Filmmaker witnessed the moment the Proud Boys attacked on January 6, CNN.com

Filmmaker witnessed the moment the Proud Boys attacked on January 6

Updated 11:22 AM ET, Sat June 11, 2022
The most impactful moments from the first night of the January 6 hearing

The most impactful moments from the first night of the January 6 hearing 05:03

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)Nick Quested, a British documentary filmmaker, testified on Thursday evening before the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection. I spoke with Quested on Friday. He told me that he wanted the public to understand the truth of what happened on January 6 and expressed worries that the riot could be a dress rehearsal for another attack on America’s constitutional order.
Quested, a producer of the Oscar-nominated Afghanistan War documentary, “Restrepo,” has worked on several other films on subjects ranging from the Mexican drug cartels to the rise of ISIS in Syria.

Quested and his producing partner Sebastian Junger became interested in the far-right group, the Proud Boys, and followed them in the weeks leading up to January 6. Quested, who captured key footage of the group during the attack at the Capitol, shared his work and his personal account of the events of that day during the committee’s first televised hearing.

He told me about the scenes of mayhem that he and his colleagues filmed that day, as well as the mysterious meeting between the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, another far-right group, that took place in a Washington, DC, parking garage the night before the assault on the US Capitol.

Disclosure: I have appeared as an interviewee in one of Quested’s documentaries. Our interview was edited for clarity.

PETER BERGEN: Why did you decide to testify?
NICK QUESTED: Because we’re approaching living in a post-factual world, and I think it’s important that these facts about January 6 are brought to bear and in an unpartisan way, especially if we can use these hearings to make sure that something like this never happens again.

BERGEN: And you had a subpoena to appear before the committee?
QUESTED: I had a subpoena. I spoke to the authorities in an interview beforehand, but when they were using my work in the way that they did, I felt it was only appropriate for them to subpoena me.
BERGEN: Your work — did you just hand it over to them, or did they request it? How did that work?
QUESTED: Well as a journalist, having filmed what were potentially many crimes, I didn’t feel there was any journalistic jeopardy giving that to authorities. I called a friend who is a US Attorney, and I said, “Listen, I have filmed I don’t know how many crimes. What do you think I should do with this?” He said, “We’ll call the DC Criminal Division.” I was then referred to an agent from the FBI. And we still had to process the footage because we shoot very high-quality video, which needs to be processed. So, we did that and then I gave it to the FBI.
Opinion: The big question about the January 6 hearings goes beyond Trump
Opinion: The big question about the January 6 hearings goes beyond Trump
BERGEN: On the morning of January 6th, what happened in terms of the Proud Boys?
QUESTED: I turned up on the National Mall around 10:30 am and the Proud Boys were already marching in an easterly direction towards the western side of the Capitol, and I immediately kicked into gear and started trying to cover the scene. I’m shooting a wide shot. I’m shooting long lens. I’m in the middle of the crowd with them. I’m shooting slow motion. I’m just trying to edit a sequence in my head, because I’ve done a lot of marching with these guys. They love marching up and down the Mall. We’d done that on December 12, 2020.
So I thought that’s what we were doing again. And we walked around the Capitol, and still they were marching. They’re singing their songs. It felt like hooligans at a soccer match. There were bawdy jokes. There’s sort of been an evolution in the Proud Boys, and at one point, people said that they were a drinking club with a political problem. I’d say they’re a political club with a drinking problem now.
