Carol Giacomo

It was at a Sunday children’s Mass in 2002, and the Rev. Percival D’Silva had just called on Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston to resign for covering up abuses by pedophile priests. At a time when the Roman Catholic Church was in a full defensive crouch, it was incredibly brave for a parish priest to challenge the hierarchy like that. I started scribbling the words of the sermon on the back of the church bulletin.

“I tell you,” he promised, “I will never hurt your children.”

Although I had had my son baptized, confirmed and educated at Blessed Sacrament, I had lost faith in the church as an institution. But Father D’Silva was giving me hope. He was standing by what I was taught were essential values of the church.

Last Sunday, the diminutive priest, now 82 and officially retired, once again affirmed those basic principles and called leaders to account. In his sermon, he spoke of how the “current occupant of the White House spews hatred, bigotry and intolerance” and must resign, I learned from James Zogby, a longtime parishioner who heads the Arab American Institute, an advocacy group. (I now live in the New York area.)

“I’m compelled by Jesus Christ to say what I’m going to say. Jesus won’t let me off the hook,” the priest said, according to Zogby. Other parishioners who were there confirmed the gist of his comments.

The message, after President Donald Trump exhorted four Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from, was unsparing. In the most political of towns, before a congregation that includes many of Washington’s most powerful people, of all political stripes, it offered a different view of what Christ expects of his followers from that promoted by acolytes of Trump, like Vice President Mike Pence, who assert that their evangelical Christianity is consistent with separating migrant children from their families, courting brutal dictators, seeking to bar Muslims from the country and stirring racism.

A few days earlier, hundreds of Catholic priests, nuns and lay people protested at the Capitol against conditions facing migrants at the southern border. Many protesters were led away in handcuffs.

D’Silva would not speak on the record about his sermon, but those at the Mass told me that he talked about how racism is a sin and referred to the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on Racism of 1979, which called upon the church at every level to confront the evil of racism and work toward full inclusion of racial and ethnic groups. He stressed the need to “respect one another as children of God” and talked of racism as being rooted in fear — of the unknown, of losing control, of one’s inadequacies, of those who are different.

And he admonished parents about their responsibility to teach children to appreciate the differences among people, invoking the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from “South Pacific” about how “you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear” as a reference point.

D’Silva feels this personally. Born in Mumbai, India, he joined the priesthood in 1964 and came to the United States in 1978, later becoming a citizen. As he told churchgoers Sunday, he loves America and loves being an American. But he is alarmed by the disintegrating national political climate and worries that someone will look at his brown skin and tell him, “You have to go home.”

He is an inspiration for anyone who is outraged by the steady erosion of values and common decency in a country founded on the idea that all men are created equal, as well as by the corruption of the church. When it was announced in 2015 that he would be transferred to another parish, congregants protested and the decision was reversed. Some said he was being punished for his past statements.

After Sept. 11, when the country was hurting, fearful and vengeful, D’Silva preached the value of forgiveness and warned against retaliation, Zogby told me. In that fragile civic moment, it was another risky message that he felt needed to be heard. He ended that sermon waving the American flag and singing “America the Beautiful.”

Last year, D’Silva called for Cardinal Donald Wuerl to resign as archbishop of Washington after a Pennsylvania grand jury report criticized the cardinal’s handling of abusive priests while he was bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006.

In each case, while there were some critics who complained to the priest’s superiors and some congregants who walked out, most of the people who heard these sermons applauded. That’s what happened Sunday, I was told, when D’Silva spoke at two consecutive Masses.

“He framed it perfectly,” Zogby said. “It was not done in a hateful, spiteful way but a very thoughtful, Christian way. It was very powerful.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/catholic-priest-trump-racism.html" id="93a105f1-d2ef-3748-ac40-3d28e4b02b54">The New York Times</a>.

I stood in the back of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Washington, where I was a parishioner for nearly 20 years, and I cried.

Editorials of The Times A Priest Says Trump Should Quit for Hate Talk

They are in their 80s and 90s now, national security titans from years past when certain values were broadly shared, like the imperative of America’s global leadership and the nation’s commitment to democracy, diplomacy and the North Atlantic alliance.

And with George H.W. Bush gone, it’s hard not to wonder how the tenor of U.S. foreign policy discourse will change as the leaders of this bipartisan old guard — Republicans Henry Kissinger (95), George Shultz (98), James Baker (88), retired Gen. Colin Powell (81) and Richard Lugar (86); Democrats Madeleine Albright (81), Sam Nunn (80), William Perry (91) and Lee Hamilton (87) — also disappear from the scene.

In various ways, they have continued to try to shape national security policy even after leaving office. All are moderates reflecting varying realist, internationalist, pragmatic and political tendencies. They value America’s alliances, especially with Europe; believe in American strength but not winner-take-all dominance; support working within the United Nations and other multinational institutions; understand the sustained effort needed to build trust with friends and manage adversaries; include human rights and rule of law as part of the agenda; and recognize the limits of cozying up to despots. Some of these values — particularly the last — were observed mainly in the breach when these officials held high office.

