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Is RFK Jr., the conspiracist scion of American political royalty, merely a nuisance, or will he present a genuine threat in 2024?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

China changed its mind about World War II. What is Israel trying to accomplish? Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead.

A Wild Card

The Kennedy family is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And, for a time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed his long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination as that of a “Kennedy Democrat” who believes in strong unions and the middle class. But last week, he broke with the party.

RFK Jr., who rose to prominence as a respected environmental lawyer before veering into conspiracism and anti-vaccine activism around 2005, said last Monday that he is now running for president as a third-party candidate. “We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our home and who amplify our divisions,” he said, announcing his decision in Philadelphia. “And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties.” Putting aside the irony of a Kennedy criticizing elites, RFK Jr.’s announcement could add an element of uncertainty into the near-inevitable rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump in 2024. My colleague John Hendrickson, who profiled Kennedy in June and has covered his campaign, told me that, because of various state-level qualifying rules, Kennedy does not appear to have a viable path to collecting the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency as an independent candidate. But even if the possibility of Kennedy actually becoming president is moot, he “could siphon voters away from Biden and Trump, and make it harder for either of them to hit 270,” John said. In a presidential race that may be close, especially in key swing states, a wild-card factor could cause headaches for both sides.

An independent run like RFK Jr.’s could also damage the American public’s already fragile trust in the integrity of the electoral system. As Jesse Wegman wrote in The New York Times this week, if a single candidate is unable to garner 270 electoral votes, a little-known provision in the Twelfth Amendment would kick in, enabling the House to elect the president; each state would cast one vote, and their tally would decide the presidency. “This is about as far from the principle of majority rule as you can get,” Wegman writes, noting that Thomas Jefferson called the provision “the most dangerous blot in our Constitution.”

The likely rematch between Trump and Biden is unwelcome news for many voters: “Americans are suffering a bit of 2020 PTSD, and the prospect of replaying that whole year over again is filling people with dread,” John told me. Poll results released by the Monmouth University Polling Institute earlier this month found that just 19 percent of voters are very enthusiastic about Trump running as the party nominee, and 14 percent are very enthusiastic about Biden. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s favorability ratings have at times surpassed those of both Trump and Biden. But Jon Krosnick, a political-science professor at Stanford University, told me that Kennedy will likely take such a small number of votes from Trump and Biden that his presence will prove inconsequential. “The only way he’s going to be influential in the outcome of the election is if he participates in debates,” which would give him a major platform for his ideas, Krosnick told me. Those experts who do believe that Kennedy could hurt the major-party candidates are divided on whether his presence in the race might inspire anti-vax or libertarian voters to divert their votes from Trump, or cause Biden-weary Democrats to jump ship, hurting the incumbent.

Third-party candidates have always been on the sidelines of American politics. Krosnick explained that sometimes, votes for them make no difference in electoral outcomes, because they tend to attract voters who just wouldn’t have voted otherwise. But these candidates have exerted power at key moments. No candidate from outside the two dominant parties has ever won a presidential election, but third-party candidates have sometimes served as “spoilers,” pulling votes from candidates in close matchups. In 2000, Ralph Nader, who received some 97,000 votes, siphoned votes in the close race—the difference in Florida was about 500 votes—between George Bush and Al Gore. In 2016, Jill Stein garnered votes that could have helped Hillary Clinton in her race against Trump.

“Some third-party independent candidate could arrive at that moment and grab the spotlight” in 2024, but “Robert Kennedy doesn’t strike me as that type of candidate,” Krosnick said. Kennedy isn’t the only third-party contender entering the fray: A third-party centrist group called No Labels has reportedly raised $60 million and qualified for 11 states’ ballots. Some Democrats are threatened by this: No Labels is “going to help the other guy,” Biden told ProPublica. And in July, my colleague Russell Berman wrote that, according to surveys and polling, a moderate independent candidate could capture a decisive number of votes in a close race. Cornel West, the intellectual and activist, is also running; he switched from the Green Party to an independent run earlier this month.

