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The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

How America can avoid the next debt-ceiling showdown

Ozempic in teens is a mess.

Culture Break Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Two months before invading Ukraine, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on its neighbor’s border and sent NATO a bill of demands. Moscow’s list—structured as a treaty—required that the alliance close itself off to new members. It declared that NATO states “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States” in Eastern Europe. It insisted that NATO remove all its forces from the 14 countries that joined after the Soviet Union collapsed. And it asserted that the alliance “shall not deploy land-based” missiles in areas “allowing them to reach the territory” of Russia.

Moscow suggested that the treaty was a pathway for lowering tensions with the West. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine months earlier. In reality, the treaty was just a diplomatic pretext for the war: a laundry list of things that Putin hated about NATO, wanted changed, and would kill Ukrainians to protest.

But if Putin thought that invading Russia’s neighbor would get the West to accede to his demands, he was wildly mistaken. Rather than pulling troops from its east, NATO responded to Russia’s aggression by deploying more soldiers in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The alliance did not close its doors; instead, it expanded, adding Finland this April, with Sweden possibly close behind. Ukraine is not part of NATO, but the invasion has pushed the United States and Europe to send remarkable amounts of military assistance to Kyiv, including rockets, tanks, and Soviet-era fighter jets. Most recently, Washington signaled that it will let Europe provide Ukraine with U.S.-made F-16s. The West has effectively flouted all of the draft treaty’s demands.

And yet there’s one line Washington hasn’t crossed. Despite repeated pleas, the United States has not given Kyiv land-based missiles capable of hitting Russia.

“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in September. He hasn’t budged since.

Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine

To many analysts, Biden’s decision—and implicit reasoning—is perceptive. Sustained Ukrainian attacks inside Russia’s territory could violate Putin’s red lines in a way that previous strikes haven’t. So could repeatedly hitting Crimea, the peninsula that the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “It’s Crimea and Russian territory,” Austin Carson, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who studies escalation, told me. “I would worry about crossing one of those bedrock limits.”

But to Ukrainians, these concerns are detached from reality. Kyiv has made isolated attacks on Crimea and Russia before, none of which has widened the conflict. In fact, none of Moscow’s wartime escalations has touched NATO land. And the United Kingdom has already given Kyiv some missiles, fired from planes, that can reach into Russia. France may do so as well. Britain’s provision did not prompt the Kremlin to go berserk.

“People are quite confused,” the former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me when I asked what Ukrainians thought about Washington’s reticence. “They just don’t understand.”

They are also tremendously frustrated, because Kyiv may need long-range U.S. missiles to win the conflict. “It’s just impossible to be on the battlefield and continuing to fight with the weapons that Ukraine already has,” Polina Beliakova, a Ukrainian political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies civil-military relations, told me. Ukrainian soldiers, she said, are performing admirably. But without superior weapons, even the most motivated military will struggle to defeat a much larger enemy. To liberate more provinces, Ukrainians could have to strike hard, far, and again and again. Washington will have to decide just how much it is prepared to help them.

The United States Army Tactical Missile System is a formidable weapon. Developed in the late Cold War and first used in Operation Desert Storm, ATACMS are launched straight out of the back of vehicles that Washington has already given to Kyiv. (Washington, afraid of escalation, modified the vehicles it sent so that Ukraine couldn’t use them to fire long-range missiles.) Once airborne, the missiles can reach more than three times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to intercept. They can travel up to 186 miles.

These specifications give ATACMS—pronounced “attack-ems”—certain advantages over Britain’s missiles. The latter weapons, although very powerful in their own right, do not move as fast or go quite the same distance as ATACMS. They must be fired out of fighter jets, and Ukraine’s fleet is overtaxed. The radars on Ukrainian jets are also not as powerful as the ones on many Western aircraft, making it tricky for the crew to accurately target each missile. Britain’s provision will become more useful if Kyiv receives F-16s, but Ukrainians won’t be able to fly the U.S. jets for at least several months. And by then, Kyiv may not have many of the missiles left.

“There is no analogue for ATACMS,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There is no alternative.”

Zagorodnyuk said that, if received, ATACMS could give Ukraine major advantages. For starters, the missiles would make it much easier for Kyiv to hit most of Russia’s command posts and wartime weapons depots, which typically lie beyond the front lines but within 186 miles. ATACMS would also help the Ukrainian military sever the so-called land bridge to Crimea: the thin strip of occupied territory that connects Russia with the peninsula’s isthmus. Similarly, the missiles could hit the bridge that directly links Crimea with Russia. Together, these attacks would substantially weaken Moscow’s forces in southern Ukraine, helping with Kyiv’s counteroffensive. They could even pave the way for Ukraine to take back the peninsula, which is widely considered Kyiv’s hardest military target.

For Ukrainians, taking Crimea may be essential to ending the war and protecting their country, especially given that the peninsula is now a giant staging ground for Russia’s forces. But for Washington, a campaign to take Crimea would be deeply unsettling. Putin views Crimea as perhaps his most prized asset. After Russia seized it in 2014, his approval ratings soared to record highs. The Biden administration has publicly said that Ukraine has the right to liberate all of its occupied territory, Crimea included, yet senior U.S. officials have repeatedly insinuated that going after the peninsula would be too dangerous. In February, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told experts that an operation for Crimea would be a “red line” for the Kremlin.

In theory, the United States could provide ATACMS on the condition that Ukraine not use them to hit the peninsula. But Kyiv is unlikely to accept such an arrangement. “That would set a massive precedent of treating Crimea as a special case, and that’s exactly what the Russians want,” Zagorodnyuk told me. Ukraine could even be tempted to use the missiles to strike Russia proper. According to The Washington Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky privately proposed attacking Russian villages in order to gain leverage over the Kremlin. And on Monday, pro-Ukrainian militias launched an assault across Russia’s border. They appear to have used U.S.-made vehicles in their incursion.

Publicly, Kyiv has assured Washington that it will not hit Russia with U.S. rockets. But no matter the conditions, guaranteeing that the missiles would not cross one of Moscow’s trip wires is impossible.

“The risk is that you think you’re okay and then you hit that red line and then things escalate really fast out of control,” Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In the worst-case scenario, that spiral could lead to Russia using nuclear weapons. But Kavanagh pointed out that Moscow could escalate in many ways without going nuclear. It could, for instance, carpet-bomb Ukrainian cities. It could also launch cyberattacks on NATO states.

From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive

The odds of Russia attacking NATO, digitally or otherwise, might seem long. But they are not outlandish, especially considering Moscow’s perspective. “Russia doesn’t see itself fighting Ukraine,” Margarita Konaev, the deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told me. “It sees itself fighting NATO.”

The Kremlin’s reasoning, she explained, makes some sense. Moscow is battling against NATO weapons systems. Its troops are being hit with NATO members’ ammunition. Ukraine is operating based off U.S. intelligence. “The only thing they’re not fighting are NATO troops on the ground,” Konaev said. If Ukraine begins regularly shelling Crimea or Russian territory with U.S.-made weapons, Russia could respond as if NATO was attacking the homeland.

Almost no one knows exactly how many soldiers Ukraine has lost fighting against Russia. But the number is large. According to the classified documents leaked on Discord last month, the U.S. government estimates that Ukraine has suffered somewhere from 124,500 to 131,000 casualties. The figure is lower than Russia’s estimated 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, but Ukraine’s population is about a third the size of its adversary’s. If the war turns into a pure battle of attrition, Kyiv will struggle to hold out.

It’s not surprising, then, that Ukrainians have little patience for Washington’s escalation concerns.

“Not providing better weapons would basically throw Ukraine under the bus in slow motion,” said Beliakova. She described the frustration of sitting through meetings where Western policy makers theorized about what a long war would look like, and how they can help sustain Kyiv. “They go, ‘Oh, well the West can easily supplement this, supplement that, provide this, provide that,’” Beliakova said. “I’m like, ‘Ukraine will run out of people!’” The country, she told me, needs more long-range weapons if it is going to overcome Russia’s enormous demographic advantage.

Some analysts went even further, wondering if Washington’s reluctance was designed to stop Ukraine from winning. “If you’ve noticed, the [Department of Defense], the White House, they never talk about victory,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “They’re still talking about an unknown ending to this story. And so the political goal of the Western coalition is unclear.”

Giving long-range missiles to Kyiv, he said, would help eliminate the ambiguity. Doing so would be a boost to Ukrainian morale—one that might be needed if the forthcoming counteroffensive does not succeed. Providing ATACMS would also signal to the rest of the Western alliance that the United States supports going to the max to help Kyiv, possibly easing hesitations in European capitals about supplying other Ukrainian needs.

Ukrainians do not think that Russia would escalate if the United States sent long-range missiles. “I don’t believe the escalation story,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There have been tons of other weapons supplied for tens of billions of dollars. ATACMS is not going to make a big difference.” Even if it did prompt Russian anger, Ukrainians are unsure as to why NATO should care. Moscow has escalated in the past: it responded to Kyiv’s astonishingly successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv by mobilizing 300,000 new troops, and it began indiscriminately bombing Ukrainian cities after an explosion damaged the Crimean-Russian bridge. But these steps hurt Ukrainians, not NATO members. Unless Russia uses a nuclear weapon, breaking a nearly 78-year taboo and endangering the entire planet, the West is unlikely to directly enter the conflict because of Russia’s atrocities. And so long as they believe they can win, Ukrainians appear prepared to endure a whole lot.

The country’s hawks have grown pessimistic about getting the missiles. Yes, they said, Washington and its allies have changed their mind in the past. But with tanks and F-16s, Western claims were as much about technical concerns as they were about the security risks. These weapons, policy makers argued, would take too much time and energy for Ukrainians to receive and learn how to use. There are technical risks with ATACMS too: Many American experts worry about depleting the United States’ limited supply, or that Russia could capture a missile, copy its design, and send China a mock-up.

Still, such hurdles can be overcome. Ukraine’s battlefield performance, and its success in Western training programs, helped convince NATO states that the country could handle more sophisticated weapons. If Ukrainians use Britain’s long-range missiles successfully, and in ways the U.S. approves of, Kyiv could convince Washington that it should get ATACMS as well.

But not if Washington is too afraid of how Russia will respond.

“With ATACMS, I don’t see these coming,” Zagorodnyuk said. Then he paused. “Yet.”

