Mike White is not just the writer of The White Lotus. He is also its creator, director, and executive producer, and I’m surprised that he doesn’t do the catering and animal-handling, too. This unusual level of control makes The White Lotus the polar opposite of, say, the Marvel films, which feel like they’re written by one committee, edited by another, and marketed by a third.

And what has White done with his unusual level of creative control? He has made the first great work of art in the post-“woke” era. He treats his characters as individuals, rather than stand-ins for their identity groups—and he insists on plot points that would unnerve a sensitivity reader.

[Hannah Giorgis: The rich tourists who want more, and more, and more]

The White Lotus repudiates the “peak woke” era of the late 2010s, which yielded safe, self-congratulatory, and didactic art, obsessed with identity and language, that taught pat moral lessons in an eat-your-greens tone. Instead, White has made a point of discovering our last remaining taboos—kink, scatology, marrying for money, male nudity deployed so frequently in moments of high tension that culture scholars call it the “melodramatic penis”—and then putting them all on-screen, with a luxury hotel or a superyacht as the backdrop. If you’ve watched Episode 6 of the latest season, set in Thailand, cross Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son’s character has a drug-fueled threesome involving his brother off your bingo card.

But that scene—the explicit fraternal bonding between Saxon and Lochlan Ratliff during a hookup with the high-class escort Chloe—wasn’t the one that caused the most chatter among my friends. Far more shocking was a four-minute monologue in Episode 5 by a minor character, Frank (played by Sam Rockwell), that drew on one of the most incendiary findings in sexology: that some otherwise straight men are aroused by the thought of themselves as women.

In a bar in Bangkok, Frank explains to his old friend Rick (Walton Goggins) why he got sober since they last saw each other years ago. “I moved here because, well, I had to leave the States, but I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls, you know?” Frank says.

At first, he took Asian women home for sex, but he began to find that boring. “Maybe what I really want,” Frank goes on, “is to be one of these Asian girls?” In a monologue punctuated by Rick’s occasional raised eyebrows, Frank describes how his behavior escalated. His quest for sexual satisfaction culminated in him buying lingerie, inviting white men over to “rail” him, and paying Asian women to watch them. This behavior led to a kind of spiritual awakening. “Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too?” Frank wondered. “Or inside, could I be an Asian girl?” Eventually, he realized he had to stop “the drugs, the girls, the trying to be a girl.” So then Frank took up Buddhism—a religion that multiple characters in this season see as the antidote to Western materialism and their own obsessions.

Throughout Frank’s monologue, Rick looks perplexed—as well he might. But on X, Ray Blanchard—a real-life researcher who coined the term autogynephilia to describe men’s sexual arousal at the idea of themselves as women—expressed delight about the scene. Many in the LGBTQ movement have dismissed autogynephilia as a slur that reframes some trans women as nothing more than men with a fetish. Out Magazine recently described Blanchard’s idea as “a widely discredited pseudoscientific theory from the 80s.” And yet here it was being discussed on television’s buzziest show.

Suggesting that cross-dressing has a sexual component is even more subversive than, say, a graphic first-season sex scene featuring the hotel manager and one of his male employees. You might have thought that no taboos were left, but here is something as countercultural as Star Trek’s interracial kiss in the 1960s, or Ellen DeGeneres coming out in a 1997 episode of her sitcom, Ellen. Notably, unlike in the past, a screenwriter seems “brave” today by challenging liberals rather than religious conservatives.

Calling Mike White “anti-woke” makes him sound dreary and polemicist, when he is really irreverent and quietly moral. His father was once a ghostwriter for homophobic evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, before acknowledging that he was gay himself in middle age. Mel White put his son through private school and college working for men who hated him for who he was. And then, when he had the financial independence to do so, Mel came out—but still joined Falwell’s congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia, despite the abuse that followed, and tried to convince his fellow Christians that religious faith and homosexuality could coexist.

[Sophie Gilbert: The erudite, absurd ]White Lotus finale

Mel’s son had a different political trajectory. By his own account, Mike White once had conventional left-wing politics. He wrote an undergraduate thesis on Judith Butler, the high priest of postmodernism, when he was studying at Wesleyan University, which he has described as “the P.C. school, before institutions all became sort of like that.” In interviews, he has talked about how mind-blowing he found Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, a 1990 book that is deeply critical of feminism, defied what was then called political correctness, and contains bracing, before-its-time sentences such as “The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.”

In the first season of The White Lotus, set in Maui, White pays Paglia homage: The snobby college student Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) has her book. Meanwhile, Olivia’s friend Paula (Brittany O’Grady) reads an anti-colonialism treatise by Frantz Fanon as native Hawaiians serve them cocktails by the pool. (Of course Paula also has a copy of Butler’s Gender Trouble.) In the second season, set in Sicily, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) tries to talk herself into dating clean-cut Albie by observing that “he’s nice and smart. He went to Stanford, and—he’s not nonbinary.” White is mocking Portia’s world, in which so many students have minority sexual and gender identities that a standard-issue straight guy makes a refreshing change.

For that season, White created a cabal of murderous gay men—an offense against the liberal orthodoxy that movies and TV shows must portray members of disadvantaged groups in virtuous ways. Even though this plot was a huge hit with gay audiences, White’s gay villains made some cultural gatekeepers uncomfortable. “Barely anyone seemed triggered by White Lotus,” Beth Greenfield seemed to lament on Yahoo Entertainment.

[Shirley Li: The sex lives of the one percent]

In a recent discussion with White on his podcast, the gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan decried Hollywood’s portrayal of gay characters, since the height of the AIDS epidemic, as suffering saints—as in the 1993 movie Philadelphia, which stars Tom Hanks as a doomed gay patient. Sullivan, who has written movingly about being diagnosed with HIV in the ’90s, praised White for allowing gay characters more emotional range. “I was hoping, you know, this was 30 years ago, that one day the gays will be presented as humans,” Sullivan said. “And so my big thrill, your second season of White Lotus, was the evil gays.”

White, who recently described himself on Sullivan’s podcast as a “guy who has sex with men,” appears particularly unconstrained in his portrayal of LGBTQ characters. In 2022, he said that “there’s a pleasure to me as a guy who is gay-ish to make gay sex transgressive again.” Frank’s autogynephilic liaisons with men and the Ratliff brothers’ incestuous threesome certainly fit into that category too.

What makes The White Lotus feel like the cultural product of a new era is that White doesn’t try to build shallow morality plays around these or any other characters. Nor does he drop in stock “Karens”—think of the way And Just Like That turned Sex and the City’s leads into idiot middle-aged ladies whom minor characters endlessly lecture about their outdated attitudes—whose primary job is to provide teachable moments. His plots and characters share elements from his own life. “Unless I feel somehow personally indicted, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything that bold,” he recently told The New Yorker. He bought a house in Hawaii after writing Enlightened, a series whose flaky lead character attends a rehab program there. He turned to Buddhist self-help books when he had a breakdown while writing a Fox sitcom, about an oddball family, called Cracking Up.

White’s most countercultural belief is that a heavy focus on identity is a prison, not a liberation. He told Sullivan that his time as an actor made him feel limited by his appearance, whereas writing allowed him to explore the way that “we’re all monkeys, first of all—we’re all apes—and we also share so much.”

Above all, his shows are fun—anarchic, dirty, humane. They have the message of 18th-century novels such as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which lets readers revel in the filth of the prostitute Fanny Hill’s life before offering them the “tail-piece of morality.” Viewers crave yachts, and hot people, and terrible mistakes, and hot people making terrible mistakes on yachts. Give them that, and underneath you can smuggle the message that it’s all incredibly hollow and unfulfilling. After a decade when too many television shows had the tone of a Sesame Street episode on healthy eating, White’s formula of miserable rich people in sunny climates is a huge relief.

The United States is rapidly dismantling the world order that it built and maintained over the past 80 years. Donald Trump’s administration is demolishing America’s foreign-aid system, weakening its transatlantic alliances, and curtailing military assistance for key partners, all in the name of putting “America First.”

