Cheer up. Feel better. Don’t worry, be happy. Smile more. As an emotion, cheerfulness has astonishing range. At its best, it’s a style of kindness that we extend to others, a salve during times of trouble, and a way of coping with trauma and despair. At its worst, cheer can be breezily dishonest, an on-demand feeling that we can project to get what we want. It can also be a burden, especially for women and people of color, many of whom feel pressure to be constantly upbeat.

When it comes to moving votes and consuming public attention, the strongest and most negative emotions come to mind: anger, hatred, fear, resentment. But Timothy Hampton’s lively new cultural history of cheerfulness is a convincing argument that modest feelings matter too—even (or especially) as democracy shrivels and the planet overheats. Cheer, which Hampton describes as a “temporary lightness, a moderate uptick in mood,” turns out to have a captivating backstory; it’s helped people build communities, muddle through, and get ahead since at least the Middle Ages.

Hampton would like us to see cheerfulness as a rich moral sentiment, not just a fleeting psychological gimmick. Yet what he has really done, brilliantly if inadvertently, is reveal cheer’s shadow side: the way it lures us into valuing surfaces over substance, the peculiar degree to which it can be conjured and wielded at will, and, ultimately, how it so handily serves and protects those with power.

[Read: Why are we so spiteful?]

Cheer, according to Hampton, isn’t what it used to be. The cheap version we know today, a ploy for selling beer and breakfast cereal and political candidates, is the result of mass consumerism. In his telling, “modern marketing culture” ruined cheerfulness and remade it into a flimsy commodity. Yet cheer was once an emotion with genuine spiritual meaning as well as intellectual heft, Hampton suggests, gently but decisively shaping the history of Western modernity.

When cheer first made its English-language appearance at some point in the 14th century, however, it had not yet acquired these powers. From the Old French word chiere (and possibly the Spanish cara), it originally meant “face” or “countenance,” the visage or impression one offers to the world. In this neutral sense, cheer typically needed an adjective to accompany it. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance, knights were described as kneeling with “humble chere” or galloping into combat with “hardy cheare and face.”

During the religious tumult of the 16th and 17th centuries, cheerfulness took on a more positive gloss. For Protestant reformers such as John Calvin, bright positivity became a signal of Christian charity, virtue, and identity. Over time, cheer became a secular good more than a spiritual one. One powerful force transforming European political and intellectual life in the early modern period, after all, was sociability: gathering in salons and coffeehouses to conduct business and discuss bold new ideas about what was true and who should rule. A light demeanor and upbeat personality made all this easier and more enjoyable. As the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume explained, “true wisdom” was found in the “cheerful discourses” of light conversation, rather than in “the formal reasoning of the schools.” Cheer powered the growth of capitalism, too, by boosting productivity (the economist Adam Smith identified a virtuous circle in which higher wages led to cheerfulness and thus more diligent work) and fueling the consumer economy. By the 19th century, cheerfulness was a marker of social mobility: In the realist novels of writers such as Balzac and Stendhal, for instance, cheer is associated with lower-class provincial men on the make, happily hustling and ascendant in a new capitalist world.

Of course, the history of anything that human beings value is also, inescapably, a story of attempts to control it. Cheer has always felt more under our command than other feelings, treated as an emotion that can be deliberately triggered. Today, you might use balloons or a bouquet of flowers. In 1561, a Dutch physician advised that “good cheere” could be made via “kissing … dauncinge, Wyne, and singing.” One 17th-century medical handbook told its readers to mix a “Powder to Create Cheerfulness” by combining ingredients such as saffron, ambergris, and shavings of bone from a stag’s heart.

[Read: The weaponization of awkwardness]

This manipulative instinct has been especially obvious in the United States, a country that has pioneered the expression and commodification of cheerfulness in too many ways to count, including cheerleaders, Cheerios (invented in the 1940s and marketed with the slogan “He’s feeling his Cheery-oats!”), and the smiley-face icon. As American economic and geopolitical dominance swelled in the 20th century, a new wave of entrepreneurs and spiritual advisers told millions of readers that achieving worldly success was a matter of choosing to be cheerful. In the 1930s, the most famous of these figures was Dale Carnegie, whose best-selling handbook How to Win Friends and Influence People stressed the benefits of good cheer for business advancement. In 1952, a Protestant minister named Norman Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking, which argued that health and wealth were the result of optimism and a cheerful outlook. (One of Peale’s most infamous fans? Donald Trump.)

This self-determined vision of cheerfulness is still minting gigantic profits for the American self-help industry. See: the Rhonda Byrne best seller The Secret (remember “manifesting”?) and the cryptic sermons of Marianne Williamson, who has suggested that disease and despair are illusions that can be overcome by choosing more positive feelings. Feeling spontaneously, genuinely cheerful no longer matters—if it ever did. What’s crucial is that you put on a convincing show, for others as much as for yourself. As Hampton explains, modern life has stripped away cheer’s authenticity and made it fully performative: “To act cheerful is what it means to be cheerful.”

It is always comforting to think that modernity has corrupted us: our morals and our manners, our children and our politics, our intellectual lives and our natural environments. This means that there was once a golden age, something for us to recover. Hampton offers this kind of degeneration story about cheerfulness. He proposes that cheer has decayed from a substantive sentiment into the tacky and shallow feeling we’re familiar with today. American-style manufactured cheer is merely “a distant echo” of an “earlier moment,” he explains, “now largely stripped of its spiritual underpinnings.”

But Hampton’s own book reveals that cheerfulness was never really so pure. From the start, cheer’s earnest and best self has coexisted with its phonier twin. Medieval French nobles realized that by responding to hostile neighbors and potential threats by putting on a “good face” (bonne chère), they could avoid violent feuds. Renaissance courtiers learned from influential texts such as the Italian diplomat Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier that a chipper personality could grease the skids of their social or political ambitions. And many popular etiquette guides in the 18th century advised young women to carefully perform “constant cheerfulness,” as one called it, a kind of “innocent deceit” that would help them succeed in the world of men and manners. Counterfeit cheer, in other words, is not so modern an affliction as Hampton would like us to think.

