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    Satellite Images Reveal Where Russian Nuclear Weapons Could Be Stored in Belarus

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    A New York Times analysis shows security upgrades unique to Russian nuclear storage facilities, at a Cold War-era munitions depot.The New York Times, Source: Maxar TechnologiesA newly added air defense system.A distinctive security checkpoint.And a triple fence around a bunker.These new security features and other upgrades at a munitions depot in central Belarus reveal that Russia is building facilities there that could house nuclear warheads. If Russia does move weapons to this location, it would mark the first time it has stored them outside the country since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.Russia already has nuclear warheads on its own soil that are close to Ukraine and NATO countries, but by basing some in Belarus, the Kremlin appears to be trying to accentuate its nuclear threat and bolster its nuclear deterrent.Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, made reference to such a site early last year, saying Russia would soon be completing the construction of “special storage for tactical nuclear weapons” in Belarus.The New York Times analyzed satellite imagery and photos, and spoke with nuclear weapons and arms control experts, to track the new construction, which started in March 2023.The site is 120 miles north of the Ukrainian border at a military depot next to the town of Asipovichy. Some of the recently built structures there have features that are unique to nuclear storage facilities at bases inside Russia. For example, a new, highly secure area is surrounded by three layers of fencing, in addition to the existing security perimeter of the entire base. Another telltale sign is a covered loading area connected to what appears to be a concealed Soviet-era underground bunker.The New York Times, Source: Maxar Technologies More

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      The Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking

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      Year
      Minutes to Midnight

      2023
      1.5

      2020
      1.67

      2018
      2

      2017
      2.5

      2015
      3

      2012
      5

      2010
      6

      2007
      5

      2002
      7

      1998
      9

      1995
      14

      1991
      17

      1990
      10

      1988
      6

      1984
      3

      1981
      4

      1980
      7

      1974
      9

      1972
      12

      1969
      10

      1968
      7

      1963
      12

      1960
      7

      1953
      2

      1949
      3

      1947
      7

      The Bomb and I go way back. In Seattle, where I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, it was common wisdom that in the event of nuclear war, we were No. 2 on the target list because Seattle was the home of Boeing, maker of B-52 bombers and Minuteman missiles.In school we had various drills for various catastrophes, and we had to remember which was which. Earthquake? Run outside. The Bomb? Run inside, to an inner corridor that had no windows. In the summer, my high-school friends and I would disappear for a couple of weeks into the backcountry of the Cascades or the Olympic Mountains. I always wondered whether we would emerge to find the world in ashes.Once, in Santa Monica in 1971, I thought it was finally happening. I woke up on the floor, having been bounced out of my bed early one February morning. There was a huge roar. Everything was shaking. I crept to my one window and pulled aside the curtain, expecting to see a mushroom cloud rising over the Los Angeles basin. I saw nothing. When the radio came back, I learned there had been a deadly earthquake in the San Fernando Valley.I was sent on this trip down memory lane by the announcement on Jan. 23 from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that it had decided not to change the setting of the Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical timepiece invented in 1947 as a way to dramatize the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The clock was originally designed with a 15-minute range, counting down to midnight — the stroke of doom — and the Bulletin’s members move it from time to time in response to current events, which now include threats like climate change and pandemics.In a burst of optimism in 1991, after the Soviet Union broke up and the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, the clock was turned way back to 17 minutes to midnight. “The Cold War is over,” the Bulletin’s editors wrote. “The 40-year-long East-West nuclear arms race has ended.”A year ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine and brandished the threat of using nuclear weapons, the clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has yet come to The End. The threat of nuclear weapons in Ukraine has diminished since then, but the clock remains poised at 90 seconds before zero.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nuclear Missile Remnants Found in a Garage

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      The police responded to a call from a U.S. Air Force museum that said a man had offered to donate a Cold War-era missile stored in his late neighbor’s garage.Garages are often cluttered with dusty boxes of heirlooms, untouched gym equipment or a multitude of tools.But how about a piece of a Cold War-era nuclear missile?Members of the bomb squad in Bellevue, Wash., on Thursday were called to inspect parts of a military-grade missile in the garage of a resident.Elements of the larger, intact missile, such as the warhead, were missing and the authorities deemed the piece to be inert and safe, the police said in a news release on Friday.An Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio, contacted the police in Bellevue on Jan. 31 to report that a resident had offered to donate the missile, which belonged to his late neighbor.The resident had been put in charge of his neighbor’s estate, according to the Bellevue police, and said that his neighbor had originally purchased the missile from an estate sale.The police were unable to contact any of the neighbor’s family, and did not identify the Bellevue man out of respect for his privacy, said Officer Seth Tyler, a Bellevue Police Department spokesman.The next day, the man was “surprised” to hear from the police because he had not called them but invited the bomb squad to inspect the missile remnant, Officer Tyler said.Squad members identified the rocket as a Douglas AIR-2 Genie missile, designed to carry a 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead.First put into operation in 1957, the Genie was the world’s first nuclear-armed rocket designed to destroy aircraft targets, and was the most powerful interceptor missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force, according to Boeing.In 1954, Douglas Aircraft began work on “a small unguided nuclear-armed air-to-air missile,” according to Boeing. Douglas Aircraft built more than 1,000 Genie rockets before discontinuing production in 1962.It was clear that the missile remnant did not pose a threat given that it was missing its warhead and did not contain rocket fuel, Officer Tyler said.“It was essentially just a rusted piece of metal at that point,” he said. “An artifact, in other words.”Because the military did not request it back, the police left it with the man to donate.It was not immediately clear whether the missile remnant would be destined for the museum in Ohio, and efforts to reach the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton on Sunday were unsuccessful.Given Bellevue’s proximity to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a large military base, Officer Tyler said it was not unusual for the police to respond to calls about hand grenades or other unexploded ordnance.But a missile from the Cold War would be a first, said Officer Tyler, who has worked for the department for 18 years. The department also seemed to believe it would be the last, referring to Elton John’s classic song “Rocket Man” in a social media post.“And we think it’s gonna be a long, long time before we get another call like this again,” the Bellevue police said. More

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      Can Liberalism Save Itself?