These decisions emerge in part from a belief that has a growing appeal today: The U.S. should fix its own problems before worrying about everyone else’s. But this view fails to recognize that America’s international relationships are indispensable to its strength and stability. In nearly 15 years working on foreign-aid efforts across continents, I’ve seen that when America withdraws from the world, the world’s problems come knocking on its door.

Trump’s policies resemble those of some American leaders in the early 20th century who withdrew from international commitments, restricted foreign assistance, and pursued objectives mainly through threats and limited force rather than engagement and support. Both American and foreign leaders typically expended blood and treasure abroad only when they sensed a near-term payoff, or when catastrophes had already broken out. Using one’s resources to stabilize the international system and prevent bad outcomes was the exception.

[Brian Klaas: DOGE is courting catastrophic risk]

The costs of this approach became clear soon enough. Even though the U.S. had the world’s largest economy and an exceptional military, the country was deeply vulnerable to international crises, including wars, epidemics, and economic tumult, all of which inflicted great harm on Americans.

Now, in fraying the international order, Trump threatens to reinstate some of the conditions that made the U.S. so unsafe a century ago. The administration claims to want to reduce wasteful spending and inefficiency. I know firsthand that these problems are real, and that effective reforms exist. But tearing down the system isn’t one of them.

Aiding other countries may seem like charity, but it protects American interests in concrete ways. Containing Ebola or Marburg outbreaks before they reach American soil, for example, is clearly preferable to addressing them once they’re already here. But even the more routine work that the U.S. has now halted—such as training nurses and supporting hospitals—ultimately makes Americans more secure. My own experiences illustrate the point.

In 2019, I worked with government officials and medical professionals in Tanzania to curb the excessive use of antibiotics, and thereby reduce the potential for drug-resistant pathogens. In a stuffy conference room four hours outside Dar es Salaam, we created a system that could help stop the next MRSA infection from emerging in Tanzania and coming to America.

During my work in Nigeria in 2016, I saw how training teachers, providing textbooks, and rehabilitating schools not only benefited locals but also promoted America’s strategic priorities. Because we conducted all of our activities with the Nigerian government, we established relationships that could be used to encourage security cooperation, combat local insurgents, and counter Chinese influence in the country.

And while working on tax reform in Tunisia in 2017, I was one small piece of an effort to ensure that the government had sufficient revenue to pay its employees and provide basic services. This wasn’t bleeding-heart altruism: The project ultimately helped equip the country’s emerging democracy to fight extremism, reduce migration that was destabilizing Europe, and pay its debts to Western creditors.

The connection between foreign assistance and U.S. national security was even clearer in Afghanistan, where I spent several months from 2010 to 2013. I was part of a team that reestablished local government offices and cooperated with officials to rebuild schools, repair roads, and improve water systems. The initiative was demanding and dangerous: Local militants attacked our workplaces and—on a day I wasn’t there—car-bombed our Kabul office. Our work benefited the local population, but that wasn’t our primary objective; we were there to convert our military’s gains into lasting security for America. As long as terrorists who opposed the West continued to find refuge in Afghanistan, the U.S. wouldn’t be safe. The Afghan government had to be rehabilitated in order to neutralize them.

America’s efforts obviously failed in Afghanistan, but that was a function of too little involvement, not too much. The U.S. had steadily withdrawn military, economic, and diplomatic support—a long, slow slide that led to the Afghan government’s collapse and our disgraceful withdrawal in 2021. We now face a similar situation in Ukraine, where the elimination of U.S. support may produce the very failure that America says it’s trying to avoid.

Even a purely self-interested America should invest in the world’s security. But it has to improve how it carries out those investments. As with any government program, America’s foreign-aid system suffers from a little fraud, some waste, and a lot of inefficiency.

[From the April 2025 issue: The Trump world order]

Let’s start with fraud. Though I never witnessed any directly, some undoubtedly occurs, and the administration is right to want to eliminate it. But firing inspectors general is not the way to do so. These independent watchdogs minimize abuse and make sure Congress knows precisely how taxpayer money is being spent. For example, they identified billions of dollars in misdirected or poorly utilized spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. To actually root out fraud and inefficiency, the federal government must empower IGs, not remove them. Tying IG budgets to the size of the programs they oversee would ensure that their resources are commensurate with the tasks they are asked to perform, including targeting fraud.

In my experience, however, fraud is far from the biggest problem. I saw many projects fail either because they didn’t fully account for local context—in fairness, it’s difficult to hold community meetings under mortar fire—or because they didn’t have enough resources to achieve their aims. But even when projects succeed on their own terms, they don’t always advance America’s interests as clearly as they could. Every foreign-assistance effort should be linked to specific foreign-policy goals, such as decreasing the number of refugees fleeing a given country, or building up a local alternative to Chinese foreign investment. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Reviews of recent decades have tried to unite projects with broader objectives, but they’re too cumbersome to be effective.

Simply meeting goals and advancing the national interest aren’t enough, though; America’s foreign-aid system needs to do both much more efficiently than it has in the past. I was part of several efforts that languished under review for well over a year before being canceled. Worse, some applications sat pending for so long that when they were awarded, the circumstances on the ground had changed so dramatically that the original plan had no chance of succeeding. Even when applications are assessed and approved quickly, other onerous processes stand in the way: contracting mechanisms, acquisition regulations, and compliance and reporting requirements all tend to result in lots of wasted money, time, and brainpower.

In theory, some of DOGE’s reforms might help in this regard. Subsuming USAID and other foreign-aid offices within the State Department could allow the government to make sure that more projects meet their goals and promote American priorities. One could also argue that reducing America’s foreign commitments might help the country focus on its most important interventions. The current administration, however, has given little indication that it is carrying out these reforms in good faith—or even wants to improve foreign aid in the first place.

A thoughtful version of DOGE that truly wants to create a leaner, more effective foreign-policy apparatus could use AI to accelerate and improve the many regulatory steps that slow down the provisioning of aid. AI might also help the government identify which applicants are most likely to meet their targets.

But at the moment, DOGE seems less inclined to excise waste and inefficiency than to implode the government. Its impact on American security is already coming into view—in a resurgence of tuberculosis in Kenya, for example, and a measurably growing risk of nuclear war.

By ostensibly putting itself first, America is really dragging the world back to a leaderless, atomized era that undermined its own interests. The administration can continue to disengage and watch chaos fill the void. Or it can make America safer.

The demonstration in London was like so many others in the past year and a half. A swell of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, tens of thousands of them, banged drums and chanted against Israel. Although this march in early October observed the one-year anniversary of the day Hamas militants broke a cease-fire by invading Israeli territory, the marchers paid no heed to the civilians who were murdered or kidnapped.

The U.K. chapter of the world’s largest human-rights organization, Amnesty International, echoed the marchers’ point of view. The official Amnesty UK account on X promoted a video of an unnamed young female protester clad in a red shirt and a keffiyeh. She peered into the camera and said: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October, 2023.”

The video showed a demonstrator’s placard: It’s been 76 years & 364 days—a reference to events that culminated in the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. The implication: Israel, a member state of the United Nations, has no right to exist. The clip, which Amnesty UK captioned “It didn’t start one year ago,” drew 9.7 million views. Amnesty employees around the world shared it.

The social-media promotion of this march marked an astonishing shift for one of the world’s most prominent human-rights organizations. Amnesty’s handbook declares that it is “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it necessarily support the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.”

Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War. The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders. As the latter group proclaims on its website: “We are independent, impartial, and neutral.”

More recently, though, human-rights leaders have grown accustomed to looking at the complicated stew of politics and culture in Israel and Palestine and blaming Israel foremost. As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations. Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate—a regressive, racist ethnic “Western” state in an Arab sea.

