Nicholas Kristof

The Tiananmen Massacre

As Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, I covered the Tiananmen democracy movement in the spring of 1989. Then on the night of June 3-4, 1989, I received a call that the Chinese army was invading the capital. Roads were blocked, so I jumped on my bike and pedaled furiously toward the gunfire — thinking that it’s a crazy job that impels you toward shooting — and then watched the Chinese Communist Party massacre its citizens. Troops fired on the crowd that I was in, leaving my notebook stained with the sweat of fear and destroying any illusions I ever had about China’s government. I abandoned my bicycle in the chaos, ran 3 miles back home in the early morning hours, embraced my wife, called my worried editors to tell them that I was alive, and hammered out a story on deadline.

Children for Sale

I’ve often written over the years about sex trafficking, and the reason goes back to a trip I made to Cambodia in 1996. I found girls who had been kidnapped and locked in brothels, and interviewed a frightened 14-year-old who was awaiting the sale of her virginity to the highest bidder. The other girls tried to reassure her. It felt like 19th-century slavery — except that these girls would be dead of AIDS by their early 20s. I thought of my own kids, and I couldn’t unsee those brothels. I was also troubled by my own complicity: I walked out of the brothels with great quotes, knowing that I had a good front-page story but that those girls would never get out. I wondered if I had exploited those girls for my own purposes, as other men had, and I felt an obligation to continue to highlight the topic and push for an end to such modern slavery.

A Story Worth Billions

My most consequential article was a 1997 piece from India about children dying needlessly of diarrhea and other ailments. It was important not because I said anything particularly new, but because it resonated with two readers in Seattle who were then thinking about where to direct their philanthropy. They read the article over their morning coffee, and they say that it got them thinking about channeling their money into global health — and Bill and Melinda Gates have since invested billions in this area and helped save millions of lives. Alas, my understanding is that what galvanized them wasn’t my luminous prose but rather a small chart that ran with the article and showed causes of global child mortality. Lesson: Always go with the graphics and visuals! A copy of the article is exhibited in the foyer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters.

Surgeons Transforming Lives

Sometimes the way you know that a girl has an obstetric fistula is her smell and the way she looks at you with humiliated, hopeless eyes. A fistula is a childbirth injury that leaves a woman or girl incontinent and leaking urine or feces or both. Victims often think that they have been cursed by God, and they are afraid to eat or drink because then the wastes will start trickling down their legs. Yet a $600 surgery can usually repair the damage and give them their lives back. The most dazzling smiles I’ve ever seen are on girls whose fistulas had just been repaired. I’ve written about fistulas regularly since 2002 and am delighted to see it get more attention, with organizations like the Fistula Foundation now playing a major role. I once interviewed and wrote about an Ethiopian woman who suffered a fistula as a 15-year-old and then, while recovering, began to help out in the operating room. The hospital was short-handed, Mamitu was smart and hardworking, and doctors gave her more and more responsibility. Eventually, she began doing fistula repairs herself and became a leading gynecological surgeon — even though she had never attended so much as elementary school.

The Frustrations of Iraq

The run-up to the Iraq War was deeply frustrating for me, because I wrote again and again about the perils of invading Iraq and yet even many liberal journalists embraced the invasion. I made a scary trip to visit Iraq under Saddam Hussein and it was clear that Iraqis both A.) hated Saddam and B.) hated the idea of a U.S. invasion even more. Yet my reporting from Iraq got little traction; I felt like Sisyphus. I came to see that on issues that people have already thought about, like Iraq or the Middle East, Donald Trump or abortion, it’s very difficult to change minds; the power of a columnist is less to sway people’s views than it is to propel an issue onto the agenda.

Genocide in Darfur

Beginning in 2004, I made about a dozen trips to report on the genocide then unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan. The reporting was terrifying, and I spent day after day with a knot in my stomach, worried for my own safety and especially for that of my interpreter, driver and video journalist colleague. Once, we were detained in a room with a mural on the wall of a man being impaled with a spear through the stomach. On my trips I saw kids who had been shot, women who had been gang-raped, a man whose eyes had been gouged out, an old couple who had been set on fire. Darfur showed me the evil that humans are capable of — and the indifference of most of the international community. Yet the ordinary citizens of Darfur showed extraordinary strength, even as they were largely abandoned. I met some Darfuris who used bows and arrows to fight against warlords with machine guns mounted on pickup trucks, and I’ll never forget the moral courage of women who spoke up after rape.

I Have the Best Readers

A number of columns about Mukhtar Mai, a young woman in a Pakistani village, underscored to me how much readers want to help. A village tribunal sentenced Mukhtar to be gang-raped because of an offense by her brother, and elders then carried out the sentence. Instead of committing suicide, as was expected of her, Mukhtar prosecuted her attackers and used compensation money to start a school — because she believed that the real enemy was ignorance and illiteracy. When I first visited, the school was running out of money and near collapse, but my readers stepped up and ended up donating more than $1 million to support the school and Mukhtar’s women’s empowerment program (it’s still going strong). Since then my readers have also raised $1 million or more after my columns about Dr. Tom Catena (see below) and after columns about the literacy group Room to Read.