And it wasn’t until that crowd moved near the barrier around the Capitol that I felt the world shift. At 12:54 pm, I feel the commotion and run over, and soon, the barriers are coming down and people are streaming forward and running towards the Capitol.
BERGEN: Were you frightened?
QUESTED: I wasn’t frightened at that point. But the language had started to change. There were more challenges to police to “respect their oath” and comments like, “We pay your wages. Do your job. Choose a side. Respect the oath.” And then people are starting to kick down the next fence. They’re starting to break up the fence and take pieces out of it to use as makeshift weapons, and it was different. It felt like some people were in rapture. It felt like a crusade, like they felt they were right, and they were unappreciative of the irony of using violence to overthrow a constitutionally elected body and justifying that violence by citing the Constitution.
BERGEN: Their interpretation of the Constitution.
QUESTED: Yeah.
BERGEN: How and when did you decide to profile the Proud Boys?
Trump claims daughter Ivanka 'checked out' and wasn't looking at election results
Trump claims daughter Ivanka ‘checked out’ and wasn’t looking at election results
QUESTED: In the summer of 2020, I was chatting with the war reporter and my producing partner Sebastian Junger, and we were talking about the psyche of the country at that time. We were in the first few months of Covid-19. People were scared because they had no idea what this virus’ potential was. The hospitals were full. There was a hospital ship in the harbor in New York. The emergency rooms were overflowing. There were stories in the papers about pressure on the food supply and Covid ripping through meatpacking plants.
And then you have the murder of George Floyd, and you literally have medieval-style pitched battles in the cities of America. And we asked ourselves this question: Why is America so divided when Americans have so much in common?
So, we thought, let’s see what the far right has to say and what the far right and the far left actually have in common here. And we wanted to ask both sides: What does it mean to be American? If you can’t define it, then how can you find commonality, if there is commonality to be had here?
BERGEN: So, you reached out to the Proud Boys.
QUESTED: Yeah. We called up the Proud Boys. On November 4, 2020, when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that he won the election before a winner had been declared, we were like, “Oh, here you go.” Because one of the fundamental tenets of America is having a peaceful transfer of power. I called up Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys. He liked the film “Restrepo” that war reporter Tim Hetherington, Sebastian, and I made together. And he just said to come down. So we went down to DC on December 11, 2020 and started working.
BERGEN: When a revolution happens, even the revolutionaries sometimes have no idea what is going to happen. To what extent did the Proud Boys know this was going to happen on January 6?
QUESTED: I don’t know. We did definitely look at the Proud Boys and say, “Well, are Proud Boys Jacobins? Are they Brown Shirts? Or are they football hooligans?” Or is it just Trumpism? Because that was a very unifying factor throughout the Proud Boys. There are no RINOs in the Proud Boys. It is the cult of Trump, and they were the muscle.
BERGEN: The footage that you have, why is it of interest to the committee, and what does it show?
QUESTED: It was shot with very high-end cameras at a very high resolution with high-quality lenses by trained professional journalists. There were three of us there and also a freelancer that we met on the day. I was shooting as well. So, basically, what we have is a full view of the day because, even though we were separated at the beginning, we managed to have parallel experiences that have nexus points. We were able to cut documentary scenes from different angles because we’re all seeing the same parts at the same time.