When you collect statues of Lenin, Harlan Crow told me, “you get to be a bit of a snob.” The first Lenin I had seen that morning was a brass likeness in the entryway to Crow’s Dallas mansion—a house that capitalism built, if ever there was one. Lenin was in his Finland Station pose, but with his head replaced by Mickey Mouse’s. Crow’s office had at least one more Lenin. Now we were outside, pelted by rain in Crow’s Garden of Evil, admiring the fourth in a series of Lenins, an 18-footer harvested from western Ukraine. “There’s so many statues of Lenin,” Crow said, educating me on dictator-statue appreciation the way another rich guy might introduce a friend to the world of fine wine. Having a good story was crucial. “You don’t want a Lenin From Factory 107. You want Politburo.”

The many Lenins joined dozens of other petrified tyrants and world leaders, among them Communist revolutionaries (Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara), a few secular autocrats (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak), and a few hunched babushkas, in remembrance of communism’s victims. “Most are Communist,” Crow said, but he acknowledged that he hadn’t sorted the statues perfectly according to gradations of evil. Some had been moved years ago, not because of a historical reevaluation but during renovations when he built a batting cage for his kids, who are now grown. When they were little, he said, “the kids used to be scared of them.”

The garden is really a mishmash of 20th-century evil, evil-lite, and a few of Crow’s heroes (in the last category: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Winston Churchill). “I have a number of people who are [just] dictators, like Pinochet and Juan Perón,” Crow said. “You can argue about Juan Perón, whether he was a force for good or a force for bad … You can argue about Mubarak.” He noted that Yugoslav President Josip Tito was preferable to Stalin, and Zhou Enlai (“one of my favorites”) was a big step up from Chairman Mao. “There are probably a few more guys in storage that I’ll eventually put out,” he said. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: “Probably more for good than bad,” he said. “But it’s complicated.”

Last month, Crow’s eccentric hobby became a side drama in a broader scandal over his friendship and financial relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics of that relationship drew attention to Crow’s garden statues as well as a small hoard of Third Reich memorabilia inside Crow’s enormous home library and museum. He owns a signed Mein Kampf, paintings by Hitler, and (reportedly) a Third Reich–era tea service. Crow said he hadn’t felt the need to sort the interior collection by level of evil, either. In the garden, he said, “I like these guys”—he motioned to Thatcher and Reagan, then to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro—“and I don’t like those guys. In my world, that’s blindingly obvious … But one thing I have learned from this is that I must not assume that things are obvious.”

“This is my era. I was born in 1949,” Crow said. “Communism was the great threat to the world.” The choice between capitalism and communism, freedom and serfdom, was a “big philosophical argument.” The Greatest Generation, he said, had a dramatic, existential shooting war. The Baby Boomers did not (“thankfully,” he added). “In my lifetime and your parents’ lifetime … we didn’t have the Battle of the Bulge or the storming of the beaches of Normandy.” But the big argument was worth memorializing. “I want us to remember it. I want us to learn from it,” he said. “And it’s pretty damn important that we remember it.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just get rid of it all,” he said. He knows that strangers have doubts about him, and about anyone who associates with him. “I’m not looking to be odd.” But the oddness was a colorful part of the case against his friend Thomas. “If you said, ‘Are you glad you did this?’ I would say, ‘I’m not sure.’”

Koba at rest. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

When the twin Thomas and Third Reich scandals broke, I wrote that Crow is not a Nazi, and that to smear him as one is an offense against victims of actual Nazis, and against Crow himself. A week later, a public-relations firm representing Crow wrote to me to offer their client for an interview. When we met, Crow said he had read my article when it came out, and that very morning had reread the first couple of paragraphs, before hitting the Atlantic paywall. Even to be defended from this charge, he said, stung. “‘Harlan Crow Is Not a Nazi,’” he paraphrased the headline. “A bit too much like ‘Good News! Harlan Crow Stopped Beating His Wife.’”

Crow made clear that his preference would be not to talk at all about the current scandal—which had made him introspective about his relationship to politics, if not repentant. “My hope is that this is the last conversation I have on this topic in public,” he said. “I’m not the private person I was. I’m sad about that, but there’s nothing I can do. I just still kind of hope that it’ll all fade from memory, and I can go back to being just an old guy.”

[Graeme Wood: Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friend is no Nazi]

He surely knows deep down that the desire to be “just an old guy” is somewhere between delusional and a forlorn dream. Crow is not even a normal old ultrarich guy.

His statue garden and in-home museum are nothing compared with the living friends and politicians he has collected: ex-presidents (George W. Bush and the late Gerald Ford are especially beloved), scholars and writers (Charles Murray, David Brooks), and foreign dignitaries (the socialist British Prime Minister James Callaghan was an early guest on his yacht, on a cruise with Ford up the Dnipro River to Kyiv in the 1990s). His patronage of the American Enterprise Institute—to name just one of the venerable conservative institutions that take his money—has placed him near the center of the conservative movement for decades.

And his relationship with Thomas is irregular to the point of suspicion. ProPublica’s investigation revealed that Thomas accepted various goodies from Crow, including luxury vacations on Crow’s yacht and jet, private tuition for Thomas’s grand-nephew, and a real-estate deal with fishy particulars. Crow bought a house owned by Thomas. Thomas’s mother lives there rent-free. Thomas’s failure to report these gifts and transactions has led to accusations that the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court votes according to the wishes of his wealthy friend, a prolific donor to right-leaning political candidates and think tanks. Even if Thomas votes autonomously, they say, for the sake of transparency and the Court’s integrity, he should have reported the gifts, hospitality, and transactions.

Rules and norms apply to justices with integrity and to justices without it, to free the former from suspicion and to expose the latter. Thomas has resisted these rules more aggressively than any other justice. His critics have enjoyed a feast of cynicism at his expense. “We should all have friends like Clarence Thomas’s,” Eric Levitz of New York magazine wrote. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa Graves described this behavior as “stunning” and “astonishing,” because of the “appearance of impropriety,” and because even if Crow has no business before the Court, he certainly knows people who do, and he supports think tanks that have submitted amicus briefs. (Although I agree that the transparency standard for justices should be a full monty—nothing less than total disclosure of financial arrangements—the accusation of corruption is different. Justices with connections to Harvard or its myriad donors, supporters, and alumni are not automatically corrupted by these connections. And Harvard, unlike Crow’s think tanks, is a respondent in the most prominent case currently pending before the Court.)

But even if justices are bound by strict rules, their unbound friends are still subject to speculation, reasonable and unreasonable, about the nature of their relationship to those in power. Crow is like most people, in that he feels he has acted with the purest and most honorable intentions. He is unlike many, though, in thinking that the world should take his word for it—and that if it does not, that’s the world’s fault, and not his.

“I probably have more influence than the ordinary Joe,” Crow told me. “But I still don’t think of myself as a center of influence. I think of myself as a real-estate guy that lives in Texas.”

One common feature of the rich and powerful is that they do not feel rich and powerful. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is an absolute monarch, told me he couldn’t just rule by fiat. He listed all the ways in which he was constrained by history, by family, by tribal interests. Last month Joe Biden told a group of visitors to the White House that “the one thing I thought when I got to be president, I’d get to give orders. But I take more orders than I ever did.”

With Crow, the psychology is similar. The liberal world thinks he orchestrates a vast right-wing conspiracy, because he is in fact surrounded by huge numbers of influential people, some who want his money and access to power, and some who are just friends. But Crow kept insisting that he has little power over the American political scene. Even with his fantastic wealth, he was incapable of preventing the rise of the politicians he most abhors, in particular Donald Trump.

And although he often says he wants to go back to being just a normal guy, it is not obvious that a man is normal when he is standing with you in his house next to a life-size mannequin of Winston Churchill and makes no comment about it until prompted. In the one-minute walk to his home office we passed perhaps a hundred objects—paintings, death masks, statues, swords, and other curios—whose presence in any normal guy’s home would have merited a proud explanation. He said he stopped giving tours long ago, after realizing that “most people just want to see a rich man’s house.” Crow happily acted as docent on request, but on our first pass through the collection, the only object that he flagged for special interest was a small ziggurat of foil-wrapped breakfast burritos and a tray of doughnuts, to which The Atlantic’s photographer and I were welcome.

Clarence Thomas and his family “have been dear friends for almost 30 years,” Crow said, denying that their friendship was political in any way. “It’s an ironic friendship, in the sense that I came from a world of silver spoons, and he came from a very difficult upbringing.” (Crow’s father, Trammell, who died in 2009, was at one point described in the press as the largest private landowner in the United States. Thomas did not see an indoor toilet until late in childhood.) Crow has taken Thomas on his yacht in Indonesia; he has hosted him at his resort in the Adirondacks.

I asked if he ever talked about law with Thomas. “I have never, nor would I ever, think about talking about matters that relate to the judiciary with Justice Clarence Thomas,” Crow said. He added that they “talk about the kind of things friends talk about,” such as weather and sports. In an email, he told me that “it’s not like we haven’t talked about work-related issues,” but that those conversations were casual and unrelated to jurisprudence. “It’s not realistic [for] two people [to] be friends and not talk about their jobs from time to time.” Thomas has spoken to him of his fondness for his clerks, or about bumping into Justice Stephen Breyer at Target. But Crow wrote that “it would be wrong” for him to talk about Court cases. “From my point of view, that is off limits. He and I don’t go there.”

[Adam Serwer: Clarence Thomas is winning his war on transparency]

Crow said he wasn’t a “law guy” and professed ignorance about any details of constitutional law. (The closest Crow has come to a Supreme Court case was in the early 2000s, when an architecture firm asked the Court to adjudicate a dispute with a firm in which Crow had a minority interest. The Court declined to hear the case.) “It would be absurd to me to talk to Justice Thomas about Supreme Court cases, because that’s not my world,” he told me at his house. “I could probably name maybe five or six cases. Brown v. Board of Education. Marbury v. Madison.” He thought for a bit and stopped at two. “We talk about life. We’re two guys who are the same age and grew up in the same era. We share a love of Motown.”

Harlan Crow at Old Parkland Campus in Dallas, Texas (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

He wanted to be normal, he said. But I noted that Thomas is not a normal friend, and friendships with Supreme Court justices are laden with responsibilities that normal friendships are not. Singing Diana Ross together on the deck of a yacht in Bali would be wholesome fun with a non-justice. But with Thomas it raised all sorts of issues. Between choruses of “Baby Love,” did Thomas wonder whether his next trip to Bali depended on his continuing to vote a certain way? What guarantee did Americans have that their friendship transcended such doubts?