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      Liberalism is under siege. It is not just a problem for America’s Democratic Party, which once again may face either losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory with a bare majority. Around the world, the entire outlook of political liberalism — with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law — is widely seen to be in trouble.It wasn’t long ago that liberals were proclaiming the “end of history” after their Cold War victory. But for years liberalism has felt perpetually on the brink: challenged by the rise of an authoritarian China, the success of far-right populists and a sense of blockage and stagnation.Why do liberals find themselves in this position so routinely? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind. It was in that era when liberals reinvented their ideology, which traces its roots to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — and reinvented it for the worse. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied by the continuity of liberal government and the management of threats that might disrupt it, the same preoccupations liberals have today. To save themselves, they need to undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their creed.Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His administration capped more than a century in which liberalism had been promising to unshackle humanity after millenniums of hierarchy — dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and breaking down barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all of these achievements were haunted by racial disparities. At its most visionary, liberalism implied that government’s duty was to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.Yet just a few years later, Cold War liberalism emerged as a rejection of the optimism that flourished before the mid-20th century’s crises. Having witnessed the agonizing destruction of Germany’s brief interwar experiment with democracy, liberals saw their Communist ally in that battle against fascism converted into a fearful enemy. They responded by reconceptualizing liberalism. Philosophers like the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin emphasized the concept of individual liberty, which was defined as the absence of interference, especially from the state. Gone was the belief that freedom is guaranteed by institutions that empower humanity. Instead of committing to make freedom more credible to more people — for example, by promising a bright future of their own — these liberals prioritized a fight against mortal enemies who might crash the system.This was a liberalism of fear, as another Cold War liberal intellectual, the Harvard professor Judith Shklar, said. In a way, fear was understandable: Liberalism had enemies. In the late 1940s, the Communists took over China, while Eastern Europe fell behind an Iron Curtain. But reorienting liberalism toward the preservation of liberty incurred its own risks. Anyone hostage to fear is likely to exaggerate how dangerous his foes actually are, to overreact to the looming threat they pose and to forsake better choices than fighting. (Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who signed up to beat the Nazis only to see paranoia spoil the country he volunteered to save.)During the Cold War, concern for liberty from tyranny and self-defense against enemies sometimes led not just to the loss of the very freedom liberals were supposed to care about at home, it also prompted violent reigns of terror abroad as liberals backed authoritarians or went to war in the name of fighting Communism. Millions died in the killing fields of this brutal global conflict, many of them at the hands of America and its proxies fighting in the name of “freedom.”Frustratingly, the Soviet Union was making the kinds of promises about freedom and progress that liberals once thought belonged to them. After all, in the 19th century liberals had overthrown aristocrats and kings and promised a world of freedom and equality in their stead. Liberals like the French politician and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, though concerned about possible excesses of government, imagined democracy as a form of politics that offered startling new opportunities for equal citizenship. And while such liberals placed too much faith in markets both to emancipate and to equalize, they eventually struggled to correct this mistake. Liberals like the English philosopher John Stuart Mill helped invent socialism, too.The Cold War changed all that. It wasn’t just that socialism became a liberal swear word for decades (at least before Senator Bernie Sanders helped revive it). Liberals concluded that the ideological passions that led millions around the world to Communism meant that they should refrain from promising emancipation themselves. “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” the Columbia professor and Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling explained.The Cold War transformation of liberalism wouldn’t matter so profoundly now if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their creed in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to disregard their own mistakes, in spite of the long-run consequences in our time. Instead, liberals doubled down. After several decades of endless wars against successor enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals have been shocked by blowback. History didn’t end; in fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in backsliding new democracies and in the United States now find it wanting.A great referendum on liberalism kicked off in 2016, after Mr. Trump’s blindsiding election victory. In books like Patrick Deneen’s best-selling “Why Liberalism Failed,” there was an up-or-down vote on the liberalism of the entire modern age, which Mr. Deneen traced back centuries. In frantic self-defense, liberals responded by invoking abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy” and “truth,” to which the sole alternative is tyranny, while distracting from their own errors and what it would take to correct them. Both sides failed to recognize that, like all traditions, liberalism is not take it or leave it. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; liberals can revive their philosophy’s promises only by recommitting to its earlier impulses.Is that likely? Under President Biden’s watch, China and Eastern Europe — the same places where events shocked Cold War liberals into their stance in the first place — have attracted a Cold War posture. Under Mr. Biden, as under Mr. Trump before him, the rhetoric out of Washington increasingly treats China as a civilizational threat. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has once again made Eastern Europe a site of struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Some like to claim that the war in Ukraine has reminded liberals of their true purpose.But look closer to home and that seems more dubious. Mr. Trump is the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee (if not the potential winner of the election). Yet liberals seem to be betting their success less on a positive vision for America’s future and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation. Even if one of Mr. Trump’s many prosecutors manages to convict him, this will not rescue American liberalism. The challenge cuts deeper than eliminating the current enemy in the name of our democracy if it is not reimagined.Since his election in 2020, Mr. Biden has been championed by some pundits — and by his administration itself — as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt warned that “too many of those who prate about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things as they were. Democracy should concern itself also with things as they ought to be.”Mr. Biden, despite an ambitious agenda of so-called supply-side liberalism, doesn’t seem to have internalized the message. And for their part, voters do not yet seem fully convinced. A liberalism that survives must resonate with voters who want something to believe in. And liberalism once had it, revolving not around fear of enemies but hope in institutions that lead to what Mill called “experiments in living.” He meant that people everywhere would get the chance from society to choose something new to try in their short time. If their hands are forced — especially by a coercive and unequal economic system — they will lose what is most important, which is the chance to make themselves and the world more interesting.If there is any silver lining in the next phase of American politics, which Mr. Trump continues to define, it is that it provides yet another opportunity for liberals to reinvent themselves. If they double down instead on a stale Cold War ideology, as they did after 1989 and 2016, they will miss it. Only a liberalism that finally makes good on some of its promises of freedom and equality is likely to survive and thrive.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale and the author of the forthcoming book “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.” More