“Extreme polarization,” Krosnick told me, “does make this a special moment in history.” Some voters, desperate for an alternative to Trump or Biden, may vote for whomever they genuinely hope to see in the White House—even if that person has no chance of winning. People who vote for Kennedy, Krosnick said, are voters who think, “I don’t care whether he wins or not. I will feel best about myself if I vote for him.”

Related:

The first MAGA Democrat Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk.

Today’s News

Jim Jordan did not secure enough Republican votes to become speaker of the House in a first vote. At least 500 people were killed by an airstrike at a hospital in Gaza City, according to Palestinian authorities; Israel says the explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket from the group Islamic Jihad. President Biden will visit Israel tomorrow. Ukraine struck Russian helicopters in its eastern region using long-range missiles newly supplied by the United States.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Elise Hardy; Shalom Ormsby; Tim Platt; dobok / Getty

An Awkward Evolutionary Theory for One of Pregnancy’s Biggest Complications

By Katherine J. Wu

In the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes some 500,000 fetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths around the world each year, had for decades been regarded as a condition most common among new mothers, whose bodies were mounting an inappropriate attack on a first baby. But Robillard, now a neonatologist and epidemiologist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de La Réunion, on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, kept seeing the condition crop up during second, third, or fourth pregnancies—a pattern that a few other studies had documented, but had yet to fully explain. Then, Robillard noticed something else. “These women had changed the father,” he told me. The catalyst in these cases of preeclampsia, he eventually surmised, wasn’t the newness of pregnancy. It was the newness of paternal genetic material that, maybe, the mother hadn’t had enough exposure to before.

Robillard’s idea was unconventional not only because it challenged the dogma of the time, but because it implied certain evolutionary consequences … If preeclampsia is a kind of immune overreaction, then perhaps unprotected sex is the world’s most unconventional allergy shot.

Read the full article.

More from The Atlantic

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The largest property developer in China will be in default if it fails to make a $15 million coupon payment on Tuesday, the end of a 30-day grace period.

As the celebrations for the BRI’s 10th anniversary kick off, attending countries would do well to ask whether their citizens have anything to gain from 'win-win' cooperation with China, Elaine Dezenski writes.

All the latest developments from the war in Ukraine.

When Chinese officials and elites berate Japan, as they frequently do these days, they often pointedly mention the atrocities that Imperial Japan committed after invading their country in the 1930s. In March, Qin Gang, then China’s foreign minister, warned the Japanese that forgetting their history meant denying crimes that they then might repeat. China’s paramount leader, Xi Jinping, uses the memory of World War II to justify the present-day bluster of a rising global power. “Chinese people who have made such a great sacrifice,” Xi said in 2014, “will not waver in protecting a history written in sacrifice and blood.” When nationalistic Japanese politicians such as Shinzo Abe and Junichiro Koizumi have paid their respects at a Tokyo shrine whose honorees include convicted war criminals, Chinese patriots have exploded with state-sanctioned rage.

One reason that East Asia’s two greatest economic powers are still sparring about a bygone war is that the most important international attempt to confront that past—the Tokyo war-crimes trial after World War II—failed to promote a common understanding of who was guilty of what. The trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg has taken on an almost sacred status in democratic Germany and its neighbors. By contrast, the Tokyo proceedings left behind ambiguities and grievances more than sufficient to fuel not only geopolitical struggles in Asia but also political intrigue within China itself.

This article is adapted from Bass’s new book.

From 1946 to 1948, the victorious Allies prosecuted General Hideki Tojo and 27 other top Japanese leaders for aggression and war crimes. Although General Douglas MacArthur, the American potentate who ran the occupation of Japan, originally proposed to try Japanese leaders before a U.S. military commission only for attacking Pearl Harbor, the Tokyo tribunal was strikingly international. Its prosecutors and judges were drawn from 11 different Allied countries, among them important Asia-Pacific powers including China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as Japanese and American defense lawyers. Spectators heard harrowing testimony from Chinese and American eyewitnesses to massacre and rape at Nanjing, Filipinos who saw slaughter in Manila and elsewhere, American survivors of the Bataan Death March, and Australians forced to build the notorious Burma-Thailand death railway.