Emotions are usually defined by their ungovernability, experienced as forces that wash over us and challenge our sense of agency. That quality is what makes most seem authentic and trustworthy to us. Fake anger or love feels like a betrayal. But fake cheer? It’s hard to say how it’s so different from the real thing. Cheer has always been perched on a knife’s edge between truth and falsity, making it especially vulnerable to political manipulation and abuse.

[Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point]

Indeed, powerful interests have long used cheerfulness to counsel complacency and forestall action. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, America’s striving middle classes and exhausted workers were instructed by best-selling inspirational books like Cheerfulness as a Life Power (1899) to be upbeat at work instead of complaining. Because cheer “lengthens the life of human machinery,” one writer explained, it would make everyone’s work easier and more efficient. Much later, Ronald Reagan (appropriately, a cheerleader in college) found in the rhetoric of buoyant national optimism a handy way to defang social democracy while boosting the neoliberal project. During his campaign for president, he tried to convince voters that success was owed largely to a cheerful mindset rather than government support or social conditions. Even today, America’s political establishment prefers its candidates to be “happy warriors” instead of furious crusaders, and frets more about the pessimistic tone of activists than the substance of the demands they make.

Nothing about this darker history means that cheer is anti-democratic, or that optimism is politically naive. Far from it. Social movements, as most organizers and activists will tell you, depend on it to make the hard work pleasurable. But it’s not as anodyne as we might think. Cheerfulness is a political emotion like any other, mercenary and vital and able to make worlds as well as break them. Hampton would like us to harness cheer’s overlooked ability to “transform the moral self.” Yet the greatest risk we face as democratic citizens may be not the neglect of cheerfulness, but rather the reverse: that we trust in it too easily.

European champions England are set to face World Cup holders USA at Wembley on 7 October.

As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.

From 2020 onward, however, Britain transformed itself from China’s best partner in Europe to its harshest critic, sweeping away decades of foreign-policy consensus in the most drastic such shift in the Western world. Britain became the first European power to formally block Huawei from its 5G telecoms network, led the global condemnation of Beijing’s barbaric treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, revoked the U.K. broadcasting license of China’s state-controlled CGTN, and offered a route to British citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong who want to flee Beijing’s political repression.

The reasons for this turn were many: Brexit meant that Britain, having cut ties with its closest economic partner, the EU, could not afford to risk its relationship with its closest security ally, the United States, as well. The pandemic then entrenched public concern about Western reliance on China. And perhaps most important of all was Donald Trump. Even as he imposed steel tariffs on allies and belittled their leaders, the American president demanded that they stand with the United States against China.

Whereas Britain’s future had once seemed Chinese, it was back to being American. But in recent months, something strange started happening: London began softening its stance toward China again. Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson this year approved a reopening of trade talks with China, and his government approved the sale of a microchip manufacturer to a Chinese company (though this is now in doubt).

Britain’s diplomatic back-and-forth in recent years has offered among the most extreme examples of how states are dealing with the wider geopolitical upheaval that has been taking place in response to China’s rise, a problem that no one yet seems to know the answer to. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has formed around the notion that “engagement” with Beijing has failed, and that China is the only great rival to American supremacy in the 21st century. For continental Europe, Beijing is less an adversary than a risk to be accommodated, managed, and recognized, and the growth of its power an opportunity to carve out more “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. For Britain, trapped between the U.S. and Europe, it is a mixture of all of these things.

[Read: What returning to China taught me about China]

To understand what was going on, I spoke with more than a dozen senior government officials, diplomats, foreign-policy analysts, and lawmakers across the U.S., Britain, and Europe. (Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government deliberations.) From these conversations a picture emerged of Britain clinging tightly to the new U.S. consensus, partly through judgment of its best interests and partly because of American pressure, while seeking to ensure its economic priorities with China are kept alive as much as possible as it faces up to the reality of the 21st century. Britain’s example shows how the widening standoff between Washington and Beijing will transform midsize powers that seek to avoid being drawn into a new cold war—and, more important, how the U.S. will not easily be able to maintain its grip on the world order that it created.

For decades, Britain followed a fairly consistent line in its policy toward Beijing, trying to balance security concerns against economic opportunities but typically erring on the side of engagement.

As early as 2003, Britain’s main telecommunications company approached Tony Blair’s government to seek permission to work with what was then a little-known Chinese company, Huawei, to upgrade the U.K.’s network. The partnership was waved through by officials who were more concerned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and Russia than some harmless Chinese firm.

By 2008, however, British intelligence agencies were warning that the Chinese state could use Huawei to gain access to Britain’s telecoms network. Soon after, the government—then led by Gordon Brown—established a watchdog to monitor Huawei, creating a first-of-its-kind arrangement involving a group of security-cleared former British officials and experts who would keep an eye on Huawei from inside the company on behalf of Britain. In effect, Britain had become sufficiently concerned about China spying on it that it demanded a special unit be created within Huawei to spy on the Chinese, but was insufficiently concerned to cancel Huawei contracts.

This was the environment in which David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010—one in which cautious partnership with China had yielded concrete benefits for the U.K., but with hard-to-gauge costs. Over his six years in charge, Cameron would expand the relationship in an attempt to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and open new markets for its financial-services industry. In 2014, London became one of the first international clearing centers for Chinese currency, before racing ahead of its competitors to become the major offshore center for renminbi trading. The following year, Cameron welcomed Xi to London for a state visit during which the British leader declared the beginning of a “golden era” in relations.

This was no one-off, but the culmination of a British strategy stretching back to at least the turn of the century. Britain was using its membership in the EU to turn itself into China’s financial gateway to the continent. Then came Brexit.

Following the referendum, Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, a more security-conscious China hawk who had spent the previous six years in the Home Office and was responsible for the domestic-intelligence agency MI5. In one of her first acts, she paused a decision on the construction of a British nuclear plant that was to receive Chinese investment. Then, in early 2018, on a three-day trip to China, May refused to sign off on a deal in which Britain would offer formal support for Xi’s infrastructure-building (and influence-generating) Belt and Road Initiative.

