret Levi, another political scientist at Stanford, wrote me that she was

not sure Trumpism per se will survive Trump. But I do think it is the current embodiment of a right-wing populism that is likely to remain the basis of internal opposition within the Republican Party or be the basis of a split in the Party, leading to two new parties.

Some form of right-wing populism, Levi argued,

is already a competitive force in general elections. And it is once again a force in competitive elections in democracies world-wide.

She added that there was no guarantee that right-wing populism "will not transform into the fascist and Nazi forms."

Unless the Democratic Party in this country and moderate parties in the rest of the world "find a way to address the populace's underlying economic insecurity and deterioration in the perceived (and actual in many cases) standard of living, the possibility for irreparable damage does exist," Levi wrote:

Otherwise, both confidence in democratic government, measured by the extent it is a reliable provider of needed goods and services, including domestic and international security, and its legitimacy, the normative belief in its right to rule, will decline significantly and dangerously - perhaps even to the point of no return.

While white identitarianism, anger over immigration and economic dislocation are often cited as causes of the emergence of right-wing populism, another argument is that there is a growing segment of the electorate that is alienated from cultural norms they see as imposed on them by a ruling elite - a repressive elite; politically correct and socially remote.

In a research paper published in the current issue of the Journal of Democracy, " Eroding Norms and Democratic Deconsolidation," Paul Howe, a political scientist at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, describes the increasing size of the nihilistic segment of the American electorate.

This constituency of the disengaged and profoundly alienated provides a base of support in the United States and Europe for populist leaders who, in Howe's view, fit the Trump mold:

They compete in the democratic process, yet with words and actions that convey disregard for core democratic principles such as the rule of law, minority rights, and checks and balances on executive power. At the same time, a number of these individuals are prone to brazen, dubious, and sometimes aggressive behaviors that suggest outsized egos, scant respect for others, and a degree of contempt for social norms.

Looking at data from World Values Surveys in recent decades, Howe finds that in the United States,

the rise of antidemocratic sentiment has less to do with dysfunction in the political arena than with corrosive changes that have reshaped the social and cultural landscape more generally.

These corrosive changes include an increase in the number of citizens who say it is O.K. to

claim government benefits to which one is not entitled; take a bribe in the course of one's duties; cheat on taxes; and avoid a public-transit fare.

When answers to these questions were correlated with political attitudes, Howe found that

indifferent feelings toward democracy are interlaced with a broader set of self-interested and antisocial attitudes that are present among a substantial minority of the U.S. population.

He then argues that the

broader constellation of transgressive and antisocial attitudes among a subsection of the public is an important force behind rising disregard for democratic norms.

Clearly, a sense of isolation, actual isolation, the breakdown of the family, the rise of opiates, the disappearance of associations, a nation " bowling alone" and " coming apart," have all played a role in creating an antisocial constituency. This very constituency has produced some of the strongest Trump supporters and backing for the so-called alt-right. As Howe writes:

Those with a high-school education or less are substantially more likely than those with a college degree to express skeptical views about democracy as well as tolerance of various antisocial behaviors, by variances that range from 5 to 30 percentage points across the questions.

Few people have looked at these issues as long and as hard as Ron Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. In " The Danger of Deconsolidation: How Much Should We Worry?" (published alongside the Foa-Mounk essay in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of Democracy) Inglehart raises this question:

What makes the United States so distinctive? One reason may be that in recent years U.S. democracy has become appallingly dysfunctional. It suffers from 1) virtual paralysis at the top, as exemplified by the willingness of Congress to shut down the federal government, regardless of the damage to the country's credit, after failing to get its way via normal procedures in a budget standoff with the White House; 2) massive increases in income inequality - greater than those found in any other established democracy, with most of the population's real income declining during the past few decades despite substantial economic growth; and 3) the disproportionate and growing political influence of billionaires, as money plays a greater role in U.S. politics than in almost any other democracy.

The economic boom in the post-World War II years "produced rising security and an intergenerational shift toward self-expression values," Inglehart wrote, but "in recent decades most advanced industrial societies have experienced economic stagnation, rising unemployment coupled with massive immigration, and the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s."

The resulting "high levels of existential insecurity," Inglehart argues,

are conducive to authoritarianism, xenophobia, and rejection of new cultural norms. The economic stagnation and rising inequality of recent decades have led to increasing support for authoritarian, xenophobic political candidates, from Marine le Pen in France to Donald Trump in the United States.

While the contemporary explosion of right-wing populism is a recent phenomenon, its roots go deeper, best captured by Daniel Bell in his 1972 essay " The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism " which foreshadowed the Trump era.

American capitalism, Bell wrote,

has lost its traditional legitimacy which was based on a moral system of reward, rooted in a Protestant sanctification of work. It has substituted in its place a hedonism which promises a material ease and luxury, yet shies away from all the historic implications which a " voluptuary system" - and all its social permissiveness and libertinism - implies.

The conflict between "the principles of economics and economizing" and a culture "rooted in a return to instinctual modes " has produced a "disjunction which is the historic crisis of Western society. This cultural contradiction, in the long run, is the deepest challenge to the society."

For the moment, the Republican Party has become the main battleground for the struggle over authoritarianism, xenophobia and the erosion of received standards.

At the Yale conference, Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard, warned that Trump and other right-wing leaders have breached traditional political boundaries that serve as "the soft guardrails of democracy." The two "master norms," in Ziblatt's view, are mutual toleration, that is, the acceptance of "the basic legitimacy of our opponents," and institutional forbearance - the responsible exercise of power by those in office.