While we will mourn the passing of members of this generation and their ideals, we should not canonize them. All made mistakes, starting with Kissinger, the grand strategist who was national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, a Republican, and will be forever stained by the needless bloodshed in Vietnam and clandestine support for the vicious coup in Chile.

Still, individually and sometimes in groups, they have brought reason, experience and a sense of history to bear on national security debates.

That’s a valuable contribution in an era when President Donald Trump and his enablers are trampling on the values, norms, institutions, treaties and relationships that have maintained Western stability and democracy for decades. Trump may not care what these gray eminences have to say, but Congress and the public should listen and learn.

One place to start is with the essay written by Shultz, who served as secretary of state, the Treasury and labor, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, in The Washington Post this month after the Trump administration announced it would begin withdrawing from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Along with President Ronald Reagan, Shultz and Gorbachev were central to Cold War efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear war, and they are now pleading with Trump not to abandon the treaty but to “preserve and fix it.” The alternative, they argue, is “a new arms race, undermining strategic stability and increasing the threat of miscalculation or technical failure leading to an immensely destructive war.”

I cut my foreign policy teeth as a correspondent for Reuters first covering Congress, then traveling the world with eight secretaries of state, starting with Shultz in the late 1980s. Before interviewing him, I struggled to devise questions that would make news while avoiding a filibuster on foreign policy arcana. I usually failed, and I’m richer for it.

Over time, Shultz has continued to focus on nuclear weapons policy and in 2007 wrote a Wall Street Journal article with Kissinger; Perry, a Democrat and former defense secretary; and Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia. They called for a world without nuclear weapons — a worthy goal, yet more remote today than ever. Nine countries possess a total of 14,575 nuclear weapons, with the United States and Russia accounting for 92 percent of them.

Perry has also dedicated himself to the nuclear threat, warning that the risk of an accidental nuclear conflagration, especially from Russia, is greater now than during the Cold War.

Meanwhile, Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, has defended existing arms control treaties and lamented that under the current administration “we are not demonstrating the kind of inspirational broad-based leadership” of Bush and Reagan.

Albright, who escaped European fascism during World War II and, under President Bill Clinton, became the first female secretary of state, is now chairwoman of the National Democratic Institute, which works to strengthen democratic institutions worldwide.

She has been outspoken in support of NATO and a searing critic of Putin and the global revival of fascist tendencies. Pulling no punches, she called Trump the most “undemocratic president in modern American history.”

From Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman and co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, and Lugar, the former Indiana senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has come a call for renewed bipartisanship in foreign policy and a warning that “our partisan divide leaves us weaker as we face the world.”

No member of this old guard has been as ubiquitous as Kissinger. Though physically frail, he is still mentally acute, and his insight is solicited by senior officials at home and abroad.

Having managed the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union, he is seized with exploring the future world order, making sure China’s rise doesn’t end in conflict and raising questions about the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence. “I don’t pretend to have the answers,” he told The Financial Times in July.

Kissinger has briefed Trump and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, but has declined to render a verdict on their tenure. Still, he has moved from predicting “something remarkable and new” possibly emerging from Trump’s presidency to warning, in The Financial Times, “I think we are in a very, very grave period for the world.”

Then there is Baker, the former Treasury secretary and White House chief of staff, who, empowered by Bush, was arguably the best secretary of state in the modern age, playing pivotal roles in German reunification, the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1991 Madrid peace conference that brought Israelis and Arabs into direct talks for the first time.

Baker tends to avoid pointing a direct finger at Trump, but the video message he delivered on receiving the annual Excellence in Diplomacy award from the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington in November was unmistakable. He warned that walking away from the multinational system created after World War II would produce “greater economic and strategic instability.”

Then he laid down rules for effective diplomacy wholly at odds with Trump’s approach: Be discreet, since much important work between states is done in private. Pick your battles carefully. Compromise on small points in service of winning the important ones. Most successful agreements are based on mutual advantage, not zero-sum outcomes.

As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Trump has already created.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/opinion/foreign-policy-leaders-bush.html" id="a14c3893-ef68-3793-a265-37eed0997007">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

A Changing of the Guard

<h1>(Editorial Observer): Early in the Afghanistan War, Army Rangers hunting Taliban fighters along the Pakistan border saw a goatherd with a radio, probably reporting their position to the Taliban. Under the rules of war, soldiers can shoot someone informing enemy forces of their location, but these men saw that the goatherd was just a girl.</h1>

If she had come into the sights of the kind of autonomous robot or drone now under development, rather than of trained snipers, it might not have made the distinction between target and child, and killed her, according to Paul Scharre, who was leading the Rangers that day.

Scharre, author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War,” recounted this episode in a speech this year at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, laying out the stakes as the artificial intelligence revolution spreads further onto the battlefield.