BERGEN: What are the key scenes?
QUESTED: The Proud Boys walking down the Mall, the Proud Boys at lunch, the barriers coming down, the Proud Boys just as the barriers come down at the West Plaza of the Capitol, the fight on the lower West Plaza, and the fight at the tunnel on the west side of the Capitol.
BERGEN: The battle scene in the tunnel? You were there?
QUESTED: I was there.
BERGEN: What did you see?
QUESTED: Chaos and mayhem. I mean, mayhem in the true sense of the word.
BERGEN: Had you ever seen that in the United States?
QUESTED: I have not seen that in the United States, no.
BERGEN: Have you seen it anywhere?
QUESTED: Yeah. I’ve seen it around the world.
BERGEN: Where?
QUESTED: Venezuela 2017, Nicaragua 2018.
BERGEN: Were you scared?
QUESTED: I wasn’t scared because I’m so living in the moment, and my job is to document this. I have a task. So, I focus on my task. I got beat up pretty bad. My camera was broken. I got shot by a beanbag or pepper balls. I got tear-gassed.
BERGEN: What was that like?
QUESTED: Well, it’s not great. It’s not great because you’re in a big crowd, and you know no one in this crowd. You lose all sense of awareness, everything. But for all those in the crowd who were violent, there were many people that were just there to witness the event. They might have chanted or whatever, but there were also people there helping others. Someone came and poured water into my eyes, and I was like, “Don’t do that?” because I was worried I was going to get Covid. And I was like I’d rather be tear-gassed.
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Opinion: American leadership is thriving abroad. It’s a disturbingly different story at home
My phone didn’t work, so I couldn’t communicate what I was doing until basically six o’clock, when I called my family and said it’s all good.
BERGEN: You also filmed a meeting on January 5 between the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers?
QUESTED: This meeting was in a parking garage. We picked Enrique Tarrio up by car from jail, as he had just made bond. (Editor’s note: Tarrio had been arrested on January 4, 2021 on a warrant charging him with burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a historic Black church and he was also found with high-capacity magazines, which are illegal in Washington, DC. He was later sentenced to a total of five months in jail for both crimes). We went to pick his stuff up from a lock-up garage south of the Mall. Then we went back up to pick up some bags from the Phoenix Park Hotel in downtown DC, and outside the hotel, we bumped into Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers. We picked up the bags, and somebody said, “You’ve got to come over to this parking garage.” So we went over to this garage, and there was Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, along with a few other people.
BERGEN: And what were they doing there?
QUESTED: Ostensibly, they said they were meeting to discuss the issue that Enrique felt he had, which was that he had brought extra capacity gun magazines into DC, which is illegal.
But there were also discussions about his communications and how they were potentially compromised. I heard him say, “I want to stay close to my boys,” and assumed he was having a discussion about where he was going to go next. But that’s all I heard.
I was close to them but at the request of Enrique Tarrio, I put down my camera. My colleague Nico Lupo, who was approximately 20 feet away from Tarrio and Rhodes, was filming from behind a car, so the mic wasn’t picking up the sound as well as we would have hoped.
BERGEN: Do you think it was a planning meeting for the following day?
QUESTED: I don’t know. I can’t say it was a planning meeting. I can tell you it looks pretty bad that you see the two leaders of the two groups that have been charged with seditious conspiracy in a meeting beforehand, but I can’t say what they were doing.
Opinion: History offers a surprising warning about January 6 hearing drama
Opinion: History offers a surprising warning about January 6 hearing drama
BERGEN: What are your hopes for your film?
QUESTED: Well, so we pivoted from our film about why America is so divided to a film that looks at the 64 days from the 2020 presidential election to January 6, 2021.
BERGEN: Is there interest in this film?
QUESTED: It took a lot of time to get interest in this film. We made an experiential film, which was just footage from the day, and we submitted it to a bunch of film festivals and hardly even got a reply, and when we did get a reply, they were like, “No, thank you. We’re not here to give any oxygen to these people.” And I said, “But if we don’t discuss this and bring truth to light, then how are we going to make this better?”
So, our film wants to lay out the facts of what happened in those 64 days in a fair and objective manner as we possibly can.
BERGEN: How much time did you spend with the committee and their investigators?
QUESTED: I had a few interviews, but my testimony of record lasted for seven hours.
BERGEN: What were the key points that you made?
QUESTED: Basically, my testimony revolves around my footage. So, I was explaining the context for my footage and what I saw.
BERGEN: Your entire life is about reporting and making a narrative. Is that what the congressional committee is doing?
QUESTED: I think that is, but, you know, we’re in a world where the narrative is driven by the politics.
BERGEN: Do you think these hearings will lay out the evidentiary basis of what happened on January 6?
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QUESTED: I think they will. From my conversations and the line of questioning, I think that they have a group of investigative counsels that are legitimately interested in being able to show the truth and prove it.
BERGEN: And you didn’t have any problem cooperating with them as a journalist?
QUESTED: Look, I’m in the business of truth, and I think they’re in the business of truth, and however people use the truth, that’s not my interest. My interest is having the truth out there.

