Ebrahim Raisi’s election as president of Iran came as no surprise. All those who might have been a threat to him were disqualified. He was the choice of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and small wonder: Few people better embody the ideology of the Islamic Republic. He will not open Iran up to the outside world, and will certainly not look to accommodate the United States in any way. As for Iran’s behavior in the Middle East, he has made clear that it is “not negotiable.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict last month was a reminder that nearly everything in the Middle East is connected—and whether we’re talking about Hamas rockets, the ongoing calamity in Yemen, or the Iran nuclear deal, Tehran and its destabilizing role in the region is the common factor.

We understand why President Joe Biden seeks a return to the deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The United States must roll back Iran’s nuclear program and then use the time left before the agreement’s sunset provisions lapse to either produce the longer and stronger deal the Biden administration seeks, or enhance our deterrence so Tehran understands that the U.S. will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-threshold state.

However, although we are convinced of the value of containing Iran’s nuclear program, that is not enough. The administration will also need to counter what will almost certainly be Iran’s escalating efforts in the region: With the sanctions relief that will result from returning to compliance with the JCPOA, Tehran’s troublemaking resources will increase. Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign limited the resources Iran could make available for militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Palestinian outfits Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but it never stopped Iran’s ongoing provision of training, weaponry, and other material and technical assistance.

[Karim Sadjadpour: Iran stops pretending]

After the recent conflict with Israel, Hamas leaders effusively praised Tehran for what it had provided them. And we know from leaked audio that Iran’s own Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was frustrated by the Iranian regime’s elite Quds Force consistently undercutting what he hoped to achieve with diplomacy. Moreover, Khamenei will want to show that the return to the JCPOA does not mean he is giving up his resistance ideology, so we can expect more Iranian expansion in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as threats to neighboring states.

This fear of Iran’s regional agenda explains much of the opposition to the JCPOA, both when it was agreed and through to the present day. Many in the U.S. Congress as well as leaders of Middle East states worried then—as they do now—that the administration and its European partners will see the Iran file as “closed” with the (temporary) resolution of the nuclear problem. Critics in the region, however, see the past as prologue: Just as Iran became much more active and aggressive in the Middle East after the JCPOA was agreed upon, so now do they expect threatening acts if and when the U.S. and Iran come back into compliance. Fairly or not, much of the region remains convinced that the Obama administration ignored Iran’s aggression out of a concern for jeopardizing the deal’s implementation.

The regional perspective on Iran is driven by these leaders’ experience with the Islamic Republic. For them, the core question with Iran, as Henry Kissinger once put it, is whether it is a country or a cause. The case for the latter is strong and deeply rooted: Revolutionary Iran uses Islamic, Shiite, and anti-colonialist rhetoric to justify an expansionist nationalistic agenda. Soon after the Iranian revolution, the execution of thousands of real or imagined regime opponents, support for terrorist groups throughout the region, unrelenting threats to Israel’s existence, the dangerous counteroffensive into Iraq in the 1980s, the assault on the U.S. in Lebanon in 1983, and the tanker war with America all made clear Iran’s nature and threat.

When, by 2005, Iran’s development of a nuclear-weapons program became apparent, it was first seen as yet another, if particularly dangerous, tool in Iran’s box of power politics. Thus, the Bush and Obama administrations declared that the U.S. would use force to stop Iran from developing a weapon—a threat not levied against South Africa, Libya, India, or Pakistan, each of which at various points had developed some nuclear capacity. Seen by the West as a dangerous cause, Iran was treated as an inherent aggressor.  

The Obama administration understandably worried that if the Iranian nuclear program could not be stopped diplomatically, it would trigger a wider conflict, either because Israel, feeling existentially threatened, or the U.S., knowing the danger of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, would act. Pursuing diplomacy as the means to alter Iran’s behavior was for many reasons not just the logical but also the politically necessary path to follow. Inevitably, it implied that Iran was now not a cause but a country, whose nuclear ambitions, and perhaps, by extension, regional threat, could be tamed by traditional carrot-and-stick diplomacy.

[Tom Nichols: Iran’s smart strategy]

Some in the Obama administration came to believe that the JCPOA could signal a diplomatic “regime change”: By witnessing Western respect and trust, Iran would embrace the globalized made-in-America world.

If that was the bet, it didn’t pay off. From 2013, when serious negotiations with the Iranian government began, until 2018, when Trump pulled out of the deal, Iran did not moderate its behavior. Instead, it accelerated its regional aggression, exploiting the instability caused by the Arab Spring as well as the rise of the Islamic State to expand its power. For many in the region, the lesson was obvious: There is no way to build trust with Iran, because Iran has an agenda to dominate the Middle East.

Regardless of how Israelis, Saudis, Emiratis, and others saw the Obama administration, Biden’s approach toward Iran is clearly different from what they perceived Obama’s to be. Note, for example, the following signs that the Biden team won’t be passive in the face of direct or indirect threats from Iran: air strikes against Iran-backed militias along the Iraq-Syria border; a retaliatory strike in Syria after Shiite-militia rocket attacks against Iraqi bases where U.S. forces are deployed; naval interdiction of dhows carrying Iranian weapons to Yemen; despite pressure, the stalwart support for Israel’s right to self-defense against Hamas rockets. At the same time, American officials are making commitments in private conversations with our allies in the region to not allow the nuclear file to change what the U.S. tolerates when it comes to Iran in the Middle East.

The challenge will be to follow up on these early moves and show, once the JCPOA is restored—which we both believe will happen sometime this year—that the administration will work with our partners and contest the Iranians as they directly and via proxies expand and threaten others. The irony is that for diplomacy to work, whether on the nuclear question or on other regional issues, Tehran must know that there is muscle behind it. Absent pressure, there would have been no JCPOA, and if we want to deter Iran’s egregious actions, we must be able to show its leaders that they will pay a price.

As Israel is now in the U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility, along with the rest of the Middle East, the Biden administration should bring it together with our Arab partners to develop options and conduct contingency planning for dealing with Shiite-militia threats. The administration must also encourage the Gulf states to better support the Iraqi government; to use our collective assets to do more to suppress Iran’s ability to export weapons to its clients; and to support continuing Israeli strikes against Iranian efforts to build its military infrastructure and develop precision-guidance capabilities for Syrian and Hezbollah missiles.

During the Trump administration, Washington used differing means across the Middle East’s various countries but on the whole applied military, economic, and diplomatic pressure to impede Iran’s advance. Its actions were supported by a regional coalition that eventually coalesced into the Abraham Accords. Building on those agreements makes sense not only in terms of using Arab outreach to Israel in order to elicit Israeli moves toward peace with the Palestinians, but also in terms of strengthening the coalition that is arrayed against Iran.

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Iran and the Palestinians lose out in the Abraham Accords]

To succeed, the Biden administration will need to work with Arab, Israeli, and Turkish partners on Iranian regional issues, and maintain pressure on both Tehran and those governments tempted to yield to Iran. Such an approach does not preclude diplomacy; quite the contrary, it could promote it. Indeed, managed the right way, we may build Iran’s interest in a dialogue.

Ultimately, if regional discussions with Tehran are to have any chance of reducing tensions and minimizing the potential for conflict and escalation, they must generate the kind of pushback from the region that gives Iran a reason to temper its behavior.

Announcing the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan two months ago, President Joe Biden invoked the need to focus on Washington’s No. 1 foreign-policy priority: China. Ending the war would, the president argued, permit America to redirect its energies toward new, more pressing challenges, foremost among them “extreme” competition with an assertive Beijing. As a rising authoritarian superpower threatens to eclipse the United States technologically, militarily, and economically, the thinking goes, we can hardly afford to be tied down in an endless war.

The idea that the U.S. needs to extricate itself from the greater Middle East to get serious about the Indo-Pacific has a natural appeal. It is also not new. The Obama administration similarly justified its withdrawal from Iraq as part of a pivot to Asia.