“I’m not trying to say I’m this moral paragon, because I’m not. I’m just a guy that made lots of mistakes in my life,” Crow said. “But I do believe that I’m on the right side of right, morally and legally.” He said that it was “kind of weird to think that if you’re a justice on the Supreme Court, you can’t have friends. That’s not healthy. Should I have changed my life in order to have these friends? Or should I behave differently around them because of who they are?” He said if the billionaire and patron of leftist causes George Soros were hunting buddies with the chair of the Federal Reserve, he would not particularly care. “If they are genuine friends and people of good character”—he said his friends’ interactions with Soros suggest that he is—“I don’t think it’s up to me to decide.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong with your questions,” Crow told me. He recognized that character is “one of those highly subjective things.” But ultimately it is all that matters. “And I believe Justice Thomas to be a person of the highest character.”

For Crow, much hinged on this question of “good character.” In discussion of politicians, he often defaulted, in a way I found almost inspiringly optimistic, to analyzing them not by their policies but by their integrity. Integrity, he seemed to think, would isolate a politician or judge from influence, and would naturally incline that person toward a moderate, decent position. We discussed his nostalgia for a “good America,” whose politics existed on the spectrum between Reagan and Roosevelt, or better yet, between Romney and Obama (“an honorable man”), with his personal preference toward the Romney side. Thomas, he said, is “one of the most amazing and admirable people I know,” and it was as blindingly obvious that Thomas would not sell his soul for a series of vacations as it was that Harlan Crow was not a supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Moreover, the hospitality he offered to Thomas was not unusual. “For a long time, I’ve lived a certain lifestyle,” Crow said, sounding like he was about to confess to a kink. But the lifestyle he described was simply that of an extremely wealthy guy who likes to travel and host friends on holidays. “I’ve been successful. I have lived a comfortable life. I have a really big house,” he said. At his home in the Adirondacks, he said, a typical summer means 150 guests—work associates, parents of his children’s friends, a few wonks and political types. His yacht, too, is best understood as a floating extension of his hospitality. The only reason to have a yacht, he said, is to go places where one cannot go any other way—hopping around guano islands in the South Pacific, visiting the grave of a favorite Antarctic explorer on a tundra island in the South Atlantic, following the Northwest Passage. He likes to fill the staterooms with guests, both when he’s aboard and when he’s elsewhere.

“That’s the life I’ve lived. I don’t think there’s anything bad about it,” Crow said. He sees no reason to exclude Thomas from it. “I didn’t want to change my life.”

The ado over Thomas’s mother’s house seemed to baffle Crow completely. He said he considers Thomas’s rise “the kind of American story you dream about,” and he’d donated money in Thomas’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, that would memorialize both his bootstrapped success and the Gullah-Geechee culture that produced him. Crow sent money to the Carnegie Library there; he bought the dilapidated former cannery where Thomas’s mother had worked (and gave the former owners a “life estate”—the right to remain living there until their deaths).

He said he’d had dinner at Thomas’s mother’s house “several times.” “She was a great cook, and probably still is at 94.” He’d asked Thomas if he could buy the house, at fair market value, and develop the area with the aim of eventually opening the house to the public to “honor” him. “I’m a real-estate guy,” Crow added modestly, and he figured that the neighborhood would improve if he bought and razed the drug dens and brothel on the same block, then sold the lots on the condition that the buyers build new houses. Thomas’s mother received a life estate as part of the transaction, which he said was “very common” in real-estate deals involving the elderly, and an “insignificant” expense in comparison to the cost of the deal as a whole.

“One day, I walked down that street with Justice Thomas, and there were mixed-race families living in the neighborhood,” he said. “The brothel and the crack houses were gone. There were kids riding bikes in the streets, families planning and working in their gardens. It was a neighborhood. And I’m very proud of that.”

Surely, I suggested, he could have structured the deal in a way that would not have involved writing a personal check to a Supreme Court justice. Create a foundation for public education, put impartial trustees on its board, and let it buy the house. Crow said he had done many deals in his life, and every one could, in retrospect, have been done a little better. This one wasn’t even a bad one, let alone corrupt. “It was a fair-market transaction, and I had a purpose,” Crow said. “I don’t see the foot fault.” But the idea that he had secretly corrupted his friend left him aghast. (I asked him whether he had any other financial relationships with Thomas or anyone related to Thomas, and he declined to answer, saying he doesn’t keep track of the hospitality extended to friends.)

[Brooke Harrington: Mob justice]

Crow is aware that being denounced in the press is an occupational hazard of being absurdly rich, and that one of the unwritten rules of the billionaire life is that one must not complain about being a billionaire. (As Anthony Hopkins said, playing a billionaire in The Edge: “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.”) But Crow certainly feels embattled. “If I go out and help an old lady across the street this afternoon, there’ll be something written about my diabolical purpose and evil intent.”

Crow’s sensibility is bound in the local culture of Dallas. I grew up there and recognized it instantly. It is not familiar to most Americans. Austin is proud of its bumper sticker KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD. But Dallas’s weirdness is so deep that it perpetuates itself unintentionally, without noticing it. An auto-insurance agent specifies on his sign that he is named Ross but prefers to be addressed as “Pistol.” At the most famous historic site, you can have a picnic and watch tourists drive by and mimic the way John F. Kennedy’s head jerked “back and to the left” as it exploded. Crow has statues of fallen dictators in his yard, and those baffle outsiders. But I remember that Goff’s, the burger joint down the street from my house, had a statue of Lenin out front, salvaged in the 1990s from an Odesa, Ukraine, crane factory and outfitted with a plaque that said AMERICA WON. It was all very Dallas, and even without the plaque everyone would have known that its owner planted it there to mock rather than revere the Soviet Union, much as a high-school student might steal and display his crosstown rival’s mascot.

Heroes (Photographs by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

Crow’s emphasis on integrity is also vintage Dallas. Dallas’s citizens may not have more integrity than anyone else, but they surely do talk about it more. A classicist friend told me he was asked to translate a Dallas family’s made-up motto, “Do the right thing,” into Latin. (His suggestion, Fac Rectum, was not accepted.) Dallas is an honor society, like much of the South. And it is no surprise that a wealthy Dallasite who aspires to be a good citizen would revile the politician who more than any other has obliterated the idea that integrity is a requirement for office.

The figure of Donald Trump looms over conversations with Crow, perhaps especially when his name hasn’t been uttered for some time. Crow’s loathing for Trump and Trumpian politics is well known. “Countries don’t survive forever,” he told me, and he thought “reasonably small groups” on the right and left in America were sowing discord. Without Trump, he said, “we wouldn’t have gone as nuts on the right as we have.” He said he had proudly self-diagnosed himself with “Trump derangement syndrome” and preferred not to sidetrack our conversation about Thomas by going on an “anti-Trump jihad,” although he was tempted to do so. He was morose and reluctant for much of our conversation but lit up when he noted how the country had “repudiated” extremists of the right and left in the 2022 elections. The extremists of the right were the Trumpists. “I don’t think the left has a Trump equivalent,” Crow wrote to me later. “Thank God.” But he does consider the “progressive wing of the Democrat party” extreme, and he said he wished it had even less power than it does.

Crow describes himself as “center right,” and he deviates from the Republican Party not only in his refusal to genuflect to Trump but also in other ways, such as his support for legal access to abortion. He is a backer of the No Labels movement, which is a quixotic—some say foolhardy—attempt to vanquish extremists by fielding a presidential ticket across party lines. He spends a great deal of energy cultivating politicians who might be bipartisan-curious. (I told him I wondered if that sort of grooming by rich donors had empowered Trump in the first place. Many voters don’t want their politics determined through backroom dealing. He acknowledged that he did not understand reactionary politics, and he committed himself to listening more to the views of those enraged by the power of people like him.)

But for Trump himself, his distaste is permanent and unalterable. Part of this animus comes from the stunning 2016 repudiation of Crow’s political causes, into which he has poured millions. But the animus is even deeper, I suspect. Crow’s view of politics, and the viability of his argument that a rich man and a Supreme Court justice can just be friends with yachting benefits, depends on voters’ and elites’ voting out people of bad character. “Trump is a man without any principles at all,” Crow wrote in an email. “Bernie Sanders has principles; I just think they’re wrong. Trump doesn’t have any.”

In superficial ways, the two men are similar. Like Trump, Crow is a real-estate developer with political interests and assets that require the use of scientific notation to estimate. Both men grew up rich, then took over his father’s empire. In almost every other respect, they are total opposites. Trump cratered the empire he inherited, while investing in the sleaziest possible ventures; under Crow’s stewardship, the family fortune increased. Crow is appalled at the accusation that he used a shady real-estate deal to funnel money to a crony—which is, frankly, the kind of thing Trump would do. Trump commands attention and bellows; Crow speaks in a reluctant mumble. Trump inflates his net worth; Crow does not. Trump contemplates pulling out of NATO. Crow says he has no time for any politician who wavers in supporting Ukraine. (“The Ukrainians’ courage is unique in recent history,” he wrote to me. “I believe they’ve earned the right to their own independence.”) Crow begs to be assessed on whether he is a person of “good character.” Not even Trump’s most loyal fans could keep a straight face if their leader asked the same.

And then there is the matter of the two men’s hobbies. The poet Clive James once observed that wealth and culture do not go together. As a rule, he said, “the bigger the yacht, the smaller the library.” Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, could sleep every Supreme Court justice and still have room for Crow and the solicitor general. His library, which is a wing of his home, is not correspondingly small. It would be a jewel in the collection of any Ivy League school. He opens it more than 100 times a year for events and visits from schoolchildren and researchers.

Does Trump own any books? I browsed randomly on a few shelves in Crow’s library and found an early edition of Montesquieu’s L’esprit des Lois. Crow has a full-time archivist and librarian. At one point I asked Crow if he had in fact collected the signatures of every Supreme Court justice in American history. He paused, opened a small side door, and poked his head in to confirm with the librarian that the collection was complete. The librarian, who presumably sits there all day just waiting for such an inquiry, said they still lacked signatures from a handful of recent justices. (“Thanks!” Crow said, before closing the door.)

It is impossible to imagine Trump sailing for days in howling austral winds to reach the grave of Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia Island. Trump has no known friendships with Supreme Court justices, or indeed any friendships, period. Crow has many friends, and many acquaintances who have been his guests. One of his problems after the ProPublica exposé was that many possible character witnesses in his defense had been disqualified due to having accepted Crow’s hospitality. This includes Atlantic contributors who are employed, or have been employed, by think tanks he and his wife, Kathy, have funded, among them Arthur C. Brooks, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute as well as those who have dined or stayed at his homes, including the Atlantic contributing writer and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Crow stands in his library. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

“What about the Hitler paintings?” I asked before leaving. He must have known the question was coming, but he took five full seconds before he gathered the courage to answer. “They’re put away,” he said.

“Permanently?”