BERGEN: Did you ever imagine that you would be where you were testifying on Thursday night?
QUESTED: Oh, hell, no. I like to ask the questions. I don’t like answering questions

Geography is Destiny: A 10,000 Year History of Britain and the World, New America Online with Ian Morris

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[ONLINE] – Geography is Destiny: A 10,000 Year History of Britain and the World
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Geography plays a central role in shaping international politics and security. The importance of geography and how people interpret it was on full display for Britain, as the country debated and then voted for Brexit. Yet, the role of geography and debates over how to understand it have a much longer history for the British. For seventy-five hundred years, the British were never more than bit players at the western edge of a European stage, struggling to find a role among bigger, richer, and more sophisticated continental rivals. By 1500, however, new kinds of ships and governments had turned the European stage into an Atlantic one; with the English Channel now functioning as a barrier, England transformed the British Isles into a United Kingdom that created a worldwide empire. Since 1900, thanks to rapid globalization, Britain has been overshadowed by American, European, and―increasingly―Chinese actors. In Geography Is Destiny, Ian Morris examines 10,000 years of British history and the ways geography and how people relate to it have shaped the British story.

To discuss his new book, Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History, New America welcomes Ian Morris. Morris is the Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University. He is also the author of Why the West Rules―for Now.

Join the conversation online using #GeographyisDestiny and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speaker:

Ian Morris
Author, Geography is Destiny
Professor of Classics and History, Stanford University

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows, New America
Professor of Practice, ASU
When
Jun. 7, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
Webcast link
RSVP

The cost of Trump’s chaos just keeps accumulating, CNN.com

by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 3:56 PM ET, Sat May 28, 2022

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World”, from which this essay is adapted. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)On January 20, 2021, Donald Trump departed the White House on a helicopter that took him to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, where he delivered the final remarks of his presidency to some of his supporters. Before boarding Air Force One for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his gilded palace in Florida, Trump promised them, “We will be back in some form.”

Some Americans took that as an exciting promise; others took it as more of a threat. Either way, Trump is, indeed, back.

A CNN poll released in February found that among Republican voters who were considering candidates for the 2024 presidential race, 54% supported Trump, which made him the top choice for securing the party’s nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis polled second at 21%, while other possible candidates such as former Vice President Mike Pence polled at no more than 1%.

There is a strong possibility that Trump will win his party’s nomination should he run again, which seems as likely as warm weather at Mar-a-Lago this summer.

Also, should he be nominated, Trump could even win the general election since only 39% of Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s performance in office, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Research poll released earlier this month.

Given Trump’s dominance of the GOP going into 2024, it’s a propitious moment to assess his failures and successes as commander in chief, which I attempt to do in my book, “The Cost of Chaos, The Trump Administration and the World.”
Trump has the distinction of being the only US president who publicly and consistently refused to accept his electoral loss. His lies about the 2020 election have poisoned America’s politics for the foreseeable future, as Trump has made signing on to those lies a de facto litmus test for many Republican candidates running for office.

Meanwhile, the bravery of the Ukrainians now fighting the Russians underlines the idiocy of Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin and also of his efforts to hold back military aid to the Ukrainians.
And when Trump was confronted by a real crisis — the Covid-19 pandemic — he largely embraced wishful thinking and quackery over any real leadership of the nation, resulting in much unnecessary further suffering.
But before examining in more detail Trump’s many failures as President, it’s worth stipulating that Trump also had some successes.

What Trump got right

Trump got one big foreign policy issue mostly right, which was China. While the United States was distracted by its post-9/11 wars, China made great advances economically and militarily — in part, by stealing American secrets through cyber espionage.

The Trump administration correctly identified China as a strategic US rival. This was an important conceptual shift because previous administrations had emphasized US engagement with the Chinese, believing that they would play by the rules of the international system and liberalize their economy and then, as they prospered, they would also liberalize their authoritarian form of governance. As it turned out, that was a fantasy that the Trump administration correctly called out.

Trump’s 2017 national security strategy asserted that the Chinese were “building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own.” The Trump strategy also warned that Chinese “land reclamation projects and militarization of the South China Sea flouts international law, threatens the free flow of trade, and undermines stability.” As a result, the Trump administration authorized at least double the number of US Navy ships transiting the South China Sea performing “freedom of navigation” exercises.

Also, the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” saved many lives during the pandemic. Under it, the US invested $2.5 billion in Moderna, which produced a testable vaccine on humans in only two months using novel mRNA technology. Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech didn’t take US government funding, but the government placed a $1.95 billion order for 100 million doses, and in doing so guaranteed demand for its vaccine. After the first clinical trials, both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna produced vaccines that were more than 90% effective, an efficacy that eventually waned. These were astonishing results given that the US Food and Drug Administration had put its threshold for approval for any vaccine at 50% effective or above.