[Dara Horn: Why the most educated people in America fall for anti-Semitic lies]

Rasha Khoury, the president of the board of Doctors Without Borders USA and a surgeon who has worked courageously in war zones, might be seen as the embodiment of this new tendency in the human-rights establishment. She was born in the occupied Palestinian territories. A month after the Hamas attack and the beginning of the Israeli counterattack, she posted an essay on the organization’s digital bulletin board, known as the Souk, the Arabic word for “market.” “We must decolonize our minds,” she wrote. “The mainstream discourse around the unhinged bombardment and massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli forces for the last 33 days continues to affirm the colonizer’s world view, one rooted in white supremacist logic.”

Not long after October 7, Khoury was among the co-authors of “Violence in Palestine Demands Immediate Resolution of Its Settler Colonial Root Causes”—an article in the journal BMJ Global Health that, subsequent commentators argued, ignored Hamas’s role in triggering the Israeli invasion and incorrectly blamed the Jewish state for a deadly missile strike. In a follow-up article, Khoury and her co-authors responded to the criticism with scorn. “Demands for ‘corrections,’” they declared, “are almost always demands to acquiesce to Israeli state propaganda.”

In a similar spirit, Doctors Without Borders seemed to minimize the egregiousness of the Hamas attack from the start, describing it on X that very day as “the escalation between Israel and Gaza.” Other human-rights groups have more forthrightly condemned the Hamas offensive but primarily faulted the Jewish state for the underlying conflict. On the day of the attack, Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, posted on X that she was dismayed by the mounting Palestinian and Israeli civilian deaths. She also called for addressing “the root causes of these escalating cycles of violence.” Doing so, she went on, “requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.”

Human-rights groups fairly argue that disagreeing with Israel’s actions and policies is not anti-Semitic, but they have become more and more averse even to considering Israel’s side. “There’s clearly a leftist perspective that would like to do away with Israel,” the longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told me. Roth led the group for decades before stepping down in 2022 and maintained that his former employer did not share this perspective. Some other former employees of the group disagreed. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” Danielle Haas, who left her job as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told me.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step of suspending its Israel chapter, after that chapter criticized a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In an internal email to colleagues in Europe, Amnesty Israel deputy director Yariv Mohar suggested that the broader organization was playing into “a zero-sum victimhood game, as if any attention or acknowledgment to the victimhood of one side comes at the expense of the other.”

Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. These activists—along with many Jewish counterparts around the world—object to the reflexive condemnation of Israel and wrestle with questions they find vexing: How can the country protect itself from Hamas? What would a proportionate, defensible response to October 7 look like?

Roy Yellin is a longtime left-wing human-rights activist in Israel who has worked closely with the big international groups in Europe and the United States over the years. “Human-rights organizations earned their prestige because they described reality as it was,” he said. “But too often now I’ve seen lots of colleagues in the international community who I thought of as partners who are in complete denial about what Hamas did in Israel.”

Within human-rights organizations, anger toward Israel has been simmering for decades, particularly as the country’s politics have shifted rightward and its settlements have expanded in the West Bank. On October 7, the divide within the human-rights movement over Israel began to seem unbridgeable, in particular to many Jewish employees. That morning, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters viciously attacked Israel, slaughtering civilians before retreating back into Gaza, where they gathered their armaments and hid in tunnels, using the dense civilian population aboveground as human shields. Hospitals, schools, and universities—all became hiding spots for Hamas militants.

Israel responded with a relentless, at times brutal, invasion of Gaza, in which many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed. This has given rise to a heated debate about whether such actions can be justified. Many critics have argued that Israel, as a democracy that professes to follow modern rules of war, has an obligation to minimize civilian casualties, and they point to abundant evidence that Israel chose to drop bombs on Hamas militants and headquarters even when aware that these sites were crowded with civilians. Even some Israelis have objected to the duration of the war and felt that it was too driven by feelings of rage and revenge. The international human-rights movement has gone further. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have all accused Israel of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. Some human-rights leaders have openly questioned Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Over the past six months, I’ve reviewed internal emails and hundreds of social-media posts by leaders of prominent human-rights organizations. I’ve also spoken with more than two dozen Jewish employees of these groups, nearly all of whom described a pervasive and growing estrangement from the organizations where they had worked, in some cases, for decades. None of these staffers would pass for an apologist for Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Their politics are left of center and many are deeply critical of Israel’s invasion and of actions that they categorize as war crimes. But, they said, talk of taking a nuanced view of the conflict drew contempt from colleagues and supervisors.

These Jewish employees argued internally that Israel had waged a brutal war, but also that Israelis were badly scarred by the slaughter of October 7 and that Hamas had committed terrible war crimes and acts of terrorism. Yet to take these positions was to risk being labeled as a propagandist for a settler-colonialist regime. Many of these employees are particularly galled by the frequent claim that Israel is a white-supremacist state. More than half of Israeli Jews are descendants of those who lived in Arab countries, Iran, and Ethiopia; a great many others have ancestors who were driven from Europe by the Nazis.

A former top executive with a well-known human-rights organization noted the frustration inherent in trying to draw evenhanded distinctions that were once elementary in the human-rights world. “Hamas has an obligation under international law not to use human shields and to distinguish between military and civilian targets,” this person, who asked not to be identified to avoid further alienating former colleagues, said. “But if you bring this up internally, it’s framed as a distraction, an Israeli talking point.”

The leaders of the world’s most prominent human-rights groups have displayed little appetite for acknowledging the uncertainty and moral murk of the Gaza war. On October 17, 2023, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and killed close to 500 Palestinians. Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders immediately picked up on that claim: The leaders of the latter group posted about the Israeli “massacre” on their social-media feeds. And Human Rights Watch’s director of Israel and Palestine issues, Omar Shakir, amplified a post blaming Israel for the attack. He added: “Abject horror. THIS MUST END.”

Shakir backed off a few hours later, saying that his organization was investigating. And to its credit, Human Rights Watch did so judiciously. A month later, it reported that the explosion likely was caused by a misfired Palestinian missile, which hit a paved area next to a parking lot and not the hospital itself. It also faulted the Gaza Health Ministry for reporting a death toll that is “significantly higher than other estimates, displays an unusually high killed-to-injured ratio, and appears out of proportion with the damage visible on site.” (Unlike Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch has also released a report that researched and documented Hamas’s war crimes on October 7.)

[Read: The case for Palestinian pragmatism]

To this day, Doctors Without Borders has not removed its debunked claims of Israeli malfeasance from its social-media feed.

Doug Sandok worked with Doctors Without Borders in Rwanda, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. He has charted the curdling of the group’s rhetoric regarding Israel. “I went to an organization-wide meeting in November 2023, and the discourse shocked me, all about anti-settler-colonialism and racism,” he told me. “A number of us asked, ‘Is it really a foregone conclusion that Israel has committed genocide?’ It feels like one more institution captured by the ideological left.”

For Dan Balson, working for Amnesty International was a longtime dream. He and his parents got out of the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of a wave of Jewish émigrés. Amnesty, he told me, played a key role in pressuring Moscow to release families like his. “It was a household name in my world,” Balson, who is 40, said.

He became Amnesty’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia, covering territory that stretched from Russia to Afghanistan to Ukraine. He admired the courage and creativity that his colleagues showed in documenting human-rights abuses. One used a fragment of an exploded shell that killed civilians to track down and publicly identify the armaments manufacturer; another donned a niqab and traveled through a war zone, documenting the crimes of a government and its secret police.

Slowly, however, Balson noticed a harshness creeping in whenever the subject of Israel arose. In particular, when he visited Amnesty’s global headquarters in London, he sensed an antipathy toward Israel and anyone who identified as a Zionist.

On the morning of October 7, Balson checked and rechecked his messages to see if Israeli friends had been harmed. Then he scrolled the Amnesty International website, which issued a statement that day deploring that “civilians on both sides” were “paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza.” That statement just once referred to Hamas, which controls the government of Gaza, preferring the term “Palestinian armed groups.”