My Friend Kevin Green

While I was writing about struggles in Africa and Asia, I was also increasingly troubled by the travails in my beloved hometown, Yamhill, in rural Oregon. Yamhill, population about 1,000, lost working-class jobs, and then some dear friends struggled with drugs, alcohol and family breakdown, including my high school running buddy Kevin Green. When Kevin passed away at 54 in 2015, I wrote a column commemorating him. The working-class crisis in America is personal to me and is the reason I write about addiction, education failure and other issues here at home.

21st-Century Concentration Camps

Early in my career, I simply pounded out articles — sent by telex from Fiji or the Philippines, by crackly telephone line from Mongolia or North Korea, by secret courier from Poland under martial law. Over time, I’ve increasingly turned to other avenues for storytelling because images and video can be so much more powerful than words on a page. One example is a 2014 video I did with a colleague, Adam Ellick, about the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. I was on my annual win-a-trip journey with a university student, Nicole Sganga, and there was a dicey moment when we were at sea in a boat whose engine gave out — leaving us stuck with curfew approaching — and I wondered what I had gotten Nicole into (eventually the motor restarted, and we returned to shore with only a modest breach of curfew). Yet I also wanted to show Nicole how reporting can bring back powerful stories and provide an early warning of humanitarian catastrophes, in this case of the hatred against the Rohingya that would later erupt in a savage mass slaughter that I also covered.

‘He’s Jesus Christ’

People sometimes ask how I stay optimistic when I cover war, genocide and poverty. The answer is simple: Side by side with the worst of humanity, you encounter the best. I’ve made repeated trips to the rebel-held Nuba Mountains of Sudan, where the government dropped bombs and starved villagers, and there I met an extraordinary human being, Dr. Tom Catena, who has devoted his life to providing medical care as the bombs fall around him. A Muslim paramount chief told me that “Dr. Tom,” as he is known, heals the sick and lets the lame walk — and thus “He’s Jesus Christ.” On one trip to the Nuba Mountains, I was sickened to visit an extended family that had lost six children to a bomb but also moved that Dr. Tom had managed to save three others. So I return from a war zone like that scarred by the pain I’ve witnessed, but also uplifted by the goodness, strength and decency shown by people like Dr. Tom — and actually feeling better about humanity.

5 Minutes, $25 and a New Life

Another reason for optimism: I have seen immense progress in my 35 years of covering the world. On my first travels to poor countries, as a law student, I was pained by the number of blind people I saw led around by their children or grandchildren. Many were blind from cataracts, and in 2015 I met a remarkable Nepali doctor, Sanduk Ruit, who has pioneered a way to perform five-minute cataract surgery without electricity or advanced facilities for only $25 a patient. He has personally performed more than 120,000 cataract surgeries. You cannot watch Ruit’s patients take off their bandages and smile giddily as they see clearly for the first time in many years without feeling a rush of warmth about our world.

An Innocent Man Facing Death?

Beginning in 2010, I wrote a number of times about a black man named Kevin Cooper who I believe was framed for murder by the San Bernardino County sheriff’s office in California, where he is now on death row. The articles didn’t get much traction or readership, but the more I reported on the subject the more aware I became that there are many people on death row after dubious convictions. So last year, with the help of New York Times colleagues who are experts in visual journalism, I conducted a thorough investigation of the Cooper case and published the results. We called on the authorities to allow advanced DNA testing in the case (Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown had previously refused to allow the testing). It may have been the longest opinion column The Times ever published. The upshot is that advanced DNA testing is now finally underway, and I’m praying that after 36 years in prison Cooper may finally get justice — along with those who framed him.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

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In a Career of Reporting, These Are Stories That Still Touch Me

Tuesday is 35 years since I walked into The New York Times for my first day of work. It was my first real job, initially covering international business and economics, and to mark the anniversary I’ve gone back and dug up some of the pieces over the decades that were particularly meaningful to me.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans got the sound bites they were looking for. Mueller declined even to read from his own report, apparently to avoid providing made-for-television clips, and he sometimes came across as muddled.

Yet the hearings still offered a window into the state of our presidency at a time when our political system is being grievously tested. I was transported back to my days as a teenager on an Oregon farm in the early 1970s, watching hearings about Watergate and President Richard Nixon. We had just bought our first television — black-and-white — so that we could follow the national crisis. While there were many facts and laws in dispute, the backdrop seemed indisputable: Our president was dishonest and had egregiously abused his powers.

There were no huge revelations on Wednesday, but there was a similar sense of a stench in Washington that might have far-reaching consequences. Here was one exchange that might offer a glimpse of the future:

Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo.: “Could you charge the president with a crime after he left office?”

Mueller: “Yes.”

Buck (sounding startled): “You believe you could charge the president of the United States with obstruction of justice after he left office?”

I wonder how that went over in the Trump family. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it creates one more reason President Donald Trump will be desperate to win reelection: Winning might keep him out of prison.

Somewhat reluctantly, Mueller seemed to acknowledge that Trump acted in ways that sound like obstruction of justice. In an exchange with Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., Mueller amplified this:

Richmond: “So it’s fair to say the president tried to protect himself by asking staff to falsify records relevant to an ongoing investigation?”