He didn’t answer directly. He recalled a 2015 incident when he planned a fundraiser for Marco Rubio, and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called his display of Hitler’s paintings “the height of insensitivity and indifference.” “So I took them down, and I put them in storage,” he said. But he sees nothing inherently wrong with displaying them. “Three World War II leaders—Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler— all being artists is in itself an interesting story,” he told me. “And I think it would be reasonable at some point to show pictures of all three of them together … But in the current environment, I’m going to say permanently—until I change my mind.”

He said he understood that certain objects mean different things to different people, and even though it was obvious to him that Nazis were bad, others might misread his intentions. “In a sensible world, people would be interested in things like that. But right now we’re not there,” he said. And the outrage over his Hitler paintings had shown him that he should consider how others feel. (This willingness to consider others’ feelings is itself a sign of his anti-Trumpishness.) “The idea that I might offend somebody, particularly somebody I care about, one of my friends, with this stuff—that hurts. I would never want to do that.”

“How about Hitler’s teapot and table linens?”

“Oh, they’re still upstairs,” he said. He admitted that Kathy had urged him to just put them away. “I’ve felt that right now it would be kind of deceptive to do that.” He said I could see the items but could not take photos.

We walked to a small room, away from the main floor of the library. “Kind of a catchall,” he said—a room with random items that didn’t fit elsewhere in his collection. Here was a sword owned by Douglas MacArthur, and another by a Japanese general present at the surrender. Then he turned, looking tense, to a display case with a rectangular leather cover, and opened it up, expecting to reveal the Nazi tableware within.

The case was empty, except for a sign that read NOT TO COMMEMORATE, BUT TO REMEMBER, IN HOPES THAT IT MAY NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

It was an awkward moment, and he seemed agitated at having misled me, even in this bizarre manner. “What I just said to you was wrong,” he said. “Somebody did something I didn’t know about.” He checked elsewhere in the room and found another empty case. “I didn’t know that. I’m not happy about it … I apologize.”

Crow looked ruffled. Even weirder than having Nazi memorabilia in your house is having it in your house but somehow losing track of it.

The Russian leader has repeatedly likened the war in Ukraine to the challenges Moscow faced when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Pope Francis has staked a position on the war in Ukraine that puts him more in line with Beijing, New Delhi, and Brasília than Washington, London, or Brussels: He wants to end Ukraine’s armament by the West and negotiate an immediate cease-fire. Earlier this week, Francis vaguely alluded to a mission he was working on to end the conflict. Yet he seems to have alienated many of the actors whose support he would need to do so.

“Never in the last sixty years,” wrote Marco Politi, a journalist who has covered the papacy since 1971, “with regard to a matter of such international importance has the Holy See found itself in such a marginal position.”

Still, Francis’s actions are neither arbitrary nor irrational. They are a deliberate response to how the Catholic Church is changing—and will continue to change—in the 21st century. More Catholics than ever before live outside the West and don’t see the war in Ukraine on the same terms as Europe and the United States do. Understood in this light, Francis’s position previews the future of the Church as a geopolitical force, one that will be far less acquiescent to the West.

Western leaders have any number of reasons to be upset with Francis’s response to the war. In addition to criticizing the West’s efforts to arm Ukraine, he has implied that NATO deserves blame for the invasion, often quoting an unnamed diplomat who accused NATO of “barking at Russia’s door.” Though Francis has condemned Russian war crimes and sympathized with Ukrainians’ suffering, he hasn’t condemned Vladimir Putin. Rather, Francis has praised him as a man of culture and even suggested that the Russian president has been acting on legitimate security concerns.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

This represents a dramatic break with the Vatican’s traditional philosophy. Historically, the Holy See has practiced what academics call the “great power” model of diplomacy, attaching itself to the superpower of the day. Over the centuries, that’s meant de facto alliances with the Holy Roman Empire, the French monarchy, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. For most of the 20th century, Rome attached itself to Western powers, so much so that Pope Pius XII, the pope during the Second World War and a ferocious anti-Communist, was dubbed “the chaplain of NATO.”

No modern pope has practiced great-power diplomacy as effectively as John Paul II. By the time he celebrated his 10th anniversary as pope some 35 years ago, he was one of the most consequential leaders on the planet—not merely a spiritual figure, but a political one, leading the Cold War fight against Communism. Accumulating such influence would have been unthinkable without the West’s support.

Nowhere was John Paul’s geopolitical power more apparent than in his native Poland. The first Polish pope helped restore democracy to his country by supporting Solidarity, the national opposition movement to Communist rule. Solidarity’s massive labor strikes, which John Paul catalyzed, forced the regime to open talks with the opposition that eventually led to Poland’s liberation from Soviet rule. This was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and John Paul’s part in its demise was crucial.

The contrast between John Paul’s outsize role in global affairs and Pope Francis’s role in them today is hard to overstate.

As Francis completed his tenth year as pope in March, a contest between Russia and the West was once again being waged on a proxy site in Eastern Europe. Now, however, the pope is at odds with Western powers, instead of operating in concert with them.

Francis has embraced what might be seen as the Vatican’s first multipolar geopolitical strategy. Instead of hewing to the Western consensus, Francis has sought nontraditional allies in his pursuit of a solution in Ukraine, such as Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in part to avoid antagonizing Russia. In this vein, the pope and his top aides have called for a 21st-century version of the Helsinki process, a diplomatic effort to reduce tensions during the Cold War that brought together a diverse set of Eastern and Western nations.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: The reinvention of the Catholic Church]

One reason for the Vatican’s geopolitical realignment under Francis is biographical. As the first pope from Latin America, Francis came into office feeling the same ambivalence about the United States and the other Western powers as many Latin American leaders, given America’s history of interference in the region.

But the principal reason is demographic.

In 1900, there were roughly 267 million Catholics in the world, more than 200 million of whom were in Europe and North America. At the time, the makeup of the Church was not much different from what it was in the 16th century.

By 2000, there were nearly 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, but only 350 million of them were Europeans and North Americans. The overwhelming majority, 720 million, lived in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. More than 400 million lived in Latin America alone. By 2025, only one in five Catholics will be a non-Hispanic Caucasian.

This is the most rapid, and most sweeping, demographic transformation of Roman Catholicism in its 2,000-year history. Perhaps the only real comparison is to the first decades of the Church, when Saint Paul left Asia Minor to evangelize Greece and Rome, thereby transforming Christianity from a sect within Palestinian Judaism into a transnational religious movement.

The Vatican is always slow to respond to such changes. As the old saying goes, if you hear that the end of the world is coming, head for Rome, because it will get there last. Francis’s papacy—and his position on Ukraine in particular—represents the beginning of the Church’s pastoral and political expression of its new demographic realities.

The best way to make sense of Francis, then, isn’t in terms of left versus right, or even East versus West, but North versus South. Across the global South, the conflict in Ukraine is seen largely as a European affair, one without an obvious hero or villain. The pope’s call for a halt to arms transfers, an end to the fighting, and negotiations that all sides could support coincides with the majority sentiment among Catholics who don’t live in NATO member states.

The Catholic Church is not a democracy. But Western critics have for centuries demanded that it become more responsive to the will of the people over whose souls it claims jurisdiction. Perhaps, therefore, observers jarred by Pope Francis’s position on Ukraine might pause for a moment to consider whether Francis is simply reflecting the instincts and desires of his base, to use the political jargon.

For better or worse, the worldviews of his constituents will move further and further from the conventional political wisdom of the West. Should we be surprised when he rejects it?

Egypt has close ties with Russia that date from the time of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era. About 60% of Egypt's wheat ...

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Today I invite emails debating any of the following subjects: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, or natural resources. Read on for more context.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

After the television host Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News, he posted a video message to Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, he noted that, in his newfound “time off” he has observed that “most of the debates you see on television” are so stupid and irrelevant that, in five years, we won’t even remember we had them. “Trust me, as someone who's participated,” he added, which squares with my impression of his show––an assessment I feel comfortable making only because I have carefully documented its shoddy reasoning.

But then Carlson added: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.” I disagree, and not just because I intend to air your perspectives on those very subjects.

Last March, this newsletter invited debate about the war in Ukraine and ran your responses. On the whole, The Atlantic––and most of the mainstream media––has published a lot more total articles from people who are supportive of Western aid for Ukraine, as I am, than contrary perspectives. But as you can see, this newsletter has made it a point to highlight the smartest writing I could find from different perspectives. If you look, you can find additional examples of contrasting perspectives from across the U.S. media: in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Review, Vox, and beyond. There are all sorts of plausible critiques of the way the American news media has covered Ukraine. But “debate is not permitted” is demonstrably false.

On civil liberties, which I’ve championed on scores of occasions in The Atlantic, the notion that debate isn’t permitted is likewise preposterous. Few issues are debated more than the parameters of free speech, abortion rights, gun rights, transgender rights, pandemic rights and restrictions, and more. “Emerging science” is a bit vague, but surely debates about mRNA-vaccine mandates and artificial intelligence count. The Atlantic has repeatedly published entries in ongoing debates about demographic change. I understand corporate power to be a perennial topic of debate in journalistic organizations. As for natural resources, I’ve recently read about subjects including climate change, gas stoves, Colorado River water supply, oil drilling and pipelines, and plastics pollution.

Again, there are all sorts of critiques of the media that are plausible, on those subjects and others, but the particular critique that Carlson actually prepared and uttered is demonstrably false, so I find it strange that so many people reacted to it by treating Carlson as if he is a truth-teller. Lots of people in the American media work much harder at avoiding the utterance of falsehoods.

How to Mark May 1?

The law professor Ilya Somin commemorates it every year in a highly nontraditional fashion, arguing that we all ought to treat the traditional workers holiday as Victims of Communism Day.

Here’s his case:

Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so …

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

Meanwhile, at the World Socialist Web Site, David North published the speech he gave to open the International May Day Online Rally. His remarks included provocative statements about the war in Ukraine:

The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago. Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion—as if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russia—the war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.

In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to “organize Europe,” it was the ambition of US imperialism to “organize the world.” Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotsky’s analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: “The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table … the world does not organize itself.” But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.

Imperialism is objectionable but to me that premise leads to a starkly different conclusion: that the imperial ambitions of Russia and China ought to be resisted and that insofar as NATO or the United States helps Ukraine or Taiwan, we are reducing the likelihood of imperial conquest, not engaging in it.

More to Come on Trans Issues

Another batch of responses from readers should be coming soon. (If you missed the first batch, they’re here.) In the meantime, here’s a question from the Up for Debate reader Paul, who writes:

I have come to understand and accept that the concept of “gender” is largely a social construct, is not synonymous with “sex,” and indeed is not dependent upon or related to sex in any objective way. This notion—that gender and sex are independent attributes—is, I think, one of the ideas that is fundamental to understanding and accepting transgender people. For many young people, this idea seems simple and self-evident. Yet, for anyone who has lived any length of time in a culture where, for centuries, these two words held virtually identical meanings, separating them can be a real struggle.

