Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

President Joe Biden is facing a unique set of challenges as he prepares to run for reelection. The most unique of all: No one his age has ever run for president. And voters are worried, even those who give him credit for an improving economy. It’s also worth pointing out that Donald Trump is 77, and has been afflicted by more than the usual number of gaffes lately.

On Capitol Hill, the GOP’s new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is a full week into the job and working to regain order. But the ideological divide among House Republicans is now attracting attention in the upper chamber after GOP anger over Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville stalling military promotions erupted on the Senate floor.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss this and more are Dan Balz, a chief correspondent at The Washington Post; Adam Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief at USA Today; and Alex Thompson, a national political correspondent at Axios.

Read the full transcript [here].

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

People all over the world are divided about the best way forward in the Middle East. As conflict devastates that region, how should citizens outside the Middle East handle their differences of opinion about the best way forward without tearing their societies apart?

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

Conversations of Note

In Spiegel International, under the headline “Middle East Conflict Tests the Postwar World Order,” a piece with six bylines advances a theory of geopolitics and poses a series of questions:

In Germany, which bears “historic responsibility for the worst imaginable crime,” as Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in her UN speech in reference to the Holocaust, one misguided sentence can divide families and end friendships. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the same is true in many countries of the Muslim world. In societies and countries that are farther away from this conflict, the debates may proceed differently. But there, too, they are increasingly toxic—from Southeast Asia to Latin America, from the U.S. to Europe.

What are the consequences of this extreme polarization? What are the consequences for a possible cease-fire, armistice or—as anachronistic as it might sound—for a political solution of the Middle East conflict? What about the broader consequences for a world order which, following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the U.S., the financial crisis in 2008, the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is clearly decaying?

Noah Millman argues that a lot of commentary about the West’s response to events in the Middle East is premature, because Western reactions depend in part on how the war in Gaza plays out. Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas, and what doing so would require, is just the first of the uncertainties he notes:

Will Israel move in with large forces, or mostly conduct periodic raids from safer positions inside Israel? Will the campaign last weeks? Months? Years? How sustained will the bombardment continue to be, and for how long? Then: how will the United Nations and various NGOs be brought in to relieve the suffering of the Gazan people? Or will they be firmly kept out—or will they refuse to come because the situation isn’t safe enough for them to operate? Will more and more vulnerable Gazans be evacuated … or will Egypt and Israel’s other neighbors and the Gazans themselves refuse to facilitate what they see as a plot to depopulate the Strip and give Israel a freer hand?

Finally, how, more generally, will the other players in the region, hostile and non-hostile, react over time to Israel’s campaign? Will Hezbollah join the war? Will Iran? Will the American military wind up getting drawn in? What about Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia—will they make dramatic efforts to mediate and moderate the conflict … Or will they make no such overtures, and just try to insulate themselves as much as possible from the conflict? Or will they even be drawn in on Israel’s side?

Any of these scenarios—a longer war, a wider war, a war with an unclear outcome—opens up wildly different possibilities for how politics will be shaped in Europe and America in response.

Shadi Hamid cautions against treating terrorism as an irrational phenomenon and support for it as unchangeable:

Terrorism doesn’t fall from the sky. Terror is a tactic. It is a choice. Hamas’s grisly assault on Israel must be analyzed with this in mind. If we ignore this, we make it more likely that other violent organizations will take Hamas’s place even if the group is neutralized or somehow eliminated … According to one July poll, 60 to 75 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had positive views of Islamic Jihad and the Lions’ Den—groups just as or even more radical than Hamas … There are two ways to look at this. One is to say that something is inherently wrong with Palestinians—a view often expressed by both the Israeli and American right—or even that Palestinians, by supporting groups that are evil, are complicit in that evil. This perspective has dangerous implications: It means downplaying distinctions between combatants and civilians (as many Israeli officials have repeatedly done) and seeing all Palestinians as enemies to be destroyed.

The other way to interpret the survey results is to acknowledge a truth about all people: They’re complicated. In the July poll, half of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” But it is possible for Palestinians to support a two-state solution that would allow Israel to exist as a Jewish state while also supporting armed attacks against and inside Israel. It’s more useful to ask how Palestinian attitudes toward violence have evolved. As the journalist Peter Beinart recently noted, at the height of the Oslo accords in 1996—when a settlement seemed possible—Palestinian support for the peace process reached 80 percent while support for violence dropped to around 20 percent. Clearly, Palestinians, like any group, are capable of supporting both violence and nonviolence, depending on the circumstances.

