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Kozak made the comments on Wednesday as the State Department presented its annual report on human rights around the world, an event at which his boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, declared that China was “in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations.”

That’s a tough call in today’s world. But China’s brutal campaign to strip Uighur and other Turkic minorities in the Xinjiang region of their culture, religion and identity through a network of secretive re-education camps must rank among the more outrageous continuing violations in the world. What makes it all the more galling is the Beijing government’s feigned umbrage whenever the camps are mentioned, and its absurd efforts to depict them as China’s contribution to the war on terrorism.

After initially denying the existence of the camps, China in October began a campaign to portray them as “campuses,” “vocational training centers” and “boarding schools” intended to bring Uighurs into the modern era.

China has made direct news reporting from Xinjiang all but impossible, giving access only to carefully monitored official tours. On one, Reuters reported that camp inmates praised their new life and sang, in English, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

Reports from survivors, Uighur dissidents, the Uighur diaspora, satellite imagery and other sources depict something far more akin to the gulag than a happy boarding school, with at least 120,000 and possibly more than 1 million Uighurs, out of a population of more than 10 million Muslims in Xinjiang, forced to undergo Cultural Revolution-style coercion to adopt state-sanctioned norms of political thought and behavior.

Writing in The New York Times, Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow on Islam at the Cato Institute, described camps at which “people are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays.” He said survivors told of sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.

Conquered and incorporated into China in the 18th century, Xinjiang has long been a thorn in China’s side. The Chinese government attributes scores of violent events, including bombings and assassinations, to Uighur separatists. Violent riots in July 2009 in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, escalated into attacks on Han Chinese people and a vicious crackdown and several death sentences.

But trying to extinguish national identity through what amounts to mass brainwashing is an atrocity that smacks of some of the worst experiments of our time — including China’s own Cultural Revolution — with some thoroughly modern twists. A key part of China’s campaign to control the Uighurs has been collecting DNA from members of the minority under the guise of a free health check.

Sadly, Muslim nations have been reticent about supporting the Uighurs, possibly because of the economic clout China wields among them and the solidarity some of these states have with an anti-Western authoritarian regime. In February, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was quoted on Chinese television after a meeting with President Xi Jinping as saying, “China has the right to carry out anti-terrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.”

That should not dissuade other governments and organizations from continuing to focus attention on the camps, as the State Department has. A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress, the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, would require the State Department and intelligence agencies to report on what the Chinese government is doing in Xinjiang. The bill should be promptly passed. The United States should also support the request of 15 Western ambassadors to Beijing — America’s was not one of them — to meet with the Communist Party secretary in Xinjiang.

What is happening in Xinjiang must not be ignored.

This article originally appeared in <a id="480d6308-7075-470c-9d5a-48f70e681a45" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/opinion/china-uighurs.html">The New York Times</a>.

The Trump administration may not be the most unimpeachable source when it comes to human rights, but the head of the State Department’s bureau for human rights, Michael Kozak, was dead on when he said China’s mass incarceration of Muslim minorities was “just remarkably awful."

China's brutal 'boarding schools'

<h1>It’s easy to sell soybeans to China. The Chinese are voracious consumers of the world’s raw materials. Until 2018, shiploads of soybeans from the American Midwest streamed to the processing plants that dot the Chinese coast. </h1>

So there is no reason to applaud the news that the Chinese government has offered to guarantee large purchases of American soybeans as part of a potential trade deal with the United States that the Trump administration is pushing to complete by late March or early April.

Instead, it is a worrying sign that the administration may settle for an ephemeral victory at the expense of America’s long-term economic interests.

President Donald Trump, by imposing tariffs on Chinese imports, created an opportunity to improve America’s economic relationship with China. It is a chance that may not come again. The U.S. economy is strong, while the Chinese economy is faltering. China still needs U.S. technologies. And despite Trump’s distaste for multilateralism, much of the rest of the world shares his concerns about China’s economic policies and trade practices.

His decision to go it alone, rather than making common cause with long-standing allies, was ill advised, and his tit-for-tat trade war has caused significant pain for many Americans. Farmers and other American exporters lost access to an important market; consumers are paying higher prices on a wide range of goods.

But Trump was right to argue that China has engaged in unfair competition. The question is whether he can win significant concessions.