The Chinese judge, Mei Ruao, insisted that his colleagues put Asian suffering at the center of their deliberations and, amid fierce battles among the judges about whether aggressive war was a crime under international law, fervently supported the tribunal’s jurisdiction over Japan’s wartime leaders. The tribunal ultimately voted to send Tojo and six other top officials to the gallows, an outcome that Mei subsequently described as a “source of satisfaction and comfort to those [who] suffered from Japanese aggression, particularly the Chinese who suffered the most.”

[From the October 1960 issue: Why Japan surrendered]

But, fatefully, the Tokyo judgment was far from unanimous. To Mei’s horror, the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed American defense lawyers to challenge the verdicts in fiery oral arguments before the justices in Washington. The Philippine judge and the Australian chief judge had concurred with the convictions but filed separate opinions; the Dutch and French judges had written dissents; and the Indian judge had voted to acquit all defendants, including Tojo himself. Although his massive dissent, which portrayed the trial as victors’ justice by colonial powers, is utterly forgotten in the United States, it resonates today in Japan and also in Asian nations with bitter memories of British, French, Dutch, and American imperialism.

Ever since, memories of the trial have pulled China—the only non-Western and anticolonial country in the first rank of Allied powers—in opposite directions. Xi himself extolled the Tokyo convictions in a major speech in 2014, as well as China’s own military tribunals for lower-level Japanese war criminals: “The righteous nature of the trials is unshakeable and unassailable!” But the Chinese Communist Party that Xi leads didn’t always feel that way, as Mei’s own experiences after the trial demonstrated.

Born in 1904 in a suburban village near Nanchang, the eldest son of a farmer, Mei at age 12 won a coveted place at Tsinghua College in Beijing—now China’s premier engineering university. Next he went to Stanford University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and followed that with a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1928.

He had good reasons to be wary of the United States. Like predatory European empires, the United States had held extraterritorial rights in China. Chinese people had been explicitly barred by nationality from the United States in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained in effect well into World War II. Yet Mei’s American sojourn left him with an abiding fondness for the country, its constitutional system, and its people, whom he saw as friendly, fair, well educated, democratic, scientific, and efficient, although sometimes childishly naive. (Chinese remembrances of him today blot out the politically awkward fact of his American affections.)

Mei believed in accountable, progressive government under law. Yet when he returned to China in 1929, it was in turmoil. The last emperor had been overthrown more than a decade earlier, and the Republic of China had been declared, but the government headquartered in Nanjing struggled to unify the country. Imperial Japan marched troops into Manchuria in September 1931, and then in 1937 launched a massive invasion of the rest of China. At least 14 million Chinese would die in the war; some scholars put the toll at 20 million to 30 million. Perhaps 80 million were displaced from their homes.

In 1934, despite some private misgivings, Mei joined Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling National People’s Party. Mei served at the Ministry of Judicial Administration, was appointed legal adviser to the Interior Ministry, and became a legislator in Nanjing. Soon before Japanese troops stormed the city in December 1937 and began the notorious massacres and rapes there, he fled inland with the remainder of the Nationalist government to the wartime provisional capital at Chongqing, in the humid mountains of Sichuan province. Swollen with desperate hordes of displaced people, Chongqing suffered some of the worst Japanese aerial bombardment of the war. Some 12,000 Chinese were killed, almost all of them civilians.

Chiang’s Nationalists weren’t just fighting Japan; their bitter contest against the Chinese Communists was spiraling toward civil war. The Communists, led by Mao Zedong and others, demanded revenge for Japanese atrocities, but were not about to bother with anything so bourgeois or slow-moving as war-crimes trials. Referring to a feudal warrior who had chivalrously refused to attack a vulnerable enemy force, Mao once declared, “We are not Duke Xiang of Song and have no use for his idiotic virtue and morality.”