Yet as details of the Biden administration’s post-withdrawal strategy for Afghanistan emerge, its benefits for American competitiveness against Beijing look nebulous. In fact, the U.S. departure from Kabul could end up undermining, rather than strengthening, America’s strategic hand against China.

In practical terms, advocates of withdrawal offer three major ways that leaving Afghanistan could strengthen Washington in its intensifying rivalry with Beijing. It could liberate military resources currently tied down in Afghanistan, allowing them to be redeployed to the Indo-Pacific theater. It could free up the diplomatic and bureaucratic bandwidth of U.S. senior officials, permitting them to devote to China the time and attention otherwise consumed by the Afghan quagmire. And finally, it could save the U.S. government money, unlocking billions of dollars better devoted to fund initiatives that boost America’s standing in its competition with China.

Each of these arguments is intuitively compelling. None, however, holds up.

[Read: What was America doing in Afghanistan?]

Begin with the military situation. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan had already been whittled away to less than a brigade’s worth of soldiers by the time Biden took office. A few thousand U.S. troops may have been enough to keep the Afghan government from falling to the Taliban, but their redeployment will do virtually nothing to alter the global balance of power. Shoring up America’s eroding military edge in the Indo-Pacific should be the Pentagon’s foremost priority, but the capabilities being withdrawn from Afghanistan represent a drop in that ocean.

Still, if the U.S. were to cease all fighting in Afghanistan, one might argue that moving those troops and capabilities to the Indo-Pacific could signal heightened American commitment there. Yet the current plan is not to stop operations in Afghanistan but simply to launch them from outside the country.

The Biden administration cannot end U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan for the simple reason that the terrorist threat there has not gone away. On the contrary, as an unclassified U.S. Treasury Department report this year bluntly warned, “al-Qaeda is gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” Moreover, while terrorist sanctuaries have multiplied since the September 11 attacks, a “significant part” of al-Qaeda’s leadership is still based around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, according to a United Nations report issued this month, underscoring the region’s special significance for the extremist network.

To deal with this challenge, the Biden administration has pledged to adopt an “over the horizon” counterterrorism strategy. At least initially, that will entail launching operations from Persian Gulf countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—several hours of flight time from Afghanistan. These long, fuel-consuming transits will leave U.S. aircraft with little time left to loiter over Afghanistan. And because effective counterterrorism requires persistent overhead presence to uncover and track targets, the Pentagon will need to devote more aircraft to the Afghan mission. It is also likely to come under pressure to keep an aircraft carrier more or less permanently in the waters off Pakistan to supply additional firepower; already, the USS Ronald Reagan is reportedly steaming from the South China Sea for that purpose.

The new U.S. approach to Afghanistan thus risks redistributing the burden of the counterterrorism mission there, away from the ground forces that are not especially needed in a China contingency and toward the kind of long-range air and naval platforms that would be.

To make matters worse, few U.S. allies can meaningfully contribute to this “over the horizon” strategy. Until recently, American troops represented only a fraction of the foreign presence inside Afghanistan, which was made up of a broad international coalition. Now, however, the premium will be on high-end aerial surveillance and strike capabilities, the kinds of assets that America possesses but that most of its allies do not. Withdrawal thus also seems likely to transform the Afghanistan mission from a multinational one—in which NATO ground troops ultimately came to outnumber Americans two to one—into an undertaking much more disproportionately borne by Washington.

[Read: A debt of honor]

What, then, of the idea that leaving Afghanistan will liberate U.S. leaders from a diplomatic and bureaucratic morass? Here, too, at least thus far, anecdotal evidence suggests that the withdrawal is having the opposite effect.

The decision to pull out has set off a foreseeable cascade of crises that have been consuming ever greater bandwidth among the senior ranks of the U.S. government. These include a mad dash to untangle Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan allies whose lives now hang in the balance; a thus-far-unsuccessful bid to secure new basing arrangements with hard-bargaining Central Asian states; a push to persuade the Turkish government to maintain its forces in Kabul in order to keep open the international airport, and with it, foreign embassies; and a scramble at the Pentagon to figure out how to keep training Afghan forces (and servicing U.S.-furnished equipment), in particular the Afghan air force, without American soldiers or even contractors left in the country to support them.

That leaves the issue of money. There is no question that ending the U.S. ground presence will yield savings—but, it turns out, significantly less than one might think. After all, U.S. troops still need to be housed, fed, and paid regardless of whether they are based in Afghanistan, Qatar, or Texas. The Biden administration has also pledged to keep financing the Afghan army to the tune of several billion dollars a year, and has actually proposed to increase budgetary support to the government in Kabul. Then there are the operational and maintenance costs for aircraft making the long-distance commute to Afghanistan, which will be eye-watering, as will any new basing arrangements. Add it all up, and the supposed windfall of savings from leaving Afghanistan starts to look more illusory than real.

There is still a theoretical path out of these problems. The U.S. troop withdrawal might be followed not by the collapse of the Afghan state but instead by a peace agreement between the government in Kabul and the Taliban. Or perhaps a major terrorist sanctuary in Afghanistan will not materialize even if the Taliban overruns the country—or if it does, possibly others will step up to deal with it, relieving the U.S. of the responsibility. In all of these scenarios,the Biden administration would be able to shift its energies, resources, and funds to the great game with China.

Yet history suggests that hoping for the best in the greater Middle East rarely works out well for the United States. It also reveals how unrest there can upend Washington’s best-laid designs. The Bush administration entered office expecting to devote its foreign policy to—you guessed it—the rise of China, only to be derailed by the 9/11 attacks. Twelve years later, the Obama administration likewise began its second term resolved to focus on Asia, only for the emergence of the Islamic State to end those ambitions. In this respect, an effective counterterrorism strategy in places like Afghanistan is not the enemy of a strong China policy, but the precondition for it.

[Read: The forgotten people fighting the forever war]

To avoid a repetition of this history, the Biden administration now has little choice but to scramble for military and diplomatic work-arounds as a result of its own withdrawal policy. Hanging in the balance is not just homeland security against terrorism and the fundamental human rights of millions of Afghans threatened by the Taliban, but America’s own capacity for strategic coherence.

Indeed, it’s difficult to see how Washington will be able to sustain the case that countering Huawei and the Belt and Road Initiative ought to be its foremost national-security priorities in a world where transnational jihadists are once again on the march and millions of refugees are fleeing across international borders. Even with the threat of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State seemingly at an all-time low, in public polling Americans still consistently, on a bipartisan basis, identify countering terrorism as an equal if not greater foreign-policy priority than rivalry with Beijing. If Afghanistan again falls into instability, America’s ambition for great-power competition with China may prove among its many tragic and unnecessary casualties.

It was less an election than a chronicle of a death foretold — the death of what little remained of the constitution’s republican principles.

With exploitative interest frowned upon in Islamic law, bankers are quitting traditional banks, creating hiring woes.

Police accuse Nathaniel Veltman of running down a Muslim family in London, Ontario 'because of their Islamic faith'.

For most of her life, Gulfisha Fatima showed little interest in anything beyond academics. By late 2019, the 27-year-old Delhi resident had finished her M.B.A. and was getting ready to apply for a Ph.D. Even as a student, she stayed away from activism. “Her world,” her brother Aqil told me, “revolved around books.”

That began to change in December of that year. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had proposed a bill that would alter the country’s citizenship law, effectively barring Muslim refugees in neighboring countries from seeking asylum in India. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) sparked outrage among critics, civil libertarians, and minority-rights activists, who worried that Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would use the potential law to erode the status of India’s 200 million Muslims as well. Before long, women in Muslim-majority northeast Delhi began staging street protests and sit-ins, demonstrations that over the following weeks would balloon to include tens of thousands nationwide.

Fatima did not immediately join the protests in Seelampur, the Delhi neighborhood where her family lived. But as the month progressed, Aqil said, she began to drop in. “Gulfisha would sit at the site for a bit, see what was going on,” he told me. She watched as protesters drew graffiti, raised placards, and read the Indian constitution aloud. Slowly, she became more interested, at one point putting up a whiteboard and writing out the English, Hindi, and Urdu alphabets to teach the older women protesters, many of whom were illiterate. “Her work was visionary,” Apeksha Priyadarshini, a student activist from Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University who was often at the protest sites, told me. “She understood the value of education,” she continued. “She was equipped with a sense of identity and power, which she wanted to share.”