The proper measure of any deal is whether it achieves Trump’s stated purpose in starting this trade war: persuading China to curb its use of state subsidies, regulations and various kinds of informal interference that limit the ability of American companies to sell goods and services in China, and help Chinese companies sell goods in the United States.

Measured as a share of Chinese gross domestic product, imports of American manufactured products have fallen by more than half since 2000, according to calculations by Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. One reason is that China aggressively subsidizes the creation of homegrown alternatives. To take a noteworthy example, a government-owned company, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, is developing a single-aisle passenger jet, the C919. The airplane is intended to reduce China’s spending on Boeing 737s — and to create a new rival for Boeing in the global market.

China’s lax enforcement of its environmental and labor laws also amounts to a significant subsidy for Chinese manufacturing, and an inducement to relocate American jobs to China.

Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s lead trade negotiator, has said the administration expects to make progress on these issues. But the United States has focused its demands on making it easier for American companies to operate in China, including protections for intellectual property and more leeway for foreign financial firms. China has accelerated work on a foreign investment law that would codify some of those changes, including a ban on the practice of requiring foreign companies to share proprietary technologies with the Chinese.

U.S. corporate expansion in China would benefit shareholders and executives. But it would not create factory jobs for American workers, Trump’s stated goal.

What’s more, any promises the administration secures from China require an effective enforcement mechanism. The United States has failed in past efforts to hold China to its commitments through the World Trade Organization and through bilateral talks.

The looming risk, however, is that Trump will accept a deal that allows him to claim a superficial triumph without forcing China to make enduring changes.

In particular, the United States should reject any Chinese offer to guarantee large-scale purchases of U.S. agricultural products like soybeans or energy products like liquid natural gas — indeed, guaranteed purchases of any kind.

Such deals could serve Trump’s desire to reduce America’s annual trade deficit with China. But the achievement would be purely cosmetic. The overall balance of America’s imports and exports is important; the balance with any particular country is not.

Past administrations have rejected similar offers from China because they run counter to America’s long-standing goal of reducing the Chinese government’s heavy-handed management of the country’s economy.

They would also come at the expense of America’s allies. If China buys more soybeans from North Dakota, it would buy fewer from Brazil. An international consensus that China’s trade policies are problematic has increased pressure on China to make meaningful concessions. Maintaining a unified front would help to ensure that China honors its commitments. Grabbing market share is unlikely to further that objective.

Lighthizer has argued, correctly, that any agreement with China is a step in a long-term process. The United States should not strike a deal that undermines those long-term goals in exchange for ephemeral gains.

This article originally appeared in <a id="5dba4323-eb47-472b-a701-a9123bae047b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/sunday/trade-china-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorials of The Times: Will Trump trade the future for a hill of beans?

Instead, it is a worrying sign that the administration may settle for an ephemeral victory at the expense of America’s long-term economic interests.

<h1>You can say this much as President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria runs for a fifth term next month — he’s alive. At least that’s what his nation’s ambassador to France felt the need to make clear Monday while the 82-year-old Bouteflika, who has been essentially out of sight since suffering a stroke in 2013, is being treated in a Geneva hospital.</h1>

Unlike old soldiers, he refuses to fade away, but that has plunged his oil- and gas-rich North African state into crisis.

The announcement that the president would run in elections scheduled for April 18 set off weeks of mass protests across Algeria, a relatively rare phenomenon in a country that eluded the wave of Arab Spring protests in 2011. Many people have said the crowds were larger than any anti-government demonstrations since the 1980s. They grew in size as the days went on.

Bouteflika’s campaign director nonetheless went ahead Sunday and delivered a truckload of petitions required of candidates. Under Algerian rules, the candidate is supposed to hand the petitions over to the Constitutional Council in person, which Bouteflika couldn’t do from a hospital room in Geneva. That sort of technicality has not bothered his government for some time now. The president is known as “the frame” because he is usually visible to the public only in framed portraits.

Along with the petitions, a letter to the Algerian people purportedly from the president was read aloud on state television, promising that should he be re-elected, Bouteflika would hold an “inclusive national conference” to write a new constitution followed by a vote to elect the next president, in which he would not run. “I listened and heard the heartfelt cry of protesters and in particular of the thousands of youth who asked me about the future of our country,” the letter said.