Balson turned to X and saw that his colleague Rasha Abdul-Rahim, then the director of technical services for Amnesty, had claimed that although she was distressed by reports of Palestinian fighters dancing on Israeli bodies, Palestinians had suffered worse for decades. She added:“To be truly anti racist and decolonial is to recognise that resistance against oppression is sometimes ugly.”

That night Balson wrote his resignation letter. Amnesty International’s time-honored approach, he wrote to his supervisors, was to decode the motivations, anxieties, and limitations of a nation and its leaders, even when those are disagreeable. None of that seemed to apply to Israel. Amnesty’s approach, he wrote, “has shown such disdain for Israelis’ existential fears that it seems deliberately calculated to repel rather than attract and persuade.”

Even Amnesty’s sparing acknowledgment of Hamas’s role on October 7 had proved too pro-Israeli for some staffers, who insisted that Amnesty’s statement was too understanding of Israel. As debate grew within the organization, and some Jewish staffers argued for measured tones, other Amnesty employees complained that such arguments were “triggering” and accused Jewish colleagues of Islamophobia, multiple staffers told me.

I asked Amnesty International USA’s director, Paul O’Brien, about these tensions. He replied that most conversations within Amnesty USA were respectful but “not pain-free.” Might unbridled passions and angry social-media positings, I asked, interfere with Amnesty’s work? “I have seen social-media publications that I wish we had not sent,” he acknowledged.

O’Brien’s critics see his own conduct as at times emblematic of the movement’s growing opposition to Israel’s entire reason for being. In March 2022, he backhandedly endorsed the disestablishment of Israel in its current form. “We are opposed to the idea—and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate—that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” he said at a luncheon of the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. He subsequently expressed regret for his remarks and said that Amnesty “takes no position on the legitimacy or existence of any state, including Israel.” (Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens vote and are represented in the country’s Parliament and on its supreme court.)

But making stridently anti-Israel remarks, whether in person or online, is not a barrier to gaining a prominent role at Amnesty. In April 2022, a Palestinian gunman killed three Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv. Rasha Abdel Latif, a human-rights activist in D.C., reposted a social-media statement written in Arabic that stated: “This land is our land … The occupation has no choice but to leave.”

Four days later, Amnesty USA appointed Latif to its board. Two people told me that angry Jewish employees demanded a meeting with O’Brien and management, during which O’Brien conceded that, yes, Latif’s social-media post could be read as anti-Jewish. But he said that she had learned her lesson and that the board would not censure her so as to avoid giving comfort to the organization’s critics. Latif’s critics accused Amnesty of treating her as a victim. “The only reason she was not removed from the board is that the victims of her bias were Jewish,” Balson told me.

Writing inflammatory social-media posts has become common among Amnesty officials. On the first day of 2024, Abdul-Rahim, the former technical-services director, posted on X, “Happy new year to everyone except the #israeli apartheid state.” Even Amnesty USA’s official website features dubious statements. In May, Amnesty put up a collage of footage from its “Solidarity With Gaza” conference, accompanied by music from the hip-hop artist Macklemore. “Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but white supremacy is finally on blast,” Macklemore said in his rap about Israel.

I asked O’Brien about that post, which at a minimum seemed ignorant of Israel’s actual demographics. O’Brien said he was unfamiliar with it (though it had been on Amnesty USA’s site for half a year, even after employees had complained about it to senior managers). I sent him a link, and he replied the next day: “Thanks for flagging that post. We have removed it as it did not follow our internal guidelines.”

This past fall, on the anniversary of the October 7 attack, an extraordinary anonymous statement purporting to represent more than 40 current and former Doctors Without Borders staffers appeared on the Souk. It angrily protested how the Geneva-based organization, which has 69,000 employees and an annual budget well over $1 billion, tended to characterize the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The statement accused Doctors Without Borders of remaining silent about Hamas’s “ferocious barbarity” and sexual violence and of ignoring Israelis taken hostage, some of whom died in captivity, including infants. “This version” of the organization, the statement declared, “does not represent us. It barely represents itself.”

French physicians founded Doctors Without Borders in the aftermath of a civil war and famine in Nigeria. Its charter committed to providing medical care without regard to politics, race, or nationality. But five staffers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of endangering their jobs, described an environment in which their colleagues refused to entertain any nuance about the Jewish state. In November, for example, Javid Abdelmoneim, the former president of Doctors Without Borders UK, endorsed a full boycott of Israel, writing on X: “Invest no other time on Israel other than to cut it out of your life.”

Michael Goldfarb, a former longtime communications director for Doctors Without Borders, had worked in desolate and dangerous corners of the world. But his patience for his former employer eventually reached an end. He posted last year on the Souk, writing of his frustration with the “blatantly hate filled and, yes, anti-Semitic responses” within the organization to the anonymous Souk statement. “Fear of retaliation, silencing, and ostracism grips many MSF colleagues,” he wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders, “who nonetheless courageously endorsed the publication of the post.” (Goldfarb declined my request for further comment.)

As if to underline his statement about organizational intolerance, Doctors Without Borders employees let loose on the Souk, going after Goldfarb and all those who signed the statement. “I leave you with your hatred, your racism and your victimization (We’re used to it!),” one rank-and-file staffer wrote. Another employee, Olivier Falhun, of the press office in Paris, responded to the dissenters, “At the risk of offending your principles-based catechism, I can’t resist sharing with you a self-evident solution … ‘We’ll have to give the land back. It’s as simple as that.’”

[Gershom Gorenberg: Netanyahu takes desperate measures]

These and similar statements have remained on the organization-wide site for many months. (I sought to talk with senior leaders at Doctors Without Borders USA about this atmosphere and other questions regarding Israel. A press officer, Brienne Prusak, wrote back that “we are respectfully going to decline.”)

The organization’s one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes beyond incendiary sentiments on message boards and social media. The fact is that the hospitals they worked in were often home to Hamas gunmen and armaments.

In November 2023, the Israeli army announced plans to root out Hamas operatives that it said were hiding in Al-Shifa Hospital, a major medical facility in Gaza City. A large contingent of Doctors Without Borders staff worked there, and its leaders took offense at the Israeli claim. The president of its Australian chapter, Katrina Penney, told a newspaper that she had “seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base.”

I asked two Doctors Without Borders employees who had worked in East Jerusalem and Gaza about such claims. These staffers frowned. The presence of Hamas gunmen in that hospital and in others was an open secret. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” the staffer, who asked for anonymity out of a desire to continue to work in the human-rights field, told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”

Laws of war require soldiers to act with great care when fighting around hospitals, and none of this testimony would justify Israeli brutality. Likewise, however, humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders claim to observe the principle of bearing witness to abuses—an obligation that includes challenging armed groups such as Hamas that risk civilian lives by using hospitals as bases and hiding spots.

Months after that Israeli operation at Al-Shifa, Hamas’s subterfuge was exposed—as was the willful ignorance of Doctors Without Borders. A New York Times investigation strongly suggested that Hamas used Al-Shifa for cover and to store weapons. U.S. spy agencies went further, saying that Hamas used Al-Shifa as a command center and that it held hostages there. That would be a war crime.

Last June, Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of killing one of its staff physiotherapists, Fadi Al-Wadiya, as he biked to work. Organization officials portrayed this as a war crime, an innocent family man slaughtered. An official statement said, “There is no justification for this; it is unacceptable.”

Doctors Without Borders posted a photo of Al-Wadiya’s fractured bicycle. Word circulated that he had been a fighter with Islamic Jihad, a radical group that allied with Hamas on October 7. The organization vigorously denied this. Then the Israeli army released photos of Al-Wadiya, who it said was a rocket specialist, wearing an Islamic Jihad uniform. Doctors Without Borders ultimately conceded that it was “deeply concerned by these allegations” and said it would “never knowingly employ” a fighter.