Once again, economic interests squashed political concerns. May’s early caution over China gave way to the same pressures that had pushed Cameron, Brown, and Blair: In April 2019, news leaked that May was preparing to give the go-ahead for Huawei’s involvement in building the country’s 5G network. By then, she had put aside her concerns about Chinese involvement in Britain’s nuclear industry as well. And then, once again, Brexit intervened.

May was replaced by Johnson, a far more liberal figure when it came to security and China. Immediately, Johnson slipped back into the old British policy, announcing that despite furious opposition from the U.S., the U.K. would allow Huawei to play a part in Britain’s 5G rollout. It was, in essence, a continuation of the Mayite policy—which itself was little more than a continuation of the cautious engagement that had been in place for decades.

[David Frum: Why Biden is right to end ambiguity on China]

The morning after Johnson’s Huawei decision, however, a Chinese student in Britain rang an emergency health line complaining that he and his mother visiting from Hubei felt unwell. At 7:50 p.m. that night, two paramedics dressed in hazmat suits arrived at the hotel where they were staying to take them to hospital. They would be the first people in Britain to test positive for the coronavirus. More than 200,000 people would ultimately die of COVID-19 in Britain. China’s role as nation zero, and its initial attempts to suppress news of the outbreak, would spark denunciations across the democratic world and demands for retaliation.

Even before the pandemic, opinion in the U.S. had shifted sharply against China, thanks in large part to the ferocity—and centrality—of Trump’s attacks on the country. This discord was almost inevitable anyway, given the great-power competition between the pair, but Trump played his part in speeding this process up and giving it political fire.

By May 2020, the U.S. had increased pressure on Britain and other European allies by unveiling sanctions on Huawei that, in effect, stopped it from being able to use American technology, a move that meant the British security services could no longer guarantee Huawei’s safety, because the company would soon be using non-Western technology that the British did not fully understand. This, in fact, was the very reason the U.S. had imposed its sanctions, and they served as a hammer blow to Britain’s strategy of careful engagement with China. In July 2020, Johnson’s government became the first in Europe to announce that Huawei would be banned from Britain’s 5G network. Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador in London, said Britain’s decision on Huawei, as well as the U.K.’s policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong, had “poisoned the atmosphere” between the two countries and Britain would “pay the price.” The Chinese state media threatened “retaliatory responses.”

In the end, London’s long-held strategy thus collapsed not through its own proactive choice but because of choices being made elsewhere. British foreign policy was forced to adapt to a world it did not want, and had tried to avoid.

When I put this to British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, she rejected (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) the idea that Britain had, effectively, been made to change its China policy.

Truss, the favorite to replace Johnson as prime minister, told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had brought together countries against Russia, some of which might not be liberal or democratic but that nevertheless did not want to see “a world where might is right.”

In reply, I suggested that, in part, might is right. After all, we live in an American world, where the U.S. uses its power to set the rules. “I don’t agree with that,” Truss replied. “We don’t live in an American world. We live in a world where there is a coalition of nations who … subscribe to the values of freedom and democracy.”

I cited the example of China. As late as 2019, Britain was trying to push ahead with the Huawei 5G deal. “We changed because the Americans changed,” I said.

“That was not the reason we changed,” she responded.

I pushed back. “The Americans changed the rules of the game, and we didn’t have the ability to guarantee the security” of the telecoms network.

Again, she was insistent. “That was not the reason we changed. We changed because it was the right thing to do. I was in the government when the policy changed, and we changed because it was the right thing to do.”

[Read: How China wants to replace the U.S. order]

I pointed out that the same government, made up of the same people, had made a different decision earlier in the same year about what was right before changing its mind.

“Well, that is true,” Truss replied. “Every government, Tom, has its internal discussions and I can’t reveal the internal discussions that took place on both occasions. However, we did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Whatever your conclusion, to look at British foreign policy now is to see almost a complete overlap with the U.S., whether on the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change, the importance of spending more on defense, NATO, the threat posed by Russia, or—now—China. One of the lessons of the Huawei policy shift, and Britain’s shift more broadly, is that the U.S. can still force its allies into line if it is prepared to take its gloves off.

But under the surface, things are not quite so simple.

There are signs that, actually, Britain’s old policy is once again being quietly rebuilt. Amid intense U.S. pressure, including threats to curtail transatlantic intelligence sharing, Britain changed tack, falling into line. Yet since then, Britain has drifted back toward its position of cautiously opening up to China as far as it feels is safe—in part spurred by a frustration with Washington.

In February, it emerged that Johnson had given the green light to reopen trade talks with China that had been paused for years. Then it was revealed that the U.K. government had apparently approved the sale of a British microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm, only for that decision to be kicked into the long grass. On each occasion, the announcements sparked a backlash among China skeptics in London. May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who had pushed for stricter controls on any economic opening to China, reacted with resigned alarm. “It seems we will never learn,” he wrote. Tough policies over Xinjiang and Hong Kong remain in place, but the recent reports point to a softening of the hardest edges of Britain’s China policy. The reasons indicate the limits of Washington’s leadership in its confrontation with Beijing.

Today, some within the British government share a sense that Brexit and Johnson’s previous, seemingly warm relationship with Trump continue to be held against the U.K. by some in the Biden administration. Despite Britain’s being the most hawkish European ally on Russia and China, spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and supporting U.S. efforts on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.K. believes it is treated as just another ally, criticized for its push to renegotiate its Brexit deal with the EU and ignored in its ambition to strike a free-trade deal with Washington. If this is the case, some in London wonder, why not be more independent where Britain’s core national interests are concerned?

In one sense, what does Britain have to lose from exploring deeper economic ties with China? The Biden administration has made clear there will be no trade deal with the U.S. anytime soon and, besides, the EU continues to pursue its own policy of engagement with China, despite continuing Chinese economic support for Russia during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rationale that long drove British policy is reasserting itself: The size and wealth of China means Britain simply cannot afford not to engage. With Britain outside the EU, economic growth sluggish, debt high, and few other obvious alternatives to increase trade, will any future prime minister really be able to ignore what China has to offer?