Both his detractors and his supporters recognize that Trump has flouted countless rules - and revels in doing so. On Monday, Senator John McCain, awarded the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, challenged Trump on this score:

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain "the last best hope of earth" for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

Mounk and Ziblatt, writing for Vox in March of 2016, made the case that "Trump isn't a fascist; he's a demagogue." Their conclusion, however, was that Trump's demagoguery does not make him any "less dangerous." Instead, Trump and politicians like him are "a profound threat to the survival of democratic politics."

Politicians in the Trump mold

wreck the informal rules of civility that democracies require to survive. Once voters are activated along violent lines and fervently believe the myths propagated by the demagogue, the dam is broken; the ordinary rules of democratic politics no longer apply, and there is no telling what might come next.

Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale and the author of "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth" (and also a contributor to these pages) was a participant at the conference in New Haven. He introduces his most recent book, " On Tyranny," this way:

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

Writing in 2012, well before the advent of Trump, three economists, Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera and Massimo Morelli, argued that the populist political tradition itself is based first on "promises of redistribution to the masses" and second on "concealment of government budget constraints from the voters." Promising redistribution to the masses and concealing government budget constraints was the essence of Trump's campaign strategy, as he promised to build a multibillion dollar wall " which Mexico will pay for"; to repeal Obamacare and replace it with "health care which will expand choice, increase access, lower costs & provide better care"; to preserve Medicare; and to enact a gigantic tax cut for the middle class. So far, Trump has failed to fulfill any of these promises, boxed in by the reality of "government budget constraints."

Paul Waldman, writing in The Washington Post on Oct, 17, summed up Trump's approach to veracity and to reality itself:

Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn't even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president's mouth to spread far and wide.

Trump's recklessness is disturbing enough on its own. But what makes it especially threatening is that much of the public - well beyond the 40 percent of the electorate that has shown itself to be unshakable in its devotion to the president - seems to be slowly accommodating itself to its daily dose of the Trump reality show, accepting the rhetorical violence that Trump inflicts on basic standards of truth as the new normal.

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Opinion | Democracy Can Plant the Seeds of Its Own Destruction

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As Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the author of " Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy," warns in The New York Review of Books: Liberal democracies are better equipped than authoritarian states to grapple with the inevitable conflicts that arise in diverse societies, including the threat of terrorist violence.

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The same cannot be said of white nationalists, who today are on the march from Charlottesville, Va., to Dresden, Germany. As an ideology, white nationalism poses a significantly greater threat to Western democracies; its proponents and sympathizers have proved, historically and recently, that they can win a sizable share of the vote - as they did this year in France, Germany and the Netherlands - and even win power, as they have in the United States.

Far-right leaders are correct that immigration creates problems; what they miss is that they are the primary problem. The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who are exploiting fear of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal.

Anti-Semitic and xenophobic movements did not disappear from Europe after the liberation of Auschwitz, just as white supremacist groups have lurked beneath the surface of American politics ever since the Emancipation Proclamation. What has changed is that these groups have now been stirred from their slumber by savvy politicians seeking to stoke anger toward immigrants, refugees and racial minorities for their own benefit. Leaders from Donald Trump to France's Marine Le Pen have validated the worldview of these groups, implicitly or explicitly encouraging them to promote their hateful opinions openly. As a result, ideas that were once marginal have now gone mainstream.

The trend is unmistakable. Hungary's ruling party has plastered anti-Semitic ads on bus stops and billboards; an overtly neo-Nazi movement won 7 percent of the vote in Greece's 2015 election; Germany's upstart far-right party, which includes a popular member who criticized Berlin's Holocaust memorial as "a monument of shame," won 13 percent in last month's election.

In France and Denmark, populist leaders have gone to great pains to shed the right's crudest baggage and rebrand themselves in a way that appeals to Jews, women and gay people by depicting Muslims as the primary threat to all three groups. But their core goal remains the same: to close the borders and expel unwanted foreigners.

Cultural and demographic anxiety about dwindling native populations and rapidly increasing immigrant ones lies at the heart of these parties' ideologies. In America, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, worries about the impossibility of restoring "our civilization with somebody else's babies." In Europe, the right frets about who's having the new German or Danish babies and the fact that it's not white Germans or Danes - a social Darwinist dread popularized by the German writer Thilo Sarrazin, whose best-selling 2010 book, "Germany Abolishes Itself," warned that barely literate Muslims were poised to replace the supposedly more intelligent German race.

The leader of the Netherlands' newest far-right party fears that Europe will not exist "as a predominantly white-skinned, Christian or post-Christian, Roman-law-based kind of society" a few decades from now. "If I go to a museum, and I look at these portraits, they are essentially people like me that I can see. In 50 years it won't be," he worries.

France, more than any other country, has been the source of these ideas.

***

IN FEBRUARY 2016, French right-wing groups descended on the town of Calais, protesting a huge informal refugee camp there known as the "Jungle." Members of the German anti-Islam group Pegida (the name is short for the German words for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) came, too. Demonstrators clashed with local policemen, and a decorated French paratrooper marching alongside them was arrested. A van marked with the logo of a medical charity aiding Jungle residents was set on fire one evening, and the group's volunteers had their tires slashed.

A few months later, I met the leaders of a local anti-immigration group called Retake Calais. When I asked if they wanted to see the migrants leave town, they lamented that closing the camp - which has since been bulldozed - wouldn't help. "They're sending them to all the little villages in France," one of them told me. "In two years the villages will be dead."