A staffer involved in hiring for Doctors Without Borders spoke of great organizational pressure to expand hiring in Gaza. “We were told not to check backgrounds,” this employee told me, adding that one office in Gaza had two known Hamas militants. “Our Arab staff was greatly concerned because to be in the same room with operatives put all at risk.”

This staffer paused. “Look, I’m truly not defending Israel; there is a lot in its actions to criticize,” this person said, adding that Doctors Without Borders had been “blindly pro-Palestinian to an extent that was destructive. And if you were Jewish and questioned it, you were just waved off.”

Amid the terrible losses and savage fighting that have marked the war in Gaza, human-rights groups have demonstrated far greater urgency in documenting and denouncing Israel’s conduct than that of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In December, Amnesty International released its much anticipated and publicized report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Amnesty, however, has yet to complete a long-promised report examining the Hamas-driven murder and rape of Israeli civilians on October 7. O’Brien said the staff is hard at work on this. “The documentation has been extraordinarily difficult,” he told me. “Investigating sexual violence in an ethical and sensitive manner can take many months.”

Amnesty has moved with far more dispatch to stamp out dissent within its ranks. Amnesty’s Israeli chapter is known for feisty independence, taking on Netanyahu’s government and at times its own international parent group. The Israeli branch has maintained that, although it was not downplaying “the many horrific atrocities made by Israel in Gaza, which, according to the information we have, seems, on the surface, to have crossed the threshold of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing,” it viewed Amnesty’s accusation of genocide as poorly reasoned. The genocide claim, the chapter argued, seemed designed to “support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience.” The Israeli branch, frustrated with the broader organization’s silence on such questions, also began what it called a “pro-human campaign” to condemn both what it saw as anti-Semitism in some worldwide protests and the Islamophobia inside Israel, and to point out that extremists on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict promote ideologies of annihilation.

[Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession]

The campaign announcement angered top Amnesty officials in the United States and Europe. Last May, Erika Guevara-Rosas, the senior director of global research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, ordered the Israeli chapter to end its campaign. “Given the serious reputational and legitimacy risk, I am asking you to take this document down from all your platforms immediately,” she wrote in an email that I obtained.

The right-wing Israeli government and its supporters frequently clash with the country’s Amnesty chapter. For their part, Amnesty International leaders view the Israeli branch as rogue and disloyal, and in January, not long after the criticism of the genocide report, they suspended the chapter for two years. Amnesty emails suggest that this could turn into a full expulsion. Tiumalu Lauvale Peter Fa’afiu, the New Zealand–born chair of Amnesty’s international board, wrote to his team that it must decide “whether Amnesty International Israel has a future within the Amnesty Movement.”

These emails revealed that Amnesty leaders planned in advance to deflect the Israeli chapter’s criticism of their genocide report by accusing it of “endemic anti-Palestinian racism.” A Fa’afiu email underlined the real grievance: The Israeli branch had tried to “publicly discredit Amnesty’s human rights research and positions.”

After leaving Amnesty, Dan Balson has found himself adrift. He has begun, with reluctance and disappointment, to wonder about the assumptions of so many in the human-rights movement. “Within Amnesty, the phrase ‘Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism’ has taken on a kind of mystical significance,” he told me. “It is repeated frequently and forcefully, in private and in public. Amnesty’s leadership appears to believe that, if said with the proper zeal and elocution, the phrase will magically ward off deeper scrutiny.”

Yellin, the left-wing Israeli activist who has collaborated with major international groups, is even more disillusioned. “They think if they just scream ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ maybe we will go back to Europe.”

He exhaled. “Some days I feel like I’ve just been a useful idiot.”

This is the gravest crisis for Western security since the end of World War Two. So which nations will step forward as the new world order emerges?

Watching Western leaders cover up Israeli crimes has been exhausting. But I refuse to surrender and accept injustice.

“This is an awesome decision by Trump.”

What did Donald Trump just do, and who is this happy about it? Is this a Republican politician supporting the president’s plans for a tax cut, or perhaps a MAGA cheerleader applauding deportations? Perhaps it’s some right-wing pundit foot-stomping his approval for an executive order about trans athletes?

No. The “awesome decision” was to shut down the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the umbrella organization that provides support not only to Voice of America but also to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Martí, and Radio Free Asia, among other groups. And the clapping is coming not from Washington, but from Moscow. The pleased Trump fan is Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT and the media group that owns Russian-propaganda outlets such as Sputnik, and one of Russia’s most venomously anti-Western television commentators. (She once suggested that Russia should detonate a nuclear weapon over its own territory as a warning to the West about supporting Ukraine.)

Here’s her full comment (made on Russian television on Sunday night) regarding Trump’s order: “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT, Sputnik, and other outlets, because Trump unexpectedly announced that he’s closing down Radio Liberty and Voice of America, and now they’re closed. This is an awesome decision by Trump.”

Organizations such as the Voice of America and “the radios,” as they have been called collectively over the years, are among America’s best instruments of soft power. (VOA was created to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II.) During the Cold War, people behind the Iron Curtain relied on these institutions, and especially on RFE/RL, not because they wanted to hear an American point of view—they already knew all about that—but because they wanted news, real information that they could trust.  These are not independent news organizations: They receive support from the U.S. government and other sources. But the journalists at VOA and the radios are not mouthpieces for any government. They are professionals who report and broadcast news and interviews in multiple languages around the world—much to the ire of authoritarian states that wish to control what their citizens read and hear.

Turning off these sources was not some slapdash DOGE move. Trump personally signed an executive order on Friday, shutting down what a White House statement absurdly called “the Voice of Radical America.” And if the order stands—USAGM is chartered by Congress as an independent agency, and Trump likely does not have the authority to close it down by fiat—he will have succeeded in gutting crucial sources of information relied on by millions of people living under repressive governments. As Max Boot wrote in The Washington Post on Sunday, “All of this amounts to a stunning and self-defeating repudiation of America’s legacy as a beacon of freedom around the world.”

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

Trump has long had a grudge against Voice of America in particular; he has accused VOA of skewing its coverage to the left, and of supporting President Joe Biden in the 2024 campaign. He also recently bristled at what he thought was an impertinent question from a VOA reporter regarding Gaza. (“Who are you with?” the president asked the reporter. When she answered that she was from VOA, Trump said, “Oh, no wonder.”)

But this is more than just a spat with VOA. By killing off USAGM and the organizations that depend on it, Trump is pulling a thorn from the paws of the world’s worst regimes, the people he seems to believe are his natural political allies and co-religionists. (The news about VOA and Radio Free Asia was happily received in Beijing, for example, where a state-run media outlet cheered the end of America’s “lie factory” and its “demonizing narratives” about China.)

RFE/RL also monitors the press and events in other nations, and provides in-depth analysis of events there that mainstream Western media do not have the time or space to explore. I know this because I wrote some of these reports as a guest analyst for Radio Liberty’s research arm back in the 1980s, during the Cold War. (My first article for RL was a discussion of developments in Soviet civil-military relations.) Throughout my career as a Soviet and Russian expert, I counted on RFE/RL for information from Eurasia. I knew that its reporters overseas faced significant risks from the governments they covered and hostility from autocracies—as well as various terrorist groups—that wanted to silence them. Before the Soviet Union’s downfall, RFE/RL was based in Munich; later, it moved to a campus in the Czech Republic with security rivaling that of a military base.

Trump, who regards any media he cannot control as a political enemy, is anxious to shut down these vessels of news and information. Once closed, they will no longer annoy him, and he will get a pat on the back from people such as Simonyan. But the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, seems eager to see it all burn as well. Indeed, she’s so enthused that yesterday, she shared an X post from Ian Miles Cheong, a Malaysia-based right-wing podcaster and journalist manqué. (He has written for RT and is still listed on its website.) His post claimed that these organizations “produced and disseminated far-left propaganda” and “perpetuated a pro-war narratives against Russia.”