Physical Therapy for New Mothers

Christine Henneberg lays out the case for making PT a more frequent part of post-delivery medical care:

Pregnant women and new mothers are, in a sense, different from other hospitalized patients. Doctors tend to think of them as healthy young people undergoing a normal, natural process, one that should require serious medical intervention only occasionally. This is how my patients tend to see themselves too—and most of them do go on to live normal, if changed, lives. By this philosophy, what new mothers need isn’t intensive rehab, but a brief period (one or two days) of observation, some education about how to feed and care for their baby, and then a timely discharge home, with a single postpartum visit a few weeks later. Indeed, this laissez-faire approach is the standard of care in many U.S. hospitals.

But as the U.S. faces a surging maternal-mortality rate, with more than half of maternal deaths occurring after delivery, physicians are now in wide agreement that the standard of care needs to change. Pregnant women in the U.S. are not as young as they once were. Pregnancy and childbirth can present grave dangers—particularly when a woman already has underlying health conditions. A vaginal delivery is an intense physiological event that involves the rapid expansion and then contraction of the musculoskeletal system, along with dramatic shifts in hormones, blood volume, and heart rate. A Cesarean section is a major surgery that involves cutting through layers of skin, fascia, and muscle—and that’s if everything goes perfectly.

Rebeca Segraves, a Washington State–based doctor of physical therapy specializing in women’s health, told me she was struck early in her career by the realization that women undergoing a C-section did not receive routine postoperative PT. She was used to performing inpatient evaluations for patients recovering from relatively minor illnesses and surgeries, such as pneumonia, gallbladder removal, and prostatectomy. But after a C-section, she says, a PT evaluation “just wasn’t the culture.”

Yes, There Are Principled Supporters of Free Speech

At New York, Jonathan Chait argues that there is a reason for the "the frequency of the claim that free-speech defenders are not consistent in their values":

Insisting that nobody really upholds a value is a way of giving yourself permission to ignore it. Brutal dictators like to say that every government violates human rights; gangsters are fond of insisting they’re no more crooked than any other powerful person.

There is a crucial difference between a specific, factually grounded charge of hypocrisy and a sweeping generalized charge of hypocrisy. The former is designed to uphold standards by shaming those who violate them. The latter is designed to undermine a standard by asserting implicitly that nobody actually cares about it.

The ubiquitous rhetorical move of insisting the “cancel-culture brigades” never criticize right-wing censorship serves that purpose. Its adherents repeat it so frequently because it plays a crucial role in their worldview in discrediting a belief system, free-speech liberalism, that poses a threat by dint of its ideological proximity. (The near enemy is always more dangerous than the far enemy.)

Provocation of the Week: You Have Two Noses

In The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang delivers a passage that forever changed how I think about my body:

The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears.

And far from being a passive tube, the nose’s hidden inner anatomy is constantly changing. It’s lined with venous erectile tissue that has a “similar structure to the erectile tissue in the penis,” Eccles said, and can become engorged with blood. Infection or allergies amplify the swelling, so much so that the nasal passages become completely blocked. This swelling, not mucus, is the primary cause of a stuffy nose, which is why expelling snot never quite fixes congestion entirely …

In healthy noses, the swelling and unswelling of nasal tissue usually follows a predictable pattern called the nasal cycle. Every few hours, one side of the nose becomes partially congested while the other opens. Then they switch, going back and forth, back and forth … The idea made sense as soon as I consciously thought about it: When I’m sick, and extra swelling has turned partial congestion into complete congestion, I do tend to feel more blocked on one side than the other. Once you’re aware of the nasal cycle, you can control it—to some extent.

If you’re suffering from a cold, get the relevant details here. See you next week!

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I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom” Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling. The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success

Creatures of the Night

This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time.

I hate it because, as a general rule, I cannot stand Morning People. I do not like to cede even one minute to those chipper and virtuous larks, the co-workers who send you emails marked “5:01 a.m.” and who schedule “breakfast meetings” at dawn so we can all do some work before we get on with … doing more work. They are my natural enemy, and I refuse to entertain their caterwauling about waking up in the dark.

Look, I love daylight. I bathe in the rays of summer. I live for the sharp definition of a sunny autumn morning. I am enchanted by the brilliance of a bright winter vista. But I am a Night Person. An owl. A Nosferatu. I move in the shadows. I am vengeance; I am the night; I am Batman.

Okay, I’m not Batman, but I am one of those people who can stay up late and remain completely alert. When I drove a taxi in graduate school, I did the 5 p.m.–to–5 a.m. shift almost effortlessly. I’d hit the road, take people on their dates, and pick them up after their dates. (Sometimes that part wasn’t so pretty.) I’d drive bartenders home after the bars closed; later, I would ferry the, ah, ladies of the evening to their residences once the city finally slumbered. Then I’d have some coffee from the all-night Dunkin’ with cops and other night-shift folks, get the early fliers to the airport, go home, and take a nap.