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      Why Joe Biden Needs a Primary Challenger in the 2024 Race

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      To understand why progressives should challenge Joe Biden in the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, remember what happened during the last one.When Bernie Sanders exited the 2020 race — after winning more than 1,000 delegates — he cashed in his votes for public policy clout. Mr. Sanders’s supporters joined Mr. Biden’s allies in working groups that crafted a common agenda on the economy, education, health care, criminal justice, immigration and climate change. From those task forces came what Barack Obama called “the most progressive platform of any major-party nominee in history.” And that progressivism continued into Mr. Biden’s presidency. One hundred days after he took office, The New York Times concluded that he had “moved leftward with his party, and early in his tenure is driving the biggest expansion of American government in decades.”By challenging him from the left, Mr. Sanders didn’t only change Mr. Biden’s candidacy. He also made him a better president. But only on domestic policy. There was no joint working group specifically devoted to foreign affairs — and it shows. With rare exceptions, Mr. Biden hasn’t challenged the hawkish conventional wisdom that permeates Washington; he’s embodied it. He’s largely ignored progressives, who, polls suggest, want a fundamentally different approach to the world. And he’ll keep ignoring them until a challenger turns progressive discontent into votes.Take China. America’s new cold war against Beijing may enjoy bipartisan support in Washington, but it doesn’t enjoy bipartisan support in the United States. According to an April Pew Research Center poll, only 27 percent of Democrats see China as an enemy — roughly half the figure among Republicans. In a December 2021 Chicago Council survey, two-thirds of Republicans — but less than four in 10 Democrats — described limiting China’s global influence as a very important foreign policy goal.Grass-roots Democratic voters dislike the government in Beijing. But they oppose a new cold war for two key reasons. First, their top foreign policy priorities — according to an April Morning Consult poll — are combating climate change and preventing another pandemic. Treating China as an enemy undermines both. Second, they oppose higher military spending, which a new cold war makes all but inevitable.But the Biden administration isn’t listening. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the administration’s China policy in a speech last May, it took him 38 minutes to even mention climate or public health. As the Brookings Institution detailed last November, the growing animosity between the United States and China “pushes solutions to global challenges such as climate change, pandemic crises and nuclear proliferation farther out of reach.”Mr. Biden isn’t listening to ordinary Democrats on military spending, either. In March, he proposed lavishing more on defense, adjusted for inflation, than the United States did at the height of the last Cold War.China is not the only place where Mr. Biden’s policies more closely resemble Donald Trump’s than those desired by his party’s base. Despite polls early in Mr. Biden’s presidency showing that almost three-quarters of Democrats wanted him to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal that Mr. Trump exited, Mr. Biden refused to sign an executive order doing that. He instead made additional demands on Tehran, which prompted negotiations that squandered the final months of President Hassan Rouhani’s relatively moderate government. By the summer of 2021, Iran had a hard-line president, which made reviving the deal nearly impossible. Now Tehran is on the verge of being able to build a nuclear bomb.A similar pattern characterizes Mr. Biden’s policy toward Cuba. When President Obama opened relations with the island, ordinary Democrats applauded. Then Mr. Trump reimposed sanctions, many of which Mr. Biden has kept. In so doing, according to Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Mr. Biden has chosen to “legitimize what Trump did by continuing it.”Mr. Biden has mimicked his predecessor on Israel, too. Mr. Trump closed America’s consulate in East Jerusalem, which served the largely Palestinian half of the city. It remains closed. Mr. Trump shuttered the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington, the closest thing that Palestinians had to an embassy. It’s still shut. And despite polls showing that more Democrats now sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel, the Biden administration will not even investigate whether Israel’s use of American weapons to abuse Palestinian human rights violates U.S. law.There are exceptions to this pattern. Grass-roots Democrats generally support the administration’s Ukraine policy, which has twinned support for Kyiv with efforts to avoid direct confrontation with Moscow. And Mr. Biden fulfilled a progressive demand by withdrawing troops from Afghanistan — although that commendable decision now looks less like an effort to restrain American militarism than to redirect it toward China.Overall, however, Mr. Biden’s foreign policy has been more hawkish than Mr. Obama’s, even as his domestic policy has been more progressive. Only a 2024 primary challenge offers any hope of changing that.Long before Bernie Sanders ran for president, progressives had a long history of using primary challenges to convey their frustration with Democratic Party elites. By winning 42 percent of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, Eugene McCarthy exposed dissatisfaction with Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. In 2004, Howard Dean did something similar when he almost upset a Democratic field composed largely of legislators who had voted to invade Iraq. And although they both lost, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Dean each laid the groundwork for antiwar candidates — George McGovern in 1972 and Barack Obama in 2008 — who won the Democratic nomination four years later.Foreign policy doesn’t motivate voters today in the way it did when American troops were dying in Vietnam and Iraq. But an outsider candidate need not do as well as Mr. McCarthy or Mr. Dean to show the Biden foreign policy team that it’s out of step with the party’s base.And that challenger would enjoy other advantages. Close to half of Democratic voters think Mr. Biden should not run again, which makes him vulnerable to a challenger who mobilizes ideological discontent. That doesn’t mean a challenger would undermine Mr. Biden’s chances in the general election. Democrats — including supporters of Mr. Sanders’s insurgency — turned out for him in November 2020 because they were terrified of a Republican in the White House. They remain terrified today. Given the disillusionment with American military intervention coursing through the Trump-era G.O.P., a less confrontational foreign policy might even attract some on the political right.A primary opponent would risk the Democratic establishment’s wrath. But he or she could put into circulation ideas that won’t otherwise get a hearing in official Washington: a joint U.S.-China initiative to support green energy in the developing world, a ban on U.S. policymakers cashing in with weapons makers and foreign governments once they leave office, the repeal of sanctions that immiserate ordinary people while entrenching rather than dislodging repressive regimes.Mr. Biden’s presidency has a split personality. On domestic policy, he’s been the most progressive president since Lyndon Johnson. But on Israel, Cuba and Iran, he’s continued some of Mr. Trump’s dumbest and cruelest policies. On China, he’s leading the United States into a cold war that imperils public health, ecological survival and global peace. Next year’s election offers the best chance to make him change course. But only if some enterprising progressive puts foreign policy on the ballot.Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also an editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Los aliados de EE. UU. impulsan el declive de la democracia en el mundo, afirma un nuevo estudio