“How would you design a robot to know the difference between what is legal and what is right?” he asked. “And how would you even begin to write down those rules ahead of time? What if you didn’t have a human there, to interpret these, to bring that whole set of human values to those decisions?”

For now, these are hypothetical questions. Two senior Pentagon officials, who spoke to The Times on background because much of their work on artificial intelligence is classified, say the United States is “not even close” to fielding a completely autonomous weapon.

But three years ago, Azerbaijani forces used what appeared to be an Israeli-made kamikaze drone called a Harop to blow up a bus carrying Armenian soldiers. The drone can automatically fly to a site, find a target, dive down and detonate, according to the manufacturer. For now, it is designed to have human controllers who can stop it.

Not long after that in California, the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office tested 103 unarmed Perdix drones which, on their own, were able to swarm around a target. “They are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” the office’s director at the time, William Roper, said in a Defense Department statement.

The Estonian-made Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry System looks like a mini-tank with guns, camera and the ability to track down and fire on a target. It’s human controlled, but its maker says it’s “autonomous and self-driving with growing AI assistance.”

“It is well within the means of most capable militaries to build at least relatively crude and simple autonomous weapons today,” Scharre said in an email exchange after his speech.

As the ability of systems to act autonomously increases, those who study the dangers of such weapons, including the U.N. Group of Governmental Experts, fear that military planners may be tempted to eliminate human controls altogether. A treaty has been proposed to prohibit these self-directed lethal weapons, but it’s gotten limited support.

The proposed ban competes with the growing acceptance of this technology, with at least 30 countries having automated air and missile defense systems that can identify approaching threats and attack them on their own, unless a human supervisor stops the response.

The Times of Israel has reported that an Israeli armed robotic vehicle called the Guardium has been used on the Gaza border. The U.S. Navy has tested and retired an aircraft that could autonomously take off and land on an aircraft carrier and refuel in midair.

Britain, France, Russia, China and Israel are also said to be developing experimental autonomous stealth combat drones to operate in an enemy’s heavily defended airspace.

The speed with which the technology is advancing raises fears of an autonomous weapons arms race with China and Russia, making it more urgent that nations work together to establish controls so humans never completely surrender life-and-death choices in combat to machines.

The senior Pentagon officials who spoke to The Times say critics are unduly alarmed and insist the military will act responsibly.

“Free-will robots is not where any of us are thinking about this right now,” one official told me.

What they are exploring is using artificial intelligence to enable weapons to attack more quickly and accurately, provide more information about chaotic battlefields and give early warning of attacks. Rather than increase the risk of civilian casualties, such advances could reduce such deaths by overcoming human error, officials say.

The United States, for instance, is exploring using swarms of autonomous small boats to repulse threats to larger Navy ships. Yet Pentagon officials say U.S. commanders would never accept fully autonomous systems, because it would mean surrendering the intelligence and experience of highly trained officers to machines.

While artificial intelligence has proved a powerful tool in numerous fields, it has serious vulnerabilities, like computer hacks, data breaches and the possibility that humans could lose control of the algorithm.

Only 28 countries have supported the call for a treaty banning such weapons, which the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an international coalition of more than 100 nongovernmental organizations, began working for in 2012. In March, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said that “machines with the power and discretion to take lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant and should be prohibited by international law.” He called on a U.N. group to develop means, by treaty, political pressure or strict guidelines, to make that happen.

That work is futile unless the United States and other major powers lead the way.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/opinion/weapons-artificial-intelligence.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Are you ready for weapons that call their own shots?

Scharre, author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War,” recounted this episode in a speech this year at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, laying out the stakes as the artificial intelligence revolution spreads further onto the battlefield.

<h1>After the horrors of World War II, the United States led in adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, recognizing the “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights” of all people to life and liberty. For three-quarters of a century it has stood for the protection of human rights by the rule of law.</h1>

Now, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is establishing a Commission on Unalienable Rights to “provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” according to a notice in the Federal Register.

Fresh thinking isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But tampering with a legacy built over decades raises serious questions, especially when the State Department’s human rights bureau and Congress have so far been excluded from the process.

One concern is the reference to “natural law,” which is held to be more powerful than the laws people write, and can suggest a narrower, religious sensibility. When the term natural law has been thrown about, it’s often been by people concerned with what they think is unnatural — homosexuality, transgender rights, reproductive choice and sexual equality.

“It has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion,” a senior State Department official said of the initiative, a personal project of Pompeo that the department plans to describe in more detail next month. “It’s not about policy, it’s about principles,” although there could be policy implications in the future, the official said.

The official said Pompeo is committed to human rights, public hearings and public debate. If the commission moves forward, its membership should be diverse and balanced.

The department would say little else about the plan, such as why Pompeo feels the country’s human rights discourse has “departed from our nation’s founding principles” or why the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, decades of State Department reports on the human rights records of more than 190 countries, several reports to the United Nations and countless speeches by presidents and other officials haven’t already provided a solid foundation to understand fundamental human rights principles.