It is with that thought in mind—the acceptance of the fundamental difference between gender and sex—that I approach the issue of transgender people participating in competitive sport with the following sincere question: Are sports competitions divided by gender or are they divided by sex? If sports are divided by sex, then it follows logically that gender should have nothing to do with the discussion. That is, it follows that transgender people should only participate in sports along with those of their same birth sex. On the other hand, if sports participation is divided along gender lines, then everyone of the same gender (obviously, by definition this must include transgender people) should be invited to participate, regardless of sex. Is there more evidence that sports are arranged as a competition between those of the same sex, or those of the same gender?

Provocation of the Week

At Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider writes that for a long time, she assumed that “with no material incentives in one direction or another, people will think more freely. A world in which no one has to worry about where their paycheck will come will be a world in which people are more likely to be courageous, and tell the truth more openly. And of course, it is obvious how financial incentives can distort truth-telling. This is, of course, the justification for academic tenure.”

Now she wonders if tenure may actually pave the way for more conformity. She explains:

First and foremost, it is not the case that free people will necessarily speak truthfully. No matter the romantic notions we like to hold about ourselves, humans do not deeply desire to “speak the truth”. There are more beautiful things to say, things that make us feel good about ourselves and our respective tribes, things that grant us hope and moral strength and personal significance—truth, meanwhile, is insufferably inconvenient, occasionally ugly, and insensitive to our feelings. But lies, by their very nature, can be as beautiful and emotionally satisfying as our imaginations will allow them.

Unfortunately, some degree of fidelity to reality is often required to prosper, and so occasionally we must choose truth. But that degree is dependent on our environments: lies are a luxury which some can afford more than others. Material freedom isn’t just the freedom to tell the truth, it is the freedom to tell lies and get away with it. As I’ve noted before, the lack of economic pressures can clear the way for independent thinking, but they can also remove crucial “skin in the game” that might keep one tethered to reality.

I suspect that on the whole, tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments. If keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be “concern-free”. Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers. (And in fact, we do see this playing out at universities. Professors are more protected from the pressures of the outside world due to tenure, yet they are uniquely subservient to the politics within their local university environment.) …

Academics actively shape their own environments. They grant students their doctorates, they help hire other faculty, they elect their department chairs. When an idea becomes prominent in academia, the structure of the environment selects for more of the same … When you are forced to coexist with the enemy, you develop norms which allow both parties to function with as much freedom and fairness as possible. Ideologically mixed groups will, in other words, tend to emphasize objective process because they do not agree on ends. This environment is fairly conducive to the pursuit of truth.

More uniform groups, on the other hand, will tend to abandon process—rushing instead towards the end they are predisposed to believe is true and willing to use dubious means to get there. This creates a hostile environment for dissenting members, and over time, there will be less of them and more uniformity, which will inevitably lead to an even more hostile environment for dissent. When a majority ideology develops, it is likely only to increase in influence, and when it is sufficiently powerful, it can begin competing with reality itself.

I retain hope that tenure does more good than harm but encourage faculty members who enjoy it to exhibit more courage to dissent from any orthodoxies of thought they regard as questionable.

Ever since the defeat of Japan in World War II nearly 80 years ago, the United States has been the preeminent military power in East Asia. Today China is on the verge of matching or even eclipsing the U.S. military’s presence in the region, having marshaled its newly acquired wealth and technological prowess to expand the scale and capabilities of its armed forces.

The military balance between the U.S. and China in Asia is “very delicate and trending in an unfavorable direction in this decade for the U.S. and its allies,” Elbridge Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative, a policy-research organization, and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, told me. “We should regard ourselves in a dead-heat race against an incredibly formidable competitor and take nothing for granted.”

The implications for American security and global influence are immense. The U.S. has not confronted a potential adversary that is so close a peer in military strength or industrial capacity since the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and has not actually fought one since it battled the Axis powers in World War II. As China’s relationship with Russia deepens, Washington must also worry about fighting two nuclear powers simultaneously on opposite sides of the world.

A few years ago, the possibility that the U.S. and China could come to blows in the near term seemed far-fetched. That is no longer the case, as tensions have been rising over the status of Taiwan. A leaked memo recently grabbed headlines with a quote from Michael Minihan, a U.S. Air Force general, arguing that war with China could erupt in 2025. Hopefully, such predictions will remain hypothetical, because a war with China would be a catastrophe for both sides, win or lose.

[Read: Biden looks east]

But war is not the only concern. American military dominance in the western Pacific has underpinned the American economic and security system in East Asia. A shifting balance of military power in the region could strain American alliances by raising doubts about Washington’s ability or willingness to protect its Pacific partners. Washington would then struggle to sustain the region’s liberal order against intensifying Chinese pressure.

Beijing may be counting on exactly this. Sam Roggeveen, a former senior strategic analyst at Australia’s top intelligence agency, says that China’s leaders are banking on the United States to “eventually reduce its commitment to its allies in Asia, and at that point China will have a force available … to exploit that gap, and China itself becomes the dominant power.”

China’s ascent as a military power is therefore concerning not only because of the near-term risk of conflict over Taiwan, but also because it raises fundamental questions about America’s role in the region and the world. As China’s military might mounts, Washington will need to commit ever greater resources to maintain American primacy. The balance of power in the Pacific will, in the end, be determined as much by political will as by weapons systems. Will the U.S. have the fortitude to preserve its leadership in Asia? Or will it lose out to a more determined China?

The fact that Washington faces such a dilemma is an unfortunate irony. China has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the U.S. security system in Asia, which ensured the regional stability that made possible the income-boosting flows of trade and investment that propelled the country’s economic miracle.

Today, however, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping claims that China’s model of modernization is an alternative to “Westernization,” not a prime example of its benefits. Chinese leaders have come to see the chain of American bases and alliances in the region as a cage containing the country’s rightful rise into Asia’s premier power. (In a sense, Beijing feels the same way Washington would if a potential adversary had troops stationed in Canada and Mexico.)

That’s why China’s top leaders routinely affirm the attainment of a “world class” military as a key pillar of the nation’s great “rejuvenation,” or the restoration of its historic wealth and power. And China has invested heavily in building such a military. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Beijing’s military budget reached $219 billion in 2022, more than double what it was a decade earlier (though it is still less than a third of U.S. spending during the same year). With that investment, China has undertaken what Colby asserted is “an unprecedented, historic military buildup that is the largest since the Cold War, possibly since the Second World War.”

China’s navy has already overtaken its American counterpart to become the world’s largest by number of ships. According to the Pentagon’s latest assessment of China’s military, the Chinese air force—the world’s third-largest—“is rapidly catching up to Western air forces and continues to modernize with the delivery of domestically built aircraft,” including a bomber that will enhance its ability to use nuclear weapons. As of 2021, Beijing was constructing three fields with at least 300 new intercontinental-ballistic-missile silos, while its efforts to upgrade the country’s nuclear capabilities “exceed previous modernization attempts in both scale and complexity,” according to the report. The Pentagon projects that China will expand its warhead stockpile from some 400 today to 1,500 by 2035.

Technologically, too, the Chinese have been steadily whittling away at American advantages. Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies, wrote to me that China has made a priority of developing missiles to target ships and aircraft that fly faster and farther than similar U.S. weapons, such as land-launched ballistic missiles. Though China’s advantage is small, he added that “the bottom line is that we are engaged in a near peer or peer competition, and we are unlikely to dominate in all areas” of missile systems. The U.S. intelligence community was flabbergasted after China tested a high-tech hypersonic missile in 2021.

[Jonah Blank: China’s troubling new military strategy is coming into view]

The Chinese are amassing this force in the exact theater where war is most likely to break out—in maritime East Asia, probably around Taiwan—which is also not far from their home base. That location gives Beijing a substantial advantage. China does not (yet) project military power globally. Its interests, and its military assets, are largely concentrated in East Asia. By contrast, the U.S., as a global superpower with commitments all over the world, keeps only a portion of its military forces in Asia. In the event of a war, says John Culver, a retired CIA analyst who once served as Washington’s top intelligence officer for East Asia, “for the U.S., the game is to move what it doesn’t have in the theater and to get it there to be relevant to the fight, whereas China starts with this hypothetical war in your front yard.”

The United States faced a similar situation in the Pacific during World War II, when the Navy had to project power far from home and deep into hostile territory. Chinese strategists have prepared to counter just such a projection of force, or, at the very least, to raise its cost. China has developed advanced missile systems, for instance, that can smash U.S. bases in the region and target American aircraft carriers steaming across the Pacific at great distances from the Chinese mainland, potentially putting them out of action before they can make a difference in the fight.

Of course, hardware alone, even if crammed with technology, doesn’t automatically convey a military advantage. And it is difficult to really know how effectively Chinese generals and soldiers would deploy and operate the new weaponry. The People’s Liberation Army hasn’t fought a war since China attacked Vietnam in 1979 (and even then, its performance was hardly overwhelming). Xi began a significant reform of the PLA in late 2015 aimed at improving its ability to stage large-scale joint operations with its varied branches. In theory, this program would make the PLA a more formidable fighting force. But Culver cautions that Beijing is only about halfway through this process, and therefore “you kind of still have your pants around your ankles if you’re the PLA.”

Still, China’s military expansion has completely altered the rules of war in East Asia. “Back in the mid-1990s, when we had a Taiwan Strait crisis, all we had to do is show up with one or two carrier strike groups, and China had no answer to that,” Culver told me. “China now has many answers to that.”

For now, the U.S. may still have an edge. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recently conducted an extensive war game and concluded that in most scenarios, the U.S., with the help of Japan, was able to repel a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But not easily. “This defense,” the report reads, “came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers.”

In real life, such losses would take years to replace, Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser and co-author of the study, told me. “During that time, the United States would be weakened,” he said. The war “would have repercussions for U.S. defense strategy and security strategy for many years.”

Defeating China in such a conflict may not get any easier either. Cancian noted that “if current trends continue, the Chinese would be in a stronger position in 10 years than they are today.”

[David Frum: China is a paper dragon]

Washington policy makers are clear-eyed on this threat. The Biden administration, in its new national-security strategy, identified China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it” and pledged to “continue prioritizing investments in a combat credible military that deters aggression against our allies and partners in the region.”