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      Los países alineados con Washington retroceden casi el doble que los no aliados, según las cifras, lo que complica las viejas suposiciones sobre la influencia estadounidense en el establecimiento de modelos democráticos.Según un nuevo análisis, Estados Unidos y sus aliados representaron una parte considerablemente grande del retroceso democrático global experimentado en la última década.Los aliados de Estados Unidos siguen siendo, en promedio, más democráticos que el resto del mundo. Pero casi todos han sufrido algún grado de erosión democrática desde 2010, lo que significa que elementos centrales como elecciones justas o independencia judicial se han debilitado, y a un ritmo que supera con creces los declives promedio entre otros países.Con pocas excepciones, los países alineados con Estados Unidos no experimentaron casi ningún crecimiento democrático en ese periodo, aunque muchos de los que están lejos de la órbita de Washington sí lo hicieron.Los hallazgos son extraídos de los datos registrados por V-Dem, una organización sin fines de lucro con sede en Suecia que rastrea el nivel de democracia de los países a través de una serie de indicadores, y fueron analizados por The New York Times.Las revelaciones dejan en claro las penurias de la democracia, una tendencia característica de la era actual. Sugieren que gran parte del retroceso del mundo no es impuesto a las democracias por potencias extranjeras, sino que es una podredumbre que está creciendo dentro de la red más poderosa de alianzas mayoritariamente democráticas del mundo.En muchos casos, las democracias como Francia o Eslovenia vieron cómo se degradaron sus instituciones, aunque solo ligeramente, en medio de políticas de desconfianza y críticas adversas. En otros, dictaduras como la de Baréin restringieron libertades que de por sí no eran plenas. Pero con frecuencia, la tendencia fue impulsada por un giro hacia la democracia no liberal.En esa forma de gobierno, los líderes elegidos se comportan como caudillos y las instituciones políticas son más débiles, pero los derechos personales permanecen en su mayoría (excepto, casi siempre, para las minorías).De manera frecuente, los aliados de Estados Unidos lideraron esta tendencia. Turquía, Hungría, Israel y Filipinas son ejemplos de eso. Varias democracias más establecidas también han dado pasos pequeños en esa dirección, incluido Estados Unidos, donde los derechos electorales, la politización de los tribunales y otros factores son motivo de preocupación para muchos estudiosos de la democracia.Los hallazgos también socavaron las suposiciones estadounidenses, ampliamente compartidas por ambos partidos, de que Estados Unidos es, por naturaleza, una fuerza democratizadora en el mundo.Desde hace mucho tiempo, Washington se ha vendido como un defensor mundial de la democracia. La realidad siempre ha sido más complicada. Sin embargo, a través de los años, una cantidad suficiente de sus aliados se ha movido hacia ese sistema como para crear la impresión de que la influencia del país genera libertades al estilo estadounidense. Estas tendencias actuales sugieren que eso quizás ya no es cierto, si es que alguna vez lo fue.“Sería demasiado fácil afirmar que todo esto puede ser explicado por la existencia de Trump”, advirtió Seva Gunitsky, politólogo de la Universidad de Toronto que estudia cómo las grandes potencias influyen en las democracias. Los datos indican que la tendencia se aceleró durante la presidencia de Donald Trump, pero es anterior a ella.En cambio, los académicos afirman que lo más probable es que este cambio esté impulsado por fuerzas a más largo plazo. Por ejemplo, la disminución de la creencia en Estados Unidos como un modelo al cual aspirar; la disminución de la creencia en la propia democracia, cuya imagen se ha visto empañada por una serie de conmociones del siglo XXI; décadas de política estadounidense en la que solo se les dio prioridad a temas a corto plazo como el antiterrorismo; y un creciente entusiasmo por la política no liberal.Debido a que el mundo alineado con Estados Unidos lidera en la actualidad el declive de un sistema que alguna vez se comprometió a promover, “el consenso internacional sobre la democratización ha cambiado”, dijo Gunitsky.Reclusos en una cárcel superpoblada en 2016 en Ciudad Quezón, en Filipinas. El presidente Rodrigo Duterte supervisó una brutal represión contra los consumidores de drogas.Daniel Berehulak para The New York TimesUna crisis globalDesde el final de la Guerra Fría, los países alineados con Estados Unidos se habían movido muy lentamente hacia la democracia pero, hasta la década de 2010, la mayoría había evitado tener retrocesos.En la década de 1990, por ejemplo, 19 aliados se volvieron más democráticos, incluidos Turquía y Corea del Sur. Solo seis, como el caso de Jordania, se volvieron más autocráticos, pero todos por márgenes muy pequeños.Eso es lo que indica el índice de democracia liberal de V-Dem, que considera decenas de métricas en una puntuación de 0 a 1. Su metodología es transparente y se considera muy rigurosa. El índice de Corea del Sur, por ejemplo, aumentó de 0,517 a 0,768 en esa década, gracias a una transición a un gobierno civil pleno. La mayoría de los cambios son más pequeños y reflejan, por ejemplo, un avance gradual en la libertad de prensa o un ligero retroceso en la independencia judicial.Durante la década de 1990, Estados Unidos y sus aliados representaron el nueve por ciento de los incrementos generales en los puntajes de democracia en todo el mundo, según las cifras del índice. En otras palabras, fueron responsables del nueve por ciento del crecimiento democrático global. Esto es mejor de lo que suena: muchos ya eran altamente democráticos.También durante esa década, los países aliados solo representaron el cinco por ciento de las reducciones globales, es decir, retrocedieron muy poco.Esas cifras empeoraron un poco en la década de 2000. Luego, en la década de 2010, cayeron a niveles desastrosos. Estados Unidos y sus aliados representaron solo el