When I was a volunteer for a suicide-prevention hotline, I worked the weekend late shift, where you’d better be on your game in the middle of the night. I’d do my best to be a supportive listener—sometimes during scary moments—and then I’d walk out at 4 a.m. feeling fine, ready for breakfast and a nap.

But ask me to get up at 4 a.m.? What is this, Russia?

Actually, that jibe is inaccurate: Russia, for many reasons, is mostly a night-owl culture. Be it under Soviet dictatorship, during the brief years of democracy, or under Vladimir Putin’s neofascism, Russian offices tend to be empty early in the morning. But Americans still venerate the idea that mornings are super productive, and every year, we’re all forced to give back an hour of sunlight in the afternoon so that our overmotivated friends and colleagues don’t have to endure their first latte in the predawn gloom. Instead, the rest of us have to feel the darkness enveloping us in the late afternoon, when we’re trying to get stuff done at work while the morning people nod off behind their desks.

Yes, I know: Kids will have to get up in the dark for school. Here’s one answer: Instead of setting the clocks back, maybe we should stop sending kids to school so ridiculously early, especially teenagers, who have a harder time learning in the early morning. Doctors and educators have been suggesting this for years, but we don’t listen, because we remain convinced that industrious people get up early in the morning and lazy people sleep in.

Take a look, for example, at the schedule that Chevron CEO Mike Wirth claims to observe, as reported by the Financial Times:

3:45 a.m. — Wake up to go to the gym for a 90-minute workout

5:15 a.m. — A cup of coffee and reading half a dozen newspapers

6 a.m. — Shower and head to the office

6 p.m. — Back for dinner with his wife

9 p.m. — Bed and reading

10 p.m. — Asleep

I believe that this is complete hooey. Not only is there no time between the end of his workout and his first cup of coffee, but no one reads six newspapers in 45 minutes. He then gets less than six hours of sleep, gets up, and does it all again. This is the idealized morning-person schedule, and it is madness. (Also, no matter what we do with the clocks, he will wake up in the dark. That’s his problem.)

Nowhere is this morning culture worshipped more obnoxiously than in Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital. I no longer live there, and I hear that things may be changing. But I was considered something of a reprobate when I worked in Washington (including on the Hill), because I would saunter into the office at, say, 8:15 a.m. instead of beating the traffic by arriving before dawn. “I was here at 6,” a co-worker would say. “I was here at 5,” another would answer, in a daily game of early-bird one-upmanship that sounded like a young-American version of the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.

I would go to my desk and growl at anyone who came near me before 9:30 a.m., but I was also the guy who was able to whip up a brief or a floor statement in the early evening, when the morning scolds were already glassy-eyed. (The greatest Hill staffers can do all of those things at any hour, but I wasn’t among them.)

I left Washington but then ended up ensnared in the morning culture of the U.S. military. I  learned about the military’s love of mornings the hard way, by teaching at the Naval War College for 25 years, where an 8:30 start time for a seminar was considered “mid-morning.” I fully understand that military operations require getting up and being ready to go at oh dark thirty, but the military venerates morning culture as a kind of iron-man virtue signaling. A culture that says a project manager in the Pentagon should arrive at the office at 4 a.m. to be there before his boss—who will come in at 4:30 a.m. after jogging in the dark—is an unhealthy culture.

So, enough. Leave the clocks alone; better yet, comrades, let us smash the oppressive culture of our lark overlords and reclaim the day.

Or let’s at least just get the time-changers and the early risers to stop bugging us in the morning.

Related:

Rejoice in the end of daylight saving time. The family that always lives on daylight saving time

Today’s News

Hezbollah’s leader gave his first public address since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war as the group continues to maintain a controlled battle along Lebanon’s border with Israel.   A former Trump appointee who violently assaulted police officers on January 6 was sentenced to 70 months in prison. New Delhi’s air-quality index was the worst of any major city today due to an increase in air pollutants.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Neil Postman’s 1985 diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a book that gave senior editor Gal Beckerman “a new set of glasses.” Up for Debate: The future of the Middle East is a divisive topic. Conor Friedersdorf asks readers how people outside the region should handle differences of opinion about it.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

The great social media–news collapse Photos of the week: Ghost Rider, canoe slalom, balloon museum

Culture Break

Read. Do you have free will? A new book by Robert Sapolsky argues that we’re not in control of or responsible for the decisions we make.

Watch. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (in theaters) is a pitch-perfect dramedy from a master of the form.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.

The repressive machinery of mainland China was closing in on the city where he had spent almost half of his young life fighting for democracy, and though for six years he had curated an image as a fearless international icon, that morning, Wong felt panicked. He had decided to take his chances by appealing to the conscience of the most powerful democracy in the world.