Mueller: “I would say that’s generally a summary.”

None of this should seem surprising to anyone who read the Mueller report. After all, more than 1,000 former federal prosecutors, serving under Democrats and Republicans alike, signed a letter stating that if it weren’t for a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion, Trump would face “multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.” The letter outlines the evidence for those charges, including “witness-tampering” and creation of “false evidence.”

We should all be wary of our own selection bias and tendency to cherry-pick, and just because a president can be indicted after leaving office doesn’t mean that Trump will be in jeopardy. But at the broadest level, the hearings underscored the stink captured in the Mueller report.

Attorney General William Barr initially fumigated the report, claiming that the evidence it presented effectively exonerated Trump; that was inaccurate but was seized upon by Trump himself. The president repeatedly claimed that the Mueller investigation (“the greatest witch hunt in U.S. history”) found “no collusion, no obstruction.”

In the hearings, Mueller directly contradicted that line of defense, stating bluntly: “The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed.”

In his opening statement before the Judiciary Committee, Mueller also flatly challenged Trump’s repeated efforts to downplay Russia’s interference in the election. Mueller noted that the Russians had interfered in an attempt to help Trump win, and he declared: “Our investigation found that the Russian government interfered in our election in sweeping and systematic fashion. … Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy. The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious.”

Likewise, Mueller directly denied that he had been interviewed for the job of FBI director and that he had been turned down, as Trump claimed. “I was not applying for that job,” Mueller said. Not surprisingly, he also denied that the investigation had been a “witch hunt” and he sharply criticized Trump’s praise for WikiLeaks’ release of emails hacked by Russia.

There was partisanship on both sides, of course, but I was struck and saddened by the way some Republicans lashed out at Mueller and tried to discredit him. After all, Mueller is a lifelong Republican, a decorated veteran and a longtime law enforcement leader — precisely the kind of person one might expect Republicans to show respect for.

It seemed that once Republicans had gauged Mueller’s refusal to push back hard, they chose to toss out conspiracy theories about the origins of the investigation. They didn’t contest the specific points made about Trump trying to foil the justice system, but they did try to distract from them.

When I was a teenager watching hearings about Nixon’s abuses, I was struck by the willingness of some Republicans to defend Nixon and argue that Watergate was vastly overblown.

Soon enough, this was shown to be a triumph of loyalty to party over loyalty to country. History won’t reward obfuscation or blind party loyalty this time, either.

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Robert Mueller seemed to be hoping during congressional hearings on Wednesday that SEAL Team 6 would rush in and rescue him from his interrogators.

The Mueller Hearings and the Stench in Washington

“That’s not spontaneous enough for me,” she told him. “Ask me out closer to the date.”

An hour or two later, Bill Gates phoned her and invited her out for that evening. “Is this spontaneous enough for you?” he asked.

And then they lived happily ever after.

Actually, not exactly. Melinda Gates has written a smart new memoir, “The Moment of Lift,” recounting how she ended up a feminist — and arguing that the American workplace needs a makeover.

Some of her story is deeply personal. She endured an abusive relationship. She felt out of place in Microsoft’s high-testosterone environment. And then she struggled to forge an equal relationship with Bill (it helped that she beat him at a math game).

I hugely admire what Bill and Melinda Gates have done to alleviate global suffering. Hundreds of thousands of children now survive each year who wouldn’t have without the Gateses’ money, advocacy and ingenuity. They have also been steadfast in advocating changes in tax laws — raising the inheritance tax, for example — to create a more fair society.

During interviews with Bill and Melinda over many years, I’ve often tried to get them to dish on their relationship, as a way of spicing up discussions about global health and their foundation work. They resolutely resisted my interrogations.

Fortunately, in her book, Melinda comes clean on marital tensions — the kind in any relationship — as a way of recounting her feminist voyage. Some readers may mock these difficulties, thinking, “Why feel sorry for a billionaire?” My take is different.

Of course her challenges are nothing compared with those of victims of sex trafficking, acid attacks or obstetric fistula around the world. Just this month, a heroic Bangladeshi teenager named Nusrat was burned to death after she reported her headmaster for groping her. Such gross injustices must be our priority. But we lack moral authority to protest abroad when we shrug at inequities here at home.

One of Melinda’s first challenges came in the harsh, male-dominated techie culture at Microsoft. “It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point,” she writes. She began thinking about quitting.

Then she found a woman colleague, Charlotte Guyman, who felt the same. “It’s not OK for women to cry at work, but it’s OK for men to yell at work?” Guyman once asked. With other women employees, they began to create oases in Microsoft where courtesy was not seen as a sign of weakness. A critical mass of women employees helped civilize the company.

Yet while women were 35% of the computer science graduates in the U.S. in 1987, when Melinda graduated from Duke with such a degree, the share has now dropped to 19%. Only 2% of venture capital partners in America are women. Much of the U.S. workplace remains tilted against women, especially moms.

“We’re sending our daughters into a workplace that was designed for our dads — set up on the assumption that employees had partners who would stay home to do the unpaid work of caring for family,” Melinda writes. She notes that the U.S. is a rare country that does not mandate some paid parental leave.