cinco por ciento de los aumentos mundiales de la democracia. Pero un impactante 36 por ciento de los retrocesos ocurrieron en países alineados con Estados Unidos.En promedio, los países aliados vieron disminuir la calidad de sus democracias casi el doble que los no aliados, según las cifras de V-Dem.El análisis define “aliado” como un país con el que Estados Unidos tiene un compromiso formal o implícito de defensa mutua, de los cuales hay 41. Aunque el término “aliado” podría definirse de varias maneras, todas ellas arrojan resultados muy similares.Este cambio se produce en medio de un periodo de agitación para la democracia, que se está reduciendo en todo el mundo.Los datos contradicen las suposiciones de Washington de que esta tendencia está impulsada por Rusia y China, cuyos vecinos y socios han visto cambiar muy poco sus puntuaciones, o por Trump, que asumió el cargo cuando el cambio estaba muy avanzado.Más bien, el retroceso es endémico en las democracias emergentes e incluso en las establecidas, dijo Staffan I. Lindberg, un politólogo de la Universidad de Gotemburgo que ayuda a supervisar el índice V-Dem. Y estos países suelen estar alineados con Estados Unidos.Esto no significa que Washington sea exactamente la causa de su retracción, subrayó Lindberg. Pero tampoco es irrelevante.Una bandera estadounidense usada para una fotografía de los presidentes Joe Biden y Recep Tayyip Erdogan en la cumbre del Grupo de los 20 celebrada en Roma el mes pasado.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesLa influencia estadounidense, para bien o para malA pesar de décadas de narrativa de la Guerra Fría en la que se consideraba a las alianzas estadounidenses como una fuerza para la democratización, esto nunca ha sido realmente cierto, afirmó Thomas Carothers, quien estudia la promoción de la democracia en el Fondo Carnegie para la Paz Internacional.Si bien Washington alentó la democracia en Europa occidental como contrapeso ideológico de la Unión Soviética, suprimió su propagación en gran parte del resto del mundo.Estados Unidos apoyó o instaló dictadores, alentó la represión violenta de elementos de izquierda, y patrocinó grupos armados antidemocráticos. A menudo, esto se realizó en países aliados, con cooperación del gobierno local. Los soviéticos hicieron lo mismo.Como resultado, cuando terminó la Guerra Fría en 1989 y disminuyó la intromisión de las grandes potencias, las sociedades tuvieron más libertad para democratizarse, y así lo hicieron, en grandes cantidades.“Muchas personas alcanzaron la mayoría de edad en esos años y pensaron que eso era lo normal”, ya que confundieron la oleada de los años noventa como el estado natural de las cosas y como algo que había logrado Estados Unidos (debido a su hegemonía mundial), dijo Carothers.“Pero entonces llegó la guerra contra el terrorismo en 2001”, explicó, y Washington nuevamente presionó para establecer autócratas dóciles y frenos a la democratización, esta vez en sociedades donde el islam es predominante.El resultado han sido décadas de debilitamiento de los cimientos de la democracia en los países aliados. Al mismo tiempo, las presiones lideradas por Estados Unidos en favor de la democracia han comenzado a desvanecerse.“La hegemonía democrática es buena para la democratización, pero no a través de los mecanismos en los que la gente suele pensar, como la promoción de la democracia”, dijo Gunitsky, estudioso de la política de las grandes potencias.En vez de alianzas o presidentes que exijan a los dictadores que se liberalicen, ninguno de los cuales tiene un gran historial, dijo, “la influencia de Estados Unidos, donde es más fuerte, es una influencia indirecta, como un ejemplo a emular”.Su investigación ha descubierto que Estados Unidos estimula la democratización cuando los líderes de otros países, los ciudadanos o ambos ven que el gobierno de estilo estadounidense promete beneficios como la prosperidad o la libertad. Algunos pueden considerar que adoptarlo, aunque sea superficialmente, es una forma de ganarse el apoyo estadounidense.Sin embargo, las impresiones de la democracia estadounidense, que solían ser positivas, se han ido deteriorando rápidamente.“Muy pocos de los encuestados piensan que la democracia estadounidense es un buen ejemplo a seguir para otros países”, reveló un estudio reciente del Centro de Investigaciones Pew. En promedio, solo el 17 por ciento de las personas en los países encuestados dijo que la democracia en Estados Unidos era digna de ser emulada, mientras que el 23 por ciento afirmó que nunca había sido un buen ejemplo.Es posible que la prosperidad estadounidense ya no parezca tan atractiva, debido a problemas cada vez mayores como la desigualdad, así como el surgimiento de China como modelo económico alternativo.Además, el conocimiento de los problemas internos de Estados Unidos —tiroteos masivos, polarización, injusticia racial— ha afectado enormemente las percepciones.Podría ser más acertado pensar que la situación actual se debe más al surgimiento de la democracia no liberal como modelo alternativo. Ese sistema parece ser cada vez más popular, mientras que ya no lo es tanto la democracia más plena, con sus protecciones para las minorías y su dependencia de las instituciones establecidas.Pero incluso las personas que quieren una democracia no liberal para su país tienden a considerarla poco atractiva en otros, gracias a sus tendencias nacionalistas. A medida que se degradan las opiniones sobre la democracia estadounidense como modelo global, también lo hace la propia democracia.“Gran parte del atractivo de la democracia en todo el mundo está vinculado al atractivo de Estados Unidos como modelo de régimen”, dijo Gunitsky. “Cuando una de esas cosas decae, hará decaer la otra”.Max Fisher es reportero y columnista de temas internacionales con sede en Nueva York. Ha reportado sobre conflictos, diplomacia y cambio social desde cinco continentes. Es autor de The Interpreter, una columna que explora las ideas y el contexto detrás de los principales eventos mundiales de actualidad. @Max_Fisher — Facebook More