Wong was a skinny, toothy teen in 2014, when his student activism in the Umbrella Movement catapulted him to global renown: Time magazine dubbed him “The Face of Protest.” He served a short prison sentence and was released in June 2019, into the tear-gas-tinged humidity of Hong Kong’s summer of discontent. Again he took the democracy movement’s cause to the press, becoming its international advocate, urging European powers to take a harder line on Beijing and calling for Washington to impose sanctions against those who throttled Hong Kong’s freedoms.

[Read: The fracturing of Hong Kong’s democracy movement]

But in the summer of 2020, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Chinese officials put the final touches on a national-security law that effectively criminalized dissent and reengineered the very character of a once freewheeling city. Those found guilty under its provisions could be sentenced to prison for life.

This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s upcoming book, Among the Braves.

Now Hong Kong’s political groups and civil-society organizations were preparing to disband. Shops were pulling protest art off their walls. People were selling apartments and saying goodbyes. Many of Wong’s closest allies had booked tickets to foreign countries where they intended to seek asylum. But Wong didn’t have that option: His passport had been confiscated by the police.

If his renown was a vulnerability, Wong reasoned, it might also be his path out. The U.S. government maintained a few offices in the St. John’s Building, and Wong had set up a routine meeting with two American diplomats.

“I don’t want to leave,” Wong told them as the meeting ended. “I want to go to the U.S. consulate.”

His gambit drew on a famous precedent and a vexed history. The United States had cast its lot, at least verbally, with the democracy movement in Hong Kong, and the administration of then-President Donald Trump styled itself as tough on China. But how much was it willing to venture for the democratic opponents of the Chinese Communist regime?

Back in 1989, the United States seemed to have weighed this problem and come down on the side of principle.

Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist with an extracurricular interest in political philosophy and political systems. His belief in democracy was as public as it was forthright, making him a figure of global stature in the years preceding the Tiananmen Square protests. A sketch of his face, round and sanguine, graced the cover of the May 1988 issue of The Atlantic: In it, he wore a slight smile and his signature dark-rimmed glasses. Fang was China’s Andrei Sakharov, the journalist Orville Schell wrote, a “man of not only keen intelligence and conviction but fearlessness.”  

The day after the massacre—June 5, 1989—gunfire still rang out in the streets of Beijing as Fang, his wife, their son, and the academic Perry Link, who was a longtime friend, scrambled into the U.S. embassy compound. McKinney Russell, a diplomat and polyglot who was the head of the press and cultural section, and Ray Burghardt, the acting deputy chief of mission, met them inside.

Before he sat down with Fang, Burghardt had consulted his ambassador, James Lilley, a former CIA operative. Lilley was alarmed at the prospect of the Fangs seeking refuge there, fearing that they might get stuck in limbo. Burghardt walked away with the impression that he should talk the Fangs out of it. He told Fang that American protection could discredit him and the Chinese democracy movement: The Communist Party would dismiss Fang as a pawn of the United States, his presence at the embassy proof that the American “black hand” was behind the protests. The argument seemed persuasive. Fang and his family left, and the procedure-abiding diplomats reported the incident back to Washington.

[Read: Seeking sanctuary in the old empire]

Several hours later, Washington, on instruction from President George H. W. Bush, responded to the diplomats’ cable. Over a secure line, the administration delivered an unambiguous message: Go to the Fangs immediately. Tell them that if they wish to seek asylum, they would be “welcomed by the president of the United States.”

Russell and Burghardt raced to the Jianguo Hotel. They snuck into the back entrance, received the family—suitcases already packed—and climbed into an unmarked American van, which raced back to the U.S. embassy. There, the senior Fangs would live for the next year, until the United States negotiated their safe release to Britain. (Their son had gone back to his university studies in Beijing after a month, smuggled out of the embassy in another covert operation.)

Washington understood why the diplomats initially handled the Fangs in the way they did. On top of the political sensitivity, the request was technically out of line, as asylum can normally be granted only in-country, not at a consulate on foreign soil. But the administration’s ultimate concern, Burghardt told us, was that “regardless of what we said or how we recounted what had happened, the story would always be that we kicked them out and they got arrested.” And so the United States broke the rules to protect the Fangs. “It is a sort of fascinating example of the tension that always exists in American foreign policy, between the realist, strategic approach and the need to continue to uphold and to demonstrate our values,” Burghardt told us.

Fang and his family eventually moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked as a physics professor at the University of Arizona until he died in 2012 at age 76. That same year, in April, Washington made another life-altering exception. Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who had championed disability and land rights, made a perilous escape from house arrest. He was given protection at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped negotiate his release to New York City, what she called “an example of American values in practice.”