"It's the great replacement," his friend added, echoing the title of a 2010 book by the French writer Renaud Camus, which paints a dark picture of demographic conquest in the West. "They want to replace us."

As Mr. Camus explains in the book: "You have a people and then, in an instant, in one generation, you have in its place one or several other peoples." He finds it scandalous that "a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture" is legally considered as French as "an indigenous Frenchman passionate for Romanesque churches, and the verbal and syntactic subtleties of Montaigne and Rousseau." In Mr. Camus's eyes, groups like Pegida are heroic. He praises the group as a "liberation front" that is battling "a colonial conquest in progress" where white Europeans are "the colonized indigenous people."

Ms. Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right National Front party, has a similar fear, and she sees birthright citizenship as the vehicle for replacement. Although she doesn't use the term favored by many Republicans in the United States ("anchor babies"), she insists, as she told me in an interview last May, that "we must stop creating automatic French citizens."

This argument has a long pedigree. It can be traced back to the Dreyfus Affair, when the virulently anti-Semitic writer Maurice Barrès warned that immigrants wanted to impose their way of life on France and that it would spell the "ruin of our fatherland." "They are in contradiction to our civilization," Barrès wrote in 1900. He saw French identity as rooted purely in his bloodline, declaring, "I defend my cemetery."

Today's version of the argument is: if you have foreign blood and don't behave appropriately, then you don't get a passport.

The notion of a Great Replacement has crossed the Atlantic and found an eager audience among groups who have long espoused similar white supremacist ideas. The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders warned in 2015 of "masses of young men in their 20s with beards singing 'Allahu akbar' across Europe." He labeled their presence "an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity."

A year later, Mr. Wilders attended the Republican national convention, where he headlined an L.G.B.T. pro-Trump event along with the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller and the alt-right wunderkind Milo Yiannopoulos. Before he began his talk in front of a wall featuring photos of barechested men, "Make America Great Again" hats and a "Don't Tread on Me" flag, Mr. Wilders was introduced as "the hope for Western civilization."

Calais and Charlottesville may be nearly 4,000 miles apart, but the ideas motivating far-right activists in both places are the same. When white nationalists descended on Charlottesville in August, the crowd chanted "Jews will not replace us" and "you will not replace us" before one of its members allegedly killed a woman with his car and others beat a black man; last week, they returned bearing torches and chanting similar slogans.

Just as Mr. Trump has plenty to say about Islamic State attacks but generally has no comment about hate crimes against Indians, blacks and Muslims, the European far-right is quick to denounce any violent act committed by a Muslim but rarely feels compelled to forcefully condemn attacks on mosques or neo-Nazis marching near synagogues on Yom Kippur.

Doing so might alienate their base. Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the newest party in the German Parliament, is adamant that his Alternative for Germany is "not the parliamentary arm of Pegida," although he did acknowledge in an interview that "a lot of people who march with Pegida in Dresden are people who could be members, or friends, or voters" for the party. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Gauland and Ms. Le Pen would never admit to being white nationalists, but they are more than happy to dog-whistle to them and accept their support.

Those who worry that a godless Europe and an immigration-friendly America are no match for Islamic extremists have ignored an even greater threat: white nationalists.

Their ideology is especially dangerous because they present themselves as natives valiantly defending the homeland. Because they look and sound like most of their co-citizens, they garner sympathy from the majority in ways that Islamists never could. White nationalism is in many ways a mirror image of radical Islamism. Both share a nostalgic obsession with a purist form of identity: for one, a medieval Islamic state; for the other, a white nation unpolluted by immigrant blood.

If the influence of white nationalists continues to grow, they will eventually seek to trample the rights of immigrants and minorities and dismiss courts and constitutions as anti-democratic because they don't reflect the supposed preferences of "the people." Their rise threatens to transform countries that we once thought of as icons of liberalism into democracies only in name.

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Opinion | White Nationalism Is Destroying the West

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The same cannot be said of white nationalists, who today are on the march from Charlottesville, Va., to Dresden, Germany. As an ideology, white nationalism poses a significantly greater threat to Western democracies; its proponents and sympathizers have proved, historically and recently, that they can win a sizable share of the vote - as they did this year in France, Germany and the Netherlands - and even win power, as they have in the United States.

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EVEN Rodrigo Duterte, who initiated a bloodthirsty campaign against drug-dealers and drug-users on becoming president of the Philippines last year, and who brooks almost no criticism of his war on drugs, had to admit that the police had gone too far.

Policemen from the national drug squad, including senior officers, falsely accused a South Korean businessman of involvement in narcotics. They hauled him off to the national police headquarters in Manila, demanded ransom from his family, pocketed the money and then strangled him, burning his body and flushing the ashes down a lavatory.

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After the National Bureau of Investigation, a separate agency, revealed all this, Mr Duterte ordered a pause in the campaign to give the police time to purge their ranks. He now wants the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, another independent force, to lead the war, which he says will continue until his term ends in 2022. Ronald Dela Rosa, the director-general of the police, said he was disbanding all its drug squads. He also instructed the entire force to observe a day of prayer (pictured).

When running for election last year, Mr Duterte promised to rid the Philippines of drugs by whatever means necessary. Even before he took office, the police showed unusual alacrity in anticipating his wishes, mounting operations in which officers often killed suspects alleged to have resisted arrest. In office, Mr Duterte has egged the police on, giving inflammatory speeches calling for the slaughter of drug-dealers, and promising to protect officers who kill suspects. He rebuffed, often rudely, expressions of concern that his campaign might be violating human rights.