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      U.S. Allies Drive Much of World’s Democratic Decline, Data Shows

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      Washington-aligned countries backslid at nearly double the rate of non-allies, data shows, complicating long-held assumptions about American influence.The United States and its allies accounted for a significantly outsize share of global democratic backsliding in the last decade, according to a new analysis.American allies remain, on average, more democratic than the rest of the world. But nearly all have suffered a degree of democratic erosion since 2010, meaning that core elements like election fairness or judicial independence have weakened, and at rates far outpacing average declines among other countries.With few exceptions, U.S.-aligned countries saw almost no democratic growth in that period, even as many beyond Washington’s orbit did.The findings are reflected in data recorded by V-Dem, a Sweden-based nonprofit that tracks countries’ level of democracy across a host of indicators, and analyzed by The New York Times.The revelations cast democracy’s travails, a defining trend of the current era, in a sharp light. They suggest that much of the world’s backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers, but rather is a rot rising within the world’s most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances.In many cases, democracies like France or Slovenia saw institutions degrade, if only slightly, amid politics of backlash and distrust. In others, dictatorships like Bahrain curtailed already-modest freedoms. But, often, the trend was driven by a shift toward illiberal democracy.In that form of government, elected leaders behave more like strongmen and political institutions are eroded, but personal rights mostly remain (except, often, for minorities).U.S. allies often led this trend. Turkey, Hungary, Israel and the Philippines are all examples. A number of more established democracies have taken half-steps in their direction, too, including the United States, where voting rights, the politicization of courts, and other factors are considered cause for concern by many democracy scholars.The findings also undercut American assumptions, widely held in both parties, that U.S. power is an innately democratizing force in the world.Washington has long sold itself as a global champion for democracy. The reality has always been more complicated. But enough of its allies have moved toward that system to create an impression that American influence brings about American-style freedoms. These trends suggest that may no longer be true — if it ever was.“It would be too easy to say this can all be explained by Trump,” cautioned Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political scientist who studies how great powers influence democracies. Data indicates that the trend accelerated during his presidency but predated it.Rather, scholars say this change is likely driven by longer-term forces. Declining faith in the United States as a model to aspire to. Declining faith in democracy itself, whose image has been tarnished by a series of 21st century shocks. Decades of American policy prioritizing near-term issues like counterterrorism. And growing enthusiasm for illiberal politics.With the American-aligned world now a leader in the decline of a system it once pledged to promote, Dr. Gunitsky said, “The international consensus for democratization has shifted.”Inmates in an overcrowded jail in 2016 in Quezon City, in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte oversaw a brutal crackdown on drug users.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesA Global CrisisSince the Cold War’s end, American-aligned countries have shifted toward democracy only slowly but, until the 2010s, mostly avoided backsliding.In the 1990s, for instance, 19 allies grew more democratic, including Turkey and South Korea. Only six, like Jordan, became more autocratic, but all by very small amounts.That’s according to V-Dem’s liberal democracy index, which factors dozens of metrics into a score from 0 to 1. Its methodology is transparent and considered highly rigorous. South Korea’s, for example, rose from 0.517 to 0.768 in that decade, amid a transition to full civilian rule. Most shifts are smaller, reflecting, say, an incremental advance in press freedom or slight step back in judicial independence.During the 1990s, the United States and its allies accounted for 9 percent of the overall increases in democracy scores worldwide, according to the figures. In other words, they were responsible for 9 percent of global democratic growth. This is better than it sounds: Many were already highly democratic.Also that decade, allied countries accounted for only 5 percent of global decreases — they backslid very little.Those numbers worsened a little in the 2000s. Then, in the 2010s, they became disastrous. The U.S. and its allies accounted for only 5 percent of worldwide increases in democracy. But a staggering 36 percent of all backsliding occurred in U.S.-aligned countries.On average, allied countries saw the quality of their democracies decline by nearly double the rate of non-allies, according to V-Dem’s figures.The analysis defines “ally” as a country with which the United States has a formal or implied mutual defense commitment, of which there are 41. While “ally” could be plausibly defined in several different ways, all produce largely similar results.This shift comes amid a period of turmoil for democracy, which is retrenching worldwide.The data contradicts assumptions in Washington that this trend is driven by Russia and China, whose neighbors and partners have seen their scores change very little, or by Mr. Trump, who entered office when the shift was well underway.Rather, backsliding is endemic across emerging and even established democracies, said Staffan I. Lindberg, a University of Gothenburg political scientist who helps oversee V-Dem. And such countries tend to be American-aligned.This does not mean Washington is exactly causing their retrenchment, Dr. Lindberg stressed. But it isn’t irrelevant, either.An American flag used for a photo-op between President Biden and Mr. Erdogan at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Rome last month.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAmerican Influence, for Better or WorseDespite decades of Cold War messaging calling American alliances a force for democratization, this has never really been true, said Thomas Carothers, who studies democracy promotion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.While Washington encouraged democracy in Western Europe as an ideological counterweight to the Soviet Union, it suppressed its spread in much of the rest of the world.It backed or installed dictators, encouraged violent repression of left-wing elements, and sponsored anti-democratic armed groups. Often, this was conducted in allied countries in cooperation with the local government. The Soviets did the same.As a result, when the Cold War ended in 1989 and great power meddling receded, societies became freer to democratize and, in large numbers, they did.“A lot of people came of age in those years and thought that was normal,” Mr. Carothers said, mistaking the 1990s wave as both the natural state of things and, because the United States was global hegemon, America’s doing.“But then the war on terror hit in 2001,” he said, and Washington again pressed for pliant autocrats and curbs on democratization, this time in societies where Islam is predominant.The result has been decades of weakening the foundations of democracy in allied countries. At the same time, American-led pressures in favor of democracy have begun falling away.“Democratic hegemony is good for democratization, but not through the mechanisms that people usually think about, like democracy promotion,” said Dr. Gunitsky, the scholar of great power politics.Rather than alliances or presidents demanding that dictators liberalize, neither of which have much of a track record, he said, “The U.S. influence, where it’s strongest, is an indirect influence, as an example to emulate.”His research has found that the United States spurs democratization when other countries’ leaders, citizens or both see American-style governance as promising benefits like prosperity or freedom. Some may see adopting it, even superficially, as a way to win American support.But once-positive impressions of American democracy have been rapidly declining.“Very few in any public surveyed think American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow,” a recent Pew Research Center study found. On average, only 17 percent of people in surveyed countries called U.S. democracy worth emulating, while 23 percent said it had never offered a good example.American prosperity may no longer look so appealing either, because of growing problems, like inequality, as well as the rise of China as an alternate economic model.And awareness of the United States’ domestic problems — mass shootings, polarization, racial injustice — has greatly affected perceptions.It may be more precise to think of what’s happening now as the rise of illiberal democracy as an alternate model. That system appears to be increasingly popular. Fuller democracy, with its protections for minorities and reliance on establishment institutions, is becoming less so. But even people who want illiberal democracy for their country tend to find it unappealing in others, thanks to its nationalist tendencies. As impressions of U.S. democracy as a global model degrade, so does democracy itself.“A lot of the appeal of democracy around the world is tied to appeal of the U.S. as a regime type,” Dr. Gunitsky said. “When one of those things decline, the other will decline.” More