Before long, she was delivering speeches to the assembled crowd. “Our fight, my Hindu brothers and sisters, is not with you,” she said in a February 26 address, a microphone in one hand and a smartphone in the other. “Our fight is with the government—against its ideology, which manufactures Hindu-Muslim riots to win votes.”

She made the speech against the backdrop of Delhi’s worst sectarian riots in decades. On February 23, after a series of hate speeches by BJP leaders, including one by a minister in the Modi government, Anurag Thakur, calling on BJP supporters to “shoot the traitors,” riots broke out in Delhi. Over the course of four days, 53 people were killed, more than 200 were injured, and numerous houses, shops, schools, and factories were looted and burned. Fatima and her family stayed at home until the violence ebbed.

Though the demonstrations continued for a time, growing fears of COVID-19’s spread forced India into a national lockdown, and the protest sites were eventually cleared in late March.

Quiet descended on Delhi. The anti-CAA movement was effectively over. The fallout, however, was still to come. On the morning of April 9, 2020, Aqil got a call from a police constable. His sister had been arrested.

[Read: India’s democracy is the world’s problem]

Fatima and 20 others were detained through April, and in September she and 14 others were formally accused of orchestrating the February riots to destabilize the Modi government. Yet the 17,000-page charge sheet was a farce, built on a series of unsigned “confessions,” some of which matched others verbatim. None of the confessions was made in the presence of a magistrate, so they were inadmissible in court. The only thing that linked the group, many of whom had never met one another, was their participation in the anti-CAA protests.

That was more than a year ago, and Fatima remains in prison, yet to face trial. Since the police filed the charge sheets, various courts have castigated them for making “irresponsible” allegations, “total non-application of mind,” and “vindictiveness.”

Fatima’s lawyer, Mehmood Pracha, says the authorities are going after her to set an example for others. That Delhi’s police answer to the national home minister (who is also the BJP president, and the architect of the CAA) only fuels that sentiment. “Gulfisha has not done anything,” Pracha told me “None of these accused has done anything. Zilch.”

In other words, she is being held not for having committed a crime, but for her opposition to government policy—for her political beliefs. India, feted as the world’s largest democracy by the United States and Europe, is detaining Fatima and many others as political prisoners.

Activists stage protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in the eastern state of Assam. (David Talukdar / NurPhoto / Getty).

The Citizenship Amendment Act marks modern India’s most significant departure from its tradition of secularism, but is only one of many controversial laws being passed by Modi’s government. Just since his reelection in 2019, the government has revoked the historic autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, and sought to reform the country’s enormous agricultural sector—in both cases without consulting either Kashmiris or farmers.

This high-handedness is part of Modi’s style. In 2016, he gave Indians less than a day’s notice before demonetizing the majority of the country’s high-value banknotes, wreaking havoc on the economy, and similarly announced a stringent nationwide lockdown last year with little warning or safety net for the millions of low-wage laborers who were suddenly unable to go to work.

Throughout, Modi remained popular. That has started to change. Two new surveys show that his approval ratings are dropping. Criticism of his government’s priorities and performance is louder than ever before. Street agitations and social-media outbursts now also feature doctors and businesspeople.

The government’s actions, and its responses to criticism, raise more troubling questions than Modi’s electoral viability does. Cases such as Fatima’s fit a pattern. In recent years, BJP governments at the federal and state levels, as well as investigative agencies under their power, have arrested a range of people so wide—priests, professors, poets, lawyers, journalists, and stand-up comedians among them—as to turn the act of dissent itself into a jailable offense.

Modi’s seven years in power mark the worst period for Indian democracy since the 1970s, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, suspending all civil liberties and curtailing the press.

[Read: India is no longer India]

Perhaps most troubling has been this government’s use of India’s anti-terrorism law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA, a piece of legislation so harsh that several former judges have voiced concern over it. It enables the state to detain someone without a charge for 180 days, conduct closed-room trials, and produce secret witnesses.

In 2019, it was amended to allow the government to designate any individual a terrorist without them having to face trial, and to enable the National Investigation Agency, the country’s main anti-terror force, to take over inquiries in state and local jurisdictions—a move that critics say allows the national BJP government to intervene in areas where the party is not in power.

The authorities were “distributing UAPA like prasad,” Nodeep Kaur, a labor-rights activist, told me, using the Hindi word for Hindu religious offerings. (Kaur herself was arrested in January for protesting the denial of minimum wages to industrial workers in a BJP-ruled state; she was charged with rioting and attempted murder, though not under the UAPA.)

This autocratic turn is no secret: Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, which studies and rates democracies, this year classified India as an “electoral autocracy.” Its report traces much of the decline of democratic freedoms to the BJP’s initial electoral victory in 2014, and calls out the party’s weaponization of UAPA. Last year, the Economist Intelligence Unit, a research firm linked to the magazine, lowered India’s ranking by two places in its Democracy Index, attributing the decline to “democratic backsliding” and “crackdowns” on civil liberties.

Yet this year alone, Modi has been either hosted at or invited to meetings by the United States, the European Council, the World Economic Forum, and the G7 summit, being held this weekend in Britain. At these gated clubs of democracies, he has spoken about how to channel technology, combat climate change, and beat the coronavirus pandemic. (India has been badly hit by COVID-19 and is still grappling with a brutal, albeit lessening, wave.) Modi’s ministers have mocked the reports of their attacks on democracy: Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar said in March, for example, that the criticism comes from “a set of self-appointed custodians of the world, who find it very difficult to stomach that somebody in India is not looking for their approval, is not willing to play the game they want to be played.”

The bottom line: India knows it does not have any real reason to worry about international censure of the kind that trails similarly threatened democracies, such as Hungary and Turkey.

“The fact of the matter is that the United States, and much of the West, has made a long-term strategic bet that India will provide a democratic counterweight to an authoritarian China,” Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., told me. Yet, he continued, India “possesses many of the trappings of electoral democracy, while democracy between elections atrophies.”

(David Talukdar / NurPhoto / Getty)

The case against Fatima is remarkable not for its novelty, but for its ostentatious frailty: The Delhi police’s charge sheet accuses her of “a conspiracy,” but fails to establish any links between anti-CAA protesters, such as Fatima, and the February riots. In theory, Fatima should have been released long ago. That she is still being held, more than a year after her arrest, points to the flaws of India’s justice system.

For instance, once arrested, dissidents cannot depend on timely trials (as the cases involving Fatima and others illustrate) or impartial investigations. In one incident, an independent American cyberforensics firm called Arsenal Consulting found this year that a hacker had planted incriminating evidence on the laptop of an activist accused of coordinating with an armed group. Mark Spencer, Arsenal’s president, said the effort was “very organized” and “extremely dark” in its intent.

(The Delhi police’s Special Cell, which is investigating the riot-conspiracy cases, did not respond to multiple telephoned, texted, and e-mailed requests for comment. In a September 2020 statement, the force denied any prejudice on its part, saying the charge sheets were being taken “out of context in order to create a controversy and doubt about the investigation.” Separately, the National Investigation Agency did not respond to my requests for an interview, but in an affidavit filed with the Bombay High Court, it denied hacking the activist’s laptop.)

[From the April 2009 issue: Robert D. Kaplan on India’s new face]

Incredibly, the fact that India is going through renewed pandemic difficulties does not affect bail from its horrifically overcrowded prisons. Under the UAPA, bail is granted only in extraordinary circumstances. Yet multiple detainees, held on spurious charges, have contracted COVID-19 and been kept in prison. In May, the Bombay High Court denied bail to Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest and activist who campaigned to strengthen rights for India’s tribal communities, but who had been arrested and charged with having Maoist links. The 84-year-old, who has Parkinson’s disease, told the court that he was going through “a very difficult moment” in jail. The court sent him to a private hospital where, days later, he tested positive for COVID-19. The same month, Siddique Kappan, a journalist, was returned to jail from a Delhi hospital where he’d been treated for COVID-19, before having fully recovered. He had been detained while en route to report on a provincial BJP government’s alleged cover-up of a lower-caste teenager’s rape and murder. The police accused him of working for the Popular Front of India, a controversial Islamic organization, and using “the garb of journalism” to incite caste-based riots, but haven’t yet provided any proof of his involvement with the PFI, and didn’t allow him to meet his lawyer until India’s Supreme Court intervened. He has been charged under the UAPA anyway.