‘Schizophrenic nature’: Dr. Birx describes what it was like working in Trump’s White House 03:44
Trump also presided over the destruction of the ISIS geographical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. Trump was largely following the battle plan that the administration of President Barack Obama had waged to defeat ISIS, but it was during Trump’s presidency that ISIS was finally defeated. And Trump ordered the Special Operations raid in 2019 during which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, died.

The worst deals

But so many other of Trump’s actions as commander in chief were spectacular failures. The seizure of Afghanistan by the Taliban last year was one of Trump’s most disastrous foreign policy legacies. Biden certainly deserves blame for claiming that he was bound by Trump’s 2020 “peace” deal with the Taliban, which really was a “surrender agreement” to the Taliban in the mordant words of H.R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser. And Biden also deserves blame for the botched execution of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer.

But it was Trump, not Biden, who had laid the groundwork for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In 2018 Trump authorized his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to begin negotiations with the Taliban, an effort that was led by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad

Khalilzad made an agreement with the Taliban that, in exchange for a total US withdrawal from Afghanistan, they would break with al-Qaeda and engage in genuine peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban simply ignored those agreements.

Trump often asserted he was as a great deal maker, but his administration’s agreement with the Taliban was one of the worst deals in American diplomatic history. The Taliban received everything that they wanted without offering anything substantive in return, other than an agreement not to attack US forces as they withdrew from Afghanistan. Since the Taliban’s main goal in their negotiations with the US was a total American withdrawal, this was an easy concession for the Taliban to make.

And so it went with many other of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives. He apparently believed that by dint of his personal charm he could persuade the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, to give up his nuclear weapons. American Presidents going back to Bill Clinton had tried to persuade the nuclear-armed hermit state to rein in its nuclear weapons program, and all of them had failed.

While he was President, Trump met with Kim three times, first in Singapore in 2018, a year later in Hanoi and then at the border between North and South Korea. Those meetings generated intense media frenzies and gave Kim and the US President equal billing on the world stage, which was a huge coup for the dictator of a country whose GDP was around the size of the state of Vermont.

At the Singapore meeting, Trump unilaterally gave a key concession to Kim — canceling joint US-South Korea military exercises, which were a longtime cornerstone of containing the North Korean rogue state — and got nothing in return. Trump and Kim also exchanged 27 letters, some of which had the ardent tone of suitors writing each other. Trump publicly described the missives as “love letters.”

Yet, these summits and exchanges of letters yielded nothing. While Trump was in office the North Koreans continued producing fissile material and tested short range ballistic missiles in contravention of UN Security Council prohibitions. They also developed hard-to-detect submarine-launched missiles.

Trump’s efforts to constrain North Korea’s nuclear program failed, while his erratic diplomacy encouraged Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump regularly castigated Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with the Iranians as the “worst deal ever.”

But unlike Trump’s peace agreement with the Taliban, the Iranians were observing their end of the nuclear deal. Trump’s own intelligence agencies concluded that the Iranians were adhering to the terms of the 2015 deal. Yet, Trump was determined to get out of Obama’s Iran agreement, which he did in 2018.

As a result, by the time Trump left office in January 2021, the Iranians were planning to enrich uranium up to 20% purity, far above the 4% purity agreed to in their deal with the Obama administration, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. While this was well short of the 90% purity needed for a nuclear bomb, the Iranian nuclear program took a large step forward as a result of Trump’s ham-handed approach to the Iranians.

Undermining NATO

Throughout his presidency, Trump embraced Putin, while regularly taking pot shots at key American allies such as the British, French and Germans. What was the strategic benefit to the US of all this geopolitical trumpery? It was never clear, although it was certainly a key aim of Putin’s to weaken the NATO alliance, which Trump’s own Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, described as the most successful alliance in modern history.

The importance of that alliance was underlined when Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The Ukrainian military, trained by NATO advisers, imposed huge costs on the Russian invaders, and the Biden administration together with its NATO allies transferred large numbers of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to the Ukrainians.

Undermining democracy

Trump’s affinity with dictators overseas — a key part of his foreign policy — dovetailed with his attempts to undermine democratic processes and norms at home, best exemplified by his continued refusal to accede to the will of the people in the 2020 presidential election and his support for his followers, who stormed the US Capitol days before Biden’s inauguration.