“We’re quick to criticize gender injustice when we see it around the world,” Melinda observes. “We also need to see it where most of us feel it and can do something about it — in the places where we work.”

After the marriage, in 1994, Melinda still struggled, and one flashpoint was the annual letter that Bill had been writing for the foundation they had established. Melinda was co-chair of the foundation and wanted to write it with him in 2013. Bill didn’t like the idea. “We both got angry,” Melinda writes, adding: “I thought we were going to kill each other. I felt, ‘Well, this just might end the marriage right here.’”

In the end, Bill wrote the letter for 2013 but included a section by Melinda. In 2014, it became a joint letter, but mostly written by Bill. Finally, in 2015 it morphed into a truly balanced letter.

That’s how equal marriages are built: not just on romance but also on hard work and grumpy compromises. And equal marriages help build fairer societies. When their eldest child, Jenn, began school an hour round-trip drive away, Bill volunteered to take her to school two days a week. That changed the norms, and abruptly other dads at the school began sharing the driving as well.

“When we saw Bill driving,” one mom explained to Melinda, “we went home and said to our husbands, ‘Bill Gates is driving his kid to school; you can, too.’”

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

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Melinda Gates has always had an independent streak. When she was still Melinda French and a young employee working at Microsoft in 1987, Bill Gates flirted with her in the parking lot and asked if she would go out with him in two weeks. She turned him down.

The Bill-Melinda Gates Romance Started With a Rejection

The Chinese regime is interning people based on religion in a more systematic way than any other regime since perhaps the Nazis. Its tolerance of fentanyl trafficking leads to some 20,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States each year. It steals intellectual property and ratchets up persecution at home.

I lived in China, speak Chinese and deeply admire the country. Yet I am increasingly repulsed by Xi’s China, for he is dragging the country in the wrong direction by imprisoning lawyers, journalists and people of faith; tightening controls over the internet; creating international security risks in the South China Sea; and fostering a personality cult around himself.

In fairness, it’s also true that the Chinese government has helped lift more people out of poverty than any other government in human history. Just since 1990, the mortality rate for children under 5 has fallen in China by 83 percent — suggesting, by my calculations, that an additional 676,000 Chinese children survive each year who previously would have died.

Those of us who condemn China for human rights violations must also acknowledge this uncomfortable truth: A child born in Beijing today has a substantially longer life expectancy (82 years) than a child born in Washington, D.C. (77 years).

In short, the Xi regime is complicated. It cheats, oppresses and brutalizes, but it also educates, enriches and saves lives.

I’ve seen the worst of China: I was on Tiananmen Square in 1989 when troops opened fire on the crowd I was in. I’ve also seen the best: impoverished families in western China moving out of caves into modern homes and sending their children to universities. I used to believe that China was best approached with ambivalence, but in the last few years the ambivalence has faded into wariness.

When a trade deal is reached, Trump may hail it as a triumph, and it will probably result in announcements of Chinese purchases of American goods. A trade deal is a good thing, but I hope that the United States will work with allies and firmly stand up to China on three issues in particular.

First, to the extent possible, we should try to curb Chinese high-technology firms’ access to Western markets. These businesses are a security threat, and the Trump administration is right to be concerned. If a company like Huawei is asked to cooperate with Chinese State Security spies, its executives simply can’t say no.

This doesn’t mean that China is evil. American companies sold telecommunications equipment to China beginning in the 1980s that let us intercept officials’ conversations there, and we have inserted cyber “back doors” into goods and software sold to China so that we can cause damage in the event of a conflict. China purchased a Boeing 767 in 2000 to be its presidential jet and it arrived riddled with listening devices. China inevitably will try to do to us what we already did to it.

Second, we should continue to highlight human rights, especially China’s internment of perhaps 1 million Muslims in re-education camps. This is a staggering affront to religious liberty, with Chinese officials reportedly forcing Muslims to violate their faith by eating pork and drinking alcohol.

Bravo to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for forthrightly denouncing China’s “awful abuses” in detaining “hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Uighurs,” as well as its persecution of Christians. The Chinese authorities have even installed monitoring cameras inside Muslims’ homes, and they have sent many Muslim parents to re-education camps, leaving the children left behind to be brainwashed in boarding schools.

Third, we need continued pressure on China over its exports of fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is killing Americans in huge numbers through overdoses. Two-thirds or more of the fentanyl in the U.S. originates in China, where the authorities have been promising since 2016 to crack down on it.

A few days ago, China announced that it would soon ban all variants of fentanyl, a welcome step that may make a difference. But China often promises cooperation that does not materialize, and everything will depend on enforcement over the country’s 160,000 chemical companies. Too many lives hang in the balance to take China at its word.

About 20,000 Americans appear to be dying each year from Chinese fentanyl (some of it entering via Mexico). That’s a toll of devastation far greater than that caused by terrorists in the U.S. over multiple decades, and it should arouse far more outrage than Chinese companies pirating videos.

So, sure, a good trade deal with China is welcome. But when so many Americans are dying from Chinese fentanyl, when 1 million Muslims are interned, when Emperor Xi is dragging China in the wrong direction, let’s not celebrate but, instead, keep up the international pressure.