When Fatima completed a year in prison, this past April, dozens of activists came together on a Zoom call to mark the day. One of them, Anuradha Banerji, described Fatima’s evolution at the protest sites, from just helping out to exhorting fellow demonstrators to chant slogans. Others, some of whom have never met Fatima but see in her situation symptoms of a deeper malaise, still go to court whenever a hearing is called in her case. “She smiles, then she walks peacefully into the court—it is a signal to us that she is okay,” Nabiya Khan, a Jawaharlal Nehru University student and one of the regular court attendees, told me. “Her parents start crying every time she disappears from view, but she says, ‘Ammi main theek hoon bilkul’ (‘Mom, I am all right’), before going in. They wave at her; she waves back at them.”

Aqil can’t bring himself to go to court, but has seen his sister on the occasional video call she is allowed with family—COVID-19 has meant that physical meetings are no longer permitted. “She doesn’t talk that much about herself,” he told me. “She wants to know how things are at home. She never asks about what’s going on in the outside world.” He said they never talk about her case on these supervised calls, partly because he is certain she will be free soon.

“We would only worry if she had done anything wrong,” Aqil said. “How long can anyone keep an innocent person in jail?”

Ali Khamenei views the June 18 presidential election as an opportunity to realise his vision for the future of Iran.

Order books for the sale are in excess of $60bn, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.

Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists in Yavne find an unbroken chicken’s egg while excavating an ancient cesspit dating from the Islamic period roughly 1,000 years ago

This article was published online on June 7, 2021.

“Nothing can go wrong!” Boris Johnson said, jumping into the driver’s seat of a tram he was about to take for a test ride. “Nothing. Can. Go. Wrong.”

The prime minister was visiting a factory outside Birmingham, campaigning on behalf of the local mayor ahead of “Super Thursday”—a spate of elections across England, Scotland, and Wales in early May. These elections would give voters a chance to have their say on Johnson’s two years in office, during which quite a lot did go wrong.

Johnson was, as usual, unkempt and amused, a tornado of bonhomie in a country where politicians tend to be phlegmatic and self-serious, if not dour and awkward. Walking in, he had launched into a limerick about a man named Dan who likes to ride trams. The mayor, Andy Street, looked horrified, tomorrow’s disastrous headlines seeming to flash before his eyes. (The limerick, I’m sorry to say, was not at all filthy.)

Johnson’s aide told me the prime minister had been excited about his tram ride all morning. He loves infrastructure, mobile infrastructure especially—planes, trains, bicycles, trams, even bridges to Ireland and airports floating in the sea. And he loves photo ops. There would be no point in displaying action and intent and momentum if no one were present to document it.

“All aboard!” he yelled, though there were no passengers. News photographers crowded around and men in hard hats stood by. The tram (British for “streetcar”) inched forward, only to jerk and shudder to a halt. That’s £2.5 million worth of vehicle, the chief executive of the tram company told me with a nervous laugh. When Johnson finally made it around the bend and neared the end of the circuit, he slammed on the brakes and blasted the horn. “Nothing went wrong!” he said gleefully.

Nothing, really, could have gone wrong. The tram was limited to three miles an hour and had an automatic-override system to protect it from reckless prime ministers, among others. No matter. It provided Johnson with the chance to do what he loves: to put on a show, to create a little tumult where there is none. He became famous in the late 1990s and early 2000s for his appearances on a popular satirical news program, Have I Got News for You. Each time, he was the butt of the jokes and also the center of attention. After he was first elected to Parliament, in 2001, his colleagues told him that he would have to become serious to succeed in politics. To spend time with Johnson, as I have done over the past several months, is to watch a politician completely indifferent to such advice.

Johnson is nothing like the other prime ministers I’ve covered. Tony Blair and David Cameron were polished and formidable. Gordon Brown and Theresa May were rigid, fearful, cautious. Johnson might as well be another species. He is lively and engaged, superficially disheveled but in fact focused and watchful. He is scruffy, impulsive, exuberant. He is the first British leader I’ve seen who genuinely appears to be having a good time. His conversations with members of the public are peppered with “That’s amazing!” and “You’re joking!” and “Wonderful!” and “Fantastic, fantastic!”

[Read: Boris Johnson and the optimism delusion]

His mission, he says, is to restore Britain’s faith in itself, to battle the “effete and desiccated and hopeless” defeatism that defined the Britain of his childhood. He believes that if you repeat that it is morning in Britain over and over again, the country will believe it, and then it will come to pass. His critics, however, say he is just leading the country “sinking giggling into the sea.”

By now, every British subject is an expert on the matter of Boris Johnson. We know that he has an extraordinary gift for extramarital affairs, that he has (at least) six children by three women, and that his personal finances are a regular subject of press gossip. We know that he has been fired twice for lying (once as a journalist, once as a politician); that he was the Conservative mayor of Britain’s left-wing capital city; that he helped engineer the defenestration of two prime ministers from his own party; and that he very nearly died during the pandemic. For three decades, we’ve followed his writing, his ambition, his outrages, his scandals. Yet the truth, for a professional Boris-watcher such as myself, is maddeningly elusive.

To many, Johnson is a clown—the embodiment of the demise of public standards and the face of international populism, post-truth politics, even British decline itself. He is the man who got stuck on a zip line during the London Olympics, dangling above the crowds in a harness and helmet, helplessly waving British flags while people cheered below. The French newspaper Libération used this image on its front page after Britain voted to leave the European Union, with the headline “Good Luck.”

During the 2012 London Olympics, Johnson—who was then the city’s mayor—got stuck on a zip line, dangling over the crowds until he could be rescued.
( Barcroft Media / Getty )

Johnson’s sense of humor regularly gets him into trouble. In 2017, as foreign secretary, he joked about the Libyan city of Sirte having a bright future, as soon as its residents “clear the dead bodies away.” Announcing further COVID-19 restrictions in October 2020, he reportedly told lawmakers that at least they wouldn’t have to spend Christmas with their in-laws. He has likened Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital” and the Conservative Party’s infighting to “Papua New Guinea–style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.”

To his most vehement critics, he is worse than a clown: a charlatan who lied his way to the top, who endangers democracy and traffics in racism, and who believes in nothing but his own advancement. He has been accused of triggering a wave of populist anger that he then rode to 10 Downing Street, leaving Britain weakened and in very real danger of dissolution. (Scotland once again is considering making its own exit.) He is leading his country through the most radical reshaping of its economy, electoral map, and international role since World War II. To Johnson’s cry of faith that nothing can go wrong, critics say: No, a lot can go wrong—and very well might.

When I began meeting with Johnson early this year, I didn’t know precisely how he would take to interrogation. His exuberance worked in my favor; the fact that he is a former journalist, familiar with our wicked ways, did not.

In Northern Ireland once, he looked over at me as I scribbled in my notebook. “Ah, Tom,” he said, “you’re picking up color or something, aren’t you?” The answer, of course, was yes—color being the journalist’s term for anything that goes beyond straight facts or quotes, the details used to paint a scene for the reader. But I was after more than that.

I wanted to understand whether Johnson was truly a populist, or just popular. His argument for patriotic optimism has obvious appeal, but I wondered whether it masked more cynical impulses. Was he working in the country’s interest, or his own? And I wanted to see up close if he truly was—as his enemies charge—the British equivalent of Donald Trump. On this question, Johnson would have an emphatic answer for me.