The House is considering a proposal to restrict funding for the commission while several Democratic senators, in a letter to Pompeo, expressed “deep concern” with the process and intent of the initiative.

A shift to “natural law” would conflict with the view that “modern human rights are based on the dignity inherent in all human beings, not on God-given rights,” Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale law professor who was assistant secretary of state for human rights in the Clinton administration, told The Times.

Pompeo’s initiative appears to tap into a debate within conservative religious and legal circles, a core of President Donald Trump’s base.

R.R. Reno in First Things, a publication of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, writes about being “increasingly against human rights” and says “exalting human rights as the epitome of social responsibility short-circuits collective judgment and stymies action for the sake of the common good.”

Vice President Mike Pence and other evangelicals have promoted religious freedom as “our first freedom” and argued that human rights are becoming politicized and conflated with economic and social goals, such as equal rights for workers, women and gays.

State Department officials say one influence in the creation of the plan has been Robert George, a Princeton professor and prominent Catholic thinker who co-founded an anti-marriage equality group.

As for Trump’s own approach to human rights, he has denigrated the free press, sought to ban Muslims from the country and treated immigrants and refugees harshly. He has undercut protections for women‘s reproductive health and for transgender people, going so far as to try to kick them out of the military.

Trump has denounced abuses by Iran, Cuba and China — adversaries at odds with the United States on many issues — while soft-pedaling the egregious behavior of repressive political favorites like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even North Korea.

If the commission is another step toward narrowing or calling into question America’s commitment on human rights, it will further erode the country’s leadership and give the world’s repressive rulers more reasons to ignore complaints about their own abuses and atrocities.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/opinion/editorials/trump-human-rights-natural-law.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

A new Trump battleground: defining human rights

Fresh thinking isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But tampering with a legacy built over decades raises serious questions, especially when the State Department’s human rights bureau and Congress have so far been excluded from the process.

After a male Russian official gave a confusing explanation about the Kremlin’s storage plans, she sought clarification. The Russian, his voice dripping with sarcasm, offered to “put this in terms a woman would understand” and then described loading plutonium into a “cooking pot and putting a lid on it.”

“I was so startled, I wasn’t really in a position to push back at that moment,” Holgate, now with the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told me in an interview. “It was incredibly disrespectful.”

For women, people of color and transgender people, sexism, discrimination and harassment are often barriers to being hired, promoted or taken seriously in the national security bureaucracy — overseas and at home.

While the numbers have improved in the Foreign Service, where women hold about 40% of all officer jobs, and the State Department, where 40% of the senior posts are held by women, they hold only 20% of senior civilian jobs at the Pentagon.

Women are particularly underrepresented in senior positions dealing with nuclear issues, according to a study by New America<a id="1aafe88d-a9e2-330d-aeec-8244ef68894f" href="https://d1y8sb8igg2f8e.cloudfront.net/documents/The_Consensual_Straitjacket_Four_Decades_of_Women_in_Nuclear_Security_2019-03-_yEtsRar.pdf">,</a> part of a growing effort involving various groups and individuals to make the fields more welcoming to women.

Part of the problem is the discipline itself, the study found. Policies involving the building, deployment, targeting and use of nuclear weapons have long been the province of an insular, innovation-averse group of men. Discussions by this “priesthood” conflate national security and manliness with sexualized jargon about vertical erector launchers and thrust-to-weight ratios. The demand for nuclear orthodoxy has excluded outsiders, particularly women, placing them in a “consensual straitjacket” of conformity in a male-dominated world.

Just consider Donald Regan, the former White House chief of staff, who before President Ronald Reagan’s summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 said women were “not going to understand throw-weights” or other national security issues raised at the meeting.

The numbers show how this order became so entrenched. From the 1970s to 2019, the study found, women held 11 of 68 of senior positions dealing with nuclear weapons, arms control and nonproliferation at the State Department, 13 of 109 of these jobs at the now-defunct Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, five of 63 at the Defense Department, five of 36 at the Energy Department and two of 21 national security adviser positions.

Generally, women have been more welcomed in offices involved with arms control and nonproliferation, which center on negotiating limits on weapons rather than developing or using them.

Even so, to be successful in these posts so critical to national security, women pay a “gender tax,” performing “the constant mental and emotional calculus that comes with implicit sexism; explicit sexism and discrimination; gender and sexual harassment; and gendered expectations,” according to the New America study, based on interviews with 23 women who held senior government positions.

Nearly all of the 23 said they were harassed or saw others harassed, and when a foreign official was involved, the stress was magnified because it could cause an international incident.

During a roundtable discussion with Global Politico in 2017, Laura Rosenberger, who spent 11 years at the State Department and the National Security Council, talked about wearing more pantsuits and baggier tops as a defense mechanism “to make myself seem less attractive in the workplace.”

Mieke Eoyang, who served 12 years as a staff member on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, has described how she would walk into a meeting and be asked to get coffee or how a committee chairman cornered her at a reception to discuss his sexual prowess.