No you didn’t, replied the youth by going right back out into the streets that evening. Their argument is straightforward: Bouteflika, in power since 1999, cannot run the country and probably hasn’t for some time. In his stead, a shadowy cabal of businessmen, generals, intelligence chiefs and politicians, including the army chief of staff and the president’s brothers, known as “le pouvoir” (the power), have been running the state and milking its wealth. Protesters saw Bouteflika’s letter as nothing more than a ploy by le pouvoir to gain time while they engineer a way to stay in control.

There lies the problem. Like many strongmen, Bouteflika has been careful not to groom a successor, and his cronies have ejected anyone who appeared to be making a play for power. There is no vice president; Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, the head of the armed forces, is approaching 80; and Bouteflika’s powerful brother Said reportedly has detractors in le pouvoir.

The opposition, moreover, is weak and divided, and many older Algerians associate the president and his National Liberation Front with relative stability and would vote for him again.

Bouteflika came to power in the wake of a horrific civil war in which some 200,000 people were killed, after the military shut down legislative elections in the early 1990s in which Islamists won early rounds of voting. He is credited with bringing peace and recovery, helped by rising prices for Algeria’s dominant exports, oil and gas.

Stability and oil enabled Algeria to weather the 2011 uprisings in the region, but with them came political repression. And when oil prices plunged, so did foreign currency reserves and the government’s ability to placate the public. Unemployment among youth, who account for more than half the population and didn’t share the trauma of the civil war, is now 29 percent.

Members of the clique in control of Algeria, including Bouteflika if he is still in command of his senses, are aware what happened to neighboring regimes in the Arab Spring, and what could happen to them if they refuse to fade away. Bouteflika has pledged a national conference; perhaps the time to convene it is now, before the next elections.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c0254683-f6bf-4b57-9041-4b46793756f5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/algeria-protests-bouteflika.html">The New York Times</a>.

Unlike old soldiers, he refuses to fade away, but that has plunged his oil- and gas-rich North African state into crisis.

Editorials of The Times: Algeria's furious youth movement

<h1>An interim report from the House Oversight Committee paints a familiar picture of Trump associates skirting the law to curry favor with people who can make them richer. This time, the dealing doesn’t involve Russians but Saudis, and it is not about a lavish tower in Moscow but the sale of nuclear power reactors.</h1>

Negotiations were conducted by people who would stand to gain millions, in apparent disregard of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which sets out explicit procedures and criteria for nuclear cooperation agreements and is intended to thwart proliferation of atomic weapons. Their conflicts of interest “could implicate federal criminal statutes,” according to the report.

By ramming through the sale of as much as $80 billion in nuclear power plants, the Trump administration would provide sensitive know-how and materials to a government whose de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has suggested that he may eventually want a nuclear weapon as a hedge against Iran and has shown little concern for what the rest of the world thinks.

The report also warned, “Within the United States, strong private commercial interests have been pressing aggressively for the transfer of highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia — a potential risk to U.S. national security absent adequate safeguards.”

It has been known for some time that the administration has been discussing a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia. But it took Democratic control of the House, and the committee, to shine a light on these dark dealings in the report, which draws on claims by multiple whistleblowers and documents.

The Saudis began dangling visions of billion-dollar deals soon after President Donald Trump was elected. In January 2017, IP3 International, a private company that has assembled a consortium of American companies to build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia, wrote Prince Mohammed, proposing a “Marshall Plan for the Middle East.”

At the center were Michael Flynn, an adviser to IP3 who continued to push for the nuclear plan after becoming Trump’s first national security adviser, and Thomas Barrack, the president’s billionaire investor friend who last week defended Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, saying the United States has committed “equal or worse” atrocities.

Flynn is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his talks with the Russian ambassador about sanctions relief and his work for the Turkish government. Barrack was chairman of the president’s inaugural committee, which is now under investigation.

Barrack told ProPublica in 2017, while these negotiations were going on, that he was considering investing in Westinghouse, the bankrupt maker of nuclear reactors. The company was later acquired by a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, around the time that firm bailed out the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and Middle East policy adviser, from a bad investment in a Manhattan office tower.

IP3 officials sent documents to Flynn for Trump to approve, before and after the inauguration, despite warnings by career and political staff members that the White House was ignoring laws requiring the president to keep lawmakers abreast of negotiations on nuclear cooperation agreements and submit the agreements to Congress for review and approval, according to the report.