Later, in his office, I asked Johnson to imagine that he was a journalist again. How would he open this profile? What is the key, I asked, to understanding Boris Johnson? After a few ums and ahs, Johnson replied: “Sheer physical fitness. And hard work.”

I laughed, as he’d surely hoped I would. “Look, Tom, that is your challenge,” he said (pronouncing challenge as if it were French), shutting down this line of inquiry. Here was the uncrackable Johnson: the amiability, the self-deprecation, the evasion.

On the day of Johnson’s visit to the tram factory, the big national story was the formation of an elite European soccer league, modeled on its steroidal American cousin, the NFL. The plan would draw at least six English clubs and six from the continent into a “European Super League.” It was announced the night before, and Johnson had come out against it, arguing that it would yank England’s grandest clubs from their traditional environment against the wishes of their fans. It was unfair, he said, and the government would fight it. His opposition led the news that morning.

I wondered why he cared so much. He doesn’t know anything about soccer, and in fact delights in his ignorance.

But Johnson intuited something important about English anxiety, and he turned the issue into a parable for a sense of powerlessness and dislocation felt by many in Britain, precisely the sort of feelings that had energized the Brexit movement and carried him to 10 Downing Street. In one of our conversations, Johnson had said that people need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. He told me that he doesn’t think of himself as a nationalist, but he argued that individuals need to feel that they belong, and they shouldn’t be patronized for worrying that their traditions and connections are being eroded. Was this why he opposed the European Super League?

“Absolutely,” he said. “This is about the deracination of the community fan base.” Soccer clubs, he continued, had turned into global brands and were leaving their supporters behind, “taking off like a great mother ship and orbiting the planet.”

I was struck by his use of the word deracinated to describe the peculiar dynamics of English soccer partisanship. To be deracinated is to be uprooted from your customs, your culture, your home—in this instance, from England. Here, Johnson was offering himself as the people’s tribune, defender of the national game from the threat of alien imposition. He was channeling a cry of anger and turning it against globalization.

[Read: Boris Johnson can remake Britain like few before him]

Johnson is a strange figurehead for such a movement. The prime minister is, at least nominally, a free-marketeer and the chief proselytizer of “Global Britain.” He plays to the rootedness of Middle England—to its anxieties, traditions, and national pride—but he is also a very obvious transient.

He was born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in a hospital that served poor New Yorkers. Johnson’s father, Stanley, then 23, had moved to the U.S. on a creative-writing scholarship but quit and enrolled in an economics program at Columbia University instead. The first few months of Boris’s life were spent in a single-room apartment opposite the Chelsea Hotel. He was officially a dual U.S.–U.K. citizen until 2016, once telling David Letterman that he could, “technically speaking,” be elected president. Some wondered whether he meant it—he had, after all, said as a child that his ambition was to be “world king.” (Johnson renounced his U.S. citizenship after being chased by the IRS for a tax bill on the sale of a London home.)

Johnson’s intricate name suggests the cosmopolitanism of his background. Boris honors a Russian émigré whom Stanley and Johnson’s mother, Charlotte, met in Mexico shortly before his birth. The man bought them plane tickets back to the U.S. so the heavily pregnant Charlotte wouldn’t have to endure the Greyhound bus. De Pfeffel comes from Johnson’s half-French grandmother, Irène, who was born in the grand Pavillon du Barry, in Versailles, which belonged to her grandfather, Baron Hubert de Pfeffel.

Even the Johnson is less English than it might seem. Boris’s great-grandfather was a Turkish journalist and politician who was murdered in the chaos of the Ottoman empire’s collapse. He was denounced as a traitor for his opposition to Kemal Atatürk and was attacked and hanged by a nationalist mob wielding stones, sticks, and knives. According to Sonia Purnell’s biography, Just Boris, his body parts were said to have been stuffed in a tree. His half-English, half-Swiss wife, Winifred, gave birth to their son Osman in England, but died soon after. Osman was brought up by his English grandmother—maiden name Johnson—and went by the name Wilfred Johnson. (In 2020, at the age of 55, Boris Johnson named his new baby boy Wilfred.)

Over the first 14 years of Johnson’s life, his family moved 32 times, including to Washington, D.C., where Stanley worked at the World Bank. Some of Johnson’s fondest early memories are of his tree house in their yard on Morrison Street, just off Connecticut Avenue. In 1974, Charlotte had a nervous breakdown while the family was living in Brussels. The next year, Johnson and his younger sister, who were then 11 and 10, were sent to a boarding school in England, traveling there each term unaccompanied by their parents.

Before leaving for school, the young Alexander was a quiet, introspective boy. He had been partially deaf until age 8 or 9, because of a condition known as “glue ear,” in which fluid builds up behind the eardrum. At school, he transformed himself into the confident, insouciant extrovert we see today. It was at Eton that Alexander became Boris, a “fully-fledged school celebrity,” according to Purnell—head boy, editor of the school magazine, president of the debating society. Sir Eric Anderson, who was a housemaster to Tony Blair in Scotland and to Johnson at Eton, was once asked to name the most interesting pupil he’d ever had, and replied: “Without a doubt, Boris Johnson.”

Johnson was a quiet, introspective child who was partially deaf until he was 8 or 9, but he transformed himself after his parents sent him off to boarding school. Above, Johnson at age 8 (top left), at 21 at Oxford (top right), and with Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he would soon marry.
( Sophie Baker / Arenapal; Brian Smith / Reuters; Dafydd Jones )

After graduating from Eton and then Oxford—the finishing schools of England’s elite, where he was close friends with Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer—Johnson married young, returned to Brussels, divorced, married again, moved back to London, conducted numerous affairs, divorced again, got engaged again, and all the while steadily made his professional ascent.

Throughout, Johnson has stood apart from any clique, whether the modernizers who have sought to remake the Conservative Party or the Thatcherite resistance against them. Johnson has, in fact, tended to avoid the formal ties of obligation that come with being part of any group. In many ways he himself is the definition of deracinated. (A friend of his once told me he suspected that Johnson subscribed to a pre-Christian morality system, with a multitude of gods and no clear set of rules. I put this to the prime minister, but he dismissed the notion. “Christianity is a superb ethical system and I would count myself as a kind of very, very bad Christian,” he told me. “No disrespect to any other religions, but Christianity makes a lot of sense to me.”)

The one group he is associated with are the Brexiteers. Johnson largely avoids the nativist rhetoric of the group’s more extreme elements, but he does believe that Britain’s discomfort with its power and its history has gone too far. (George Orwell once observed that Britain is “the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”) On England’s national day last summer, Johnson released a video message urging the country to raise a glass “without embarrassment, without shame.” Imagine a U.S. president needing to make the same qualification on Independence Day.

But while Johnson’s patriotic message is powerful in England—by far the largest of the U.K.’s four nations—it does not readily translate elsewhere, particularly in Scotland, which voted to remain in the EU. The great irony is that although Johnson led the campaign to “take back control” from Europe, his success has intensified calls in Scotland for control to be wrested from London. This is where Johnson’s legacy is most at risk. If he were to preside over the breakup of the country, whatever else he did would forever be overshadowed. He would be the Lord North of the 21st century: not the prime minister who lost America, but the one who lost Britain itself.

A few days after Johnson’s tram ride, I saw him again in Hartlepool, a coastal town in England’s struggling, industrial northeast. Johnson had threatened to drop a “legislative bomb” on the English soccer clubs planning to join the new Super League. Within hours all six had pulled out, and the league had collapsed. Newspapers across Europe hailed Johnson’s influence. Italy’s La Gazzetta Dello Sport, apparently a newspaper given to hyperbole, likened Johnson’s intervention to Churchill’s stand against the Nazis.

Keen to squeeze more political capital from the episode, Johnson stopped by a soccer stadium in town. I grew up only a short drive from Hartlepool. The region was once rock-solid Labour Party territory, but Conservatives have been making inroads there. It was heavily in favor of Brexit, and it has a long tradition of contempt for the political establishment. In 2002, the town elected its soccer club’s mascot, H’Angus the Monkey, as mayor. The man who wore the costume served the term and was twice reelected.