Some security analysts worry that Washington’s response remains short on urgency. “We are moving in the right direction but too slowly and with inadequate scale,” Colby told me. “I personally think there is a tremendous discounting of what China is capable of.” Culver said that “we’re only now starting to do the kind of investments that we really need, and it probably won’t take full effect until the mid-2030s and beyond. We need to regain the advantages we usually have.” Unless the Biden administration makes the investments its strategy entails, Cancian told me, “at some point you are bluffing.”

But an effective response to China is not just a matter of budgets and bombs. To determine what type of force to deploy in the region, American leaders need to define what kind of power the U.S. can, or wants to, be in the future. “Part of the problem is the phrase ‘military balance,’” Stephen Biddle, a defense-policy specialist at Columbia, told me. There is no generic balance of forces that implies an absolute advantage. Rather, military strength depends on how well a force is suited to its mission. And as to what the U.S. mission should be in East Asia, Biddle said, “There is a big debate going on in the United States over this issue, and I don’t think it is resolved yet.”

Much will depend on what Washington is willing to spend on its military in East Asia. As China’s military capabilities advance, the United States will have to commit ever greater resources to countering them. The political benefit of retaining a decisive military advantage over China would have to be weighed against the mounting expense. Colby, in his recent book, The Strategy of Denial, wrote that “the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the U.S. economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength.” And even if the U.S. spent what it could, the Chinese government has ample room to follow suit. Though the Chinese military budget has grown, it remains below the global average at the equivalent of 1.2 percent of national output, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“In the Cold War, the United States could spend the Soviet Union into the ground in an arms race because our economy was bigger than theirs and it was growing faster than theirs, and we knew that they couldn’t keep up,” Biddle said. “That’s not true with China. They can keep up if they want to.”

And they almost certainly do. Roggeveen says there is “an imbalance of resolve” between the U.S. and China. East Asia is more important to China than it is to the United States on account of its proximity, and China wants a status there “that at the moment is still denied to it by the U.S.,” Roggeveen told me. “I think China is going to fight harder to get that status than the United States is prepared to fight to keep it.”

The costs and risks led Colby to conclude in his book that “even though U.S. military dominance over China is certainly desirable, it is simply no longer attainable.” Instead, he recommends that the U.S. stress “denial,” which “does not require dominance, only the ability to prevent the adversary from achieving its objectives.” In this case, “success for China is to subordinate the targeted state: defeat is to fail to do so.” Similarly, Roggeveen suggested that the U.S. and its allies should “focus on capabilities that can nullify China” and make “maritime Asia too dangerous for the massive Chinese surface fleet,” which would entail beefing up submarines and aviation.

Like it or not, the changing military equation seems destined to create an East Asia that is vastly different from the one that has existed for decades. The region would be split into zones, with a no-man’s-land between them, etched into the waters of the Pacific.

“We’re headed to a likely future of competing spheres of influence,” Biddle said: “a world where the Chinese will have a sphere of influence in which it becomes very expensive for the United States to enter,” but “the United States and its allies will also have spheres of influence … that are cost-prohibitive for the Chinese to enter in a sustained kind of way. You’ll have a more differentiated pattern of power and influence in the region in which there isn’t just one hegemon who can go anywhere they want and do whatever they want.”

From an American perspective, such an outcome would not be ideal. The U.S. would be less able to use the threat of military force to coerce Beijing to alter its policies or behavior. But the spheres-of-influence scenario is also not inevitable. China can comfortably sustain its military expansion only if its economy continues to strengthen—and this trajectory is by no means assured, because the country faces serious obstacles to its growth and technological advance. Meanwhile, if the U.S. stays the course and makes wise strategic decisions, it can still achieve its chief aims in East Asia, which include deterring possible Chinese aggression and maintaining its alliances and security order in the region. Even a regionally powerful China would, in that case, be contained.

What the changing military situation in Asia highlights most of all is the continuing transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, with all its new risks to American power and interests. Such a shift does not automatically mean that U.S. power will decline. But it does require new U.S. commitments.

No technology since the atomic bomb has inspired the apocalyptic imagination like artificial intelligence. Ever since ChatGPT began exhibiting glints of logical reasoning in November, the internet has been awash in doomsday scenarios. Many are self-consciously fanciful—they’re meant to jar us into envisioning how badly things could go wrong if an emerging intelligence comes to understand the world, and its own goals, even a little differently from how its human creators do. One scenario, however, requires less imagination, because the first steps toward it are arguably already being taken—the gradual integration of AI into the most destructive technologies we possess today.

The world’s major military powers have begun a race to wire AI into warfare. For the moment, that mostly means giving algorithms control over individual weapons or drone swarms. No one is inviting AI to formulate grand strategy, or join a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the same seductive logic that accelerated the nuclear arms race could, over a period of years, propel AI up the chain of command. How fast depends, in part, on how fast the technology advances, and it appears to be advancing quickly. How far depends on our foresight as humans, and on our ability to act with collective restraint.

Jacquelyn Schneider, the director of the Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, recently told me about a game she devised in 2018. It models a fast-unfolding nuclear conflict and has been played 115 times by the kinds of people whose responses are of supreme interest: former heads of state, foreign ministers, senior NATO officers. Because nuclear brinkmanship has thankfully been historically rare, Schneider’s game gives us one of the clearest glimpses into the decisions that people might make in situations with the highest imaginable human stakes.

It goes something like this: The U.S. president and his Cabinet have just been hustled into the basement of the West Wing to receive a dire briefing. A territorial conflict has turned hot, and the enemy is mulling a nuclear first strike against the United States. The atmosphere in the Situation Room is charged. The hawks advise immediate preparations for a retaliatory strike, but the Cabinet soon learns of a disturbing wrinkle. The enemy has developed a new cyberweapon, and fresh intelligence suggests that it can penetrate the communication system that connects the president to his nuclear forces. Any launch commands that he sends may not reach the officers responsible for carrying them out.

There are no good options in this scenario. Some players delegate launch authority to officers at missile sites, who must make their own judgments about whether a nuclear counterstrike is warranted—a scary proposition. But Schneider told me she was most unsettled by a different strategy, pursued with surprising regularity. In many games, she said, players who feared a total breakdown of command and control wanted to automate their nuclear launch capability completely. They advocated the empowerment of algorithms to determine when a nuclear counterstrike was appropriate. AI alone would decide whether to enter into a nuclear exchange.

Schneider’s game is, by design, short and stressful. Players’ automation directives were not typically spelled out with an engineer’s precision—how exactly would this be done? Could any automated system even be put in place before the culmination of the crisis?—but the impulse is telling nonetheless. “There is a wishful thinking about this technology,” Schneider said, “and my concern is that there will be this desire to use AI to decrease uncertainty by [leaders] who don’t understand the uncertainty of the algorithms themselves.”

AI offers an illusion of cool exactitude, especially in comparison to error-prone, potentially unstable humans. But today’s most advanced AIs are black boxes; we don’t entirely understand how they work. In complex, high-stakes adversarial situations, AI’s notions about what constitutes winning may be impenetrable, if not altogether alien. At the deepest, most important level, an AI may not understand what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meant when they said, “A nuclear war cannot be won.”

There is precedent, of course, for the automation of Armageddon. After the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as victors of the Second World War, they looked set to take up arms in a third, a fate they avoided only by building an infrastructure of mutual assured destruction. This system rests on an elegant and terrifying symmetry, but it goes wobbly each time either side makes a new technological advance. In the latter decades of the Cold War, Soviet leaders worried that their ability to counter an American nuclear strike on Moscow could be compromised, so they developed a “dead hand” program.

It was so simple, it barely qualified as algorithmic: Once activated during a nuclear crisis, if a command-and-control center outside Moscow stopped receiving communications from the Kremlin, a special machine would inquire into the atmospheric conditions above the capital. If it detected telltale blinding flashes and surges in radioactivity, all the remaining Soviet missiles would be launched at the United States. Russia is cagey about this system, but in 2011, the commander of the country’s Strategic Missile Forces said it still exists and is on “combat duty.” In 2018, a former leader of the missile forces said it has “even been improved.”

In 2019, Curtis McGiffin, an associate dean at the Air Force Institute of Technology, and Adam Lowther, then the director of research and education at the Louisiana Tech Research Institute, published an article arguing that America should develop its own nuclear dead hand. New technologies have shrunk the period of time between the moment an incoming attack is detected and the last moment that a president can order a retaliatory salvo. If this decision window shrinks any further, America’s counterstrike ability could be compromised. Their solution: Backstop America’s nuclear deterrent with an AI that can make launch decisions at the speed of computation.

[From the September 2020 issue: Ross Andersen on China’s artificial intelligence surveillance state]

McGiffin and Lowther are right about the decision window. During the early Cold War, bomber planes like the one used over Hiroshima were the preferred mode of first strike. These planes took a long time to fly between the Soviet Union and the United States, and because they were piloted by human beings, they could be recalled. Americans built an arc of radar stations across the Canadian High Arctic, Greenland, and Iceland so that the president would have an hour or more of warning before the first mushroom cloud bloomed over an American city. That’s enough time to communicate with the Kremlin, enough time to try to shoot the bombers down, and, failing that, enough time to order a full-scale response.

The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), first deployed by the Soviet Union in 1958, shortened that window, and within a decade, hundreds of them were slotted into the bedrock of North America and Eurasia. Any one of them can fly across the Northern Hemisphere in less than 30 minutes. To preserve as many of those minutes as possible, both superpowers sent up fleets of satellites that could spot the unique infrared signature of a missile launch in order to grok its precise parabolic path and target.

After nuclear-armed submarines were refined in the ’70s, hundreds more missiles topped with warheads began to roam the world’s oceans, nearer to their targets, cutting the decision window in half, to 15 minutes or perhaps fewer. (Imagine one bobbing up along the Delaware coast, just 180 miles from the White House.) Even if the major nuclear powers never successfully develop new nuclear-missile technology, 15 minutes or fewer is frighteningly little time for a considered human response. But they are working to develop new missile technology, including hypersonic missiles, which Russia is already using in Ukraine to strike quickly and evade missile defenses. Both Russia and China want hypersonic missiles to eventually carry nuclear warheads. These technologies could potentially cut the window in half again.

These few remaining minutes would go quickly, especially if the Pentagon couldn’t immediately conclude that a missile was headed for the White House. The president may need to be roused from sleep; launch codes could be fumbled. A decapitation strike could be completed with no retaliatory salvo yet ordered. Somewhere outside D.C., command and control would scramble to find the next civilian leader down the chain, as a more comprehensive volley of missiles rained down upon America’s missile silos, its military bases, and its major nodes of infrastructure.