It’s one thing for the DNI to say that she supports the president’s decision; it’s another to see her reposting material from an online provocateur who came to prominence fighting on Reddit over “Gamergate” a decade ago. (I contacted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to ask if Gabbard agrees with Cheong and believes he is a reliable source of information. ODNI has not responded.)

No one should really be surprised that Gabbard is amplifying such nonsense. As I wrote last November, her views are so pro-Russian that allowing her to serve as DNI constitutes a national-security threat. But you don’t have to take my word for it: The journalist Julia Davis, who monitors Russian media, has kept track of the affection with which Gabbard is regarded in Russia. In December, the Russian state-television host Evgeny Popov surveyed Trump’s prospective Cabinet nominees and declared that none of them were “friends of Russia, except for Tulsi Gabbard.” And Vladimir Solovyov, a talk-show host whose rants are depraved even by the low standards of Russian television, referred to Gabbard as “our girlfriend Tulsi.” (“Is she some sort of a Russian agent?” another guest asked. “Yes,” Solovyov snapped.)

Now, some of this gloating in the Russian media is likely just an attempt to pull on American pigtails. The Russians are very good at this game, and they know that referring to the DNI as Russia’s “girlfriend” will throw some Americans into a swivet. But if Gabbard isn’t a Vladimir Putin supporter, she’s doing a good imitation of one: Any sensible American politician would dread a public association with Cheong—today he referred to Russia’s horrendous 2022 massacre of civilians in the town of Bucha as a “hoax”—but Gabbard thought highly enough of his comments to send them out under her official X account.

The courts may yet stop Trump’s assault on USAGM, although if the agency survives, it will be headed by Kari Lake, who has her own irresponsible plans for VOA. (If there is one bright spot in all of this, it is that Trump’s executive order may have put Lake out of a job.) But regardless of the eventual legal outcome, the president is proudly showing America and the alliance of democracies it once led that he is on the side of the world’s dictators. The Kremlin and other autocracies have long ached to see Voice of America and Radio Liberty destroyed, but even in their most fevered dreams, they could never have imagined that the Americans would do the dirty work themselves.

For President Donald Trump, last month’s spat at the White House with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky was “great television.” To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945.

Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own. Perhaps the most candid response came from the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that “the free world needs a new leader.”

There is plenty of good sense in the EU taking a resolute stand. The need for “strategic autonomy” is not only the preoccupation of French President Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc’s codified global strategy since 2016 as well. Now Trump is fulminating against the EU, claiming that it was “formed in order to screw the United States,” and European autonomy has become an urgent priority.

But to reduce this moment to a Euro-American clash, let alone to resort to clichés about the supposedly essential qualities of Europe and the United States, would be a fundamental mistake. The current rift is part of a broader battle for the soul of the West. On one side are those who believe that Western countries should continue to be characterized by open societies, Enlightenment values, pluralism, and liberal democracy, as they mostly have been for the past few decades. The most notable opposition to this status quo comes from ultranationalists who believe that the West has gone too far in its espousal of progress and liberalism, and that it must revert to a civilizational ethos centered around Christianity—one that is more traditional and less libertine, less feminist, and less internationalist (or “globalist,” as they like to call it). As a shorthand, I call them anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries.

Both sides have long had partisans in both America and Europe. For about a decade, the standard-bearer for the nationalist right has been Viktor Orbán, the self-styled “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary. Orbán’s fellow anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries have grown in political relevance and popularity across the EU, though they are still relatively marginal. For inspiration, they look to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose national chauvinism, banning of “gender ideology” and “gay propaganda,” and revisionism against the world order fit well with their agenda.

[Michael McFaul: The tragic success of global Putinism]

The European far right traditionally fulminated against Atlanticism, decrying the United States as the fulcrum of a global liberal order from which Europeans must de-link. But the immense influence of anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries over Trump, especially evident in his second administration, has turned the tables. The world’s mightiest country is now an ally for Europe’s far right. Trump’s first term also encouraged these elements, but its direction wasn’t always stable or clear.

This time around, some of the most influential figures in Trump’s court have commitments to the anti-liberal counterrevolution: Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. One common theme among these men is their championing of Orbán’s Hungary. In 2022, Carlson made a documentary about the country, portraying Orbán as leading “the fight for civilization” against the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Don Jr. made a well-publicized trip to Budapest last year and spared no words in praising Orbán’s Hungary as “one of the last beacons of hope in Europe.”

[Zack Beauchamp: Make America Hungary again]

American proponents of Orbán often praise his hard-line policies on migration and refugees, but this is a red herring. Politicians across the political spectrum in Europe have taken anti-migration positions of various kinds. The admiration for Orbán comes from his unapologetic assault on the liberal values that have defined the West for generations. In a now-famous speech in Romania in 2014, Orbán espoused his anti-liberalism in detail and attacked the United States in terms that have become familiar on the American right: “The strength of American soft power is in decline, and liberal values today embody corruption, sex, and violence and, as such, discredit America and American modernization.”

Orbán’s critique is not of any one policy but of something fundamental about the soul of the West. And it reflects a view that has found fuller expression in the words of the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, a treasured guest on Carlson’s show last year. Dugin sees a dichotomy between liberalism and its enemies that goes back to antiquity. For him, Putin’s Russia represents the “eternal Rome,” a land-based empire of conservative virtue, set against the liberal West’s “eternal Carthage,” a maritime empire of circulation and exchange. Dugin rails against the European Enlightenment, the intellectual root of modern rationalism and liberalism, and defines himself in the lineage of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home. The billionaire Peter Thiel has been compared to Dugin by the latter’s biographer. As early as 2007, Thiel offered a sweeping critique of Western enlightened thought, inveighing against both Karl Marx and Adam Smith for giving primacy to earthly human needs. Instead, he advocated for “an older Western tradition” that wasn’t afraid to “seek glory in the name of God or country.” Thiel argued that the Enlightenment was a “very long intellectual slumber and amnesia,” from which the West should reawaken into something more like the medieval age. He criticized George W. Bush’s administration for fighting the War on Terror in the name of democratic values and suggested instead an explicitly anti-Islamic campaign in the tradition of the Crusades. Thiel evinced an affinity for the German jurist Carl Schmitt—one of the Nazi luminaries, along with Heidegger, of the anti-liberal counterrevolution.

Since 2019, Thiel has been a major supporter of the national conservative movement that has helped give an intellectual identity to Trumpism. Vice President Vance is a prominent figure in that movement. As early as 2021, Vance warned about a “civilizational crisis” in the West and claimed that “every single major cultural institution” in the U.S. had been “lost.” Earlier this month, when asked about European-American ties, he praised Europe as the “cradle of the Western civilization,” with which the United States has “religious bonds” and “cultural bonds,” before stating that Europe was “at risk of civilizational suicide.”

Vance’s answer is notable not just for what it states but for what it omits. The actually existing transatlantic relationship has long been based on a common espousal of liberal democracy, built on the legacy of defeating fascism in World War II. But for Vance, the proper foundation for Euro-Atlantic ties should instead be Christian faith.

The postwar order we have known was the product of a broad alliance that brought together socialists and liberals against fascism. This order dismantled colonial empires; it conceived of new institutions, such as the United Nations, to foster international dialogue in place of aggression, and new covenants, such as the International Bill of Human Rights, to codify both the civil rights advocated by liberals and socioeconomic rights advocated by socialists.

Unsurprisingly, the anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries of today have no sympathy for this legacy. In fact, historical revisionism about World War II is an important feature of their movement. For years, the European far right has engaged in various forms of Holocaust relativization or outright denial. Last year, Carlson hosted the Holocaust-denying podcaster Darryl Cooper and introduced him as America’s “best” historian. Not only did Cooper make denialist claims about the Holocaust—he criticized the post-1945 order as making it “effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

These are not isolated ideas but a political campaign, with proponents on both sides of the Atlantic, against the post-1945 order and the broader Enlightenment tradition. Its proponents reject the full spectrum of European and American liberal thought, from left to right, and hark back to a West defined by their reading of Christianity and traditional values.