When Johnson arrived to be interviewed by the regional press, I showed him the Gazzetta article. Grabbing my phone, he read the headline aloud in exaggerated Italian as an aide urged him to get to the business at hand, which was to ensure that the town moved into the Conservative column.

Talking to a TV reporter, Johnson kept referring to a previous Labour MP for Hartlepool, Blair’s close ally Peter Mandelson, as “Lord Mandelson of Guacamole.” Mandelson is reputed to have once confused mushy peas—a side dish served with fish and chips—for guacamole. The story isn’t true, but the populist in Johnson enjoyed it so much that he deployed the nickname three more times before leaving the stadium. The joke would be hypocritical but for the fact that the prime minister doesn’t try to hide his own class status: When David Cameron was mocked for admitting that he didn’t know the price of a loaf of bread, a reporter confronted Johnson with the same question. He got it right, but then added: “I can tell you the price of a bottle of champagne—how about that?”

After the interview, Johnson joined a group of players passing a ball around. “Another chapter in my epic of football humiliation,” he said, alluding to a much-watched YouTube video of a charity soccer match in which Johnson charged at an opposing player before stumbling and crashing headfirst into the player’s groin, leaving him collapsed in pain on the ground. In Hartlepool, Johnson told the players that he was better with an oval ball than a round one, referring to rugby, the sport of Britain’s elite schools. He added that he knew how to play the wall game, an obscure sport played only at Eton. The Hartlepool players didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.

Johnson and his team then set off to knock on doors on a quiet suburban street. Prime-ministerial campaigning is more homespun and spontaneous than the American presidential sort, and Johnson knew next to nothing about the people whose doors he’d be knocking on. At one home, a retired couple told him they were furious about his handling of the pandemic, especially his failure to close the border as emerging strains of the coronavirus ravaged India.

Johnson’s political ascent began with a run for Parliament in 2001 (top) and culminated with his becoming prime minister in 2019.
( The Independent / Alamy ; Adrian Dennis / AFP / Getty )

Before the virus was brought under control in the spring, Johnson had overseen one of the worst responses in Europe; more than 125,000 Britons have died. His own former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, has publicly accused Johnson and his team of botching the government’s response to the pandemic and then lying about it.

[Read: How the pandemic revealed Britain’s national illness]

Johnson stood silently and took the couple’s haranguing. A few days later, he would take another; it was reported that in the depths of the pandemic, faced with announcing a second lockdown, he had declared: “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands.” He has denied saying this.

At the other houses, however, the prime minister was treated like a lovable celebrity, and it was almost taken for granted when he asked people if he could count on their support. He was twice stopped and thanked for “everything you’ve done.” (Although Britain’s death count is appalling, Johnson has also overseen a rapid vaccine rollout; by March, Britain had administered first doses to half its adult population—more than the U.S., Germany, and France.) Two women came out clutching toddlers. Johnson elbow-bumped the little ones and asked how old they were, then struggled to remember precisely when his own son would turn 1. The mothers laughed as he fumbled for the right date—guessing three times before he got it right.

Johnson’s uncle, the journalist Edmund Fawcett, told me the prime minister’s shambolic manner helps him connect with people. One of Johnson’s closest allies in government, his Brexit negotiator, David Frost, said the technique was “deliberate but unconscious.” Johnson, however, seems to know exactly what he’s doing. He said as much in an interview with CNBC in 2013, when he was asked whether his performative incompetence was typical in a politician. “No, I think it’s a very cunning device,” he said. “Self-deprecation is all about understanding that basically people regard politicians as a bunch of shysters.”

According to his allies, Johnson goes out of his way to suggest that he’s more flawed than he really is. He claims, for instance, not only that he has smoked pot “quite a few” times but also that he once tried cocaine and accidentally sneezed it out. Andrew Gimson, who wrote Boris: The Rise of Boris Johnson, doesn’t believe it. Noting that the prime minister once described sex as “the supreme recreation,” Gimson argued that “where others might reach for the bottle, or the needle, he is more likely to embrace some warm and attractive woman.”

Johnson’s ability to invite underestimation seems to shield him from the usual rules of politics. “There’s a magic to Boris which allows him to escape some of the political challenges that he’s had since he became prime minister,” Frank Luntz, an American pollster who was friends with Johnson at Oxford, told me. “People are more patient with him, they are more forgiving of him, because he’s not a typical politician.”

And there’s been a lot to forgive.

Johnson has written about Africans with “watermelon smiles” and described gay men as “tank-topped bumboys.” As foreign secretary, he put a fellow citizen at risk when he mistakenly claimed that she was in Iran to teach journalism, giving Tehran an excuse to charge her with spreading propaganda. As prime minister he has erected a trade barrier within his own country as the price of Brexit—subjecting Northern Ireland to EU regulations while the rest of the country is free to do its own thing.

That nothing ever seems to stick drives his opponents mad. He won the Conservative leadership just weeks after it was reported that an argument with his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, became so heated, neighbors called the police. He won the biggest parliamentary majority in a generation despite breaking promises over when and how he would secure a Brexit deal. Time and again, when controversy has engulfed him, he has emerged unscathed.

[Read: Boris Johnson keeps defying gravity]

Part of his electoral genius lies in his ability to stop his opponents from thinking straight: In their hatred for him, they cannot see why he is popular, nor what to do about it.

“What am I doing this for?” Johnson asked his aides, looking at his schedule for the day and seeing a slot carved out to talk to me.

“It’s for the profile I advised you not to do,” James Slack, Johnson’s then–director of communications, said.

In the year since I’d first asked Johnson’s team for time with the prime minister, his director of communications had changed twice, and much of the rest of Johnson’s early team had been replaced, partly over interoffice rivalries that had spun out of control. In the end, Johnson himself gave the green light. When I finally got to see him, it was March 2021 and the country was just starting to come out of its most stringent lockdown.

Visiting Downing Street is a strange business: You have to be precleared to enter and you pass through airport-style metal detectors, but then you simply walk up the street as if it were any other and knock on a door to be let in. It is not a single building, but a warren of Georgian townhouses that have been connected, extended, fixed up, and perpetually tinkered with. At the heart of the complex is No. 10, the prime minister’s official residence and place of work.

Behind the smart black bricks and polished front door, an air of shabbiness hangs over the place. Stepping inside, you find yourself in a high-ceilinged entrance hall where the house cat, Larry, is often asleep. Discarded modems sit on windowsills; thick red carpets lie worn and uneven with bits of tape stuck to them. (This spring, Johnson was caught up in an ethics investigation over allegations that he’d sought political donations to help pay for redecorating the Downing Street apartment he shares with Symonds, who was blamed in the British tabloids and nicknamed “Carrie Antoinette.” Johnson has denied any wrongdoing.)

Downing Street is extraordinarily ill-suited to its function as the nerve center of a modern bureaucracy. Its rooms are either small and disconnected or big and impractical—the dining rooms, libraries, and servants’ quarters of a different England. It manages to be both modest and cavernous, iconic and underwhelming. It is outdated and dysfunctional—and yet somehow it works. It is a physical incarnation of 21st-century Britain.

Johnson believes the British state showed unforgivable weakness in its Brexit negotiations, and some of his advisers told me it also exhibited fatal incompetence during the pandemic. Britain’s bureaucracy, they argue, is in need of an overhaul. Johnson’s critics would point out that it was he who negotiated Britain’s exit from the EU, and the state was not to blame for his pandemic decision making. It is also true, however, that Britain was notably ill-equipped to cope with the coronavirus, and that by the time Johnson took over in 2019, he faced a devil’s bargain in how to leave the EU, the terms on offer largely having been set beforehand.

Britain’s only real success fighting COVID-19 came when Johnson turned down the opportunity to join the EU’s vaccine-procurement program and handed the country’s own effort to a venture capitalist with a virtually unlimited budget outside the usual rules of government. As a result, Britons were being vaccinated in the millions long before the rest of Europe. But this way of working has created layers of complexity and confusion that have left no clear lines of accountability. Even some of those at the top feel a sense of powerlessness, telling me that the only way to get anything done is to declare, “I’ve spoken to the prime minister about this, and he wants it to happen.”