A first strike of this sort would still be mad to attempt, because some American nuclear forces would most likely survive the first wave, especially submarines. But as we have learned again in recent years, reckless people sometimes lead nuclear powers. Even if the narrowing of the decision window makes decapitation attacks only marginally more tempting, countries may wish to backstop their deterrent with a dead hand.

The United States is not yet one of those countries. After McGiffin and Lowther’s article was published, Lieutenant General John Shanahan, the director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, was asked about automation and nuclear weapons. Shanahan said that although he could think of no stronger proponent for AI in the military than himself, nuclear command and control “is the one area I pause.”

The Pentagon has otherwise been working fast to automate America’s war machine. As of 2021, according to a report that year, it had at least 685 ongoing AI projects, and since then it has continually sought increased AI funding. Not all of the projects are known, but a partial vision of America’s automated forces is coming into view. The tanks that lead U.S. ground forces in the future will scan for threats on their own so that operators can simply touch highlighted spots on a screen to wipe out potential attackers. In the F-16s that streak overhead, pilots will be joined in the cockpit by algorithms that handle complex dogfighting maneuvers. Pilots will be free to focus on firing weapons and coordinating with swarms of autonomous drones.

In January, the Pentagon updated its previously murky policy to clarify that it will allow the development of AI weapons that can make kill shots on their own. This capability alone raises significant moral questions, but even these AIs will be operating, essentially, as troops. The role of AI in battlefield command and the strategic functioning of the U.S. military is largely limited to intelligence algorithms, which simultaneously distill data streams gathered from hundreds of sensors—underwater microphones, ground radar stations, spy satellites. AI won’t be asked to control troop movements or launch coordinated attacks in the very near future. The pace and complexity of warfare may increase, however, in part because of AI weapons. If America’s generals find themselves overmatched by Chinese AIs that can comprehend dynamic, million-variable strategic situations for weeks on end, without so much as a nap—or if the Pentagon fears that could happen—AIs might be placed in higher decision-making roles.

[From the April 2019 issue: How AI will rewire us]

The precise makeup of America’s nuclear command and control is classified, but AI’s awesome processing powers are already being put to good use in the country’s early-alert systems. Even here, automation presents serious risks. In 1983, a Soviet early-alert system mistook glittering clouds above the Midwest for launched missiles. Catastrophe was averted only because Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov—a man for whom statues should be raised—felt in his gut that it was a false alarm. Today’s computer-vision algorithms are more sophisticated, but their workings are often mysterious. In 2018, AI researchers demonstrated that tiny perturbations in images of animals could fool neural networks into misclassifying a panda as a gibbon. If AIs encounter novel atmospheric phenomena that weren’t included in their training data, they may hallucinate incoming attacks.

But put hallucinations aside for a moment. As large language models continue to improve, they may eventually be asked to generate lucid text narratives of fast-unfolding crises in real time, up to and including nuclear crises. Once these narratives move beyond simple statements about the number and location of approaching missiles, they will become more like the statements of advisers, engaged in interpretation and persuasion. AIs may prove excellent advisers—dispassionate, hyperinformed, always reliable. We should hope so, because even if they are never asked to recommend responses, their stylistic shadings would undoubtedly influence a president.

Given wide enough leeway over conventional warfare, an AI with no nuclear-weapons authority could nonetheless pursue a gambit that inadvertently escalates a conflict so far and so fast that a panicked nuclear launch follows. Or it could purposely engineer battlefield situations that lead to a launch, if it thinks the use of nuclear weapons would accomplish its assigned goals. An AI commander will be creative and unpredictable: A simple one designed by OpenAI beat human players at a modified version of Dota 2, a battle simulation game, with strategies that they’d never considered. (Notably, it proved willing to sacrifice its own fighters.)

These more far-flung scenarios are not imminent. AI is viewed with suspicion today, and if its expanding use leads to a stock-market crash or some other crisis, these possibilities will recede, at least for a time. But suppose that, after some early hiccups, AI instead performs well for a decade or several decades. With that track record, it could perhaps be allowed to operate nuclear command and control in a moment of crisis, as envisioned by Schneider’s war-game participants. At some point, a president might preload command-and-control algorithms on his first day in office, perhaps even giving an AI license to improvise, based on its own impressions of an unfolding attack.

Much would depend on how an AI understands its goals in the context of a nuclear standoff. Researchers who have trained AI to play various games have repeatedly encountered a version of this problem: An AI’s sense of what constitutes victory can be elusive. In some games, AIs have performed in a predictable manner until some small change in their environment caused them to suddenly shift their strategy. For instance, an AI was taught to play a game where players look for keys to unlock treasure chests and secure a reward. It did just that until the engineers tweaked the game environment, so that there were more keys than chests, after which it started hoarding all the keys, even though many were useless, and only sometimes trying to unlock the chests. Any innovations in nuclear weapons—or defenses—could lead an AI to a similarly dramatic pivot.

Any country that inserts AI into its command and control will motivate others to follow suit, if only to maintain a credible deterrent. Michael Klare, a peace-and-world-security-studies professor at Hampshire College, has warned that if multiple countries automate launch decisions, there could be a “flash war” analogous to a Wall Street “flash crash.” Imagine that an American AI misinterprets acoustic surveillance of submarines in the South China Sea as movements presaging a nuclear attack. Its counterstrike preparations would be noticed by China’s own AI, which would actually begin to ready its launch platforms, setting off a series of escalations that would culminate in a major nuclear exchange.

In the early ’90s, during a moment of relative peace, George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev realized that competitive weapons development would lead to endlessly proliferating nuclear warheads. To their great credit, they refused to submit to this arms-race dynamic. They instead signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first in an extraordinary sequence of agreements that shrank the two countries’ arsenals to less than a quarter of their previous size.

History has since resumed. Some of those treaties expired. Others were diluted as relations between the U.S. and Russia cooled. The two countries are now closer to outright war than they have been in generations. On February 21 of this year, less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden strolled the streets of Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that his country would suspend its participation in New START, the last arsenal-limiting treaty that remains in effect. Meanwhile, China now likely has enough missiles to destroy every major American city, and its generals have reportedly grown fonder of their arsenal as they have seen the leverage that nuclear weapons have afforded Russia during the Ukraine war. Mutual assured destruction is now a three-body problem, and every party to it is pursuing technologies that could destabilize its logic.

[From the October 2018 issue: Yuval Noah Harari on why technology favors tyranny]

The next moment of relative peace could be a long way away, but if it comes again, we should draw inspiration from Bush and Gorbachev. Their disarmament treaties were ingenious because they represented a recovery of human agency, as would a global agreement to forever keep AI out of nuclear command and control. Some of the scenarios set forth here may sound quite distant, but that’s more reason to think about how we can avoid them, before AI reels off an impressive run of battlefield successes and its use becomes too tempting.

A treaty can always be broken, and compliance with this one would be particularly difficult to verify, because AI development doesn’t require conspicuous missile silos or uranium-enrichment facilities. But a treaty can help establish a strong taboo, and in this realm a strongly held taboo may be the best we can hope for. We cannot encrust the Earth’s surface with automated nuclear arsenals that put us one glitch away from apocalypse. If errors are to deliver us into nuclear war, let them be our errors. To cede the gravest of all decisions to the dynamics of technology would be the ultimate abdication of human choice.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition.

Many years ago, as a tenth grader at Malverne High School, in New York, I made the mistake of asking my English teacher, Charles Messinger, why he was forcing us to memorize Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” We were already memorizing, and reciting, much of Hamlet, and I was in the middle of preparing my lines for the spring musical he directed. The Bronx-born Messinger made short work of my complaint. “It’s better to be literate than illiterate,” he said. “You’ll thank me later.”

Mr. Messinger died three years ago, and I never did properly thank him, even though he changed my life. Soon after he died, I called my social-studies teacher, Douglas Sheer, the other teacher who changed my life. Mr. Sheer is much younger than Mr. Messinger, but I told him I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Mr. Sheer had come to Malverne shortly after finishing a tour on the Marshall Islands as a Peace Corps volunteer. It was Mr. Messinger—who, along with my parents, teachers both—taught me how to use words. And it was Mr. Sheer who taught me to see the world beyond the South Shore of Long Island.

Thoughts of my teachers came to me last month, when my colleague Clint Smith, in his hometown for a book reading, tweeted the following: “On Colbert last week I mentioned my 3rd grade teacher, Ms. Mueller, who after reading a poem I wrote, told me I could be a writer when I grew up. I never forgot those words. So what an utter delight when I looked up from the signing table in New Orleans and saw Ms. Mueller there!” He attached a photo of himself and Ms. Mueller. Both are beaming, as they should be.

Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day. It seemed a good idea, at a time when teachers are under siege across America, to ask some of my colleagues, including Clint, to reflect on the teachers who made them who they are.

When teachers become too scared to teach what they are meant to teach, our democracy will be lost. We must come to understand our teachers as builders of our civilization, one child at a time.  — Jeffrey Goldberg

Illustration by Karagh Byrne

Mrs. Talbert was elegant. Sinewy and dark brown, she wore skirt suits and had a perfectly round mid-sized afro. Each morning, she led my preschool class in the Pledge of Allegiance and held a morning meeting. Afterwards, as we fanned out to our desks, she gave instructions in a tone both caring and steely. Midday, we 4-year-olds would practice our letters, cursive and print. Because I was usually the last student to be picked up, after school she and I would restore the classroom to order in preparation for the next day. She taught me that you do what must be done. Children contributed. Seriousness—as evident in her suits and posture, and our always-tidy desks—was never coldness. In fact, Mrs. Talbert indulged me. Unlike the other teachers, she never tried to make me eat raisins or the many other foods I found revolting. One afternoon she even showed me the cabinet where all of the good snacks were hidden. I promptly shared the information with other kids.  

Several times I stayed overnight with Mrs. Talbert, when my mother had to travel. I learned that her chin was slightly lifted even when she was in her house dress and slippers, with her scarf tied loosely around her afro. She hugged tightly and woke me up with gentle shoulder taps. Her table was Formica, like at a restaurant, and so clean it smelled like lemon.  

I was sent up to kindergarten in the middle of the year, even though I was small and young. I remember running downstairs black to preschool each afternoon and breathlessly telling her about my days upstairs. I missed her. And I missed her much more later when we moved to Massachusetts and lost touch. My next school was progressive, informal, exceptional, and predominantly white. But Mrs. Talbert, in her classroom full of Black children in Milwaukee, a city churning with the challenges of desegregation and social movement, had laid my foundation.  — Imani Perry

They called the Talented and Gifted program at Ben W. Murch Elementary School “TAG”—and I was not it. Each time a group of my first-grade classmates was assembled for an hour of “enrichment,” I was left to work on my penmanship or to do whatever the ungifted did when they had time to themselves.