American values clearly aligned with those of the movement in Hong Kong—such, certainly, was the message Wong and his fellow activists heard loud and clear from Washington in 2019 and 2020. American politicians across party lines praised Hong Kongers for standing up to China in defense of freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and, most of all, democracy. Some of the demonstrations turned violent, but Hong Kong remained a cause célèbre inside the Beltway, where stalwarts of both parties had deep connections to the city.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a decades-long supporter of human rights in China, lauded the protesters, as did Jim McGovern, one of the most liberal members of Congress. But any politician would have been hard-pressed, in 2019, to outdo Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, two of Trump’s closest legislative allies, in performative support. Cruz, the Texas Republican, traveled to Hong Kong in mid-October, wearing all black—in solidarity, he said. A few days later, Hawley, of Missouri, planted himself among teens in athletic gear and yellow helmets to tweet details of a nighttime standoff between protesters and police. Both men invoked Berlin and cast Hong Kong as the new center of a global struggle between democracy and communism.

No such sense of mission animated the president, however. Trump had billed his administration as one that took risks and was tough on China. But his position on Hong Kong was muddled, erratic, and guided primarily by his fixation on Chinese President Xi Jinping and his desire to secure a trade deal. The entire U.S.-Chinese relationship, for Trump, came down to dealmaking.

[Read: The final blow to Hong Kong]

The Hong Kong democracy movement did not understand Washington in these terms. They saw a president who claimed to be tough on China, together with bipartisan concern for the fate of their city. Why wouldn’t the United States take a stand for one of the movement’s representatives?

Wong enlisted Jeffrey Ngo, a gregarious candidate for a Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University and a former member of Wong’s prodemocracy group, to help him execute a plan. Wong and Ngo had worked together since 2016 to win support for Hong Kong from American lawmakers, meeting with dozens of staffers and officials in the administration. Now they would appeal to those contacts for help.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a meeting over a secure phone line with his closest advisers on May 23, 2020. Details of China’s national-security law were still not public, but Pompeo was preparing to respond to its implementation by announcing that America no longer considered Hong Kong sufficiently autonomous to warrant separate treatment under U.S. law. He wanted policy suggestions on what should follow.

The advisers threw out a long list of punishments: enacting sanctions against top officials, scrapping training programs with the Hong Kong police, stopping the export of defense equipment to Hong Kong. Miles Yu, Pompeo’s China-policy adviser, suggested that Washington create a special immigration pathway for Hong Kong residents. Britain had done this. Canada and Australia were also working on such schemes. And admitting Hong Kongers wasn’t just charitable. The United States could offer special visas to Hong Kong residents with university degrees or with specialized skills; the country stood to benefit from fleeing Hong Kong talent.

The policy recommendations reached Trump, whose National Security Council had also prepared three lists of options in response to China’s strangling of Hong Kong. Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and Ivan Kanapathy—the NSC’s director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia and deputy senior director for Asian affairs—described theirs as a “Goldilocks” menu: One option included a list of “hot” measures (a maximalist approach); the second, “cold” ones; and the last, in-between.

The “hot” list comprised actions that had nothing to do with Hong Kong but that China hawks had long sought the opportunity to take, such as closing the Chinese consulate in Houston, where Washington claimed that spies were aiding in espionage and the theft of scientific research. Trump picked the “hot” menu. He even liked Yu’s immigration idea.

“President Trump said, ‘Why don’t we just open up? Why don’t we just let a huge portion of people from Hong Kong move to the U.S.?’ And I loved it,” Pottinger told us. “You know, my view was just, transplant the whole damn city and make a new Hong Kong in America. [Trump] was like, ‘They’re going to be industrious; they’ll be great. They’ll make great Americans.’”

[Read: What happened to Hong Kong?]

But Stephen Miller, Trump’s far-right political adviser, stopped the immigration scheme from going further. He was “very persuasive,” Yu told us.

The White House and the State Department moved forward on most of the other measures. As one senior official said: “So now we’re going to be thinking about Taiwan. We need to be thinking about the next steps and saying, Look, if you’re going to kill the golden goose, we’re not going to put the goose on fucking life support. We’re going to let you kill the goose. And then we’re also going to make sure that you regret it.”

Pompeo announced on May 27, 2020, that Hong Kong no longer had a high degree of autonomy. In the Rose Garden, Trump promised to eliminate “policy exemptions that give Hong Kong different and special treatment.” Then the president went off script and vowed to cut America’s ties with the World Health Organization. The WHO announcement completely overshadowed the Hong Kong news.