[Michael Schuman: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Britain’s apparent return to a more open China policy is a reminder of the difficulty Washington is going to have constructing and leading any kind of alliance—democratic or otherwise—to contain Beijing. Though it can use a policy of maximum pressure to force some countries into line, as it did with Britain over 5G—effectively removing London’s ability to sustain an independent policy—such a stance can go only so far. The U.S. remains powerful enough that its sticks can and do work, but without any carrots at all, this strategy will have limits.

Perhaps the main lesson of Britain’s experience with China is that core national interests are likely to reassert themselves in the long term, no matter which party, prime minister, chancellor, or president is in power in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In London, Johnson has pursued a policy that would have been familiar to any of the previous four British prime ministers this century, Labour and Conservative among them. The same is true of the EU. Such is the depth of economic entanglement with China today that it will take far more than talk of “democratic alliances” and threats to the rules-based order for Brussels, Berlin, Paris—and London—to seriously change course.

What does that mean for the U.S.? If it wants to construct a coalition behind its attempt to contain China, it will need to be prepared to threaten and cajole, yes, but also bribe far more effectively than it has until now. No longer is America the only dog in the pound, even if it still has the biggest bark.

A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like … well, like the back of his hand. It is unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.

These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, The Last White Man: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” These are also the opening beats—albeit about a black man who wakes up white—of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015), the epigraph of which cites Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to make the debt explicit. It’s also the premise of a chapter of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) about a black woman who wakes up white, which, per its title, “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” alludes to Robert Louis Stevenson’s scene from 1886: “The hand of Henry Jekyll … large, firm, white, and comely” appears “in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes … lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair.” Perhaps Hamid is hoping to make good on a saying from his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000): “Tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise.”

Like the hero of Herman Raucher’s novelization of Watermelon Man (1970), Anders’s first impulse is to mistake himself for a dark-skinned home intruder. Like the hero of Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Man Who Changed His Skin (1959), Anders soon realizes this isn’t just a tan, either: “He looked like another person, not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different.” Like the hero of Mortimer Weisinger’s pulp story, “Pigments Is Pigments” (1935), Anders reacts with shock at his darkening, then falls into a “murderous rage.” As with the more scientifically minded versions of this plot, like Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine (2014) and Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow (2019), we’ll soon find out whether the transformation is explicable or reversible. We’ll discover whether it afflicts just Anders or spreads to others like a fad, as in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), or like a plague, as in Junot Díaz’s story “Monstro” (2012).

Even if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming. Distinguishing between those born dark and the newly transformed will become fraught. Violence will erupt. Some will come to believe that a genocidal conspiracy is to blame; some will kill themselves; some will kill others. “Militants” will take over, emitting fear and hate like a musk. Love will blossom. Heightened scenes of interracial sex and awkward perusals of genitals will follow. In the end, skin color will be shown to be meaningless for identity, a mere construct. Yet it will prove almost atavistically fascinating as an aesthetic surface and a conductor of feeling.

Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a “meditation,” and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it turns out.

Anders is haunted by his entrance into double consciousness, which W. E. B. Du Bois famously first described in The Atlantic as being divided between your sense of yourself and your sense of how others perceive you. Anders obsesses over how white people will treat him now that they have no way “to know he was white,” and seems to sense their “contempt and fascination.” As for his new kind, “all these dark people around, more dark people than white people … made Anders uneasy, even though he was dark too.” He feels he’s been recast as a supporting character in his life; he feels “triply imprisoned, in his skin, in this house, in this town.” He dons a hoodie and sunglasses to hide himself from strangers and family.

[From the August 1897 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Strivings of the Negro People”]

Anders feels comfortable enough to reveal his new body only to his sometime lover, a high-school friend named Oona. They smoke some weed and give it a spin:

He started to undress, and then she did the same, warily, and they joined with a degree of caution, almost as though one was stalking the other, which of them stalking and which of them being stalked unclear, maybe both doing both, in a way, and so it was that they came to have that night’s sex.

Anders worked at a gym and Oona taught yoga, and their bodies were youthful and fit, and if we, writing or reading this, were to find ourselves indulging in a kind of voyeuristic pleasure at their coupling, we could perhaps be forgiven, for they too were experiencing something not entirely dissimilar, pale-skinned Oona watching herself performing her grind with a dark-skinned stranger, Anders the stranger watching the same, and the performance was strong for them, visceral, touching them where, unexpectedly, or not so unexpectedly, they discovered a jarring and discomforting satisfaction at being touched.

The sex improves; the prose does not. A phrase from a later scene, “arousal shadowed by gloom,” captures the general feeling. The novel evinces the worst of Hamid’s style, intensifying his turn in Exit West (2017) toward folksy transitions (“and so it was”), diction that manages to be both officious and purple (“the performance was strong for them, visceral”), and run-ons that feel less breathless than halting, laden as they are with comma-capped redundancies (“maybe both doing both, in a way”) and reversals (“unexpectedly, or not so unexpectedly”). As in his earlier novels about social mobility and immigration, romance supplies the plot and casts an aura of “love” over the politico-speculative gimmick. But Hamid here emphasizes the familial, perhaps as a stand-in for the genetic: The love between generations meets the idea that race is an inherited trait.

The titular last white man is in fact Anders’s widowed father, who responds to his son’s new condition by weeping “like a shudder, like an endless cough, without a sound,” then giving him a gun. Anders feels guilty for his darkness; “just by being here, Anders was taking something from his father, taking his dignity.” But his father makes it his dying task to accept Anders, even though

he could understand those who wanted [his son] gone from town now, who were afraid of him, or threatened by him, by the dark man his boy had become, and they had a right to be, he would have felt the same in their shoes, he liked it no better than they did, and he could see the end his boy signaled, the end of things.

Family blood and racial blood are pitted against each other.

Oona’s mother, who vomits when she catches the interracial couple in flagrante, is also averse to the barbarian transformation, which she predicts: “People are changing,” she warns her daughter early on. “All over. Our people.” Hooked up to an IV of online fearmongering and cable news, she has become a “fantasist”; her belief “that life was fair and would turn out for the best and good people like them got what they deserved” has warped upon the death of her husband into an embittered crouch, a “deep, abiding panic” that springs into a “brittle” joy once the violence begins. Oona, “a realist” unnerved by this nativist zealotry, is inspired by Anders’s transformation to paint herself with brown makeup. But this flirtation with blackface leaves Oona “ashamed,” and though she appreciates her new features when she too turns dark, “a feeling of melancholy” yet touches her, “a sadness at the losing of something.”