It didn’t help that I was painfully shy and not terribly coordinated. That year, I shunned the eyeglasses that the optometrist said that I needed, which made the blackboard indecipherable and my grades a source of shame. What I remember of that year was a feeling of drowsiness—stultifying fluorescent lights, shades drawn, a teacher with a pillowy voice.

Except for when Mary Alice Jackson, the TAG teacher, appeared. Every few weeks Mrs. Jackson would come down from the second floor to enrich the whole of our class, even those of us who hadn’t been selected for her program. Those visits felt like a James Brown concert descending on us. She moved with frenetic energy, almost athletically, and shook me back to life. She would divide us into teams to play Super Password or It’s Academic, quiz competitions she had adapted from television. Sometimes she brought a buzzer system; otherwise, we’d slap a desk and she would judge which of us answered first. Eventually, Mrs. Jackson invited me to join TAG, and it felt as if I had joined the greatest club in the world.

Everything about her class now feels a touch out-of-date. Mrs. Jackson loved knowledge—the kind that can now be summoned instantly on the phone but used to reside in encyclopedias and flash cards. This wasn’t dreary or pedantic, though it might sound like it. She wanted us to be citizens of the world and she made facts feel electrifying, because she would laugh hysterically and tease mercilessly—and because the facts were deeply meaningful to her.

Mrs. Jackson was a hugger. I’m guessing her embraces would be frowned upon these days, if not an outright violation of policy, but they mattered to me. By wrapping her arms around me, she gave me a sense of belonging that took the edge off fears. She allowed me to become myself.

Over the years, I would hear from Mrs. Jackson. Cleaning my childhood home, my mother recently found a letter that she once sent me after I published a book review in The Washington Post, our hometown paper. “Dear Squirt,” she began. “I wasn’t sure what you would amount to. But just know, I’m here and proudly watching. Here’s a dollar. Go buy yourself a Coke.” To know that she was still watching was all I wanted.  — Franklin Foer

Illustration by Karagh Byrne

Stanley Falkow was the first person to convince me that a bacterial pathogen could be a new friend. I was an unmoored college junior when I wandered into his Introduction to Bacteriology course, expecting to learn only a bit about infectious disease. But Stan talked about microbes like each one was a pal, a character, a protagonist in its own tale; he reminded me that science was a field fueled by wonder and interrogation, rather than answers set in stone. I’d visit him in his office, and he’d tell me stories about his days running his own lab, joking crassly in his gravelly septuagenarian voice; I’d gaze at the many photographs of his golden retriever, Honey, and wonder what it would be like to conduct scientific experiments of my own.

I was at first afraid to confess this to Stan. A giant in his field, he’d spent the past half century making breakthrough after breakthrough on how bacteria passed their most dangerous genetic elements around. I, meanwhile, had no experience in science, much less bacteriology; I worried he’d laugh and tell me I was too late. But I should have known that the man who could befriend a bug would be more generous than that. It didn’t matter, he told me, that I didn’t know how to swim. I had the potential to walk on water, and so he counseled me exactly as he had generations of mentees in his lab. If science was my goal, I had to try. “Do the fucking experiment,” he told me. And so I did.  — Katherine J. Wu

Nearly every day during eighth-grade English, we’d whip out some loose leaf paper and scribble our thoughts without stopping for five, 10, or 15 minutes. These “free write” exercises could be anything: scenes, dreams, dialogue, short stories. Ms. Celano never graded them. Her goal was simply to help us establish a daily creative practice, to make us not fear writing.

As I type this right now, I can still see her classroom. To the right of the blackboard stood Ms. Celano’s own impeccably curated lending library. In addition to traditional middle-school texts, she peppered in some riskier, more advanced titles. (I recall picking up Sanyika Shakur’s Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member one day and not being able to put it down.) She treated us like adults, or at least like writers with promise. Ms. Celano had a way of making us feel like the distance between our daily exercises and those bound books wasn’t so large.  — John Hendrickson

Illustration by Karagh Byrne

In 1968, while the adult world was blowing up, my second-grade teacher was a woman named Yvonne Prudhomme. She was the only Black teacher at Escondido Elementary—possibly in the entire Palo Alto Unified School District. Miss Prudhomme was in her mid-20s, though at 7 I had no sense of her age. She was quite beautiful, with very dark skin and hair styled like the Supremes’ circa 1965. I loved her. I don’t mean that I worshipped her as my teacher; I mean that I was in love with her in the obsessive, daydreamy way that I would later fall in love with more age-appropriate girls, but haunted by the knowledge that this love was doomed.

Nonetheless, I asked my parents if I could invite Miss Prudhomme to dinner. At our kitchen table, she informed us that she was going to leave Escondido at the end of the school year. She said that poor Black children in the neighboring district needed her more than middle-class white children in Palo Alto. My mother tried to talk Miss Prudhomme out of it, arguing that the white families in our community needed help overcoming their racial biases (a few parents had actually withdrawn their kids from her class). Miss Prudhomme was unmoved by this liberal appeal. The white kids, she said, would be fine. Rocked by her news, I didn’t think that I would be fine.

Shortly after this dinner, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. When my parents explained why they had tears in their eyes, my first thought was how Miss Prudhomme would react. I don’t remember what she said in school the next day, but I remember sensing that the world was a big and frightening place; that I was about to lose her to it, if I hadn’t already; that the warm magic of her classroom couldn’t be sheltered from tragedy and injustice outside. This lesson was important enough to stay with me ever since, though at the time I felt only a selfish and inconsolable grief.  — George Packer

Before we start, I should say that my favorite teacher is my mother, who taught biology and religious studies at my school and filled our home with copies of Reader’s Digest and encyclopedias of common medical conditions. My favorite teachers who weren’t related to me, however, were Mrs. Oliver and Mrs. Cox, who both taught English.

Although they looked very different from each other—Mrs. Cox was austere, looking out from a blunt brown fringe; Mrs. Oliver was white-haired and given to theatrical gestures—my mind has merged them into one enthusiastic, sometimes-exasperated presence. Which of them introduced me to Arthur Miller? Which of them failed to make me care about gerunds? Which of them got me to learn “Spring” by Gerard Manley Hopkins by heart? (“Thrush / Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring / The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing.”)

They both showed me that the English language was a gift, a toy box, and an instrument that I could attempt to master. Plangent, mournful, and sad create subtly different effects; sentence lengths need to vary; semicolons are underrated. I use their lessons every day, because they did what the best teachers do. They made me want to keep learning for the rest of my life. — Helen Lewis

Illustration by Karagh Byrne

It’s easy to underestimate a classroom full of 11-year-old boys, ever on the edge of anarchy. It’s a lot harder for the boys to see the potential in themselves.

Father Martin Desmond Maiben taught English and music at St. Mary’s College, in Dublin, the school I attended in the mid-1960s. He was a Catholic priest, and for many years had been a missionary. In Dublin, his young charges wore short pants and striped ties, and with their red cheeks and unruly hair looked like inventions of the Irish tourist board. The image was deceptive. Father Maiben understood that part of his job, in truth, was managing a kennel.

And yet this was also the group of students, assembled for the first time in his music room, that he taught to sing Schubert’s An die Musik—interspersing our caterwaul with a recording of the same song by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. In English class, his desk stood on a dais. Every week he brought in a stack of books to lend from his own library—mostly boys’ books from the midcult comic canon of late-imperial Britain: Kipling’s Stalky & Co., Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. As we stepped up onto the platform, he would match each of us to a volume of his choosing. In time, when I tried my hand at bits of personal writing, he took them seriously. His skill as a teacher was to make high expectations seem like a reward.

The day before my family left Ireland—we would never live there again—Father Maiben invited me to join him for an entire day walking the streets and alleys of Dublin. This was the magical, sooty city of John Banville, not the one visitors see now. And at the end of the day, he gave me Three Men in a Boat to keep.  — Cullen Murphy

I was a difficult and contentious teen. One teacher changed the direction of my life by meeting me head-on: Paul Midura was wry and intellectual, an artist and an Army veteran, an adult and a man of the left who engaged my youthful conservatism with energy and seriousness but who had no compunction about snorting derisively at my adolescent overconfidence.

In a course on dystopian literature, Paul challenged me about everything, whether socialism or social conformity. He introduced me to Brave New World (years would pass before I realized what a zinger it was when he referred to me once as “Mustapha Nichols”), and then to 1984, which I devoured in two days. That book, and a new understanding of the nightmare of totalitarianism, never left me: In college I would study the Soviet Union, learn Russian, and begin a career in political science. Over the decades, we kept arguing and laughing together as we forged a friendship that became like family. But in that first year, Paul taught me never to fear criticism, that spirited arguments were about learning rather than winning or losing, and that rigor and truth—and above all, humaneness—were more important than political dogma.  — Tom Nichols

Illustration by Karagh Byrne

My mother was battling drug addiction. My father already had been in recovery, and he and I were in the process of repairing our estranged relationship. I was a teenager who had inherited adult problems. And I’m certain I wouldn’t have learned how to cope with them without Kathy Seabron.

Mrs. Seabron was my journalism adviser and English teacher at Mumford High School, a Detroit public school that had its share of inner-city-public-school problems: low resources, ancient textbooks, dilapidated facilities. But we also had educators like Mrs. Seabron.

She made me eager to learn about literature and language. She was patient but tough. Loving but firm. She understood that many of us came from single-parent homes, working-class families, or challenging environments, but she never let us use our circumstances as an excuse to not achieve.

Thirty-plus years later, we’re still in touch. During one particularly tough moment in my career, Mrs. Seabron sent me an email reminding me of a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “Truth never damages a cause that is just.” As always, she knew what to say.  — Jemele Hill

When I was in third grade, Ms. Mueller gave us an assignment that would change my life: She told us to select a color and write a poem about it. I selected the color gray. (Strange, I know, but I was a somber child). My poem went something like this:

I hate the color gray.

It reminds me of a rainy day.

Gray I really hate that color.

It’s annoying like my little brother.

To be clear, my brother and I have a great relationship. But at the time he was a toddler, and younger sibling toddlers can often be, well, annoying. Anyway, I remember that Ms. Mueller came over to my desk, read the poem, looked down at me and said, “Clint, that was beautiful. You could be a writer when you grow up.” For all I know she could have told the same thing to every kid in the class, but I will remember that moment for the rest of my life. She planted something inside of me that made it possible to imagine a life of writing poems. You never know how something you say—even an offhand comment—is going to stay with a student.  — Clint Smith