[Read: John le Carré Knew England’s Secrets]

In his office, Johnson steered the conversation to a subject he raised nearly every time I saw him. He’d read an article I’d written, a kind of eulogy for the late British novelist John le Carré. I’d praised le Carré’s observations about England and its failing ruling class—privately educated charlatans whom the author mocked as the greatest dissemblers on Earth. And I’d listed Johnson as an example.

He told me he’d taken a completely different lesson from the novelist. To Johnson, le Carré had exposed not the fakery of the British ruling class, but its endemic passivity, and acceptance of decline. “I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at school,” he said. “It presented to me this miserable picture of these Foreign Office bureaucrats … For me, they were the problem.” Johnson told me this was exactly what he was determined to fight.

“You lump me together with various other people—and you say we are all products of these decadent institutions and this culture, an inadequate and despairing establishment. That’s not me!” He said he was trying “to recapture some of the energy and optimism that this country used to have.”

Johnson believes there remains a “world-weariness” in the government that has to be “squeezed out,” one of his ministers told me. Johnsonism, an aide said, was partly about “puffing our chest out and saying, ‘We’re Britain.’ ” (Several of Johnson’s advisers agreed to be candid in exchange for anonymity.) In an early phone call with Joe Biden, an aide told me, Johnson said he disliked the phrase special relationship after the president used it. To Johnson it seemed needy and weak.

The one member of le Carré’s establishment whom Johnson does not hold in contempt is the hero, George Smiley, who is jaded like his colleagues but plods on nonetheless, catching traitors and serving Britain. “He was a patriot,” Johnson said.

To Johnson, Smiley might be a cynic, but he is also a romantic—a believer. Isn’t that you? I asked. Johnson is a romantic who urges the country to believe in itself, but who plays the political game, stretches the truth, stands against his friends, and deposes his colleagues. After an initial show of mock evasion, the prime minister replied: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.”

Here was Johnson offering a rare moment of self-reflection. During the time I spent with him, whenever we got close to anything approaching self-analysis, he would parry, swerve, or crack a joke. At one point, when I brought the conversation back to le Carré, Johnson fell into a series of impersonations of the novelist’s characters. One of Johnson’s aides told me the prime minister loathed anything that smacked of overintellectualizing politics.

At Downing Street, I heard Johnson repeat a saying his maternal grandmother was fond of quoting. “Darling,” he said, mimicking her, “remember, it’s not how you’re doing; it’s what you’re doing.” Johnson said this was “the key advice.” I asked Johnson’s sister, Rachel, about it. She told me their mother was also fond of the saying. “It’s about being in the moment,” she said, rather than worrying about how things will turn out.

Get on with it is the Johnson mantra.

Johnson often carries a notepad around, a habit from his days as a journalist. A former aide told me that you know he has taken your point seriously if he writes it down. He runs meetings like an editor, surveying his staff for ideas, always looking for “the line”—cutting through dry and occasionally contradictory facts to identify what he sees as the heart of the matter, the story.

The prime minister’s journalism career, however, got off to an ignominious start. In 1988, one year out of Oxford, he was fired from The Times, the newspaper of the establishment, for making up a quote in a front-page story and attributing it to his godfather. He has since apologized, sort of, while also complaining about the “sniveling, fact-grubbing historians” who called him out.

Despite getting sacked from The Times, he quickly landed at its rival, The Daily Telegraph, and rose through the ranks of British media, eventually becoming the editor in chief of The Spectator, Britain’s premier conservative magazine. In 1992, Johnson was the Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, laying the foundation for the modern incarnation of the European Union and sending British politics into one of its perennial tailspins over London’s relationship with Europe. It was the perfect time and place for a man of Johnson’s talents.

Johnson in his office at The Spectator magazine, where he served as editor in chief from 1999 to 2005 ( Edd Westmacott / Alamy )

He made a name for himself with outlandish, not-always-accurate stories about European regulations ostensibly being imposed on Britons—rules governing the flavors of potato chips, the bendiness of bananas, the size of condoms. Margaret Thatcher, whose battles over European integration had cost her the premiership in 1990, reputedly enjoyed Johnson’s columns. He later described his life in Brussels as “chucking these rocks over the garden wall and [listening] to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England.”

But rereading Johnson’s work today, what jumps out is that he appears far less hostile to Europe than one might imagine: In a January 1992 article, for example, he writes that while the principal charges against the EU—that it was wasteful and bureaucratic—were true, these problems were “dwarfed by the benefits” of membership. He goes on to say that the EU was “run by an undemocratic Brussels machine, full of faceless busybodies,” but that it also gave Britain a new purpose: to run Europe.

I asked Johnson about his change of mind. He famously wrote two drafts of a column—one in favor of “Leave,” the other for “Remain”—before announcing which side he supported in the 2016 referendum. Critics allege that he only backed Brexit because it provided him with a path to power. Johnson rejects that characterization—his aides say he often plays devil’s advocate to pressure-test his arguments and ideas. And Johnson told me Britain had never been able to lead the EU in any case, because it was too hamstrung by division and doubt over the project to be anything but a brake. This seemed anathema to him: better momentum, whatever the direction, than playing the role of spoiler.

“Anyway,” he said, “do we have to talk about Brexit? We’ve sucked that lemon dry.”

So we turned instead to Horace.

In 2005, Johnson gave a lecture about the Roman poet, in which he reflected on the lasting influence that poets and historians and journalists have over how people are remembered. “Horace writes all these bum-sucking poems about his [patrons] saying how great they are,” Johnson told me, “but the point he always makes to them is ‘You’re going to die and the poem is going to live, and who wrote the poem?’ ”

I told him that sounded like a cynical view of the world.

“It’s a defense of journalism!” he said.

“So you’re saying I’m more powerful than you?” I asked.

“Exactly, exactly,” he replied, laughing.

I said I didn’t buy it. But Johnson very clearly appreciates the importance of shaping perceptions. To him, the point of politics—and life—is not to squabble over facts; it’s to offer people a story they can believe in.

In the prime minister’s view, those who wanted to remain in the EU during the Brexit referendum didn’t have the courage to tell the real story at the heart of their vision: a story of the beauty of European unity and collective identity. Instead, they offered claims of impending disaster were Britain to leave, most of which haven’t come to pass, at least not yet. The story voters believed in was fundamentally different—in Johnson’s words, “that this is a great and remarkable and interesting country in its own right.”

“People live by narrative,” he told me. “Human beings are creatures of the imagination.”

“So you’re noT Trump?” I asked Johnson. I had just been treated to a long monologue about his liberal internationalism and support for free trade, climate action, and even globalism.

“Well, self-evidently,” he replied.

It might be self-evident to him, but not to others—the former president himself embraced Johnson as “Britain Trump,” and Biden once called him a “physical and emotional clone” of Trump.

This is the central argument against Johnson: For all his positivity and good cheer, the verses of Latin and ancient Greek he drops into conversation, he is much closer to Trump than he lets on. Johnson spearheaded the “Leave” campaign the same year the U.S. voted for Trump, and the two campaigns looked similar on the surface—populist, nationalist, anti-establishment. What, after all, is Brexit but a rebellion against an ostensibly unfair system, fueled by the twin angers of trade and immigration, that aims to restore to Britain a sense of something lost: control.

[Read: Why Britain’s Brexit mayhem was worth it]

The prime minister certainly understands that this perception has taken hold. “A lot of people in America, a lot of respectable liberal opinion in America—The Washington Post and The New York Times, etc.—thinks that Brexit is the most appalling, terrible aberration and a retreat into nationalism,” he told me. “It’s not at all.”