Trump’s antidemocratic stance — which he still promotes with the “Big Lie” conspiracy theory — has poisoned American politics.

In part because of Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies, during his presidency current and former senior military leaders issued more than 250 public statements that were critical of Trump’s leadership, according to a tally by New America, the research institution where I serve as a vice president.

This was unprecedented, as military leaders, both those in uniform and in retirement, generally stay out of politics. Following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, Trump threatened to send the federal military to quell the unrest that was roiling American cities. On a call about the protests with the nation’s governors on June 1, Trump told them, “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks.”

Later that evening protesters gathered outside the White House and were met with violence when Trump walked to St. John’s Episcopal Church wielding a Bible, which resulted in a now-infamous photo op.

Mattis broke his long silence about Trump, issuing a blistering statement: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.”

The events of January 6, 2021, further turned the leaders of the US military against Trump. On that day a crowd of many thousands of his supporters gathered outside the White House — some wearing body armor and many wearing quasi-military outfits. To the assembled crowd Trump spouted a geyser of baseless conspiracy theories about his loss in the presidential election. Trump then urged them to go to the Capitol. A mob then assaulted the building.

That evening, Trump was unrepentant about the mayhem he had helped to foment, tweeting: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” This tweet was later deleted. Twitter then suspended Trump from its platform.

The service chiefs of all the branches of the military — led by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley — took the extraordinary measure of sending a joint letter to the 2 million members of the active-duty, National Guard and Reserve units of the US military decrying the insurrection and confirming that “President-elect Biden will be inaugurated and will become our 46th Commander in Chief.”

The message was clear: The US military would not be assisting Trump in any of his efforts to mount a coup against the Constitution they had sworn an oath to serve.

The assault on the Capitol triggered Trump’s second impeachment trial. He was once again acquitted by the Senate, but he now had the distinction of being the only American President to be impeached twice.
The Covid disaster

It was, above all, in his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that Trump revealed his many weaknesses as a leader. First, he never did any homework, meaning his understanding of complex issues, such as how best to mitigate a pandemic, was always cartoonish. Related to Trump’s first failing was his second: He always believed he knew more than the experts about any given subject. Third, Trump always trusted his own gut. This was not likely to produce relevant knowledge or coherent policy. And it didn’t.

Trump had a lot to say publicly about the coronavirus, a great deal of it misleading or simply false, and he also modeled and even encouraged irresponsible behavior.

Before effective vaccines, there were two tools that worked to stop the spread of the virus; they were social distancing and wearing a mask in public. Trump denigrated mask-wearing and he also hosted events at the White House with large numbers of attendees socializing without masks, such as the celebration of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court on October 26, 2020.

As Americans first became aware of the threat from the coronavirus, Trump said on February 26, 2020, that cases of the virus would go down to zero “within a couple of days.” He also wrongfully claimed that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the seasonal flu.

In the first phase of the pandemic, the federal government abdicated its role by not issuing a national shutdown order and a mandate to wear masks. In late April 2020, Trump suggested that injecting bleach might prove to be a treatment for the virus. A month later Trump said that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, was likely a “game changer.” In June 2020, the FDA revoked “emergency use” of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 patients because it could cause heart problems.

Even when Trump had the chance to make a public statement that really might have made a difference to the scope of the pandemic, he failed to do so. He and his wife, Melania Trump, were vaccinated at the White House during the closing days of his presidency. Any leader with the slightest regard for his own people would have allowed the media to cover this event, especially given the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in the country. Trump chose instead to be vaccinated in secret.

His weak leadership produced grave results: More than 400,000 Americans died from Covid-19 during Trump’s final year in office, which was more than the death toll of all the Americans who had died in wars going back to World War II. Many of those deaths could have been avoided with better leadership; Covid mortality in the US was 40% higher than the average of other advanced nations such as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, according to a report from the medical journal The Lancet.

Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, told a congressional committee in October that “we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range.”

The first duty of the commander in chief is the protection of US citizens, and Trump clearly was derelict in this duty. In short, Trump was the most incompetent President in modern American history.