Michèle Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official who was expected to be the first female defense secretary if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, told me she was fortunate enough to have supportive, often male, mentors and to have risen quickly in the field. She was, hence, less vulnerable to sexism and discrimination. But she has won plaudits as an inspiring leader who helps younger women advance.

Holgate predicts even greater strides for the next generation. There is a new vocabulary for identifying discriminating behavior — men-only expert panels are now mocked as “manels,” for instance — and more men are standing up for their female colleagues, she said.

To encourage progress, Pamela Hamamoto, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, began a program called Gender Champions to identify international leaders committed to advancing women, and Holgate, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, replicated it in the United States.

But does having women at the table really make a difference? There is little evidence women are inherently more peaceful than men. A forthcoming paper by Alexandra Stark of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and Madison Schramm of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, goes so far as to argue that, in certain parliamentary democracies, women leaders, feeling a need to prove their strength, “may be more likely to initiate conflict than their male peers.”

But the New America report found that including women in nuclear decision-making makes discussions more collegial and encourages collaboration and innovation. Could this subvert the orthodox notions of nuclear planning? Other research suggests a more diverse workforce produces better results and that risk-taking behavior may be greater when women are not involved in decisions.

Fairness and good sense argue for greater inclusion of women and underrepresented groups in all crucial policy fields. No democracy can afford to exclude so many talented people from fundamental decisions of war and peace.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9573aab5-d966-3cd6-aa8c-bdf3a9f7cd21" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/opinion/women-national-security.html">The New York Times</a>.

In the mid-1990s, Laura Holgate, then a senior Defense Department official, was in Moscow leading a delegation to discuss ways the United States could help the Russians secure plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons.

The nuclear weapons sisterhood

Less than two weeks later, a second interview left me amazed. Lugar, a former Rhodes Scholar and mayor of Indianapolis who died Sunday at 87, had clearly mastered his brief, speaking authoritatively about tensions with the Soviet Union, the Central America wars, apartheid South Africa and any other topic that was posed.

Over the years, he grew in stature, establishing a reputation as an independent voice willing to buck his party and one of the country’s pre-eminent leaders on foreign policy, especially efforts to restrain nuclear weapons. He was an internationalist who believed in U.S. leadership, the web of post-World War II alliances, and in talking to Russia — even in the present difficult days.

I last saw him in March, at a conference on “America’s Role in the World” at the Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. Over dinner on the night before it started, he spoke fondly of continuing to oversee the 604-acre soybean and corn farm in Indiana that his father bought in the 1930s. The conversation became darker but no less animated when it segued to the arms control system that he worked decades to help build and which President Donald Trump seems to be abandoning.

Lugar told conference attendees the next day that he worried that Trump had no plan on that and other central foreign policy issues. There was no enmity in his voice, just deep concern for the nation and the world.

One of Lugar’s most heralded contributions was the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that he pushed through Congress with Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Over the years, it has provided millions of U.S. dollars to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and related technology inherited by the former Soviet states of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In time, the assistance was expanded to cover non-Soviet countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, China and South Africa.

The concept of having the United States pay to destroy an adversary’s weapons was so controversial that it met opposition from Lugar’s own Republican Party. One of his closest foreign policy partners, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., told the conference attendees in March that voting for the program was his toughest vote ever. “You think that was popular in southern Indiana, giving money to the Russians? ... They thought I was nuts,” Hamilton said as Lugar, seated nearby, grinned.

But it was worth it: More than 7,500 strategic nuclear warheads were deactivated, and more than 1,400 ballistic missiles that could be launched by land or submarine were destroyed. It reduced the chances that terrorists could buy or steal a weapon and provided jobs for Soviet nuclear scientists who otherwise might have gone to work for Iran or another state eager to develop a nuclear program.

Lugar played a key role in securing Senate approval for several arms control treaties, including the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty that Trump recently abrogated because of Russian violations, the 1997 pact banning chemical weapons and the 2010 New START Treaty that will expire in 2021 if Russia and the United States do not agree to extend it.

Lugar called the INF withdrawal a “gravely misguided” decision that “will not make us safer, it will rob us of leverage essential to our own security and power.” And after having opposed many in his own party to ensure passage of New START treaty, he urged Trump to extend it until 2026 as the treaty allows.

But the administration doesn’t appear to be listening.

Even though Lugar — who mentored President Barack Obama on arms control when he was still a senator — and Nunn were invited to the White House by Vice President Mike Pence for talks before Trump’s 2018 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Lugar was not impressed by the summit outcome. “There has been no victory won there,” he said.

But, then again, Lugar had stood up to presidents before. In 1986, he led the successful effort to override President Ronald Reagan’s veto of legislation imposing economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa. That same year, I accompanied him to the Philippines where he monitored the election between President Ferdinand Marcos, a longtime U.S. ally, and his challenger Corazon Aquino. Lugar concluded there was widespread fraud and persuaded Reagan against recognizing Marcos as the victor.