The police's own records indicate that since Mr Duterte became president in June officers have killed 2,555 drug suspects alleged to have resisted arrest. The figures indicate that another 3,603 killings connected with the drug trade remain unsolved. The victims had often been abducted, bound and tortured. Officers usually ascribe such deaths to fighting between drug gangs or to mysterious vigilantes. But many Filipinos assume that the police and gangs or vigilantes are often one and the same. In the 24 hours after the purge of the police was announced, reports of unexplained killings abruptly ceased.

Mr Duterte reacted to the scandal in typical fashion, holding a press conference in which he revealed a vague plan through a rambling monologue punctuated by coarse exclamations. "You son of a whore!" he said, addressing himself to the drug-squad officer suspected to be the mastermind of the kidnapping. The president offered a reward of 5m pesos ($100,000) for his capture. "Dead or alive," Mr Duterte said. "If you bring him dead, the better." Mr Dela Rosa leant in to whisper to the president that the officer was already in custody. Mr Duterte ploughed on, inveighing against the police force in general, which he described as corrupt to the core. "You use the power to enforce the law and arrest people for shenanigans," he said. "Almost 40% or so of you guys are habituated to corruption."

This assertion-in contrast to the standard mantra that only a small minority of officers are bad apples-drew attention. After all, Mr Duterte was a close ally of the police during his career as a prosecutor and then mayor of the Philippines' third-biggest city. Until now he has unstintingly supported the tactics the police have used, and reserved expressions like "son of a whore" for their critics. In the unlikely event of the purge of the force leading to prosecutions, the question of whether the president turned a blind eye to murders of drug suspects-or even incited them-is bound to be asked. But if Mr Duterte is worried, he shows little sign of it. "I don't give a shit," he insists. "I have a duty to do, and I will do it."

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The president of the Philippines admits his war on drugs has been dirty

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EVEN Rodrigo Duterte, who initiated a bloodthirsty campaign against drug-dealers and drug-users on becoming president of the Philippines last year, and who brooks almost no criticism of his war on drugs, had to admit that the police had gone too far.

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THRONGS of relatives and lawyers pushed their way past a metal barrier manned by security guards, fighting for a spot in the crowded courtroom. The area where the accused sat was crowded, too. The 17 journalists whose trial began on July 24th were the core of the editorial staff of Cumhuriyet, Turkey's oldest newspaper and one of the few media outlets that has refused to play by the rules of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's autocratic president. In a case widely considered a perversion of justice even by Turkish standards, they face prison terms of up to 43 years for "assisting an armed terrorist organisation".

For one of the accused, Ahmet Sik (pictured on poster), this is far from his first trial. Mr Sik has been a thorn in the side of the state for decades. In the 1990s he investigated disappearances in the Kurdish south-east, torture in prisons and killings of journalists (including that of a friend, Metin Goktepe, by police officers). He was prosecuted for defaming the military, the government and individual politicians. In the 2000s he was one of the first to document the penetration of Turkey's security forces by an Islamist brotherhood known as the Gulen movement. When he tried to publish his findings in 2011, police seized copies of his book; prosecutors linked to the Gulenists had him thrown in prison. He stayed there for over a year.

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At the time, Mr Erdogan's government, which had made common cause with the movement, defended his arrest. "Sometimes a book is more dangerous than a bomb," Mr Erdogan said. Mr Sik's warnings turned out to be prescient. The government and the Gulenists fell out in 2013. Gulen followers in the army are widely believed to have spearheaded an attempted coup in July last year.

Mr Sik's foresight did not spare him from Mr Erdogan's subsequent wrath. Over 50,000 people have been jailed in the purges that followed the attempted coup. In January Mr Sik found himself back in the same prison where he was held years ago, joining ten colleagues from Cumhuriyet. They are allowed only an hour a week with their lawyers, says his wife, Yonca Verdioglu, and the meetings are recorded by camera and overseen by a guard. Mr Sik cannot send or receive letters. Absurdly, the journalists are accused of abetting the Gulen movement, the very group many of them helped expose.

Akin Atalay, the paper's CEO, who has spent nearly nine months in detention, says the trial is intended both to silence Cumhuriyet and to intimidate others. The indictment, written in the kind of newspeak increasingly popular with Turkish officials, claims that the Cumhuriyet journalists prepared the ground for the coup by turning public opinion against the government. A former editor is alleged to have done so by documenting covert arms shipments to Syrian insurgents by Turkey's intelligence agency. A veteran columnist is accused of "attempting to create the impression of the existence of an authoritarian government in Turkey".

The bulk of the evidence against the journalists consists of their writing. Many are accused of corresponding with people who had downloaded a messaging app popular with Gulen supporters, known as ByLock. Simply receiving text messages from people who subsequently turned out to be ByLock users is treated as evidence of guilt. Users of the app have been sacked and arrested en masse. In a twist no longer considered out of the ordinary, one of the prosecutors behind the Cumhuriyet investigation has turned up as a Gulenist suspect in a separate case.

Ruling-party officials who once ignored warnings about the Gulenists now complain that the world does not take their concerns about the group seriously. They are not doing themselves any favours. In recent weeks Turkish police have detained at least 15 people for wearing T-shirts with the word "Hero", on suspicion that this was a secret message of support for the Gulenists. They have also arrested ten human-rights activists, including the head of the Turkish branch of Amnesty International, Idil Eser, and a German national, Peter Steudtner, on terrorism charges.