Wong wanted to enter the U.S. consulate. The diplomats told him that only the rooms in the St. John’s Building were on offer, and that the office tower did not offer the protection of a diplomatic compound. In Washington, Ngo took the matter up with one of Hawley’s policy advisers, reasoning that the ultra-Trumpian senator might have the president’s ear. Responding at 1 a.m., Hawley’s staffer promised to pass the message on to his boss, but nothing changed.

On July 1, the national-security law passed. The diplomats’ positions were the same: Wong couldn’t enter the consulate and couldn’t apply for asylum from outside the United States. Wong and Ngo knew the rules. But they were asking for the same pathway to haven that had been granted to Fang and Chen.

For years, Ngo had worked behind the scenes for Wong, writing op-eds in his name and even editing his tweets. Now he wrote an email above Wong’s signature to the secretary of state. “I want nothing more than to continue to fight for democracy and freedoms in my home,” it read. “But there is legitimate danger that I become a prime target of arrest and detention … I request U.S. protection so that I may apply for asylum, including as necessary traveling to the U.S. for the purpose of applying for asylum.”

The email landed in the inbox of Mary Kissel, Pompeo’s senior adviser, just after noon on July 1 in Washington. Kissel knew Wong and Ngo personally and had lived in Hong Kong as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She got the message where it needed to go.

Within the next 48 hours, Pompeo summoned his half dozen or so top officials to discuss Wong’s request. They immediately ruled out sheltering him at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. Plans were already under way to close the Chinese consulate in Houston, and when the announcement came, Beijing would likely retaliate. If Wong was hiding in the U.S. consulate, Beijing could close it down. Or Beijing could demand Wong’s release in exchange for American prisoners—it could snatch Americans off the streets in Hong Kong and hold them in arbitrary detention for this purpose.

The officials considered covertly extracting Wong from Hong Kong instead. But Hong Kong’s geography was unforgiving—the city shared a land border solely with mainland China, which meant that the only escape would be by boat across the Taiwan Strait or south toward the Philippines. Wong would risk encountering the Chinese Coast Guard in those waters, and American involvement could make for an international incident. Options dwindled. Soon the officials came to believe that none remained.

Pompeo and his advisers decided that the United States could neither let Wong into the consulate nor extract him from Hong Kong. “You’ve got national interest and personal interest, and in some ways you try to find a balance between the two,” one senior official involved in the process told us. “In the end, you know, on the seventh floor of the State Department, national interest won out.”

[Read: Hong Kong’s elite turned on democracy]

The decision was hardly unanimous in Washington. A National Security Council memo to the State Department opined that Wong should be protected, but deferred to State as the deciding authority with, as Pottinger later told us, a “fuller picture” of the facts. Pottinger’s deputy, Kanapathy, told us that fear of what Beijing would do in response was the “absolute wrong” reason to refuse to help Wong: “If you can’t do what I think a lot of people would say is the right thing [because] you’re afraid they’re going to do the wrong thing, then you’ve already lost.”

The State Department’s decision was, strangely, kept close. No one informed Wong or Ngo that the die was cast. In August, Ngo appealed to Pelosi and Senator Marco Rubio, both of whom had worked with Wong since he was a teen. They made calls to State on Wong’s behalf, pushing the request at the “highest levels,” according to one Hill staffer. At one point, a fellow Hong Kong activist named Nathan Law, who had slipped away to London just before the national-security law passed, met with Pompeo in private, raising Wong’s plight directly and emotionally. Nothing changed.

The issue “dragged,” one State Department official involved told us, “and it lingered, and then the inevitable happened.” Wong was arrested in September 2020 and then remanded in custody in late November. Last year, he pled guilty to charges of subversion under the national-security law.

The democracy movement in Hong Kong made little secret of the hope it placed in Washington. Some protesters flew American flags in the street, or made public appeals, whether to Trump’s gigantic ego or to Pelosi’s support for Chinese democracy activists dating back to Tiananmen. Many believed that America had the ability to alter Beijing’s course of action. They were wrong. What the United States could have offered was a haven, but it didn’t.

Washington made no special provision for Hong Kongers who wanted to emigrate to the United States. Cruz, notwithstanding his show of solidarity, killed a bill in December 2020 that included provisions for temporary protected status for Hong Kongers and expedited certain refugee and asylum applications. In a self-aggrandizing memoir, Pompeo wrote that he wished he had done more to punish China over Hong Kong, but he made no reference to Joshua Wong.

The focus in Washington has moved on from Hong Kong to Taiwan. The island is under constant military threat from Beijing, which claims the territory as its own, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled it. But for those in Taiwan who cherish their democracy, Hong Kong’s story offers a cautionary tale. The United States gave Hong Kong’s cause its vocal backing, then abandoned the city in its time of greatest need.