Trump and Biden were both foolish about Afghanistan. Now we’re all paying the price, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Whether it’s providing a safe haven for terrorist groups like al Qaeda or installing officials who face United Nations sanctions in cabinet positions, the Taliban is up to its old ways, according to a new report issued by the UN on Friday. While the report does not mention former President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden by name, it is an indictment of their administrations’ failed policies in Afghanistan.

The 25-page report says that the Taliban “remains close” with al Qaeda, which now has “increased freedom of action” in Afghanistan.

Underlining that increased freedom of action, the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, “has issued more frequent recorded messages,” appearing in eight videos since the Taliban took over Afghanistan last August, according to the UN report. And al Qaeda has renewed its pledge of allegiance to the leader of the Taliban.

The UN also points out that an astonishing 41 members of the Taliban who are on the UN sanctions list have been appointed to the cabinet and other senior-level positions in Afghanistan.
Among them is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban Haqqani Network, which the UN says now controls key Afghan ministries such as the interior ministry and the departments of intelligence, passports and migration.

A previous UN report identified Haqqani, Afghanistan’s acting interior minister, as being part of the leadership of al Qaeda, marking the first time that the terrorist group has had a member in a senior cabinet position anywhere in the world. Haqqani is also on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

All of this demonstrates how deeply flawed a strategy it was for the Trump administration to negotiate a “peace” agreement with the Taliban — and how misguided it was for Biden to abide by that agreement once he assumed office
In 2018, the Trump administration started negotiating directly with the Taliban, eventually coming to an agreement that the United States would withdraw from Afghanistan providing that the Taliban would not let the country become a haven for terrorists and agree to enter into genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government.

The Trump team signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 and Biden, who said he was forced to either abide by that deal or escalate the fighting in Afghanistan, chose to pull out all US troops in August last year.

It’s worth noting this agreement wasn’t ratified by the US Senate, and instead was a deal negotiated with a terrorist/insurgent group that failed to stick to their end of the agreement. It was also a deal that had been struck without any substantive involvement of the elected Afghan government.

As the new UN report makes clear, the Taliban did not break with al Qaeda, noting that the terrorist group has instead “used the Taliban’s takeover to attract new recruits and funding” while the core al Qaeda leadership “is reported to remain in Afghanistan: more specifically, the eastern region from Zabul Province north towards Kunar and along the border with Pakistan.”

And of course, the Taliban didn’t come to a peace agreement with the Afghan government. As the Americans hastily withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban instead overthrew the elected Afghan government.

After they seized power in Afghanistan in August, Taliban leaders gave their first press conference and told the assembled journalists bald-faced lies about how they respected women’s rights. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, “Our sisters, our men have the same rights; they will be able to benefit from their rights.”

This was, of course, nonsense, but some wishful thinkers had bought into the fantasy of some kind of “Taliban 2.0.”

Instead, we now have just the same old Taliban. They have banned girls from school above the sixth grade; they have insisted that women need a close male relative to escort them if they travel long distances; they have declared that women need to be covered from head to toe and have instituted punishments for male “guardians” who don’t enforce this; more than 200 media outlets have closed in Afghanistan, and the Taliban have presided over an economy that is in free fall.

The UN report states that the Taliban “are, in large part, the same Taliban movement that was deposed in 2001.” The UN also notes that the top posts in the Taliban government “have been given to the Taliban’s ‘old guard.'”

Meanwhile, the Taliban continue to allow foreign terrorist groups to use Afghanistan as a base. The largest such group is the Pakistani Taliban, which numbers several thousand fighters, according to the UN.

For the past six months, the Taliban have also imprisoned without charge five British citizens, including businessman Peter Jouvenal, a friend of mine who once worked with CNN as a cameraman. The Taliban have also held American contractor Mark Frerichs for more than two years.

The UN report does have some qualified good news, concluding that the Afghanistan branch of ISIS and al Qaeda are not believed to be “capable of mounting international attacks until 2023 at the earliest.”