Lugar was a Republican, for sure, and even made a short-lived bid for president in 1996. But in 2012 the Tea Party faction ended his tenure as Indiana’s longest-serving senator, judging his moderation and bipartisanship a liability.

Undeterred, Lugar spent the past few years pleading, along with Hamilton, for a return to a less polarized polity that would seek constructive outcomes to problems like climate change and feeding the world.

Even while afflicted by a nervous system disorder that eventually caused his death, Lugar displayed his mental acuity and grace in one of his last public appearances, just after the conference, when Indiana University celebrated the donation of his personal and professional papers to the institution.

The 800 boxes of documents will be a trove for those who want to study how public policy was once crafted, and could be again.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b7e21abe-6e7b-43c5-9775-61c7f1ae806e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/opinion/richard-lugar.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer): I first interviewed Richard Lugar of Indiana in January 1985, shortly after he became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the first time, and left the encounter unimpressed. He seemed to lack the international expertise of his predecessor, Sen. Charles Percy, R-Ill., and I wondered where the leadership would come from on that crucial committee.

Richard Lugar wasn't afraid to lead

“Congress has just extricated itself from any involvement in foreign policy decisions,” said Rose, a Democratic freshman whose district includes Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. “Like, if you want to kill people in a country, if you want to lower tariffs in regards to a country, you’ve got to get our approval.”

“That’s not a value statement,” he added, “that’s just a statement about upholding the Constitution. But it’s also a political statement, too, in that we are willing to have skin in the game.”

Rose himself has had skin in the game. He is a former Army platoon leader who earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in Afghanistan, and is now a company commander in the National Guard.

That puts him in a notable subset of the 67 new representatives who swung control of the House to the Democrats in the 2018 elections. Of that group, 10 served in the military, intelligence agencies or diplomatic service and bring expertise to a body where practical skills and deep knowledge about war, peace, foreign aid, diplomacy and geostrategic thinking are in short supply.

I invited Rose and one of his congressional pals, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., a former CIA case officer, to discuss how they and their national security cohort expect to have an impact.

“My national security experience colors everything I touch,” Spanberger said as her 5-year-old daughter, Catherine, raptly watched a video nearby. “It impacts my views on global climate change, it impacts my views on food security, in my district on educational issues, everything. And so I think that what we bring to the table is a fierce commitment to the idea that we can actually fix things, no matter how broken the system is or feels at times.”

While new Democratic members like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have worried some in the party by pushing an unyielding liberal line, Rose and Spanberger occupy a more moderate space as part of the Blue Dog Coalition, which advocates a bipartisan approach to the budget and national defense.

“One thing I do think we all agree on, on a high level, is that the last generation has seen, in regards to Congress and foreign policy, a massive dereliction of duty,” said Rose, 32, who won his Republican-leaning district by roughly 6 percentage points.

The president will always be the most powerful force on U.S. national security. But the founders also gave Congress a crucial role. A Congress emboldened by these new Democrats to accept that role could claw back some of the power usurped by presidents and provide a needed check on the executive branch.

Congress has long feared that taking on that responsibility could backfire politically if it means sending a constituent’s son or daughter to war. When President Barack Obama wanted lawmakers to vote in 2013 on taking military action after Syria used chemical weapons against civilians, lawmakers recoiled at being dragged into the decision and refused to vote. Later, some members berated the president for not taking unilateral action.

Similarly, after passing laws in 2001 and 2003 authorizing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress for years refused to weigh in again as presidents extended military operations to the Islamic State and other militants in Syria, Pakistan, North Africa, Somalia and Yemen. Only recently, after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has Congress given final passage to a bipartisan resolution to end U.S. military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. Trump vetoed the measure Tuesday.

“We are in this situation where people don’t have to be accountable” and instead can place the blame on the president, Spanberger, 39, said. “Our group is united on this issue of we should actually be upholding our constitutional duty.”

The two lawmakers perceive the threats facing the nation somewhat differently. Rose emphasizes cyberattacks and the risk of terrorists obtaining a nuclear dirty bomb. Spanberger cites lesser-known dangers, like the fact that about 70% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 would not qualify for the military because they are overweight, don’t meet education standards or have felony records or behavioral issues. Both feel an urgency to act on climate change. Rose is adamant about getting out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. Spanberger wants more detail about how that would be done and the potential consequences.

Still, though Rose and Spanberger don’t see eye-to-eye on every issue — he opposed the Iran nuclear deal, she supported it, for example — they share an easy friendship, a desire to address problems in a nonpartisan way and a determination to prove Congress can actually get things done.

“I promised him I’d never let him eat alone at the lunch table ever,” Spanberger said as they both erupted in hearty laughter.

“Abigail’s going to be president,” Rose said a few minutes later.