Things settle down. Darkness—in the novel’s conception, more a symbolic hue than an ethnicity—sweeps inexorably, beneficently over town. A child’s notion: If everyone is “the same, just dark,” what is there to fight about? Anders’s father dies; the last white man is buried; you might think the newly darkened (the darkies?) will get together for a block party. Instead, they take walks to process their feelings. Oona and Anders fall in love, move in together, have a daughter—she comes out “brown” and “ferocious.” By then, Oona’s mother has lost her whiteness, too. When she waxes nostalgic about the glories of the white past, her brown granddaughter stills her with a word, “stop,” and a kiss. This is the novel’s cure for white despair over the loss of whiteness: Keep calm and carry on.

Never one to let us get away with missing an analogy, Hamid tells us of our baleful lovers:

Sometimes it felt like the town was a town in mourning, and the country a country in mourning, and this suited Anders, and suited Oona, coinciding as it did with their own feelings, but at other times it felt like the opposite, that something new was being born, and strangely enough this suited them too.

What exactly is being mourned? Whiteness in The Last White Man is a dream. It’s the neighborhood watch and home security. It’s weight lifting in an old-school gym, men testing themselves against gravity. It’s yoga in a scentless studio, women “staving off aging through attempts to remain supple.” It’s going out drinking, going out dancing, going out to dinner. It’s the myth that “a gun was a marker on the journey of death, and was to be respected as such, like a coffin or a grave or a meal in winter.” It’s having no vocation and curating yourself online. It’s feeling “cashed out, emotion-wise” but flush enough in cash for provisions to survive a race riot. Primarily, it’s not being “dark.” (The word black is verboten in The Last White Man, appearing only once, to describe iron.)

What exactly is being born—or rather, borne? Darkness in The Last White Man is an ordeal. Those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel. There is no sense that they have cultures or mores; Anders still sees them, “he could not help it, … like a group of animals.” Darkened Oona comes to notice “finer gradations in the texture of someone’s skin and the shape of their cheekbones and the nature of their hair,” but this somehow leads to a conceit comparing people to trees. Darkness awakens “the ancient horrors … the almost forgotten savagery upon which [the] town was founded.” Anders wonders if “maybe that was the point, the point of it was to break him, to break all of them, all of us, yes us, how strange to be forced into such an us.”

Despite its conciliatory tone, this echoes the narratives that Oona’s mother reads online about

the savagery, the savagery of the dark people, how it had been in them from the beginning, and had manifested itself again and again throughout history, and could not be denied, and she read the examples, the examples of when groups of whites had fallen, and the rapes and slaughters and tortures we had been subjected to, and how that was their way, the way of the dark people, whenever they seized the upper hand.

The Last White Man in this way dramatizes the inane, paranoiac interpretation of migration known as the “Great Replacement,” which was just condemned in a 2022 resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives.

This conspiracy theory claims that the West is being colonized in reverse by the global South, and has inspired a string of white-supremacist terrorist attacks in places such as Christchurch, New Zealand, and, most recently, Buffalo, New York. The trope of “colored hordes” overwhelming white nationhood is an old and eugenicist idea. The French author Renaud Camus gave it new life when he named it the “Great Replacement” in a short book he published on the subject in 2011. That same year, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight people, then went on to hunt down and murder 69 members of the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League, mostly teenagers. What are we meant to make of Hamid’s giving his latest hero the name of the man who applied the logic of “the last white man” so horrifically?

If Hamid’s novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. But The Last White Man’s structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance.

The characters are mostly presented as your basic good white people, trying their best to deal with the coming darkness: “Oona wondered … if her mother was always going to find a way to carry on, and had simply been mourning, or not simply, there was nothing simple about it, but mainly, mainly been mourning, as a woman who had lost her husband and her son was entitled to do.” Hamid lets them grieve for what is posited as a genuine loss of whiteness, with no compulsive melancholy, no unhealthy attachments, no obsessive shrines left over. Just mementos and a brown child who symbolizes a race-blind future. The Last White Man feels like a primer for mourning whiteness, not a critique of it.

To accede to the idea that whiteness can be lost, albeit in the name of open-endedness and open-mindedness, is to exculpate the capitalist imperialism that invented race in the first place. Whiteness isn’t monolithic any more than darkness is—remember the Irish, the Jews? Nor is it a dream for everyone. Remember James Joyce’s line? “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Hamid’s commitment to a liberal literary ethos veers close to a vague both-sides-ism:

Online you could form your own opinion of what was going on and your opinion was, likely as not, different from the next person’s, and there was no real way to determine which of you was right, and the boundary between what was in your mind and what was in the world beyond was blurry, so blurry there was almost no boundary at all.

It’s one thing for a character to be afflicted with blurred vision or the race “blindness” that grants Oona a “new kind of sight”; it’s another for the novel to suffer the same confusion of perspective.

There are two cracks in the humanist glaze, patches of clarity in the blur. A dark man follows Oona and Anders on a walk, scares them with a shout, then walks off, laughing at their hysterical reaction. And a dark-from-the-start, nameless “cleaning guy” at the gym where Anders works declines Anders’s belated offer to train him. “What I would like,” the man adds, “is a raise.” Both of these fleeting scenes are genuinely funny. Why don’t we follow these dark men home? Or any of the other people born dark, who must surely be annoyed as well as amused by these confused, deracinated, sad-sack interlopers? Wouldn’t their lives offer an interesting foil or counterpoint?

An earlier novel by the same author might have pursued this tack. Hamid’s characters sometimes offer scathing indictments of racial capitalism, like this one from a rapscallion in Moth Smoke:

Well, what about the guys who give out the Nobel Prize? What are they? They’re money launderers. They take the fortunes made out of dynamite, out of blowing people into bits, and make the family name of Nobel noble. The Rhodes Scholarship folks? They do the same thing: dry-clean our memories of one of the great white colonialists, of the men who didn’t let niggers like us into their clubs or their parliaments, who gunned us down in gardens when we tried to protest.