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President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China will probably soon reach a trade agreement, but that won't solve the biggest problems.

Even After a Trade Deal, Be Wary of China

Mr. President, meet Clemente and his daughter Wendy, both fleeing gang violence in Guatemala. Your administration separated them six months ago and kept them apart.

These family separations, continuing but at a lower level than before, are an element of the real “emergency” at the border — the one also involving physical and sexual abuse of immigrant children in U.S. custody and systematic deception from Washington.

The paradox is that Trump’s cruel policy to deter desperate immigrants appears counterproductive; apparently the furor it provoked drew attention to the possibility of migration. The result is a surge of Central American families traveling to the United States, with the number crossing the border far higher than a year earlier.

Clemente, 34, is from a small Guatemalan village. He doesn’t want to use his last name because of all he has been through at the hands of the U.S. government. There is no way to verify parts of his story, but individuals who work with immigrants say it rings true.

A gang in Guatemala killed his cousin, and last year gangsters stabbed Clemente’s father and sent warnings to Clemente: “It’s now your turn.”

Terrified, he fled with his eldest daughter, Wendy, then 15, leaving his wife and five other, younger children, whom he did not believe the gang would target. He feared that the gang would abduct Wendy, an excellent student who loves books, and he could not bear that thought.

They crossed Mexico without serious incident, then waded across the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers, requesting asylum. That was Aug. 20, two months after Trump said he had ended the family separation policy. But officials promptly separated Clemente and Wendy.

Clemente was put in a “hielera,” or ice box, notorious detention rooms predating Trump that are kept cold. Clemente, wet from the river crossing, was soon freezing as well as hungry and weak because he had given his food to Wendy. “As a dad, the last thing you want is for your daughter to suffer,” he explained simply. “So I gave everything to her.”

In this frail state, he caught pneumonia and passed out. Many hours went by before he was taken to a hospital, unconscious and gravely ill. Inadequate health care in detention centers is common, and two migrant children died in December in Border Patrol custody.

“I woke up in the hospital, and I didn’t know where I was,” Clemente told me. “It was a nightmare. My first question was, ‘Where’s my daughter?'” He was eventually released from the hospital and later from detention, but now he found himself on the streets of Brownsville, Texas.

“He was distraught and he was crying,” recalled Sergio Cordova, a volunteer in Brownsville who does heroic work with immigrants, funded by donations, and discovered Clemente at the bus station. “I gave him a hug and he started saying he can’t find his daughter, he doesn’t know where his daughter is.”

Eventually, Clemente discovered that she was in a shelter. She was allowed to telephone him once a week, but not return to his care; his voice broke as he described her as “an angel from God.”

Immigration is a complicated challenge, but ripping apart families isn’t the solution. Perhaps the best approach is to help improve security in Central America so that people like Clemente need not flee. Some anti-gang initiatives there have been very successful in reducing homocide rates that drive migration.

“If it were peaceful, I’d like to be back there where I grew up,” said Clemente, who received help from Immigrant Families Together in his quest to reunite with his daughter. “I’d love to be in the land where I was born.”

The Texas Civil Rights Project found that at least 272 adults were separated from a child family member in the six months after Trump supposedly ended family separation. The youngest to be separated was an 8-month-old girl taken from her mother.

Officials are less likely now to separate parents from children, but they continue to separate grandparents from grandchildren, siblings from siblings. The day I spoke with Cordova, the volunteer, he was helping two brothers from Honduras who had no other family left: Junior, 21, had raised Andy, 7.

When gang members brutally beat up Junior for refusing to sell drugs for them, he fled with Andy to the United States — and officials separated them on arrival six months ago. So little Andy is now in a shelter, apart from the only person who has loved and protected him.

“I see this all the time,” Cordova told me. “They cry with me, I cry with them.”

Finally, there was a break in Clemente’s case. On Wednesday night, authorities released Wendy to him. After six months apart, they had a teary reunion.

“I thought I might never get her back again,” Clemente said. “I am very thankful.”

So, yes, President Trump, you’re right that there’s an emergency at the border. It’s a humanitarian crisis of family separation that you helped create.

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President Donald Trump claimed last June to have ended the practice of separating immigrant families at the southern border. “We are going to keep the families together,” he declared from the Oval Office.

The Cruelty at the Border Continues

Of all the harebrained and unscrupulous dealings of the Trump administration in the last two years, one of the most shocking is a Trump plan to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Even as President Donald Trump is trying to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, he may be helping to nuclearize Saudi Arabia. This is abominable policy tainted by a gargantuan conflict of interest involving Kushner.

Kushner’s family real estate business had been teetering because of a disastrously overpriced acquisition he made of a particular Manhattan property called 666 Fifth Avenue, but last August a company called Brookfield Asset Management rescued the Kushners by taking a 99-year lease of the troubled property — and paying the whole sum of about $1.1 billion up front.

Alarm bells should go off: Brookfield also owns Westinghouse Electric, the nuclear services business trying to sell reactors to Saudi Arabia.

It may be conflicts like these, along with even murkier ones, that led U.S. intelligence officials to refuse a top-secret security clearance for Kushner. The Times reported Thursday that Trump overruled them to grant Kushner the clearance.