This article originally appeared in <a id="fc31d8bc-0817-46b0-81a9-49681ff2a524" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/opinion/democratic-veterans-congress.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer): Rep. Max Rose thinks Congress has surrendered its national security authority, ceding too much power to presidents to make war and enter into international agreements.

New to Congress, wise to the world

“We’re seeing floods that last longer, we’re seeing droughts that are longer, we’re seeing a reduction in fish with the drying out,” she recently told The Times’ editorial board. “And so it affects our food security. It also affects our culture.”

The Amazon rain forest, an environmental treasure of more than 2 million square miles across Brazil and eight other countries, is sometimes called “the lungs of the planet” because the trees release so much oxygen and absorb so much carbon dioxide, mitigating the effects of climate change. It is also home to an unparalleled diversity of animal and plant species as well as roughly 1 million indigenous people in Brazil alone.

Although long imperiled, the forest is at greater threat now under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, a polarizing populist leader in the mold of President Donald Trump who took office in January and met with Trump at the White House on Tuesday.

Bolsonaro moved quickly to undermine protections for the environment, indigenous land rights, nongovernmental organizations and basically anyone who disagrees with him.

“Just in the first 50 days of the Bolsonaro government there has been a reversal of 30 years of progress,” Guajajara said. “Everything we have been trying to construct, trying to build since then, we are trying to keep standing.”

Her work with Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples centers on securing their rights, including claims to ancestral rain forest lands. Brazil lost nearly 10 percent of its tree cover between 2000 and 2017, according to the World Resources Institute. Now Bolsonaro is raising the threat even more with a call for economic investment to exploit the country’s forests, minerals and other natural resources.

Since his inauguration, Bolsonaro has weakened or defunded government agencies that oversee protections for the Amazon and indigenous people and given those responsibilities to the pro-farming, pro-mining, pro-timber agriculture ministry.

The result is that indigenous people, who have secured government protection for about 13 percent of Brazil’s territory, fear there will be no more lands set aside, Guajajara said.

Lands that are formally recognized as “collective lands” are owned by the government but guaranteed under the constitution for the exclusive use of indigenous groups. Bolsonaro says he wants those lands made “more productive.”

Guajajara, who ran unsuccessfully for vice president in the recent election as a candidate of the leftist Socialism and Liberty Party, said that would mean the beginning of the end to indigenous cultures. “And for me, that’s kind of ethnocide,” she said. “Ethnocide is when you kill the culture. Genocide is when you kill the people.”

Wiser leaders than Bolsonaro would look for ways to expand economic development while also respecting the indigenous tribes and recognizing the Amazon’s irreplaceable contributions to halting climate change. Research shows indigenous communities are better stewards of the land.

Brazil has a history of conflict over development and conservation. That is now playing out in a civil suit that accuses the state of genocide when hundreds, maybe thousands, of Waimiri-Atroari tribe members died between 1968 and 1977 as a highway was forcibly being built through the Amazon, The Associated Press reported.

At a hearing in a remote Amazon reserve last month, six tribal elders told a judge how the military dictatorship had tried to eradicate them with arms, bombs and chemicals.

Now, decades after that period, according to Guajajara, Bolsonaro is asserting “there’s no such thing as an indigenous people” and insisting he wants to “unify us all into one culture.” That is offensive and unrealistic, given that Brazil encompasses more than 300 ethnic groups, including perhaps 100 that have no contact with society whatsoever, and about 274 languages.

At least, Bolsonaro’s election seems to be making clear what could be lost to his policies and to be persuading marginalized groups — the poor, women, children, indigenous people — to unite in common cause.

The Bolsonaro election also calls into question the fate of a proposal by an international coalition of Amazon indigenous groups to the United Nations Biodiversity Conference last year to create a rain forest sanctuary the size of Mexico.

If there is hope for the rain forest, and for countries where authoritarians threaten democracy and progressive agendas, it lies in the determination and power of civil society activists like Sônia Guajajara.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e1da4ad8-1119-45bb-add8-e423be4b50ce" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/opinion/brazil-rain-forest.html">The New York Times</a>.

Brazil's new president threatens 'the lungs of the planet'

(Editorial Observer): The indigenous peoples of the Amazon rain forest are the shock troops in the struggle against climate change. “We are the first ones to be affected,” says Sônia Guajajara, one of Brazil’s best known indigenous leaders.

<h1>Then there’s the Twitter account of Martin Dempsey, the four-star Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Barack Obama until his retirement in 2015.</h1>

A balm in an inflamed social media universe, his account dispenses minisermons and sensible advice, often for an unnamed audience of one who uses Twitter as a delivery vehicle for insult and fabrication.

The general would never take on a commander in chief directly; none of his posts mentions President Donald Trump by name. But the daily trolling, mild by Twitter standards, is unmistakable.

“I never think it’s appropriate for senior military leaders to publicly and personally criticize the president, as he is the elected leader of the country,” Dempsey said in a telephone interview from North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke University.

He does, however, cut some slack for other retired military leaders, like Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Adm. William McRaven, who have made criticisms that “can be informative.”