As for Johnson himself, his past language about members of minority groups is, to some, evidence of a kinship with Trump. Johnson has compared Muslim women in burkas to mailboxes, written of “flag-waving piccaninnies,” and recited a nostalgic colonial-era poem while in Myanmar. His partisans note, defensively, that his first finance minister was the son of a Pakistani bus driver; his second is a British Indian. The business secretary is a fellow Eton alum whose parents came to Britain from Ghana, and Britain’s president of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is being held in Glasgow, Scotland, this year, was born in India. The man Johnson charged with overseeing Britain’s vaccine rollout is an Iraqi-born British Kurd, and the home secretary, responsible for policing, is the daughter of Ugandan Indians.

There is also the issue of immigration. During the Brexit campaign, Johnson did call for—and has since delivered—stronger controls on migration from Europe. But in contrast to Trump, he has supported amnesty for undocumented immigrants; offered a path to British citizenship to millions of Hong Kongers; and refashioned Britain’s immigration system to treat European and non-European migrants equally. As mayor of London, he said that Trump’s claim that the British capital had “no-go areas” because of Islamic extremists betrayed “stupefying ignorance” and that Trump was “out of his mind” for seeking to ban Muslim immigration.

Even so, the Trump question is the first thing many Americans will want to know, I told him.

“Well, how ignorant can they be?” he said. I ventured that the curse of international politics is that each country looks at others through its own national prism.

“They do, they do,” he admitted, before continuing: “I’m laboriously trying to convey to an American audience that this is a category error that has been repeatedly made.”

“The point I’m trying to get over to you and your readers is that you mustn’t mistake this government for being some sort of bunch of xenophobes,” he added, “or autarkic economic nationalists.” (Here even Johnson’s critics would have to concede one difference: Donald Trump is unlikely to have ever used the word autarkic in conversation.)

The first attempt at pulling together a coherent intellectual framework for Johnsonism was the government’s “integrated review” of foreign, economic, and defense policy, published in March. It emphasized the importance of deepening alliances outside Europe and the need to more robustly defend democratic values. Its driving force was John Bew, Johnson’s chief foreign-policy adviser and the author of Realpolitik, a book published four years before Johnson came to power that now reads like a primer for Johnsonism. According to Bew, realpolitik is based on four interlocking principles: politics is the law of the strong; states are strong when they are domestically harmonious; ideas matter because people believe them, not because they are true; and finally, the zeitgeist is “the single most important factor in determining the trajectory of a nation’s politics.”

Johnson’s blueprint for governing can be found in these principles. His pitch to voters is that he will “unite and level up” the country, which starts from the premise that Britain cannot be a decisive, confident international actor as long as it is divided, economically imbalanced, and as vulnerable to global financial and health crises as it has shown itself to be.

He also believes that the global zeitgeist has radically changed since the 2008 financial crisis, and therefore so too must Britain’s foreign policy. This is not an ephemeral, insubstantial thing: Voters will not accept a laissez-faire attitude toward free trade, deindustrialization, or the rise of China any longer. Whether voters’ demands on these issues are reasonable or constructive is beside the point—they are reality.

Johnson and his allies emphasize that Brexit did not happen in a vacuum. In The Globalization Paradox, the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik notes that the more tightly the world’s economies intertwine, the less influence national governments can have over the lives of their citizens. For a long time, governments—including Britain’s—believed that the economic benefits of globalization outweighed that cost. But when this bargain began to reveal its emptiness, particularly after 2008, voters demanded more control. In Britain this was particularly acute, because the country was more exposed than most, with its oversize financial sector and open economy. It was ripe for a revolt to “take back control”—the “Leave” campaign’s central promise.

Johnson has vowed to use the power of government to reinvigorate industry and boost growth outside London, using levers that he says wouldn’t be available if the country were still in the EU. One aide told me Johnson had ordered civil servants to reject conservative orthodoxies about government intervention being bad and to be “more creative and more confident around who we choose to back.” It’s an unusual approach for someone caricatured as a right-wing ideologue; on the American political spectrum, Johnson’s policies would fall well to the left of center.

The prime minister told me he doesn’t want the EU to fragment—he just doesn’t want Britain to be a part of it. For too long, Johnson and his team believe, Britain has been “living out a foreign policy of a world that has gone,” one of his closest advisers said. Beijing and Moscow have shown us the limits of the rules-based order. Britain can no longer afford to be a “status quo power” naively trying to resurrect a defunct system. “The world is moving faster,” the adviser said, “and therefore we have got to get our shit together and move faster with it.”

To do so, Johnson insists, Britain must be independent, united, and nimble. (His foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, told me that instead of “some big cumbersome whale,” the country needed to be “a more agile dolphin.”) The prime minister has already indicated what this might look like, imposing human-rights sanctions on Russia, using the presidency of the G7 to turn the group into a wider alliance of democracies, and trying to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The world is messy, and Johnson likes mess. He believes the key is to adapt. He has spent a lifetime turning ambition, opportunism, and ruthless self-promotion into extraordinary personal success. Why can’t a country do the same?

Johnson in 2019 campaigning on the Isle of Wight (top) and at a session of the UN Security Council on climate and security in London in 2021
( Dominic Lipinski / WPA Pool / Getty; Stefan Rousseau / WPA Pool / Getty )

Whenever you talk to Johnson, you bump up against an all-encompassing belief that things will be fine. He believes, for example, that the threat of Scottish independence will melt away over time, with Brexit acting as a centripetal force pulling the U.K. back together.

Yet Johnson understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals do. He is right that his is a battle to write the national story, and that this requires offering people hope and agency, a sense of optimism and pride in place. He has shown that he is a master at finding the story voters want to hear.

Whether he succeeds or fails matters beyond Britain’s borders. As democratic states look for ways to answer the concerns of voters without descending into the authoritarian Orbánism of Eastern Europe or the Trumpian populism that has consumed the Republican Party, Johnson is beginning a test run for a conservative alternative that may prove attractive, or at least viable.

But with Britain finally outside the European Union, Johnson must now address problems that cannot be dealt with by belief alone. If his domestic economic project fails, some fear the country will turn toward xenophobic identity politics. If he cannot unify the country at home, his bid to make Britain more assertive on the world stage may prove impossible. If he cannot fend off demands for Scottish independence, the state will fracture. “Telling everyone everything is fine is not the same as everything is fine,” Tony Blair told me.

Now that Johnson has won his revolution, does he have the focus to see it through? Even one of his closest aides expressed worry that the prime minister doesn’t think systematically about Britain’s problems, that he is too reliant on unshakable faith.

The last time I saw Johnson was back in the northeast of England. “Super Thursday” had come and gone and he had scored thumping victories in England, though not in Scotland, where pro-independence parties won a small majority. We met in Sedgefield, long Blair’s constituency. When I was a child, the joke was that Labour votes there were not so much counted as weighed. Now it’s Conservative territory.

Johnson admitted a certain “grudging admiration” for Blair, who won three parliamentary majorities in the 1990s and 2000s. I said that the difference between the two men, as far as I could tell, was that Blair saw everything through a prism of progress: those on the right side of history, such as himself, and those like Johnson who were trying to hold back the inevitable.

“He felt the hand of history on his shoulder, didn’t he?” Johnson said, mocking a famous Blair quote shortly before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.

Johnson doesn’t see the world that way. “I think that history—societies and civilizations and nations—can rise and fall, and I think that things can go backwards,” he said.

This might sound like a warning. But to Johnson, Brexit is the fuel for Britain’s rise, not its fall. He believes the country today has far more “oomph, impetus, mojo” than before it left the EU.

As ever with Johnson, it’s hard to discern true belief from narrative skill. I kept coming back to something he’d told me earlier, in our discussion of le Carré: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.” The duality of his character continued to fascinate me. There is the light and the color he wants the world to see—his jokes and unclouded optimism. But there is a shadow, too, the darker side that most people who know him acknowledge, the moments of introspection and calculation.

Hoping for another glimpse of the more reflective Johnson, I repeated the quote to him and began to ask him what he’d meant.

“I wondered—” was all I was able to get out before Johnson cut in.

“Did I say that?” he asked. “How pompous of me.”

This article appears in the July/August 2021 print edition with the headline “Boris Johnson Knows Exactly What He’s Doing.”