After Japan finally surrendered in 1945, the Allies resolved on an international military tribunal for the top Japanese leadership. Despite Mei’s lack of practical judicial experience, Chiang’s government, wanting someone familiar to American lawyers, chose Mei as its judge.

Judges in the Tokyo war-crimes trial. Mei Ruao, the Chinese judge, is second from right in the front row. (Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho / Getty)

As the trial opened, Mei glared at the defendants with patriotic rage. Although he was privately worried that the debilitated Chinese authorities had not managed to gather enough evidence of Japanese atrocities in places other than Nanjing, he pressed his fellow judges for a stern verdict. He insisted that aggressive war was already a war crime, not a new offense willed into existence by the Allied powers. He bristled at the fact that Emperor Hirohito kept his throne even as his underlings and his closest aide went to trial. “From a purely legal perspective,” Mei wrote in his diary, “I can’t see how the emperor could take no responsibility for Japan’s war of aggression.”

After the trial ended in November 1948, the obviously crumbling Nationalist government offered Mei a lofty position as justice minister. Yet rather than following his Nationalist patrons into exile on Taiwan, he joined the Communists as they neared their victory on the mainland in 1949. “He has hope in the Chinese Communist Party’s governance,” his son told me years later. Praised by Zhou Enlai himself, the premier and foreign minister of the revolutionary new People’s Republic of China, Mei was appointed as a Foreign Ministry adviser and later became a member of the People’s Congress. Abandoning his elegant English and fondness for the United States, he now adopted the stock jargon of Maoist propaganda, reviling “the American imperialists’ single-handed domination over Japan and their ambition to rule the world.”

[From the October 2023 issue: The bizarre story behind Shinzo Abe’s assassination]

He still could not fit in with Mao’s new order. In 1957, Mei was branded as a “rightist” after politely suggesting that the Communist Party should give the People’s Congress more power and defer less to the Soviet Union. And as Communist China sought to normalize relations with Japan, Mei’s well-known resentment of Japanese war crimes became a distinct political liability. The Communist Party insisted that only a small clique of Japanese imperialists had caused the war, casting the Japanese masses as innocent victims. “You have apologized,” Mao told visiting Japanese legislators in 1955, in an astonishingly conciliatory statement that no Chinese cadre could say today. “You cannot apologize every day, can you? It is not good for a nation to sulk.”

In 1962, Mei dared to challenge that party line. He boldly wrote an article for a government journal that excoriated Japanese leaders and troops for the Nanjing massacre. For that, he was accused of stirring up national hatred and revenge against the Japanese. A few years later, during the Cultural Revolution—Mao’s bloody mass political campaign, beginning in 1966, to break the power of bureaucracy, intellectuals, and professionals—Red Guards came to his home to search for anti-revolutionary materials. Because his article about the Nanjing massacre had warned against forgetting past suffering, he was denounced for “slandering the party as being forgetful.” He was forced to perform self-criticism, endlessly denouncing his own reactionary and bourgeois tendencies and promising to remake himself as a better Communist. He was put to forced labor, meant both to make him understand the working classes and to humiliate him: a Stanford-educated lawyer cleaning offices and scrubbing toilets.

Mei despaired. He was rocked by terrible news of old colleagues being killed and old friends committing suicide. He smoked too much—it was the one thing he liked that he could still do. His health deteriorated; he suffered from hypertension and heart disease. He was too sick to write. On April 23, 1973, he died at 69.

After Mao died and the Cultural Revolution came to an end, Mei was written out of Chinese history. Yet his reputation was revived more than a decade later under Deng Xiaoping, when Chinese elites went through a searing introspection about the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, Mei was reintroduced to the Chinese public in a long magazine profile.