Hamid’s narrators often refer matter-of-factly, sometimes with delight, to the variety of darker complexions, to the difference between being a brown Muslim and a black Muslim, to the internal diversity within Pakistani or Nigerian culture. It is taken for granted that “darkness” is not just half of a simplistic racial binary, but rather a pluriform, diasporic, and syncretic cultural phenomenon.

Hamid seems to have sacrificed this sort of specificity in favor of a polished brand of globalish allegory. If in this latest work his characters grow black, over his career, they seem to have grown ever more blank. The primary political dialectic of Moth Smoke is rich Lahore and poor Lahore; in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), it’s New York City and Lahore. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) never names the Asian country where it’s set; the protagonists of Exit West leave an unnamed, presumably Muslim, country in the putative East and move steadily West. And in the unnamed, probably European country of The Last White Man, we have shifted to an even larger-scale paradigm: the dark and the white. This drift toward the general is also a drift toward the didactic, one that is only nominally secular insofar as it amounts to a righteous liberalism that promises us a peek, as Oona says, into “a mystical truth, a terrible mystical truth” about humanity. Hamid’s work is starting to look a lot like high-flown self-help, Paulo Coelho or Robin DiAngelo for the jet-setting smart set.

Hamid has always tended to map the rising tensions of romance onto the movements of social mobility onto metafictional asides about the relations between authors and readers—as if love, politics, and literature were all simply different ways to negotiate intimacy. The absurdity of these equivalences becomes clear in the closing lines of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia:

You have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.

Beyond the creepiness, this pablum presumes reversibility. Yes, the political affects the personal, and both affect the literary. But having sex with the right person won’t change the world; reading the right book won’t either. Dark-washing characters won’t disappear race, nor will believing that brown kids are our future.

Yet this kind of magical thinking will no doubt continue to meet with success in an era obsessed with the conviction that we are all in a moment of racial reckoning. What Hamid’s novels actually offer isn’t education but recognition, a self-congratulatory reconfirmation of ideas like “migration is a death” and “race is a construct,” which are true enough but also truisms by now. Despite the horrors it has conjured, “the end of whiteness” is just another mantra of our current discourse; whether you are troubled by it or merely curious, Hamid is here to talk you through it.

But who is you? Whom is this novel for? Hamid has never shied from connecting his characters’ identity crises to his own. “I was not certain where I belonged,” the narrator of The Reluctant Fundamentalist says, “in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither.” In a recent New Yorker interview, Hamid explains the origin and intent of The Last White Man:

After 9/11, I experienced a profound sense of loss. I was constantly stopped at immigration, held for hours at the airport, once pulled off a flight that was already on the tarmac. I had become an object of suspicion, even fear. I had lost something. And, over the years, I began to realize that I had lost my partial whiteness. Not that I had been white before: I am brown-skinned, with a Muslim name. But I had been able to partake in many of the benefits of whiteness. And I had been complicit in that system …

So we have to imagine our way out of it, excavate our way out of it, and over generations grow our way out of it … As a writer, I build environments out of words that readers enter and make their own—and in that process puzzle out a bit of what it is they think. What might it feel like to live in a town that undergoes the transformation that Anders’s town undergoes?

This way of putting it hums with the soothing privilege of the elite. Apparently, the solutions to the problem—to the violence—of the color line were with us all along: Fiction! Imagination! Empathy!

The Last White Man offers no news for the nonwhite among us. Maybe Hamid wants it that way. This is unfortunate, because now is a good time to remind ourselves that “dark” people, despite our erasure from national narratives, have been in the West for centuries. We have our own perspectives; we have said and written and done many things—and not just about whiteness, or race, or racism. We are not, and have never been, mere symbols or surfaces for melancholy reflection. You might even say that we have tended on the whole to add some color to things, with our highly particular food, fashion, words, music, art—with that stuff of life that usually goes by the name of culture.

This article appears in the September 2022 print edition with the headline “A World Without White People”

Ahmed Lamlas, the governor of Aden, had been cheerfully describing his progress in rebuilding Yemen’s interim capital—a program aiming to ensure that most cars in the city had license plates was under way, and Saudi-funded projects to rebuild a hospital and dig new water wells were moving forward—when the power went out, plunging the dilapidated conference room into darkness.

“This,” a Yemeni sitting with our small group interjected sarcastically, “is one of the accomplishments.”

Aden is known as the Eye of Yemen, the gateway through which foreign ideas and would-be conquerors enter the country. This southern port city spent more than a century under British rule, connecting London’s imperial possessions in Egypt and India. It fell within the Soviet sphere of influence following the collapse of the British empire, becoming the capital of the Middle East’s only communist state. Now it is under the sway of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and at the center of their efforts to drive back the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia, in Yemen’s long-running civil war.

Even though the Houthis were driven out of Aden seven years ago, it looks as if fighting ended seven days ago. Houses lie in rubble across the city; Lamlas had only enough funds to remove debris from one of eight municipal districts. Across the street from where I stayed, the Aden Hotel—once known for hosting lavish weddings—was half-collapsed from shelling years prior that had left gaping wounds in its facade. Lamlas mused about putting up billboards to boost the morale of citizens frustrated by the slow pace of reconstruction, but as he himself acknowledged, his entire budget would not cover repairs to the Aden Hotel. In November, Yemen’s prime minister promised to repair a single power generator. It remains broken. “We are poor,” Lamlas said simply.

Lamlas’s matter-of-fact comment to me, if anything, understates the despair in Aden, and in Yemen. No one involved in Yemen’s war, at any level, has any significant aspiration for the country. Hopes—to the extent that any exist—are limited to improving the odds of surviving. In Yemen, in Saudi Arabia and the UAE (the dominant powers in non-Houthi areas), in the United States, there is no discussion of how to rebuild Yemen, let alone how to make it thrive as it once did. The grandiose ambitions of the war’s major players were dashed long ago, and yet the conflict still grinds on, leaving a country ruined. The war has created its own logic and its own momentum.