The anti-liberals are a growing force in European politics. Last year, Orbán’s Fidesz party helped establish Patriots for Europe (PfE), the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, with which 86 of 720 MEPs identify. Its most notable member is France’s National Rally, a once-marginal party that is now the main opposition force in the EU’s second-largest economy. The bloc’s other member parties are currently parts of governments in the Netherlands and Italy. The Trump administration has given these far-right entities new momentum. Elon Musk openly supports not just Orbán’s sister parties, such as Spain’s Vox, but even Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was deemed too extremist for PfE and instead joined the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations, whose member parties are even more explicitly pro-Putin, anti-NATO, and anti-American.  

Such extreme parties are still relatively marginal in European politics. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, at least 20 are currently led by mainstream liberals, centrist conservatives, or Socialists. For now, thinkers spanning a wide spectrum—the American center-right political theorist Francis Fukuyama, say, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek—can still share in the view of Europe as a bastion of Enlightenment values worth preserving.

To uphold the best of this European tradition now will require more from liberals than just a defense of the old continent against the new. Much as their anti-liberal rivals have done, Western liberals will have to forge transatlantic links and demonstrate their willingness to fight for their values. Broad fronts and global alliances made the post-1945 order. To keep it will require nothing less.

Western powers and regional neighbours attend conference in Brussels aimed at helping country rebuild after civil war.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all deaths. In 2023, after a brief hiatus, tuberculosis regained from COVID its status as the world’s deadliest infectious disease—a title it has held for most of what we know of human history.

Some people die of TB when their lungs collapse or fill with fluid. For others, scarring leaves so little healthy lung tissue that breathing becomes impossible. Or the infection spreads to the brain or the spinal column, or they suffer a sudden, uncontrollable hemorrhage. Lack of appetite and extreme abdominal pain can fuel weight loss so severe that it whittles away muscle and bone. This is why TB was widely known as “consumption” until the 20th century—it seemed to be a disease that consumed the very body, shrinking and shriveling it. On a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019, I met a boy named Henry Reider, whose mix of shyness and enthusiasm for connection reminded me of my own son. I thought he was perhaps 9 years old. His doctors later told me that he was in fact 17, his body stunted by a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

The cure for TB—roughly half a year on antibiotics—has existed since the 1950s, and works for most patients. Yet, in the decades since, more than 100 million people have died of tuberculosis because the drugs are not widely available in many parts of the world. The most proximate cause of contemporary tuberculosis deaths is not M. tuberculosis, but Homo sapiens. Now, as the Trump administration decimates foreign-aid programs, the U.S. is both making survival less likely for people with TB and risking the disease becoming far more treatment-resistant. After decades of improvement, we could return to something more like the world before the cure.

[Read: The danger of ignoring tuberculosis]

Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, a quarter of all humans living now, including an estimated 13 million Americans, have been infected with the bacterium, which spreads through coughs, sneezes, and breaths. Most will only ever have a latent form of the infection, in which infection-fighting white blood cells envelop the bacteria so it cannot wreak havoc on the body. But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can’t produce enough white blood cells to surround the invader. M. tuberculosis explodes outward, and active disease begins.

Certain triggers make the disease more likely to go from latent to active, including air pollution and an immune system weakened by malnutrition, stress, or diabetes. The disease spreads especially well along the trails that poverty has blazed for it: in crowded living and working conditions such as slums and poorly ventilated factories. Left untreated, most people who develop active TB will die of the disease.

In the early 1980s, physicians and activists in Africa and Asia began sounding the alarm about an explosion of young patients dying within weeks of being infected instead of years. Hours after entering the hospital, they were choking to death on their own blood. In 1985, physicians in Zaire and Zambia noted high rates of active tuberculosis among patients who had the emerging disease now known as HIV/AIDS. TB surged globally, including in the U.S. Deaths skyrocketed. From 1985 to 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World War I, and many of them also had HIV. In 2000, nearly a third of the 2.3 million people who died of tuberculosis were co-infected with HIV.

[Read: Tragedy would unfold if Trump cancels Bush’s AIDS program]

By the mid-1990s, antiretroviral cocktails made HIV a treatable and survivable disease in rich communities. While a person is taking these medications, their viral levels generally become so low as to be undetectable and untransmittable; if a person with HIV becomes sick with tuberculosis, the drugs increase their odds of survival dramatically. But rich countries largely refused to spend money on HIV and TB meds in low- and middle-income countries. They cited many reasons, including that patients couldn’t be trusted to take their medication on time, and that resources would be better spent on prevention and control. In 2001, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development had this to say when explaining to Congress why many Africans would not benefit from access to HIV medications: “People do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, ‘What do you mean by 10:00?’” A 2007 review of 58 studies on patient habits found that Africans were more likely to adhere to HIV treatment regimens than North Americans.

In the mid-2000s, programs such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund finally began distributing antiretroviral therapy to millions of people living with HIV in poor countries. PEPFAR, a U.S.-funded initiative, was especially successful, saving more than 25 million lives and preventing 7 million children from being born with HIV. These projects lowered deaths and infections while also strengthening health-care systems, allowing low-income countries to better respond to diseases as varied as malaria and diabetes. Millions of lives have been saved—and tuberculosis deaths among those living with HIV have declined dramatically in the decades since.

Still, tuberculosis is great at exploiting any advantage that humans hand it. During the coronavirus pandemic, disruptions to supply chains and TB-prevention programs led to an uptick in infections worldwide. Last year, the U.S. logged more cases of tuberculosis than it has in any year since the CDC began keeping count in the 1950s. Two people died. But in some ways, at the beginning of this year, the fight against tuberculosis had never looked more promising. High-quality vaccine candidates were in late-stage trials. In December, the World Health Organization made its first endorsement of a TB diagnostic test, and global health workers readied to deploy it.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Now that progress is on the verge of being erased. Since Donald Trump has taken office, his administration has dismantled USAID, massively eliminating foreign-aid funding and programs. According to The New York Times, hundreds of thousands of sick patients have seen their access to medication and testing suddenly cut off. A memo released by a USAID official earlier this month estimated that cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis will rise by about 30 percent in the next few years, an unprecedented regression in the history of humankind’s fight against the disease. (The official was subsequently placed on administrative leave.) Research on tuberculosis tests and treatments has been terminated. Although the secretary of state and Elon Musk have assured the public that the new administration’s actions have not disrupted the distribution of life-saving medicine, that just isn’t true. A colleague in central Africa sent me a picture of TB drugs that the U.S. has already paid for sitting unused in a warehouse because of stop-work orders. (Neither the State Department nor DOGE employees responded to requests for comment.)

Last year, roughly half of all international donor funding for tuberculosis treatment came from the U.S. Now many programs are disappearing. In a recent survey on the impact of lost funding in 31 countries, one in four organizations providing TB care reported they have shut down entirely. About half have stopped screening for new cases of tuberculosis. The average untreated case of active tuberculosis will spread the infection to 10 to 15 people a year. Without treatment, or even a diagnosis, hundreds of thousands more people will die—and each of those deaths will be needless.

By revoking money from global-health efforts, the U.S. has created the conditions for the health of people around the world to deteriorate, which will give tuberculosis even more opportunities to kill. HIV clinics in many countries have started rationing pills as drug supplies run dangerously low, raising the specter of co-infection. Like HIV, insufficient nutrition weakens the immune system. It is the leading risk factor for tuberculosis. An estimated 1 million children with severe acute malnutrition will lose access to treatment because of the USAID cuts, and refugee camps across the world are slashing already meager food rations.

For billions of people, TB is already a nightmare disease, both because the bacterium is unusually powerful and because world leaders have done a poor job of distributing cures. And yet, to the extent that one hears about TB at all in the rich world, it’s usually in the context of a looming crisis: Given enough time, a strain of tuberculosis may evolve that is resistant to all available antibiotics, a superbug that is perhaps even more aggressive and deadly than previous iterations of the disease.