Since then, his legend has grown. His devoted children have looked after his legacy, getting his works published posthumously. Newspapers run admiring stories about his achievements at the Tokyo trial. Disdainful of the trial at the time, the Communist Party now celebrates it as an act of historic justice, thereby rebuking Japan’s conservative governments. In 2006, to mark the 75th anniversary of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, a big-budget Chinese film called The Tokyo Trial was released in major theater chains, telling the story from his viewpoint. The bookish Mei was played by a dashing Hong Kong action-movie star, Damian Lau, who usually plays assassins or cops. “Mei Ruao is a person with a strong sense of ethics and national pride,” Lau said in a story for Chinese state radio. “I really respect him.”

Today the Chinese government is preoccupied with history. Since taking power, Xi has established two official days of commemoration for the war. As the Chinese Communist Party embraces a xenophobic nationalism, Mei’s star has risen as an anti-Japanese champion. His anti-Japanese sentiments, so ruinous for him during the Cultural Revolution, have now become the basis for his posthumous renown. As tensions rise between China and Japan, and as wars rage in Ukraine and in Israel and Gaza, upholding the laws of war promoted at Nuremberg and Tokyo has a fresh urgency.

Yet for an authoritarian government, the memory of historical wrongs can also provide a welcome distraction. Xi and his underlings would rather call public attention to Imperial Japanese cruelty than to the social and economic failings of their own governance. At a lavish museum and memorial to the massacre in Nanjing, Mei is extolled for the very words that got him in such trouble when he wrote them in 1962, about the need not “to forget the suffering of the past.”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping welcomed delegations from across the developing world to Beijing on Tuesday to celebrate his pet project, the Belt and Road Initiative. The forum, the third of its kind, is meant to display China’s influence in the global South and show that Washington’s efforts to isolate and pressure Beijing can’t succeed: China simply has too many friends.

But one very important person was absent. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government have steadfastly refused to join Xi’s infrastructure-building program and have promoted alternatives instead. Just last month, Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a joint project to connect India to Europe through the Middle East by rail and ship.

Modi’s absence from the Belt and Road forum is a sign that the rivalry between the United States and China is not the only one shaping global affairs. Another, between India and China, may have geopolitical consequences that are equally important. At stake are the shape of the global South and its role in international governance. Whose vision prevails—Xi’s or Modi’s—will help determine the future of the world order and American global power.

Xi’s goal is to build a bloc of supporters in the global South that he can use to expand Chinese influence and challenge American primacy. But New Delhi is not much more eager than Washington to usher in a China-centric world system. Modi has therefore intensified his diplomacy in the global South, so that India can serve as a counterweight to China.

For Washington, Modi’s new assertiveness presents an opportunity. With India by its side, the U.S. can make the case that the South will benefit less from joining forces with Beijing to upend the American-led global order than from participating in partnerships with the United States and India.

Still, Biden and Modi are playing from behind. Xi has long recognized the aspirations and frustrations of the global South, and his foreign policy is designed to capitalize on those sentiments for China’s own geopolitical benefit. The Belt and Road Initiative is the premier pillar of that effort. The program, launched a decade ago, provided an alternative source of development financing to that offered by the institutions of the West, such as the World Bank. Xi has also fostered forums to promote the interests of developing countries, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS group of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Ideologically, Xi introduced a framework of principles, called the Global Development Initiative, aimed at refocusing international discourse on economic inequality and more evenly spreading the benefits of growth. Earlier this year, Qin Gang, then China’s foreign minister, framed global affairs as an international class struggle. “The principal contradiction in today’s world is not at all a so-called ‘democracy versus autocracy’ played up by a handful of countries,” he argued, “but a struggle between development and containment of development.”

[Read: Xi Jinping is done with the established world order]

The money and attention have paid off. At a BRICS summit in August, Xi overcame Modi’s opposition and won agreement to invite six new members—most, if not all, likely to support China’s interests.

Indian policy makers are worried. They see China usurping the role that India has historically sought to play, as the champion of the postcolonial developing world. China has even intruded into South Asia in ways that undercut Indian primacy in its own neighborhood—particularly through Beijing’s heavy support for Pakistan, India’s arch nemesis.