This nuclear reactor mess began around the time of Trump’s election, when a group of retired U.S. national security officials put together a plan to enrich themselves by selling nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia. The officials included Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, and they initially developed a “plan for 40 nuclear power plants” in Saudi Arabia, according to a report from the House Oversight and Reform Committee. The plan is now to start with just a couple of plants.

As recently as Feb. 12, Trump met in the White House with backers of the project and was supportive, Reuters reported.

These are civilian nuclear power plants, and Saudi Arabia claims it wants them for electricity. But the Saudis insist on producing their own nuclear fuel, rather than buying it more cheaply abroad. Producing fuel is a standard way for rogue countries to divert fuel for secret nuclear weapons programs, and the Saudi resistance to safeguards against proliferation bolsters suspicions that the real goal is warheads.

Trump may be vigilant (destructively so) about Iran’s nuclear plants, but in the Saudi case his response seems to be: There’s money to be made! When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised objections to the transfer last year, Axios reported, “Trump and his advisers told Netanyahu that, if the U.S. does not sell the Saudis nuclear reactors, other countries like Russia or France will.”

Trump seems to believe that the Saudis have us over a barrel: If we don’t help them with nuclear technology, someone else will. That misunderstands the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The Saudis depend on us for their security, and the blunt truth is that we hold all the cards in this relationship, not them.

Why on earth would America put Prince Mohammed on a path to acquiring nuclear weapons? He is already arguably the most destabilizing leader in an unstable region, for he has invaded Yemen, kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister, started a feud with Qatar, and, according to U.S. intelligence officials, ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

The prince has also imprisoned and brutally tortured women’s rights activists, including one who I’m hoping will win the Nobel Peace Prize, Loujain al-Hathloul. As Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., has noted, “A country that can’t be trusted with a bone saw shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.”

The White House won’t clarify whether Kushner discussed the nuclear issue when he met Prince Muhammed a few days ago, but Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told me, “I’d be surprised if it didn’t come up.” Along with Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., Merkley has introduced a resolution to oppose the transfer of nuclear technology that would allow Saudi Arabia to create nuclear weapons.

There’s another element of Trump’s Saudi policy that is simply repulsive: the fawning courtship of a foreign prince who has created in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, killed a journalist and tortured women’s rights activists. The White House genuflections are such that Prince Mohammed had a point when, according to The Intercept, he bragged that he had Kushner in his “pocket.”

No one knows whether Prince Mohammed will manage to succeed his father and become the next king, for there is opposition and the Saudi economic transformation he boasts of is running into difficulties. Trump and Kushner seem to be irresponsibly trying to boost the prince’s prospects, increasing the risk that an unstable hothead will mismanage the kingdom for the next 50 years. Perhaps with nuclear weapons.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/opinion/sunday/saudi-arabia-jared-kushner-nuclear.html" id="d5d3f2d2-be4b-3934-a8be-c0cdb7502b04">The New York Times</a>.

Jared Kushner slipped quietly into Saudi Arabia last week for a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, so the question I’m trying to get the White House to answer is this: Did they discuss American help for a Saudi nuclear program?

Jared and the Saudi Crown Prince Go Nuclear?

“If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!” Trump tweeted last summer. He seems to see his legacy in part as the great peacemaker of the Korean Peninsula and recently boasted that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Many other people feel that way, too,” Trump told reporters, as he spoke about the “beautiful” letter that Abe had written to nominate him.

Abe, apparently mortified that his effort to stroke Trump had become public, refused to confirm this. And two leading Japanese newspapers, The Asahi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun, reported that Abe’s letter was written at the White House’s request.

In surprising symmetry, North Korea is said to be abuzz with talk about the Nobel Peace Prize and the possibility that it could be awarded to Kim. The Kims are generally overachievers: Kim is said to have started driving at age 3, and his father had five holes-in-one in his first game of golf, not to mention a perfect score of 300 the first time he bowled.

It is, of course, delusion to think that either Trump or Kim will win the Nobel Peace Prize, and in general it’s not a good thing for leaders to go into a summit delusional. Many security officials in the United States and abroad worry that in his quest for the prize, Trump might make some rash pledge, such as to withdraw American forces from South Korea.

But delusions can be helpful if they make each side more willing to make concessions and pursue an arduous peace process. I don’t think there is any prospect of North Korea handing over its nuclear weapons soon, but it is possible to see a diplomatic path that leaves the world safer — and there’s a fighting chance that we might achieve this.

Last year, Trump was bamboozled at his first meeting with Kim. There were minimal preparations, and Trump made major concessions such as suspending military exercises in exchange for nothing as significant.

Trump compounded his diplomatic ineptitude with rhetorical grandiosity. He tweeted, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” and he later asserted that Kim had sent him “beautiful letters” and “we fell in love.”

In fact, the North Korean threat remained. Indeed, North Korea has apparently continued to produce nuclear fuel and operate its missile bases. American intelligence officials bluntly told a Senate committee this year that North Korea is unlikely to denuclearize.