That prompted a huge row with Germany. Germany's foreign ministry warned against travel to Turkey, proposed freezing EU assistance and suggested rolling back credit guarantees to companies doing business in Turkey. Officials in Berlin revealed that their Turkish counterparts had asked them to probe nearly 700 German companies, including Daimler, Siemens and Volkswagen, for links to terrorist groups. Turkey has since withdrawn the demand.

Mr Sik's opening statement at the Cumhuriyet trial was a blistering counter-indictment of Mr Erdogan, whom he accused of a "pogrom" against freedom of thought. It was also an ode to journalism's power. "I have managed to offend the judiciary of every government and of every period," he said, continuing: "The irreconcilable contradiction between us [journalists] and those who want to drown the truth will never end." Observers see the trial as a chance for the justice system to assert itself against an authoritarian government. Mrs Verdioglu sees little hope of that. "There is no law left in this country," she says.

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Turkey's latest trial of journalists is surreal even by its own standards

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THRONGS of relatives and lawyers pushed their way past a metal barrier manned by security guards, fighting for a spot in the crowded courtroom. The area where the accused sat was crowded, too.

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TURKEY matters not just for its size, but also as a bellwether of the political forces shaping the world. For centuries it was the seat of a great empire. Today, as a frontier state, it must cope with the violence spewing out of war-ravaged Syria; it is a test case of whether democracy can be reconciled with political Islam; and it must navigate between Western liberalism and the authoritarian nationalism epitomised by Russia. In recent years under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has gone backwards. This weekend it can begin to put that right.

On April 16th Turks will vote in a referendum over whether to abandon their parliamentary system for an executive presidency. A Yes is likely, but far from certain. There is nothing wrong with a strong president, but Turkey's new constitution goes too far. The country would end up with a 21st-century sultan minimally curbed by parliament (see Briefing). A Yes would condemn Turkey to the elected dictatorship of President Erdogan. A No might just let Turks constrain him.

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Authority figure

After Mr Erdogan came to power in 2003, he and his AK party did a lot that was good. Encouraged by the IMF, he tamed inflation and ushered in economic growth. Encouraged by the EU, he tackled the cabal of military officers and bureaucrats in the "deep state", strengthened civil liberties and talked peace with the Kurds. He also spoke up for working-class religious conservatives, who had been locked out of power for decades.

But today Turkey is beset by problems. In the shadow of the Syrian civil war, jihadists and Kurdish militants are waging campaigns against the state. Last summer the army attempted a coup-probably organised by supporters of an American-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who had penetrated the bureaucracy, judiciary and army in their tens of thousands. The economy, once a strength, is growing slowly, plagued by cronyism, poor management and a collapse in tourism.

Mr Erdogan argues that, to put this right, Turkey needs a new constitution that will generate political stability. He says that only a strong president can galvanise the state and see off its enemies. Naturally, he is talking about himself.

The new constitution embodies the "illiberal democracy" of nationalists such as Viktor Orban of Hungary and Vladimir Putin of Russia, to whom Mr Erdogan is increasingly compared. On this view, election winners take all, constraints are obstacles to strong government and the ruling party has a right to subvert institutions, such as the judiciary and the press.

Yet this kind of stability is hollow. The most successful democracies make a point of separating powers and slowing governments down. The guiding idea of the American constitution is to stop presidents from acting as if they were monarchs, by building in checks and balances. Even the British prime minister, untrammelled by a written constitution, has to submit herself to the courts, a merciless press and a weekly grilling in Parliament, broadcast live.

Turkey is especially ill-suited to winner-takes-all government. It is divided between secular, religious and nationalist citizens, as well as Turks, Kurds, Alevis and a few remaining Greeks, Armenians and Jews. If the religious-conservative near-majority try to shut out everyone else, just as they were once shut out, Turkey will never be stable.

But the most important argument against majoritarian politics is Mr Erdogan himself. Since the failed coup, he has been governing under a state of emergency that demonstrates how cruelly power can be abused.

The state is entitled to protect its citizens, especially in the face of political violence. But Mr Erdogan has gone far beyond what is reasonable. Roughly 50,000 people have been arrested; 100,000 more have been sacked. Only a fraction of them were involved in the coup. Anyone Mr Erdogan sees as a threat is vulnerable: ordinary folk who went to a Gulenist school or saved with a Gulenist bank; academics, journalists and politicians who betray any sympathy for the Kurdish cause; anybody, including children, who mocks the president on social media. Whatever the result on April 16th, Mr Erdogan will remain in charge, free to use-and abuse-his emergency powers.

During the campaign he accused the Germans and Dutch of "Nazi practices" for stopping his ministers from pitching for expatriate votes. EU voices want to suspend accession talks-which, in any case, are moribund. Before long, the talk may even turn to sanctions. Some in the West will point to Turkey's experience to claim that Islam and democracy cannot coexist. But to give up on that idea would be to give up on Turkey itself.

The fault is not so much with political Islam-many AK members and voters are uneasy with the new constitution. It is with Mr Erdogan and his inner circle. Although he is a religious man, he is better seen as an old-fashioned authoritarian than as a new-fangled Islamist. The distinction matters because AK, or an Islamist party like it, is bound to feature in Turkey's democracy. Mr Erdogan, however, will one day leave the stage, taking his authoritarian instincts with him.