China’s actions have fostered “a feeling in Delhi that we are being replaced, that we are getting pushed out of our traditional spheres of influence,” Happymon Jacob, a specialist in Indian foreign policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, told me. “That feeling is palpable when you talk to the policy makers in Delhi, and they want to do something about it.”

New Delhi, much like Washington, has come to fear that Chinese influence will shape a new world order hostile to its interests. Indian policy makers feel that “rather than China’s integration into the globalized world benefiting the globalized world, that globalized world is being used by China to advance its own national interests,” Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Washington-based think tank Observer Research Foundation America, told me. “On almost every issue of the global governance agenda, China and India are at odds with each other.”

Xi has further inflamed tensions with an ever more assertive foreign policy. Aggressively pressing territorial claims along its disputed border with India, China helped spark a deadly Himalayan brawl between Chinese and Indian soldiers in 2020. Just last month, Xi snubbed Modi by opting not to show at the latest Group of 20 summit that the Indian prime minister hosted in New Delhi.

Modi took advantage of Xi’s absence. He burnished his credentials as an advocate for the global South by pushing for the inclusion of the African Union in the G20. (Previously, South Africa was the continent’s sole representative.) In the days before the summit, Modi darted off to Indonesia to attend a conference of Southeast Asian nations (which Xi also skipped, instead sending his No. 2, Premier Li Qiang). Indonesian President Joko Widodo altered the meeting’s schedule to accommodate him. And New Delhi has attempted to capitalize on Xi’s missteps in other ways—most notably by calling out the Chinese government for its resistance to offering significant debt relief to economically troubled low-income countries.  

But however canny its appeal, New Delhi’s capacity to counterbalance Beijing is limited. With an economy one-fifth the size of China’s, Modi cannot match Xi in financial resources with which to woo wallets in the global South. He will need to work with partners that have deeper pockets, such as the United States.

By doing so, Modi is sending a message to the Global South: Poor and marginalized countries can attain greater sway in world affairs through cooperation rather than confrontation with the West. He made this case by deftly managing the G20, where he worked closely with Biden and other Western leaders to offer the prospect of inclusive partnership to countries of the global South within expanded and reformed institutions of the current order. By contrast, this week’s Belt and Road forum showcases Xi’s intention to build a different, competing order. The Communist Party–run news outlet Global Times, citing the conflict between Israel and Hamas, claimed that the Belt and Road is evidence that as the United States “fans the flames of war, China exports peace and development.”

Some 140 countries are sending delegations to Xi’s forum, suggesting that the Chinese leader’s vision for a new world order does have global appeal. But that vision is also China-centric, and therefore divisive. By expecting governments to repeatedly send high-level representatives to Beijing for such events, Xi is treating members of the global South more like supplicants than partners. And Modi isn’t alone in steering clear. Past forums attracted prominent representatives from the West, including Italy’s prime minister in 2017. This year’s event will include Russian President Vladimir Putin, as welcome in China as ever, and a representative from Afghanistan’s Taliban. But Western leaders have generally stayed away, and overall, the delegates at this forum are of lower stature. By the Chinese government’s count, 37 national leaders attended 2019’s forum; this year, roughly half that number showed up.

[Read: China doesn’t want to compete. It wants to win.]

Xi may attract crowds, but many countries remain wary of choosing sides in a great-power standoff, and Modi’s approach will likely appeal to them. Rama Yade, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and a former French secretary of state for foreign affairs and human rights, told me that “behind India, you have the Western allies, and that is something that is very important for Africans” because “they want to preserve or keep their partnerships with the West as well as the Chinese.” That, she continued, is why “the Indians seriously challenge the Chinese” in Africa.

With India in the mix, Xi can’t so easily claim that the future depends on conflict between the West and the rest. Not only are multiple centers of power emerging in the developing world, but they speak with diverse voices and promote different visions for a more balanced future. Xi, however, doesn’t seem interested in listening. He appears to believe that he can marshal the global South to isolate the West—but in pushing his partners to side against the United States, he might ultimately end up isolating China.

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Xi Jinping’s signature policy to transform the world has cost billions - has it paid off?