Early in 2017, legal advisers for the National Security Council agreed that Flynn had a potential conflict of interest. But despite at least two warnings — by the legal advisers and by H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s successor as national security adviser — that the NSC staff stop work on the plan, the White House has continued to pursue it with Barrack as the designated point man. Trump reportedly met with nuclear power developers as recently as Feb. 12.

The United States has long been a leader in nuclear technology, the sale of which is governed by bilateral pacts, called “123 agreements,” which require adherence to nine nonproliferation criteria. Some 21 countries, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency have these agreements.

The criteria include guarantees that none of the nuclear materials provided by the United States will be used for explosives, that none of the technology or classified data will be transferred to third parties without U.S. consent, and that the other country involved in the agreement will not enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium, which could be a pathway to a nuclear bomb.

The requirements are intended to prevent another country from gaining nuclear weapons. The Saudis say they want the technology only to produce nuclear power for domestic purposes and thus prolong their oil reserves, not to acquire a weapons capability.

But it’s hard to trust such assurances, given Saudi animosity toward Iran and Prince Mohammed’s 2018 comment, “Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

Although Iran never produced a nuclear weapon, it had a robust nuclear program until it agreed to an international deal in 2015 that curbed its activities. The deal, opposed by the Saudis, is now hanging by a thread because Trump abrogated America’s commitment.

Efforts by the Obama administration to negotiate a nuclear cooperation agreement faltered over the Saudis’ refusal to make a legally binding commitment to forgo uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing. It’s no surprise that the Saudis would prefer to negotiate over nuclear technology with Trump, who seems to care far more about profits than about halting the spread of nuclear weapons.

Congressional disaffection with Saudi Arabia was already rising over the Yemen war and the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The House Oversight Committee’s investigation is a stark warning that there is even greater reason for concern and for congressional efforts to put stricter controls in place.

This article originally appeared in <a id="74179272-7aa5-4b35-b061-02b8b2f2d43b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/opinion/trump-saudi-arabia-nuclear-technology.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorials of The Times: Trump's idea of a Middle East nuclear deal

Negotiations were conducted by people who would stand to gain millions, in apparent disregard of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

<h1>The chaos of a British exit from the European Union without a deal has been often foretold, and in frightening detail — goods stranded for weeks, shortages of medicines, flight of businesses and jobs. The deadline, 11 p.m. London time on March 29, is so close that the civil service has begun advertising for applicants to an “EU Exit Emergencies Centre.” Yet Prime Minister Theresa May and her Parliament seem capable only of futile votes whose main effect is to harden positions and bring the precipice closer.</h1>

The votes themselves are often on matters that are symbolic at best — the last, on Thursday, was a nonbinding motion to support May’s battered strategy. Her humiliating loss by a 303-258 vote was another example of the prime minister’s inability to overcome a deep rift within her own party, much less the partisan divisions in Parliament, since the resounding defeat of her Brexit plan last month.

Yet with every lost vote, her authority — and the European Union’s faith in her ability to get any deal through Parliament — is further diminished. Still, she remains at 10 Downing Street, the nominal head of a bitterly divided party loath to risk an election it could lose to Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, an old-fashioned left-winger whose own party is divided over Brexit.

What is alarming in this whirlpool of conflicting schemes and fears is the evident sentiment among hard-core Brexiteers that a no-deal exit is not only feasible, but perhaps desirable as a way for Britain to dramatically reaffirm its sovereignty. Their contempt for the chorus of warnings from businesses was best expressed by Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary, when he was overheard last June to dismiss such concerns with an expletive. The hard-core Conservative camp has voted against any attempt to legislate a rejection of a no-deal exit.

Also striking in the debates is lack of recognition that the EU, which has a major say in how Britain is released from complex legal and economic bonds formed over more than four decades, must agree to any deal. The bloc has steadfastly insisted that the agreement reached with May’s government, and rejected by the British Parliament, is not open to substantive change.

European leaders have become increasingly unbuttoned in their frustrations with the British, most notably Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, who openly mused at a news conference, “I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.” Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, was equally blunt in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País when he warned Britain that outside the European Union, it would be “a middling economy stuck in the Atlantic Ocean.”