Hold him close

Hence the outside world should not give up on Turkey, but be patient. Partly, this is self-interest. As a NATO member and a regional power, Turkey is too important to cut adrift. It will play a vital part in any peace in Syria. Driving it into Russia's arms makes no sense. Turkey has also been a conduit for refugees into the EU as well as vital in controlling their inflow. The refugee situation is in flux: the EU will need to keep talking to Turkey about how to cope with the resulting instability.

Engagement is also in Turkey's interests. The EU is its biggest trading partner. Contact with it bolsters the Western-leaning Turks who are likely to be Mr Erdogan's most potent opposition. NATO membership can moderate the next generation of officers in its armed forces. Although Turkey will not join the EU for many years, if ever, a looser EU, with several classes of member or associate country, might one day find room for it.

Turkey will remain pivotal after April 16th. If Mr Erdogan loses, Turkey will be a difficult ally with a difficult future. But if he wins, he will be able to govern as an elected dictator.

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TURKEY matters not just for its size, but also as a bellwether of the political forces shaping the world. For centuries it was the seat of a great empire.

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"Illiberal" tendencies of Eastern European countries

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"Illiberal" tendencies of Eastern European countries

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At the same time, Visegrad leaders have made political hay out of such mistreatment, rather than working to correct for it. That's not to say that the Visegrad Group doesn't put forward constructive responses or that there isn't a way forward. But the rhetoric ensures that the group's proposals will be ignored or rejected out of hand in Brussels. As a result, governments from Warsaw to Budapest retreat into sulking mode.

While Hungary, Slovakia and Poland have taken the authoritarian route, the Czech Republic, with its more secular, democratic grounding, long seemed like the best hope for a bridge between the two sides. But the victory by Ano and its billionaire leader, Andrej Babis, make that unlikely.

People who know Mr. Babis's business style warn that he is a ruthless businessman, more interested in expanding his personal power than in furthering the common good. Apart from an empire in agricultural industry, he owns several newspapers and a radio station. After allegations of tax fraud, he was removed as minister of finance in May. There are also investigations into claims that Mr. Babis illegally received European Union subsidies for one of his hotels.

Yet all of this does not seem to impair his popularity. On the contrary, in the eyes of many Czechs it makes Mr. Babis one of them, a guy who stands up against the bigotry and double standards of the establishment, or, as one slogan goes, against the Prague "coffeehouse thugs." Almost 30 years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the heritage of freedom fighters like Vaclav Havel has been replaced by the chauvinism of the underdog.

Of course, a certain disillusionment with the promises of the West is understandable. When today's Visegrad states joined the European Union 13 years ago, they expected stability. Instead they joined a club that soon slipped into permanent crisis mode, first over the future of the eurozone and then over the mass influx of migrants. Freedom, it turned out, did not mean security - just new insecurities. To many Central Europeans, it was shocking to learn that you could be part of the West and still fear being left behind.

Along with that shock came a lack of cultural preparedness for the new competitiveness. Forty years of Communism left people with an immense distrust of one another and of the political class. The era of totalitarianism was never really processed. Even young Czechs, who did not experience Communist rule as adults (if at all), describe their society as being shot through with distrust, leaving them wary of their neighbors.

Czech society places a premium on scapegoating and victimization, says Erik Tabery, the editor in chief of Respekt, a newsmagazine based in Prague. In his book "The Left Nation," Mr. Tabery argues that the Czech Republic needs a more proactive, cooperative foreign policy that will push the country farther into the West. But he admits that positions like this have left him and like-minded colleagues very lonely in Prague.

It is true that Western Europe has cared too little for its new Eastern members since they joined the union, and it is understandable that many there feel treated like second-class Europeans. The West never took seriously the different experiences and legacies east of the Elbe River. American soldiers never set foot there after 1945, nor was there a 1968 generation to force a phase of messy, republican puberty.

But the Central Europeans have done too little to make themselves fit for freedom and ready to be taken seriously by the West. While liberalizing their economies, they have forgotten to liberalize their minds. East and West need to engage in couples therapy soon. Otherwise, Brexit might eventually look like one of Europe's minor problems.

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Opinion | Is the Czech Republic Turning on the West?

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At the same time, Visegrad leaders have made political hay out of such mistreatment, rather than working to correct for it. That's not to say that the Visegrad Group doesn't put forward constructive responses or that there isn't a way forward. But the rhetoric ensures that the group's proposals will be ignored or rejected out of hand in Brussels.

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THE BRITISH AND US WORLD SYSTEMS VOCABULARY

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THE BRITISH AND US WORLD SYSTEMS VOCABULARY

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THE UK IN EUROPE AND IN THE WORLD VOCABULARY

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THE UK IN EUROPE AND IN THE WORLD VOCABULARY

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VOCABULARY

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But we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set up at the top. We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country. The personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institution, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency.

The reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have been elected to serve. None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that that is just the way things are now.

If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that it is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified.

And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy. Such behavior does not project strength because our strength comes from our values. It instead projects a corruption of the spirit and weakness. It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, 'Why didn't you do something? Why didn't you speak up?' What are we going to say?

Mr. President, I rise today to say: enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it.

We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that. Here today I stand to say that we would be better served - we would better serve the country - by better fulfilling our obligations under the Constitution by adhering to our Article 1 - "old normal," Mr. Madison's doctrine of separation of powers. This genius innovation which affirms Madison's status as a true visionary - and for which Madison argued in Federalist 51 - held that the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract with each other, if necessary.