Yet if Trump was hoodwinked last year, there are some more hopeful signs this time. He has appointed a well-respected special envoy, Stephen Biegun, and both Biegun and Trump have been signaling that they are now realistic about trade-offs and a timeline, with Trump saying that North Korea will denuclearize “ultimately” and that “I’m in no rush.”

Here’s what a plausible deal might look like.

North Korea would promise to dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear complex and a couple of less important sites, admit international inspectors and continue its moratorium on nuclear and missile tests. In exchange, the United States would relax sanctions on inter-Korean projects involving tourism and manufacturing. The two sides could also declare that the Korean War has ended, exchange diplomatic liaison offices, ease cultural exchanges and agree on a path forward chipping away at the nuclear program.

In some sense, this is Kabuki. On my last visit to North Korea, in 2017, officials spoke of learning from Libya that if you give up your nuclear program, America may then topple your government. So I suspect Kim has zero plans to give up his nuclear weapons.

But even without full denuclearization, it is progress if there is a freeze on testing, a halt to nuclear production, an easing of tensions and an agreement on future steps. When an American crossed into North Korea from China last fall, the North Koreans expelled him rather than imprisoned him as a bargaining chip. The United States has likewise eased rules on humanitarian aid to North Korea.

Trump and Kim may claim some magical breakthrough, perhaps around a declaration of the end of the Korean War. But don’t believe any magic. This is not a problem that will be solved this month or this year.

At its best, this will be a slog. We should pray that U.S.-North Korea relations become boring.

The greatest threat of this presidency was that Trump would stumble into a nuclear war, and in 2017 and 2018 the Pentagon was deeply concerned that this was a risk with Trump-Kim brinkmanship and Trump’s boast that his nuclear button was bigger than Kim’s.

If he and Kim pursue a painstaking peace process instead, in some illusory quest for a Nobel Peace Prize, we can live with that.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/opinion/sunday/north-korea-summit-trump.html" id="d9b4f45b-bbdc-3a06-ac15-d2347f07b89f">The New York Times</a>.

As President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un hold a summit meeting this upcoming week in Vietnam, they have something in common: Each apparently looks in the mirror and sees a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Waiting for the Trump-Kim Nobel Peace Prize

Male anxieties about mentoring women seem to me overblown. Sure, there are risks of misunderstandings — women navigate this turf every day — but common sense can usually mitigate them, and gender separation won’t work any better for us than it did for the Taliban. We should all be adult enough to maneuver through the middle ground between leering at a colleague and avoiding her.

Here are a couple of real-life work experiences I’ve had. How do you think I should have handled them?

It’s 1993 and I’ve sneaked into a remote part of the Xinjiang region of China with a female intern, June Shih. After a horseback ride, we get to our “hotel,” which has only several large yurts, each with more than a dozen beds.

The lodge manager opens one yurt and turns on the electricity and heat. I ask the manager for a separate room, but he points out that there are another dozen beds available in this yurt; he doesn’t want to open up another.

June says she doesn’t care. What do I do?

I was conflicted, for it seemed absurd for the two of us to take up two giant yurts when there was zero risk of actual impropriety. On the other hand, I dreaded word getting out that I had shared a room with an intern.

In the end, I persuaded the manager to open up a second yurt. It was within shouting distance of the first, which allayed my concern that June might not be safe alone in an unlocked yurt. If she had been a colleague on a more equal footing, we might have stayed together, but the gap in power between us made me particularly cautious.

This week I reached out to June to ask if her memory jibed with mine. She said it was the best trip of her life, but she didn’t remember any crisis over accommodations — and thought that even if she hadn’t said so, she might have felt “weird” if we had shared a room. “I remember more that it was freezing cold,” she told me, “and I slept with all my clothes on and about a foot of stinky wool blankets on top.”

It’s 2006 and I’m traveling in the Darfur area of Sudan with my female researcher, Winter Miller, who persuaded me to let her use her own money and vacation time to join the trip for her own writing (she later wrote the play “In Darfur”). We’re also accompanied by a male video journalist, Naka Nathaniel.

The problem is that the first night we’re in an upscale hotel in the Chadian capital, which is more than Winter can readily afford. Do I let Winter sleep on the extra bed in my room to save money?

This really pained me. I wanted to help but feared stories about me sharing a hotel room with my researcher. Fortunately, Naka rescued us by letting Winter stay on his extra bed; at least she did not work for him, and they were simply colleagues.

I reached Winter, now a playwright in New York, and here’s her take: “At the time, I wanted you to be a hero and pay for an additional room. However, I thought you were overreacting; I trusted myself to be around you and I trusted you to be around me.”

Did I choose right in these cases? Wrong? I’m not sure. The challenge is less about maintaining propriety than about the image of propriety. I know I wouldn’t do anything improper, but I don’t want to leave the slightest room for innuendo.

That’s why men sometimes say they don’t dare mentor women; tongues will wag.

To me, that’s ridiculous. Bosses should manage these issues just as they handle every other kind of risk — conflicts of interest, volatile personalities, data safety and so on.

There’s abundant evidence that companies with more senior women have a higher return on equity. This seems to be because more diverse teams do better and also because the companies willing to promote women are more innovative in other ways. The upshot is that managers who don’t mentor women don’t just hurt those women; they also sell their own companies short.