Two weeks into his presidency, Joe Biden described the war here as a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” He had good reason: The Saudi-led air campaign has killed at least 9,000 civilians and precipitated the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, while also failing to dislodge the Houthis from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Aden, meanwhile, has seen its economy and security collapse under the rule of Saudi- and Emirati-backed politicians.

The Yemeni government’s poverty has made it dependent on handouts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In return, it has ceded no small amount of sovereignty. Ships hoping to dock at Aden’s harbor must first undergo inspection by the Saudi-led Coalition, primarily by passing through the Saudi city of Jeddah, and the decision to grant a foreign journalist like me a visa had to be approved by officials in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. (The Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, an independent research institution focused on Yemen and funded by grants from the EU and European states, organized the trip and handled these negotiations.) Even Yemen’s airspace is no longer its own: Our flight to Aden sat on the runway for seven hours, waiting for approval from the Saudi-led coalition to take off.

Yemenis deeply resent this dependency. “This is bullshit,” one fellow passenger yelled as our wait dragged on. “Someone call [Saudi Crown Prince] Mohammed bin Salman!”

The country’s horizons were not always so limited. Some Adenis still remember when the city was the Dubai of its era, prospering from its global commercial links in the dying days of the British empire. Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1954, less than a year after her coronation, hailing the city as an “outstanding example of colonial development.” Decades later, a Yemeni hotel still promoted the legend that she had spent a night in one of its rooms, decking out a “Royal Suite” with photographs of Her Majesty.

If I had visited in the 1950s or ’60s, one older Adeni told me, the bombed-out Aden Hotel would not have been the central landmark in the neighborhood in which I stayed. Instead, I would have seen a neon-lit cinema, the Shenaz, that played that era’s biggest English-language blockbusters, including Ben Hur and Cleopatra. Next door was an adjoining night club, the Shalimar, which imported international bands and German beer. The Shenaz was partially destroyed in the mid-2000s during a property dispute and now sits derelict. The Shalimar has been demolished.

“It was an era where going out was something you did with a bit of aplomb,” Dadi Motiwalla, the eldest son of the Shenaz and Shalimar’s owner, told me. “If you didn’t have a tie or a bow tie, we wouldn’t let you in.”

A hotel damaged by the war, in Aden, Yemen, Feb. 15, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

This was once a vital city, Adenis wanted me to know, connected to global commerce and culture. It was a place where one’s aspirations could extend beyond cleaning the streets of rubble. Motiwalla described having his birthdays at the Shalimar: large parties with more than 100 children scrambling around the dance floor, and the chefs making cakes with sugary lakes and toy boats floating upon them.

The cinema’s theme song, he remembers, was “Sail Along Silvery Moon.” “I never forgot that,” he said quietly, choking up. “It brings a lot of memories back.”

Nobody is trying to restore Aden to what it once was. Yemen’s leaders aspire only to hold on to power so that they can wring the few remaining dollars out of state coffers. The wealthy Gulf states involved in Yemen’s war seem only to want the government to limp along ineffectually until they can extricate themselves from the conflict. And the United States’ primary concerns are counterterrorism and the maintenance of its security relationships with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

There was a time when Saudi leaders imagined that they would swoop in as Yemen’s savior. Mohammed bin Salman launched Riyadh’s military campaign against the Houthis a mere two months after he was appointed defense minister, and the 2015 intervention became integral to the young prince’s rise to power. He argued privately that the kingdom’s old guard—including his chief rival, then–Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef—had failed to stop the Houthis’ rapid gains across Yemen in the preceding year. It now fell to him to take the sort of bold actions that his elders refused to contemplate. The Houthis, and by extension Iran, had to be stopped.

MBS cultivated an image of himself as a decisive, dynamic military leader. The kingdom’s official news agency published photographs of the prince flying on a military helicopter to inspect army positions near the Yemeni border, and Saudi television broadcast clips of him overseeing the campaign’s first air strikes from an air-force operations center. He claimed that the Saudi-led coalition could “uproot” the Houthis “in a few days” if it chose to do so, and posters touting him as a military leader proliferated across Riyadh.

By 2019, however, the Saudis had what one analyst described to me as a “come to Jesus” moment about the war’s trajectory. Their military campaign had stalled, their local allies were weakened, and Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi territory were becoming deadlier. MBS, now firmly ensconced as crown prince, stepped back as the public face of the war and charged his younger brother with negotiating an end to the conflict with the Houthis.

That diplomatic opening paved the way in April of this year for the first nationwide truce since 2016 in Yemen’s war. Although the agreement has resulted in a notable decline in violence, U.S. diplomats acknowledge that it does not address the root causes driving the war. Fundamental questions about how to share political power and rebuild the country’s shattered institutions remain unresolved. The current diplomatic goal is to freeze the conflict in place, in the hope that this will open the door to broader political negotiations.

For many people whom I spoke with in Yemen, however, that risks simply freezing their lives in an impossible situation. In an encampment overlooking an abandoned stretch of Aden’s beachfront, for example, a community of Ethiopian refugees has suffered multiple displacements, by multiple tormentors: First they were driven from their home country by ethnic conflict there, then out of Sanaa by the Houthis, and finally they were dumped in Aden and forced to fashion shelters out of tree branches and roadside debris.

Internally displaced–persons camp in Modereyet el-Shaab, Aden, Yemen, Feb. 9, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Beyza, 22, remembers only life in Yemen. She and her mother fled across the Red Sea in 2004, settling in Sanaa when her mother found work cleaning houses there. After the Houthi takeover of the capital, however, the Islamist movement came to see the Ethiopian community as a humanitarian burden and, later, as transmitters of the coronavirus. Beginning in 2020, the Houthis began sending refugees on forced marches to the Saudi border and locked up others in detention facilities.

When refugees protested against their dismal conditions in the detention center, Houthi fighters locked the facility doors and launched projectiles inside that ignited a raging fire. International organizations reported that scores of people burned to death; the refugees in Aden insisted to me that the true death toll was in the hundreds. A tattered poster featuring gruesome images of the fire’s aftermath and demanding justice for the victims still hangs outside the encampment I visited.