"Ambition counteracts ambition," he wrote. But what happens if ambition fails to counteract ambition? What happens if stability fails to assert itself in the face of chaos and instability? If decency fails to call out indecency? Were the shoe on the other foot, we Republicans - would we Republicans meekly accept such behavior on display from dominant Democrats?

Of course, we wouldn't, and we would be wrong if we did. When we remain silent and fail to act, when we know that silence and inaction is the wrong thing to do because of political considerations, because we might make enemies, because we might alienate the base, because we might provoke a primary challenge, because ad infinitum, ad nauseam, when we succumb to those considerations in spite of what should be greater considerations and imperatives in defense of our institutions and our liberty, we dishonor our principles and forsake our obligations. Those things are far more important than politics.

Now, I'm aware that more politically savvy people than I will caution against such talk. I'm aware that there's a segment of my party that believes that anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect. If I have been critical, it is not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the president of the United States.

If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so. And as a matter and duty of conscience, the notion that one should stay silent - and as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters - the notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.

A president, a Republican president named Roosevelt, had this to say about the president and a citizen's relationship to the office: "The president is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able and disinterested service to the nation as a whole."

He continued: "Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that there should be - that there should be a full liberty to tell the truth about his acts and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile." President Roosevelt continued, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by a president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."

Acting on conscience and principle in a manner - is the manner - in which we express our moral selves and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. I certainly put myself at the top of the list of those who fall short in this regard. I am holier than none.

But too often we rush to salvage principle - not to salvage principle, but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing until the accommodation itself becomes our principle. In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice any principle. I am afraid that this is where we now find ourselves.

When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country, and instead of addressing it, goes to look for someone to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops.

Humility helps, character counts. Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly or debased appetites in us. Leadership lives by the American creed, "E pluribus unum." From many one. American leadership looks to the world and just as Lincoln did, sees the family of man. Humanity is not a zero sum game. When we have been at our most prosperous, we have been at our most principled, and when we do well, the rest of the world does well.

These articles of civic faith have been critical to the American identity for as long as we have been alive. They are our birthright and our obligation. We must guard them jealously and pass them on for as long as the calendar has days. To betray them or to be unserious in their defense is a betrayal of the fundamental obligations of American leadership and to behave as if they don't matter is simply not who we are.

Now the efficacy of American leadership around the globe has come into question. When the United States emerged from World War II, we contributed about half of the world's economic activity. It would have been easy to secure our dominance keeping those countries who had been defeated or greatly weakened during the war in their place. We didn't do that. It would have been easy to focus inward.

We resisted those impulses. Instead, we financed reconstruction of shattered countries and created international organizations and institutions that have helped provide security and foster prosperity around the world for more than 70 years.

Now it seems that we, the architects of this visionary rules-based world order that has brought so much freedom and prosperity, are the ones most eager to abandon it. The implications of this abandonment are profound and the beneficiaries of this rather radical departure in the American approach to the world are the ideological enemies of our values. Despotism loves a vacuum and our allies are now looking elsewhere for leadership. Why are they doing this? None of this is normal.

And what do we, as United States senators, have to say about it? The principles that underlie our politics, the values of our founding, are too vital to our identity and to our survival to allow them to be compromised by the requirements of politics because politics can make us silent when we should speak and silence can equal complicity. I have children and grandchildren to answer to.

And so, Mr. President, I will not be complicit or silent. I've decided that I would be better able to represent the people of Arizona and to better serve my country and my conscience by freeing myself of the political consideration that consumed far too much bandwidth and would cause me to compromise far too many principles.

To that end, I'm announcing today that my service in the Senate will conclude at the end of my term in early January 2019. It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative, who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party, the party that has so long defined itself by its belief in those things.

It is also clear to me for the moment that we have given in or given up on the core principles in favor of a more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess that we've created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.

There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal by mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems and giving in to the impulse to scapegoat and belittle - the impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican Party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

We were not made great as a country by indulging in or even exalting our worst impulses, turning against ourselves, glorifying in the things that divide us, and calling fake things true and true things fake. And we did not become the beacon of freedom in the darkest corners of the world by flouting our institutions and failing to understand just how hard-won and vulnerable they are.

This spell will eventually break. That is my belief. We will return to ourselves once more, and I say the sooner the better. Because we have a healthy government, we must also have healthy and functioning parties. We must respect each other again in an atmosphere of shared facts and shared values, comity and good faith. We must argue our positions fervently and never be afraid to compromise. We must assume the best of our fellow man, and always look for the good.

Until that day comes, we must be unafraid to stand up and speak out as if our country depends on it, because it does. I plan to spend the remaining 14 months of my Senate term doing just that.

Mr. President, the graveyard is full of indispensable men and women. None of us here is indispensable nor were even the great figures of history who toiled at these very desks, in this very chamber, to shape the country that we have inherited. What is indispensable are the values that they consecrated in Philadelphia and in this place, values which have endured and will endure for so long as men and women wish to remain free.

What is indispensable is what we do here in defense of those values. A political career does not mean much if we are complicit in undermining these values. I thank my colleagues for indulging me here today.

I will close by borrowing the words of President Lincoln, who knew more about healthy enmity and preserving our founding values than any other American who has ever lived. His words from his first inaugural were a prayer in his time and are now no less in ours.

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of our affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

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Full Transcript: Jeff Flake's Speech on the Senate Floor

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But we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set up at the top. We must never regard as normal the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country.