This article has been adapted from Shibani Mahtani and Tim McLaughlin’s new book, Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, And Exile In The Battle For Hong Kong And The Future Of Global Democracy.

Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.

Survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz (which lost a quarter of its population in the October 7 pogrom) had taken over Safra Square and installed an exhibit consisting of beds, neatly made, for each of the hostages currently in Gaza. They were arranged in a grid. Some were queen beds. Others were singles. Some had books on nightstands nearby. Several were IKEA cribs, for the dozens of children among the captives. One didn’t need to know even that one word of Hebrew to figure out what the crowd was demanding—the return of the hostages, without delay—and what it was promising: the creation of a civic movement that will continue screaming at the Israeli government, in anger and recrimination, until the hostages are back.

[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

I spoke with relatives of six of the Nir Oz hostages whose kidnappings were captured on video that spread within hours of the attack. The abductees are Shiri Silberman-Bibas, 32, who was kidnapped with her husband, Yarden, and two young children; Tamir Adar, 38, a young father last seen sealing his family into their safe room; and Yaffa Adar, 85. If you saw images of the kidnappings on the day of the attack, these were probably the people you saw. Silberman-Bibas is the distraught mom with two redheaded kids clutched to her chest. Yaffa Adar is the white-haired woman being taken to Gaza by golf cart.

Yifat Zaila is an architect in Herzliya and Shiri’s cousin. She told me that she talked with her uncle, Shiri’s father, at 7:30 on the morning of the attack. He lived in the kibbutz and said that they were in their safe room and that she shouldn’t worry. Her WhatsApp shows that he logged in for the last time that morning at 9:05. Zaila quickly determined that six members of her family were missing: Shiri’s family as well as her aunt and uncle, Margit and Yossi Silberman. The Silbermans’ house had been burned down, but their bodies were not in the ashes, so she held out hope that they were alive in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces told her they found her aunt’s keychain near the border. But last Friday, they informed her that their corpses had been recovered. The IDF told her that for security reasons, they would not say whether the bodies were in Gaza, at the border, or somewhere else.

“I don’t speak about it to the Israeli media,” Zaila told me. “I know it’s absurd. But if for some reason Shiri is watching television, I don’t want her to find out like this about her parents.”

She thinks about what it might be like for her nephew Kfir, who was nine months old when captured and is 10 months old now, to live in a dungeon. “How can a baby so young survive in these conditions?” she asked. “You’re supposed to learn how to clap, or see when a light goes on.” His brother, Ariel, 4, is energetic, “nonstop,” she said. “How can he sit in a room somewhere? I don’t know if they can even see the light of day.”

Zaila’s mother and grandparents came to Israel from Argentina in the 1970s, to escape the junta that assassinated leftists, in some cases by throwing them out of airplanes into the sea. The relatives of these “disappeared” have been tortured with uncertainty about what happened ever since. “My grandfather was very involved in politics, and he was scared to get the knock on the door,” she told me. “That’s why he came here.” Now the uncertainty has sought her out.

So have numerous Hamas enthusiasts, who have bombarded Zaila’s cellphone with taunting images. (She became internationally famous after going on CNN and making Anderson Cooper cry on the air.) “I receive a lot of hate messages telling me, ‘Hamas is taking care of your babies,’” she said. “It puzzles me. Our family, we’re left-wing.” They were peaceniks. “We never want to see anyone hurt. And now we find that they just wanted us dead. Not peace. Just dead.” She said she still has hope for the West Bank, which is run by the Palestinian Authority, a rival of Hamas. But Hamas, she said, made its views abundantly clear. “I was sure they were people just like me. They just want peace. It shook my entire existence.”

Soldiers walk through the debris of a destroyed home in the attack by Hamas militants on Kibbutz Be’eri. Be’eri is 16 miles from Kibbutz Nir Oz. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic)

Adva Adar understands that the world will always think of her grandmother as the golf-cart woman. The footage was admittedly surreal: a granny surrounded by killers and being driven out of her kibbutz in her geriatric chariot, as if on the way to a communal meal or a session at a painting studio. Adva also realizes that the world was transfixed by her grandmother’s expression: an enigmatic smile, held for the whole video while she was carted off to an uncertain fate.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Yaffa Adar is a classic labor-lefty kibbutznik who has lived in Nir Oz for 60 years. She has three children, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren, of whom Adva’s daughter is the youngest. When we spoke, the baby’s first birthday was five days away. “Ever since my child was born, it’s like she and my grandmother were connected,” Adva told me. “All day [my grandmother] would look at pictures of her. [My child] meant the world to [my grandmother]. And thinking of us celebrating her first year without my grandmother—that breaks my heart.