May’s next confrontation with Parliament is set for the end of the month, when she must report on what progress she has made with the European Union, which is likely to be none. Following that, the Parliament may vote to take the management of the Brexit process away from her. May’s last move may be to wait until the last minute and confront the Parliament with a choice between her negotiated deal and a long extension of the Brexit deadline. That, at least, is what her chief Brexit negotiator, Olly Robbins, was overheard telling colleagues in a Brussels bar.

The way the process has been going, counting on a reasonable vote at the last minute is seriously tempting disaster. There are several sites already displaying a countdown to Brexit, and their message seems to be that the eleventh hour has struck, and getting an extension now might not be the worst idea.

This article originally appeared in <a id="57adbf8a-1f53-4dff-8903-100364c7c0d4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/opinion/brexit-theresa-may.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorials of The Times: What's the Brexit plan? There is none

The votes themselves are often on matters that are symbolic at best — the last, on Thursday, was a nonbinding motion to support May’s battered strategy.

<h1>Last Valentine’s Day, a year ago this Thursday, classes were wrapping up at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a former student with a semi-automatic rifle murdered 17 people and wounded 17 others.</h1>

It so happens that this Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will move to advance legislation requiring background checks on all firearm sales. The killer in the Parkland, Florida, school massacre passed such a check, but this measure would close a loophole exploited by other killers that exempts unlicensed gun sellers from conducting background checks. Support for such a change is overwhelmingly popular, even among gun owners. The bill has an excellent chance of passing the Democrat-led House. Its prospects in the Senate, controlled by Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are bleak.

Even so, the very emergence of this bill is a reminder of how the gun debate has shifted since President Donald Trump took office — and not in a direction that Second Amendment crusaders might have hoped. Politically, financially and legally, the gun-rights cause and, more specifically, the lobbying juggernaut that is the National Rifle Association have not fared well in the Trump era. If this trend continues — or accelerates — it could wind up being a rare silver lining to Trump’s presidency.

Some of the challenges facing the gun lobby are not specific to Trump. A gun-loving president always makes a less effective boogeyman than a gun-skeptical one. In that way, President Barack Obama was good for the gun-rights cause — and it was perhaps inevitable that, having labored to get Trump elected, the NRA’s fundraising would taper off. In 2017, the group’s revenues dropped by $55 million, or 15 percent, over its 2016 haul, driven largely by a decline in member dues. Combined with its heavy spending in the 2016 campaign, the group now finds itself in a deep financial hole, in debt to the tune of $31.8 million.

The NRA has suffered Trump-specific turmoil as well. As part of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, special counsel Robert Mueller has been exploring possible ties between the NRA and Russia. Among Mueller’s top concerns is reportedly whether Russian interests funneled money to the Trump campaign via the NRA — and, if so, to what degree the group’s leaders may have known what was happening.

In addition to Mueller’s interest in the NRA, there have been multiple congressional inquiries into a possible love triangle among the gun group, Team Trump and Russia. With Democrats now in charge of the House, expect the scrutiny to get more intense. Rep. Adam Schiff, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, has said that under Republican leadership the committee did not delve deeply enough into the muck. “We were really not able to determine how the Russians used the NRA as a back channel or look into allegations that the Russians may have funneled money through the NRA to influence the election,” Schiff recently told The New York Times. “Those issues remain of deep interest to us.”

Beyond any legal missteps that may be uncovered, revelations that the NRA was snuggling up to Russian officials and intimates of President Vladimir Putin already have proved a public-relations nightmare. Particularly embarrassing is the bizarre case of Maria Butina, the Russian graduate student who pleaded guilty in December to working as a foreign agent and who conspired to infiltrate the NRA and the Republican Party in order to help Russia influence American politics.

While the Russia-NRA bonds were years in the making, Americans can thank Trump for the intense spotlight on this unwholesome relationship.

Last year, for the first time in nearly two decades, polling indicated that more Americans held a negative view than a positive view of the NRA. There has also been an upswing in support for stricter gun laws.

Despite the will of the people, the Republican-controlled Congress clung to its do-nothing approach after the Parkland shooting and others like it. At the state level, however, there has been action. The private sector also got involved. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart both halted the sale of assault-style weapons in their stores, along with the sale of guns and ammunition to customers under age 21. Companies ranging from MetLife to Delta to Alamo Rent A Car did away with discounts for NRA members.