[Read: Resistance to the antibiotic of last resort is silently spreading]

The Trump administration’s current policies are making such a future more plausible. Even pausing TB treatment for a couple of weeks can give the bacterium a chance to evolve resistance. The world is ill-prepared to respond to drug-resistant TB, because we have shockingly few treatments for the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Between 1963 and 2012, scientists approved no new drugs to treat tuberculosis. Doing so stopped being profitable once the disease ceased to be a crisis in rich countries. Many strains of tuberculosis are already resistant to the 60-year-old drugs that are still the first line of treatment for nearly all TB patients. If a person is unlucky enough to have drug-resistant TB, the next step is costly testing to determine if their body can withstand harsh, alternative treatments. The United States helped pay for those tests in many countries, which means that now fewer people with drug-resistant TB are being diagnosed or treated. Instead, they are almost certainly getting sicker and spreading the infection.

Drug-resistant TB is harder to cure in individual patients, and so the aid freeze will directly lead to many deaths. But giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop drug resistance is also a threat to all of humanity. We now risk the emergence of TB strains that can’t be cured with our existing tools. The millennia-long history of humans’ fight against TB has seen many vicious cycles. I fear we are watching the dawn of another.

This article has been adapted from John Green’s forthcoming book, Everything Is Tuberculosis.

With every passing day, it is harder to remember that Elon Musk was not always a political firebrand. The old Musk advocated for his business interests and professed to care deeply about climate change, but he largely stayed out of partisan politics. As a result, he was much more popular. He hosted Saturday Night Live and walked the Met Gala’s red carpet. He also received substantive honors, including election to one of the oldest and grandest institutions of science, the Royal Society. The fellowship put Musk in elevated company: In 2018, he traveled to London to add his signature to the society’s charter, alongside those of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton.

Thousands of scientists are now calling for Musk’s name to be blotted out from that charter’s fine vellum pages. The effort kicked off last summer, when 74 fellows (out of roughly 1,600) sent a letter to the Royal Society’s leadership, reportedly out of concern that Musk’s X posts were fomenting racial violence in the United Kingdom and could therefore bring the institution into disrepute. In November, one of the signatories, the neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, resigned from the Royal Society in protest of what she saw as inaction; her statement cited Musk’s derogatory posts about Anthony Fauci and the billionaire’s promotion of misinformation about vaccines. Then, last month, Stephen Curry, a biologist who is not himself a Royal Society fellow—or a guard on the Golden State Warriors—wrote an open letter calling for Musk’s expulsion, for many of these same reasons. It has since been signed by more than 3,400 scientists, including more than 60 actual fellows.

The society has not taken any disciplinary action in response to these entreaties. Musk himself made no comment on the campaign to oust him until March 2, when Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI” (and a member of the Royal Society Class of 1998), lent his voice to the cause. In a reply to Hinton on X, Musk said that only “craven, insecure fools” care about awards and memberships. Despite this I’m-not-mad bravado, Musk seemed stung. He did not respond to emailed questions, but on X, he did accuse Hinton of cruelty. The following evening, the Royal Society convened a meeting to discuss the matter. It took place behind closed doors, and what transpired is still not entirely clear. (In an email to The Atlantic, the society said that all matters relating to individual fellows are dealt with in strict confidence.) According to one report, the society now plans to send a letter to Musk, though what it intends to write was undecided as of last week. At least for now, Musk’s fellowship seems to be safe.

This roiling at the Royal Society comes at a tricky time for scientific institutions, especially universities. Having perhaps waded too far into political disputes in recent years, the leaders of these institutions are now trying to stay out of politics at the precise moment when politicians are trying to damage them. Musk may have been spared, so far, by an understandable desire among the Royal Society’s leadership to stay neutral. Scientific organizations that succumbed to political orthodoxies, or enforced them, have often come to regret it. During the Cold War, some scientists in the United States faced professional penalties or outright ostracization because they were suspected of being Communists. In the Soviet Union, dissenting biologists were shipped to the gulag. At the peak of China’s Cultural Revolution, a physicist who worked on the “Western science” of general relativity could be charged with resistance and denounced at a public rally.

[Read: The death of government expertise]

These cases are extreme, but subtle interminglings of politics and science can be toxic in their own way. They can undermine the atmosphere of free inquiry that gives science its unique power, its ability to sift good ideas from bad in pursuit of a more expansive and refined vision of the universe. Even an institution’s well-meaning statement of support for a social cause may have a chilling effect on any member who does not happen to agree. A scientist’s success is determined in no small part by their peers’ appraisal of their work and character. Scientific institutions should therefore avoid actions that could be interpreted as political litmus tests. They largely do: No university would deny a Donald Trump–supporting grad student’s application for enrollment, at least not as a matter of official policy. And likewise, mere support for Trump should not and would not disqualify Musk from the Royal Society.

Of course, Musk’s support for Trump is not the issue here. In her resignation letter, Bishop raised the matter of his scientific heresies, specifically about vaccines, to argue that he breached the society’s code of conduct, which prohibits fellows from undermining the society’s mission. In 2021, Musk posted and later deleted a cartoon that depicted Bill Gates as a fearmongering villain who was trying to control people with COVID vaccines. In 2023, he insinuated that the NBA player Bronny James’s cardiac arrest could have been a side effect of those vaccines. Outrageous as these posts may be, Musk is allowed to be wrong about some things. Scientists are unevenly brilliant, if they are brilliant at all, and some of the best were heretics or even fools on one scientific issue or another. Lynn Margulis revolutionized evolutionary biology. She also promoted pseudoscientific theories of HIV transmission. Freeman Dyson had a better handle on the physical laws of the universe than almost anyone since Einstein, but he went to his grave a climate-change skeptic. Kicking Margulis and Dyson out of polite scientific society for these consensus violations would have impoverished science.

[Read: The erasing of American science]

The best case for booting Musk from the Royal Society doesn’t concern his beliefs at all. It proceeds from his actions, the way that he is degrading the world of science on Trump’s behalf. In the months since the 2024 election, he has made himself into a tool of Trump’s administration, a chain saw, in his own telling. And with that chain saw, the president has begun dismembering America’s great scientific institutions. The Royal Society is an ancestor of those institutions. During its centuries-long heyday, it funded scientific research that wouldn’t otherwise have been pursued. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do this today, on a much larger scale. The Royal Society’s members are right to feel a twinge of solidarity as they watch Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency push deep staff cuts at the NSF and the NIH, and hear reports that deeper cuts are to come. In their speed and extent, these force reductions have no precedent in the history of American science.

Musk has done all of this in the name of efficiency, but scientific research is antithetical to unrelenting thrift. Basic research needs some slack to allow for false starts and trial and error. Musk of all people should know this. When the Royal Society announced that Musk would be made a fellow, it cited SpaceX’s advances in rocketry, first and foremost, and rightfully so. The company has made reusable rockets a reality, and if its larger Starship model starts working reliably, it will enable a host of new wonders in space. But SpaceX’s success required long experimental phases and lots of exploded rockets, all of which cost money. A big chunk of that money came from NASA, a scientific institution whose checks are signed by the U.S. taxpayer. Last week, it was reported that NASA, too, will soon face budget cuts. They are said to be concentrated in its science division.

Maybe Musk values scientific institutions only as a means to his personal ends. Maybe he sees them as disposable ladders that he can cast off after he has climbed to new heights of wealth. Either way, scientists are finding it difficult to fight back. They don’t have much money. Their petitions and open letters can be cringeworthy. But at the very least, they ought to withdraw the honors that they have extended to Musk. They don’t have to let him retain the imprimatur and gravitas of the Royal Society, one of the most storied institutions to have come down to us from the Enlightenment. If you give a man a medal, and he returns with a torch to burn your house down, figure out how to stop him, fast. But also: Rip the medal from his chest.