“The last message we got from her was around 9 a.m.,” Adva said. “We were texting in the family group since 6 o’clock. And around 9 a.m. she wrote that we wouldn’t believe it, but they had started to enter the houses.”

Elsewhere in the kibbutz, Yaffa’s ex-husband, Adva’s grandfather, was trapped in his house while Hamas set it on fire. “Thank God, he survived,” Adva told me. His wife was able to rescue him. “But, you know, his soul is dead. It was not his lungs. His soul is dead, and it is like he aged a hundred years from what they did to him.”

Adva’s cousin Tamir, 38, also lived on the kibbutz. He left his wife and two kids, 7 and 3, locked in their home and went out to engage the terrorists. “I won’t be back,” Adva says he told them. He was afraid the terrorists would force him to lure his family out. “No matter what, even if you hear me ask, don’t open the door.” His wife and children survived. Tamir is among the kidnapped.

About Yaffa’s fate, nothing is publicly known, except that the IDF confirmed to the family that she is one of the hostages. All of the footage from Hamas cameras and surveillance footage has been scoured for clues. “The elders that survived, each one was really attached to his golf cart,” Adva said, with a tiny laugh. “When the video came out, they tried to find whose golf cart it was.” Yifat Zaila told me that many of the golf carts had been stolen—someone had tried to link them up and bring them all, loaded with loot, into Gaza, but had abandoned the project halfway to the border.

It was left to those who know Yaffa to interpret her smile in the video. “People think she has dementia or Alzheimer’s, because it seems like she’s not getting the situation,” Adva told me. “But her mind is clear. She’s sharp.”

“She’s one of the people that established this country, who believe in living here, and who have pride. They can kidnap her, but they can’t kidnap her pride. And she would not let them see her suffering or hurt or scared.” This is what Adva sees in her grandmother’s face. “She will sit there and she will look them in the eyes and she will let them see that she’s a human being and not scared of them.”

Blackened fruit on a kitchen table. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic) A home interior destroyed by Hamas militants, Kibbutz Be’eri. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic)

The hostages’ families have spoken out individually and collectively about the plight of their loved ones—in general, to call for their return through some form of negotiation. On Friday, a contingent of them protested at the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters, to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declare that no cease-fire will take place until the hostages are all home. Some have vowed, starting Friday night, to camp out in front of the Kirya until all of the hostages are home. The families have a gold-star status, which none of them sought, but which gives their voices unusual heft in Israel. The model for their effort is the campaign that lasted more than a thousand days to keep in the public mind the name of Gilad Shalit, a single Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006 and released in 2011. Zaila, who served in Gaza with the IDF, said the government would have forgotten about Shalit if ordinary people hadn’t kept his name on the agenda. Time was the enemy, and as the years passed, it seemed less possible that the episode would ever conclude.

“In the first week, I thought I had an 80 percent chance of seeing them.” The next week she figured it was 70. Calculating those odds may not be psychologically healthy, Zaila conceded. “Being stupid sometimes helps,” she told me wistfully, “because you don’t know the result of things.”

“If I think about the politics, I get angry,” she added. “I think about how [my family] was left alone for hours. And now that there is a ground invasion, of course I think about my family over there, that they are going to be collateral damage. They can’t rescue 230 hostages.” With that in mind, she continued; “If we haven’t [been] able to take down Hamas for how many years now, I don’t think we will succeed now. I don’t think my family will be saved like this.” She hopes instead for “a deal,” but fears that Hamas and Israel will strike some compromise that leaves her family members still in Gaza. “There will probably be a cease-fire. And then they will just be names,” impossibly low on a long list of priorities. “That is what they did with Gilad.”

[Read: The end of Netanyahu]

A fence in the buffer zone between Kibbutz Be’eri and Gaza. (Photograph by Jerome Sessini/Magnum for The Atlantic)

But like so many of the hostages’ families, she feels most bitter toward, and least confident in, the politicians who would have to make that deal. The Netanyahu government left her family unprotected, she said. “This right-wing government shifted its entire focus to the West Bank to support the extreme right wing, so they could build a sukkah”—a shelter for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot—“in [the] center of Hawara,” a flash-point city in the West Bank. She thinks security resources were diverted from Gaza, and that the massacre followed. “My family were abandoned. And now they’re keeping them in Gaza.”

The IDF is helpful, she said, but the government ministers aren’t attending the funerals when new bodies turn up. They are mortified and cowardly.

“Maybe they don’t want to be screamed at,” I offered.

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “A great leader needs to go stand still and receive criticism in times of grief. This is how you measure someone—whether he knows how to lower his head and say, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”