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      Biden Aims to Bolster U.S. Alliances in Europe, but Challenges Loom

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      The good will President Biden brings on his first trip abroad papers over lingering doubts about U.S. reliability and the cost that Europe will be expected to pay.WASHINGTON — It should not be that hard to be an American leader visiting Europe for the first time after President Donald J. Trump.But President Biden will face his own challenges when he departs on Wednesday, especially as the United States confronts a disruptive Russia and a rising China while trying to reassemble and rally the shaken Western alliance as it emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. Biden, who will arrive for a series of summit meetings buoyed by a successful vaccination program and a rebounding economy, will spend the next week making the case that America is back and ready to lead the West anew in what he calls an existential collision between democracies and autocracies.On the agenda are meetings in Britain with leaders of the Group of 7 nations, followed by visits to NATO and the European Union. On Mr. Biden’s final day, in Geneva, he will hold his first meeting as president with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Mr. Biden’s overarching task is to deliver the diplomatic serenity that eluded such gatherings during four years in which Mr. Trump scorched longstanding relationships with close allies, threatened to pull out of NATO and embraced Mr. Putin and other autocrats, admiring their strength.But the good will Mr. Biden brings simply by not being Mr. Trump papers over lingering doubts about his durability, American reliability and the cost that Europe will be expected to pay. At 78, is Mr. Biden the last gasp of an old-style, internationalist foreign policy? Will Europe bear the cost of what increasingly looks like a new Cold War with Russia? Is it being asked to sign up for a China containment policy? And will Mr. Biden deliver on climate?Those questions will loom as he deals with disagreements over trade, new restrictions on investing in and buying from China and his ever-evolving stance on a natural gas pipeline that will route directly from Russia to Europe, bypassing Ukraine.Throughout, Mr. Biden will face European leaders who are wary of the United States in a way they have not been since 1945 and are wondering where it is headed.“They have seen the state of the Republican Party,” said Barry Pavel, the director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at The Atlantic Council. “They’ve seen Jan. 6. They know you could have another president in 2024.”White House officials say that stable American diplomacy is back for good, but of course they cannot offer any guarantees after January 2025. European officials are following the raging political arguments in the United States, and they note that Mr. Trump’s grip on his party is hardly weakening.Days before Mr. Biden’s departure, Republicans in Congress rejected the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot. Republican lawmakers embrace Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Democrats are faltering in their efforts to pass sweeping legislation to counter Republican attacks on voting rights at the state level.Through it all, Mr. Trump keeps hinting at a political comeback in four years. “There’s an anxiety about American politics,” said Ian Lesser, a vice president at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Simply, what is going to happen in the midterm elections? Whether Trumpism will prove more durable than Mr. Trump. What is coming next in American politics?”If the future of the United States is the long-term concern, how to manage a disruptive Russia is the immediate agenda. No part of the trip will be more charged than a daylong meeting with Mr. Putin.Mr. Biden called for the meeting — the first since Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Putin’s denials of election interference at a summit in Helsinki, Finland, three years ago — despite warnings from human rights activists that doing so would strengthen and embolden the Russian leader. Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, has noted that American presidents met with their Soviet counterparts throughout the Cold War, and their Russian successors afterward. But on Monday, he said Mr. Biden would warn Mr. Putin directly that without a change in behavior, “there will be responses.”Yet veterans of the struggle between Washington and Moscow say disruption is Mr. Putin’s true superpower.President Donald J. Trump embraced the denials of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Putin doesn’t necessarily want a more stable or predictable relationship,” said Alexander Vershbow, who was an ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush. “The best case one can hope for is that the two leaders will argue about a lot of things but continue the dialogue.”White House officials say the president has no intention of trying to reset the relationship with Russia. Having called Mr. Putin a “killer” this