The political world has sensed this shift in the wind. Of late, more lawmakers have seemed willing to boast about their poor ratings by the gun lobby. The 2018 elections were the first in which spending for gun-safety advertising exceeded that for guns-rights ads, and candidates backed by gun-safety groups enjoyed important victories.

Not all of the change can be directly attributable to Trump, of course. But, much as women’s frustration over his presidency helped drive the #MeToo movement, his administration has energized gun-safety advocates, who have put the gun lobby and its cause on the defensive.

This won’t yield an imminent revolution on regulating firearms, especially within the overly cautious halls of Congress. The NRA remains a political powerhouse, an increasingly conservative Republican Party still controls the White House and the Senate, and guns remain a centerpiece of the culture war.

But with a topic this polarizing, small steps deserve to be applauded — and encouraged. When lawmakers held a hearing on the background-check bill last week, it was the first hearing in eight years to broach the subject of gun violence.

With a little luck and some political spine, more such actions will follow. The victims and survivors of Parkland, and of the 339 other mass shootings in 2018 alone, deserve more than pious sentiment and political cowardice.

This article originally appeared in <a id="77d0a188-472b-4ec5-a296-9709829946f6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/opinion/trump-nra-parkland.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorial of The Times: How Trump has hurt the gun lobby

It so happens that this Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee will move to advance legislation requiring background checks on all firearm sales.

<h1>Before the fear of being blown up on a plane, or a train, or a sidewalk gave millions of people sleepless nights, before the threat of global climate disaster stirred dread, nuclear annihilation was the stuff of nightmares.</h1>

By the mid-1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union had amassed 63,000 nuclear weapons, with the promise of mutually assured destruction if even one were ever used, even accidentally.

Then, after years of global protests and skyrocketing budgets, American and Soviet leaders stepped back from the brink and began a process of arms control diplomacy, accelerated by the fall of the Soviet Union, that shrank those arsenals by nearly 90 percent. For decades, that process and that diplomacy continued … until now.

President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who control 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, are preparing to abandon the 1987 treaty that eliminated ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 310 miles to 3,100 miles. They have yet to begin serious talks on extending a 2010 treaty that reduced the nuclear warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles and other strategic systems, and the Americans, in particular, don’t appear to have any interest in doing so. Washington and Moscow are also modernizing old weapons systems and building new ones, at a cost of $494 billion over the next decade in the United States alone.

At the same time, Pakistan, India and North Korea are expanding their arsenals as the international consensus for nonproliferation erodes.

Experts with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who evaluate the nuclear threat, last month judged the current state of affairs to be “as worrisome as the most dangerous times of the Cold War.”

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which eliminated 2,692 ground-based missiles, is part of a web of arms control agreements that have managed the threat. Trump is right to blame the Russians for beginning to unravel the INF treaty during the Obama administration by testing and then deploying a cruise missile banned by the treaty.

But he was wrong to assert in his State of the Union address that he had “no choice” other than to withdraw from the treaty, a move that takes effect in August.

His threat to “outspend and out-innovate all others by far” in the production of weapons of mass destruction was chilling, particularly given Putin’s vow of a “symmetrical” response.

“If our American partners suspend their participation in the INF treaty, so will we,” he said Feb. 2. “And if they start working on new weapons, so will we.”

It’s unlikely the treaty will be revived, given the deterioration of Russian-American relations, despite Trump’s promises of warmer ties and a coziness that has drawn the scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller.

The pact’s imminent collapse has intensified concerns that the United States and Russia will let the 2010 New START agreement, with its caps on deployed nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles and heavy bombers, as well as requirements for verification and data exchanges, expire in 2021. (START stands for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.) Absent an extension or a new treaty, the nuclear arsenals will become unregulated — meaning there will be no legally binding, verifiable limits on the American or Russian nuclear arsenals — for the first time since 1972.

Adding to the uncertainty, Putin has warned that Russia is developing new “invincible” hypersonic missiles that will travel at more than five times the speed of sound.

The United States, meanwhile, is developing a new conventionally armed intermediate-range missile that could one day be deployed in Europe. By the end of the year, Washington may be ready to field a low-yield nuclear weapon that could make it easier to use nuclear weapons without courting Armageddon.