Men and women alike will periodically hug someone who isn’t ready to be hugged, or will make a ribald comment that leaves someone uncomfortable. But occasional awkwardness is preferable to gender apartheid.

In my journalistic career, I’ve worked alongside women covering war, genocide, riots and famine. Often there are no toilets, no places to change, no privacy, but men and women manage to make the situation work through mutual respect. If people of goodwill can make those “work places” succeed, a modern office building should be no problem.

Frankly, if we men need help sorting all this out, we can ask a woman. They’ve always managed this terrain, mostly avoiding both anxiety and lust and relying on simple common sense.

—

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/me-too-male-bosses.html" id="1512aa15-cd35-3b82-aa51-f56295bc943b">The New York Times</a>.

We’re seeing a backlash from the #MeToo movement, with many male bosses saying in surveys that they are less willing now to mentor junior female colleagues, go to dinner with them, travel with them — generally treat them as co-workers rather than as land mines.

Navigating the Male-Female Work Relationship

There has properly been global outrage at Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia. Jamal was a friend of mine, and I find it infuriating that President Donald Trump and other officials won’t hold Saudi Arabia accountable for killing and dismembering him.

Still, we can’t bring him back. So let’s direct equal attention to those still alive — like Hathloul, along with nine other women’s rights activists who are also in custody, including some who say they have endured torture.

Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner bet big on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman but they were bamboozled. MBS isn’t a great reformer, and he isn’t coming clean about Khashoggi’s murder.

Nor is he releasing Hathloul, who, along with others, had peacefully and persistently campaigned for years to allow women the right to drive.

In 2014, she was arrested when she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia with a driver’s license from the United Arab Emirates, nominally valid also in Saudi Arabia. Then in 2015, Hathloul was one of the first women to run for a seat on a municipal council. (She lost.)

She moved to the emirates. But in 2017, Saudi security forces effectively kidnapped her and her husband and returned them to the kingdom. The couple have divorced, and while accounts differ, some believe this is because of pressure the government placed on the husband.

Shortly before women were allowed to drive last June, the government rearrested Hathloul, along with other women’s rights activists who had fought for the right the government was about to grant.

“She said she had been held in solitary confinement, beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed and threatened with rape and murder,” her sister, Alia al-Hathloul, who lives in Belgium, wrote in a searing op-ed in The New York Times this month, recounting what Loujain had told their parents when they saw her. “My parents then saw that her thighs were blackened by bruises.”

Despite being threatened with rape and murder and having her body thrown into the sewage system, Hathloul would not stay silent and reported the torture to her parents.

Her sister said Loujain was “shaking uncontrollably, unable to hold her grip, to walk or sit normally.”

The other imprisoned women suffered similar treatment, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and their families. They were said to have been subjected to electric shocks, whippings, forced kissing and hugging, threats of rape and more. Some were tied to a metal bed and flogged.

“Loujain’s abuse exemplifies the methods of Saudi thuggish and lawless leadership, hellbent on exacting sadistic vengeance against any citizen who dares to think freely,” Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch told me. “The Saudi people owe a huge debt to Loujain.”

A government spokesman did not respond to my inquiries about why Hathloul was imprisoned and tortured. A pro-government newspaper did suggest that Hathloul is a traitor who could even deserve to be executed.

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has stepped up the pace of executions, with about 150 reported last year. Apparently for the first time, prosecutors have sought the death penalty for a woman who is a nonviolent human rights defender, Israa al-Ghomgham.

Trump is right that Saudi Arabia is an important ally. That’s why it’s important that it have a decent, modernizing leader, rather than one who feuds with neighbors, kidnaps Lebanon’s prime minister, invades Yemen, murders a journalist and tortures outspoken women.

Saudi politics are murky, but there are whispers that the crown prince will not necessarily be elevated to king on the death of his father. Yet Trump, Pompeo and Kushner are acting as MBS’ protectors and backers — so the world could be stuck with MBS as a destabilizing and oppressive ruler for the next half century.

America doesn’t have much leverage to improve human rights in countries like China, Venezuela or Iran. But we have enormous leverage over Saudi Arabia, because it depends on us for its security. Yet Trump, Pompeo and Kushner refuse to use that leverage.

I can’t find any indication that any official in the Trump administration has even publicly mentioned Hathloul’s name or called for her release. So I hope Congress will step up, oversee the relationship and ask tough questions about why we are silent when our close ally waterboards a woman seeking equal rights.

Saudi Arabia will never live up to its potential as long as it treats women as second-class citizens. What’s at stake is not only justice but also stability, economic development and peace in the region.

Thus I urge the Nobel Peace Prize committee to consider selecting Hathloul this year.

Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/sunday/loujain-al-hathloul-saudi.html" id="cfdadc50-7dae-3308-a440-fdf1156cb46d">The New York Times</a>.

Remember this name: Loujain (pronounced Loo-JAYNE) al-Hathloul. She is 29 years old and a courageous advocate for gender equality — so she is in a Saudi Arabian prison, and reportedly our Saudi allies have tortured her, even waterboarded her.

Nicholas Kristof

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