The community launched protests outside the United Nations refugee agency’s headquarters in Sanaa to demand support for the families of those who died. The Houthis, unwilling to condone even this minor expression of dissent, came for the protesters at dawn on a Friday morning. “They took everyone,” Beyza told me. “Those who could pay 2,000 Saudi rials [$533], they took to the passport center. If they didn’t pay, they took them to the front line.”

Beyza and her mother handed over their meager savings to the Houthis. From the passport center, they were placed on buses and transported out of the group’s territory to Aden. “They took our photos and said, ‘If you come back to Sanaa, you will be killed,’” said Beyza. “Some people’s children were still in Sanaa, and they couldn’t go back for them.”

In Aden, the beleaguered Ethiopian community now suffers more from neglect than abuse. Its members had to construct their own rudimentary shelters, and say they received little to no humanitarian assistance from the Yemeni government or international organizations. They beg for food at nearby restaurants and gather water from a broken pipe at a nearby derelict hotel.

Abandonment, too, can be deadly. One 33-year-old Ethiopian, Jawar, told me how his seven-month-old son fell ill and died due to the lack of basic medicine. He could not find anywhere to bury him, so he pleaded with a guard at the nearby hotel to lay his son to rest in the garden.

“This is what it is like here,” Jawar said quietly. “Children are born, and children die.”

Photographs of severely malnourished infants hung on wall in the administrative office at the Aden Hospital, in Yemen, Feb. 13, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Eight years into this conflict, any hope of a decisive victory has vanished. Many Adenis I interviewed have grown cynical about the point of this seemingly pointless war: It only continues, they say, to justify a small elite’s grip on power and continued looting of state coffers.

I have been covering and studying this war—first from Beirut, then from Riyadh, and now from Washington, D.C.—since its inception and, frankly, that explanation is as good as any. The Gulf Arab states have abandoned the pretense that they will deal a death blow to Iranian expansionism; MBS has secured his position in the Saudi hierarchy; the Houthis’ boasts that they would win a swift victory over their foes have been proved false. What better reasoning can I put forward than that proffered to me by those Adenis?

Last year, retired Brigadier General Naji al-Arabi found himself leading a group of angry protesters massed outside Aden’s presidential palace. Inside, Yemeni leaders were meeting. As the protesters approached, the soldiers at the gate fired warning shots to disperse the crowd. The demonstrators, many of them military veterans like Arabi, didn’t back down: They surged forward toward the entrance, and after a brief scuffle the guards stepped aside and allowed them to enter the palace.

“We didn’t know the government was having an emergency meeting,” Arabi told me. “We just heard the helicopters flying away.”

The Yemeni government fled shortly after the palace gates were breached. The protesters soon departed peacefully, returning to a nearby mosque to read their list of demands, calling on the government to improve the dismal living conditions in the city. It made little difference: An atmosphere of imminent collapse and simmering revolt still hangs over Aden.

Wedding dresses on display in Lelte boutique on a street in Aden, Yemen, Feb. 15, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)

Arabi, a blunt man who wears a perpetually exasperated expression, joined the army in 1978. He trained in the Soviet Union for three years until being forced into retirement in the ’90s, after the unification of South Yemen and North Yemen. He and thousands of his comrades now survive on their pensions: Arabi is owed roughly $30 a month.

But even this paltry sum comes in rarely. In 2016, Arabi and fellow ex-soldiers formed a protest movement to pressure the government to pay its debts to veterans. Since the protesters breached the palace, Arabi says he has not received a cent.

Arabi has eight children who depend on his pension for their survival. Some of his sons now chop wood to make ends meet during the long stretches when the money does not arrive. Many well-trained military officers have similarly been forced to scratch out a living by whatever means necessary. “You can find a fighter pilot watching over sheep, or selling newspapers or cigarettes,” Arabi said.

In addition to pressuring the government and its foreign patrons, the protest movement is a way for officers like Arabi to maintain some influence over the thousands of desperate ex-soldiers abandoned by the Yemeni state. Arabi fears that, without any way of supporting themselves, some of his former comrades could drift into Islamist militancy or work for criminal gangs to earn a living. In fact, he believes that the government is hoping they do, as it would then have a pretext to crack down violently on the protest movement.

“We think the government is trying to repress us so that people will use their weapons to sabotage and to steal,” he said. “They are trying to create new front lines to keep the war going, to feed on it.”

The movement has sputtered in recent months, however, as its members grow further impoverished. Arabi admitted that it has become difficult to persuade veterans to bear the costs of leaving their home in the countryside to travel to Aden for protests. With their pensions gone, members are devoting their energies to simply surviving. If Yemen’s leaders hope to silence the protest movement by starving it of resources, as Arabi believes, they may soon get their wish. But it will be a pyrrhic victory.

Arabi and his fellow soldiers will not be the last victims of Yemen’s collapse. Spend any time at all in Aden, and you will find a whole new generation furious at the impossibility of building a life here: There are the medical students without textbooks or functional internet, the psychiatrist specializing in conflict trauma who had his desk taken away by university administrators, and the government official who works from home because heavily armed men occupy his office. The list goes on.

If you listen to diplomats, this moment constitutes a hopeful one for Yemen. The truce is for the most part holding, in no small part because of coordination between U.S. and Saudi diplomats. When it was renewed in June, Biden praised Saudi Arabia’s “courageous” diplomatic efforts. His administration is now trying to leverage its ties with the Saudis to forge a permanent peace agreement.

For residents of Aden, however, international diplomacy often seems divorced from the daily struggles of life. So much has already been lost. What remains feels ephemeral. And there is only one employer that is always hiring.

Standing in the courtyard of the University of Aden, I asked a medical student what would happen if he couldn’t find work after graduation. “There’s always the war,” he said. “You can make 1,000 Saudi rials [$266] each month as a fighter.”

In Aden, your salary and savings can shrink to nothing; your physical security can be threatened at a whim; even electricity is fleeting. But the front line is a constant, fixed reality, and it’s not going anywhere.

Aden port, before sunrise, Yemen, Feb. 18, 2018. (Nariman El-Mofty/AP)