Last month, Trump threatened to unsettle the nuclear landscape even further by promising to reinvent American missile defenses, a quixotic vision reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s unfulfilled “Star Wars” program.

Reagan appreciated the dangers of nuclear war and the value of negotiated agreements that could reduce weapons. The New START numbers can go even lower. It has been over seven years since the two powers held serious nuclear arms reductions talks. The United States, its allies, even the Russians will be less safe if that process atrophies.

With Democrats now in control of the House, the new chairman of its Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, plans to hold what could be the most fundamental public examination of American nuclear doctrine in decades.

If Trump continues to push for an expanded nuclear arsenal and abandons the strategic arms accord, Congress should freeze the nuclear modernization budget and block funding for new weapons.

The commitment to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the aging nuclear arsenal was part of the Faustian bargain President Barack Obama made with Senate Republicans to win support for the New START pact. He did so with the hope that it would help lead, eventually, to a world with no nuclear weapons.

Outspending Russia on a nuclear arms race, as Trump has bragged he would do, or abandoning an arms control regime that has helped forestall nuclear war for decades, is a foolish game of chicken, with no possible winners.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b0a1807a-7193-484f-bb9c-26f9e5b15808" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/opinion/trump-putin-inf-treaty.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorial of The Times: No winner in a new arms race

By the mid-1980s, the United States and the Soviet Union had amassed 63,000 nuclear weapons, with the promise of mutually assured destruction if even one were ever used, even accidentally.

<h1>After the catastrophic rupture of a mine-tailings dam in Brazil this past week, leaving behind at least 110 dead, 238 missing and an environmental disaster of epic proportions, the police were quick to arrest five people who had been responsible for inspecting the dam and who most recently proclaimed it “stable.” </h1>

Certainly they had erred, and courts will decide whether they did so criminally. But rounding up the usual suspects does not begin to address responsibility for a disaster of this scale and a danger many mining communities face around the world.

Tailings are the wet waste from mining operations, often laced with toxic chemicals. At thousands of mines around the world, millions of tons of the muck accumulate behind dams. The most common type of dam — and the cheapest to build — is known as “upstream,” made by piling up thick sludge and raising the height of the dam as the pond grows. At the mine where the incident occurred in southeastern Brazil, owned by the giant mining company Vale, the dam was 28 stories high.

The danger posed by tailings dams is well known. Three years ago, another upstream dam in the same Brazilian state, Minas Gerais, and co-owned by Vale and Australia’s BHP Group, collapsed, killing 19 people. The muck from that mine flowed 400 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. Other dams have collapsed in many countries around the world, and while the overall number of failures each year has been declining, the occurrence of major collapses has increased. According to the database World Mine Tailings Failures, there were 46 “serious” or “very serious” collapses — such as those in Brazil — between 1998 and 2017.

One reason is increased rainfall because of climate change, which can erode a dam wall years after the tailings pool is no longer in use. One study found that heavy rain was cited as a contributor to a quarter of global dam failures. Given that there are thousands of tailings dams around the world, and that mining companies generate ever more waste — they produced 8.5 billion metric tons in 2017, more than double the amount in 2000, according to an Australian researcher — the dams pose a danger that arresting a few workers won’t address.

The cost of failures is high, as Vale is learning. Shares in the company plunged 24 percent on the Monday after the Friday incident, and Vale is likely to face billions of dollars in penalties. That cost alone should propel Vale and the rest of the mining industry to take an immediate look at the way that they dispose of mining sludge and to inspect their dams. A joint report in November 2017 by the U.N. Environment Program and the Norwegian foundation GRID-Arendal found that in most failures, there had been ample advance warning signs. “The tragedy is that the warning signs were either ignored or not recognized by under-resourced management,” the report said.

After the 2015 incident in the state of Minas Gerais, state and federal investigators urged hiring more dam inspectors. But the federal government slashed budgets, in effect leaving Vale and other companies to do their own monitoring. It’s far from certain that the government will do better this time: Brazil’s new right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, has already hobbled environmental regulators, and his infrastructure minister has warned against the “demonization” of Vale.

Vale, by contrast, has been quick to pledge changes. Fabio Schvartsman, its chief executive, said Tuesday that the company had decided to stop operations at mines where another 10 upstream dams were still in use until all were fully decommissioned, a process likely to take one to three years. The dam that burst last week had been out of use for 2-1/2 years, he said, and was in the process of being decommissioned.