year, Mr. Biden is cleareyed about his adversary, they said: He regards Mr. Putin more as a hardened mafia boss, ordering hits with the country’s supply of nerve agents, than a national leader.But Mr. Biden is determined to put guardrails on the relationship, seeing out some measure of cooperation, starting with the future of their nuclear arsenals.But there is a dawning awareness in Europe that while Mr. Putin cherishes his growing arsenal, Russia’s nuclear ability is a strategic remnant of an era of superpower conflict. In what Mr. Putin recently called a new Cold War with the United States, the weapons of choice are cyberweapons, ransomware wielded by gangs operating from Russian territory and the ability to shake neighbors like Ukraine by massing troops on the border.Mr. Biden will embrace NATO and Article V of its charter, the section that commits every member of the alliance to consider an armed attack on one as an armed attack on all. But it is less clear what constitutes an armed attack in the modern age: a cyberstrike like the SolarWinds hacking that infiltrated corporate and government networks? The movement of intermediate-range missiles and Russian troops to the border of Ukraine, which is not a NATO member?Mr. Biden’s associates say the key is for him to make clear that he has seen Mr. Putin’s bravado before and that it does not faze him.“Joe Biden is not Donald Trump,” said Thomas E. Donilon, who was a national security adviser to President Barack Obama and whose wife and brother are key aides to Mr. Biden. “You’re not going to have this inexplicable reluctance of a U.S. president to criticize a Russian president who is leading a country that is actively hostile to the United States in so many areas. You won’t have that.”When Mr. Biden defines the current struggle as “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” though, he appears to be worrying more about China’s appeal as a trading partner and source of technology than Russia’s disruptions. And while Europeans largely do not see China as the kind of rising technological, ideological and military threat that Washington does, it is an argument Mr. Biden is beginning to win.The British are deploying the largest fleet of its Navy warships to the Pacific since the Falklands War, nearly 40 years ago. The idea is to re-establish at least a visiting presence in a region that once was part of its empire, with stops in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. But at the same time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has signed on to the effort by Washington — begun by Mr. Trump and accelerated by Mr. Biden — to assure that Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, does not win new contracts to install 5G cellular networks in Britain.Some in Europe are following suit, but Mr. Biden’s aides said they felt blindsided last year when the European Union announced an investment agreement with China days before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. It was a reflection of fears that if the continent got sucked into the U.S.-China rivalry, European companies would bear the brunt, starting with the luxury auto industry in Germany.The future of the agreement is unclear, but Mr. Biden is going the other way: Last week he signed an executive order banning Americans from investing in Chinese companies that are linked to the country’s military or ones that sell surveillance technology used to repress dissent or religious minorities, both inside and outside China. But to be effective, the allies would have to join; so far, few have expressed enthusiasm for the effort.Mr. Biden may be able to win over skeptics with his embrace of the goal of combating climate change, even though he will run into questions about whether he is doing enough.Four years ago, at Mr. Trump’s first G7 meeting, six world leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris climate accord while the United States declared it was “not in a position to join the consensus.”Protesters outside the White House in 2017 as Mr. Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Biden is reversing that stance, pledging to cut U.S. emissions 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade and writing in an op-ed in The Washington Post before the summit that with the United States back at the table, countries “have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress.”But world leaders said they remained wary of the United States’ willingness to enact serious legislation to tackle its emissions and deliver on financial promises to poorer countries.“They have shown the right approach, not necessarily to the level of magnitude that they could,” said Graça Machel, the former education and culture minister of Mozambique.Key to reaching ambitious climate goals is China, which emits more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. Peter Betts, the former lead climate negotiator for Britain and the European Union, said the test for Mr. Biden was whether he could lead the G7 countries in a successful pressure campaign.China, he said, “does care what the developing world thinks.”Lisa Friedman More