“But,” Dempsey said, “that should not become the ‘new normal.'”

Even if he doesn’t take on the president by name, any of the general’s followers would be hard pressed not to contrast his steady counsel with the pronouncements of the man in the White House.

On Jan. 25, after Trump ended the longest government shutdown in history by acceding to essentially the same deal he rejected in December, Dempsey tweeted:

“Leadership: the art of motivating people to act toward achieving common goals. Brinksmanship: the art of pushing a confrontation to the limit of safety to force a desired outcome. One is persuasive, the other coercive. One feels like success, the other like failure. #Leadership”

A day earlier, when the president was threatening to declare a national emergency to build a wall on the southern border, the retired general posted:

“In solving complex problems and resolving contentious issues, the most effective leaders use their influence much more than their authority. The goal is to solve problems so that they stay solved. Solutions imposed rarely last.#RadicalInclusion”

The hashtag #RadicalInclusion is a bit of self-promotion for a book by the same name that he wrote last year with Ori Brafman. But the thought behind it comes from his decades of experience commanding troops and managing complex missions.

“I’m constantly thinking about and always looking around for examples of good leadership and bad leadership,” Dempsey told me. “It’s harder to be a leader today because of the proliferation of information and the intensity of scrutiny.”

In his book, he argues that with ubiquitous access to news and information, business, industry and government leaders will lose control over their organizations unless they share control over problem-solving with teams that include more people in the process and are primed for action, not for paralysis. (The book’s subtitle is “What the Post-9/11 World Should Have Taught Us About Leadership.”)

Dempsey sometimes tweets inspirational quotes, like this one, citing industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie: “No man will make a good leader who wants to do it all himself or to take all the credit for doing it.”

Dempsey says he tries to be as “nonpolitical as possible,” although he will comment on matters directly related to his service while in uniform.

In 2017 he responded after Trump claimed that Obama and other presidents did not call the families of fallen American service members:

“POTUS 43 &amp; 44 and first ladies cared deeply, worked tirelessly for the serving, the fallen, and their families. Not politics. Sacred Trust.”

“Nobody asked me to respond, but I was in a unique position to say that wasn’t true,” he told me.

The retired general weighed in in November when Trump deployed military forces to the Mexican border, stoking fears about an “immigrant invasion” in the days before the midterm election.

“Our men and women in uniform are better trained, better equipped, and better led so they meet any threat with confidence. A wasteful deployment of over-stretched Soldiers and Marines would be made much worse if they use force disproportional to the threat they face. They won’t.”

Dempsey exercises self-discipline rare for social media. Normally, before he hits the send button on a tweet, he will let the tweet sit overnight to be sure it’s not something he will regret.

Most of those who comment on his tweets are approving, he said, while about a quarter tell him some version of “mind your own business.”

While his opinions have largely focused on the best use of power — “Real power is power used for the good of the many not the few” — they have also explored the misuse of power.

“Responsible leaders don’t fabricate fear to motivate their followers,” he tweeted in August. And last month, he emphasized the need for credibility: “Trust. Years to build, seconds to break, forever to repair. The one, non-negotiable, indispensable, ingredient of leadership. An everyday, all-the-time factor in any productive relationship. #Leadership”:

Will any of this cause the president to pause and reflect? Probably not. But other leaders and would-be leaders could learn a thing or two.

Twitter can be a soul-crushing place where people leave inhibition behind as they launch invective in 280-character volleys, usually aimed at someone they don’t know and assume they will never have to face.

The General and his tweets

<h1>John Limbert belongs to an exclusive club — the 52 American diplomats held hostage by Iran for 444 days during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since that crisis, which began 40 years ago next month, the two countries shared an enmity that has only grown worse under President Donald Trump.</h1>

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the rhetorical stakes earlier this month when he urged the world to isolate Iran and promised to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria. The United States and Iran are so hostile one wonders whether they will be enemies forever.

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Limbert said in an interview. At 75, he remains fond of Iran and committed to helping Americans understand the country, but he finds the bilateral dynamic more dangerous than ever. “I think the best we can hope for is not to get into a war,” he said, setting a low if tragically realistic bar.

In theory, no Islamic country is better positioned than Iran to play a leading role in the Middle East, because of its location, its wealth and the sophistication of its people. But that potential has been stunted because of Iran’s continued meddling in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, and an antipathy for the United States that is mutual and obsessive.

Both sides are to blame, with hard-line leaders demonizing each other in a struggle to satisfy their constituents and maintain power. Excoriating the “Great Satan” is central to Iran’s defense of its revolution and its religious underpinnings; the administration has made intensifying pressure on Iran a central tenet of its foreign policy.

Pompeo and John Bolton, the national security adviser who before joining the administration called for regime change and military strikes on Iran, are driving the hard-charging approach.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the rhetorical stakes earlier this month when he urged the world to isolate Iran and promised to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria.

Carol Giacomo

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