The global mining industry should take heed. It is clear that the industry needs to take a close look at upstream dams, to establish strict international standards for the way they are built and inspected, and to study alternative ways to dispose of their wastes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="36f6d05a-d0d7-4636-addf-e6dd07728ce1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opinion/brazil-dam-break-environment-bolsonaro.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorials of The Times: Brazil's lethal environmental negligence

Tailings are the wet waste from mining operations, often laced with toxic chemicals. At thousands of mines around the world, millions of tons of the muck accumulate behind dams.

<h1>This year’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” — compiled by the country’s 17 intelligence agencies — is lengthy and growing: terrorism, climate change, hostile foreign powers, rising nationalism, illegal drugs, cyberattacks and organized crime. Those threats will “expand and diversify” in 2019, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at a hearing on Tuesday.</h1>

Many critics were quick to note where the consensus judgments of the intelligence community differed with the statements and policies of the Trump administration.

No, North Korea is not going to give up its nuclear weapons program, as the administration has promised. “Its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival,” Coats said.

No, Iran is not close to building a nuclear weapon or trying to, as the White House has asserted. “We continue to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device,” the report says.

Yes, the assessment notes, climate change is real and a global security problem: “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” President Donald Trump on Monday tweeted his mocking of the idea that the climate is changing.

The Islamic State, which Trump has described as “largely defeated,” is both large and not defeated. The group “still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria, and it maintains eight branches, more than a dozen networks and thousands of dispersed supporters around the world, despite significant leadership and territorial losses,” the report says.

And while Trump and his populist fellow travelers may cheer chaos in the European Union, Brexit and the rise of nationalism across Europe, the report notes that those are also all major objectives of Russian foreign policy.

“The Kremlin is stepping up its campaign to divide Western political and security institutions and undermine the post-Word War II international order,” Coats said. “We expect Russia will continue to wage its information war against democracies and to use social media to attempt to divide our societies.”

But the report also makes a reasoned assessment of some of the issues that Trump has focused on in his public statements.

China is stealing trade secrets, spying and expanding its military and economic reach. From building islands in the South China Sea to working more closely with Russia than at any time since the mid-1950s, China has a “long-term strategy to achieve global superiority,” said Coats.

The Iranian government is not building a nuclear weapon, but its destabilizing regional influence is a threat to American interests, the report concludes, saying, “Iran almost certainly will continue to develop and maintain terrorist capabilities as an option to deter or retaliate against its perceived adversaries.”

While the report doesn’t explicitly mention the security of the U.S. southern border — or the wall whose funding Trump closed down the federal government over — it did say that instability in South and Central America is concerning: “Flagging economies, migration flows, corruption, narcotics trafficking and anti-U.S. autocrats will present continuing challenges to U.S. interests, as U.S. adversaries and strategic competitors seek greater influence in the region.”

The scope and severity of the parade of horribles in the assessment — even space weapons — reflect a world order that may be strained to the point of fracture. From cyberspace to pandemic diseases, the biggest challenge facing leaders in Washington isn’t identifying threats to the homeland. “It is increasingly a challenge to prioritize which threats are of greatest importance,” Coats told lawmakers.

How the country responds to threats to national security is as important as picking which to focus on. When it comes to foreign meddling in democratic elections — a top priority for the intelligence community — the initial signs are not encouraging.

“Russia’s social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities,” the report warns.

But, as Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, pointed out during the hearing, foreign nations exploit America’s divisions, they don’t create them. “When a divisive issue like the ‘take a knee’ NFL controversy or a migrant caravan dominates the national dialogue, these are issues that can be — and are — taken advantage of by Russian trolls. Let’s not make their work easier.”

It’s tempting to see the report as simply a scorecard on the president’s own threat assessments. With such a wide range of risk, what matters most is that the nation grapples with the problems as they are, rather than how it imagines them to be.

This article originally appeared in <a id="14f9d9a0-6f2e-4c75-8679-da01b2ecd2b3" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/opinion/senate-intelligence-hearing.html">The New York Times</a>.

Editorials of The Times: What keeps the spies up at night

Many critics were quick to note where the consensus judgments of the intelligence community differed with the statements and policies of the Trump administration.

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