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This is the best podcast to understand the Saudi purge and the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran

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These developments do not suggest that Mr. Assad has an easy road ahead. He remains a pariah in much of the world, presiding over a blasted, divided land. If he emerges victorious, he is likely to be left with a weak state that is beholden to foreign powers and lacks the resources to rebuild.

But his endurance has serious ramifications for the country and for the Middle East, affecting the prospects of Syria's future stability, of refugees to return home and of the Syrian government to tap international funds to rebuild its destroyed cities.

It is also a grim, late act in the Arab Spring uprisings that broke out in 2011. While protests and armed insurrections removed from power the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, Mr. Assad has remained, despite wielding tremendous violence against his people.

Mr. Assad himself has acknowledged the toll of the war, but argued that it has purified the state by eliminating threats to the nation and uniting Syrians around a shared project.

"We lost the best of our youth and our infrastructure," he told a conference in Damascus, Syria's capital, last month. "It cost us a lot of money and a lot of sweat, for generations. But in exchange, we won a healthier and more homogeneous society in the true sense."

Syria's conflict began in 2011 with a popular uprising against Mr. Assad, which his security forces sought to suppress with overwhelming force. The opposition took up arms, and the United States, Saudi Arabia and others endorsed the rebels' cause, backing them politically and giving them arms and cash.

Now, Mr. Assad has succeeded in dispelling the rebel threat, largely because of the steadfast financial and military support of his foreign backers.

His government controls Syria's largest cities and most of its remaining people, who generally live in better conditions than those elsewhere in the country. His allies - Russia, Iran and Hezbollah - have stood by him, bolstering his depleted military and helping it advance.

The rebels, a disparate collection of factions with varying ideologies, never managed to form a unified front, or to convince all Syrians that they would create a better future. Extremists linked to Al Qaeda joined their ranks, and their territory has shrunk as their backers have abandoned them to focus on fighting the Islamic State.

"The Syrian regime is now the furthest from being toppled," said Bassam Alahmad, executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, a human-rights monitoring group based in Turkey. "Fewer powers are interested in making that happen than was the case near the beginning of the Syrian war."

But Mr. Assad is in many ways a limited head of state.

Much of Syria's territory remains out of his hands, and foreign powers have carved out spheres of influence, undermining his claim to rule all of Syria.

Turkish forces allied with local rebels hold territory in the north, and the United States is working with Kurdish and Arab fighters against the Islamic State in the east.

Even in areas nominally under Mr. Assad's control, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and local militias empowered by the war often exercise greater control than the Syrian state. And Russia has taken the lead in Syria's international diplomacy, negotiating safe zones with foreign powers around the country to try to stop the violence.

The war's toll has been tremendous and could be a burden on Mr. Assad and his allies for decades to come.

A recent report by the World Bank put the country's lost economic output during the first six years of the war at $226 billion, four times its gross domestic product in 2010, before the conflict began. And while images of Syria's destroyed cities have become common symbols of the war's toll, the cost of unseen factors like broken social trust and shattered social networks could outstrip that of the physical damage many times over, Harun Onder, the report's lead author, said in an interview.

"As the conflict continues, it is not only the physical destruction, but also that the degradation in the social fabric intensifies," he said.

Merely by staying in power, Mr. Assad could hinder reconstruction.

Officials in the United States and Europe still hope that Mr. Assad will leave office in an eventual political agreement, but they have vowed not to reward him for his brutality and rampant human rights violations if he stays by helping rebuild the country.

Other countries that support Mr. Assad could help, but their resources are limited. Iran and Russia are under international sanctions, their economies hurting from low oil prices.

Last month, the government held an international trade fair in Damascus for the first time since 2011, welcoming companies from Iran, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela and elsewhere. Among the new deals signed were ones for the importation of 200 buses from Belarus and contracts to export 50,000 tons of produce.

Mr. Assad's hold on power could also affect the return of refugees, a critical issue for neighboring states.

About half of Syria's people have been displaced by the war, with more than five million of them seeking refuge abroad. Many fled attacks by Mr. Assad's forces and have no homes to return to. Others say the situation is not safe or fear arrest or conscription by Mr. Assad's security forces.

After years of living in exile, Bassam al-Malik, a businessman and former member of the main exile opposition group, tried to return to Syria this year to sell off some of his property. Through an intermediary, the government warned him not to return or he would be detained.

Now he was stuck, he said, between "the regime and the opposition."

Some Syrians have dropped their opposition and made their peace with a government that seems to be winning.

In 2012, Firas al-Khatib, a star soccer player, told a crowd of screaming fans that he would not play for the Syrian national team "as long as any artillery is shelling any place in Syria."

Last month, he returned to Damascus and received a hero's welcome at the airport. "Today, we are on the land of our homeland and in the service of our homeland," he said.

The team, which is closely related to Mr. Assad, is still in the running to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.

Other citizens, like the teacher from Madaya, are happy to support anyone who can provide basic security and services.

"We are people who walk where the winds take us," she said. "During the siege, we were with the revolution. Now we are hanging Bashar's photos and we sing for him."

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Syrian War Drags On, but Assad's Future Looks as Secure as Ever

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These developments do not suggest that Mr. Assad has an easy road ahead. He remains a pariah in much of the world, presiding over a blasted, divided land. If he emerges victorious, he is likely to be left with a weak state that is beholden to foreign powers and lacks the resources to rebuild.