This is a more optimistic projection than the one delivered by a top Pentagon official, Colin Kahl, in October 2021. Kahl testified before a US congressional committee that ISIS’s affiliate in Afghanistan could mount external operations “somewhere between six and 12 months” while “al Qaeda would take a year or two to reconstitute that capability.”
That said, the Taliban is in a stronger position today than the last time it was in power. That was before the 9/11 attacks, when it was fighting the Northern Alliance, a not insignificant opposition force.

The Taliban today hasn’t significantly changed any of its social policies, nor has it abandoned its alliance with al-Qaeda. We have seen how this movie plays out in the past. To paraphrase an observation attributed to Mark Twain, while history may not repeat itself, it certainly may rhyme.

Mass shootings in the US are a national security issue, CNN.com

Opinion: This is how we stem America’s mass shootings

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)It’s long past time that mass shootings in the United States should be treated as a national security issue; it is about our security as a nation of Americans.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 213 mass shootings already this year in the United States. And there have also been 27 shootings at schools causing injuries or deaths, according to Education Week.

This. Is. Not. Normal.

In any given year, Americans are many thousand times more likely to be killed by a fellow citizen armed with a gun than by a terrorist. There were, for instance, 19,384 gun homicides in the US in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, four people were killed by terrorists in the country that same year, according to research done by New America.

Americans think of themselves as citizens of an exceptional nation; and yes, the US is exceptional. No other country is as heavily armed as the US. The closest country is Yemen — a place in the throes of a long civil war — and even then, gun ownership is less than half the US.

Contrary to the claims of the gun lobby, this has not made Americans safer. Adjusted for population size, you are roughly 90 times more likely to be killed by an assailant with a gun in the US than you are in England and Wales, which have a population under a fifth the size of the US and where there were 30 homicides by shooting in the year ending March 2020, according to the most recent data available from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The same year in the US, according to CDC data, there were more than 14,800 homicides with a firearm.

So, let’s dispose of the National Rifle Association talking point that we will surely be hearing ad nauseam in the coming days; that it’s not about the weapon, it’s about the shooter.

Are Americans really drastically more mentally unstable than the British? Of course not. The issue is easy access to guns.

And I’m not talking about the guns that any of my in-laws in Louisiana use to hunt deer. They never use assault rifles.

Assault rifles have one purpose which is to maim and kill as many humans as possible efficiently and quickly. They have no place on American streets.

The Texas suspect purchased two AR-15-style assault rifles days before his assault, as reported by CNN. Also, according to Sgt. Erick Estrada with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the perpetrator in the Texas massacre at the school was wearing body armor. Why is this OK? Why should American citizens easily be able to purchase body armor, other than those who legitimately need it for their jobs, such as security guards?

There are some common sense actions that can be taken to reduce the number of mass shootings in the US. Law enforcement officials and teachers need to better understand the issue of “leakage,” which was identified a couple of decades ago as a possible predictor of school shootings. It’s where a student planning to do something violent often intentionally or unintentionally reveals something about their plans to peers or family members.

The Texas shooter texted photos of his semi-automatic weapons and a bag of ammunition to a classmate days before the shooting, according to CNN. He also posted pictures of his weapons on social media.

“Leakage” can also be found in acts of domestic terrorism as was the case of the suspect in the attack at the Buffalo supermarket in a Black neighborhood in which 10 people were killed earlier this month. The perpetrator made a “generalized threat” a year before he carried out his attack with an assault rifle that was investigated by police. Despite that threat, he was still able to legally purchase a semi-automatic rifle.

As the conservative writer David French has pointed out, more states should pass “red flag” laws and they should be better enforced. Such laws would prevent the purchase of guns by those like the Buffalo terrorist who had made the threat that had come to the attention of law enforcement.
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Let’s see if anything substantive comes of the tragedy in Texas that reduces the toll of gun violence in the United States. We have all seen too many terrible tragedies unfold and then watched as nothing really changed.

Let’s hope this time is different. America’s mass shootings are a national shame and tragedy and an outlier globally. And they will surely continue if Americans revert to business as usual, which has tragically been the case now for decades.

The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and The World

NEW YORK TIMES (Editor’s Choice)

REVIEWS

“A respected national security analyst at New America and CNN, Bergen provides a deeply informed study, written with clarity and flair. Reflecting fresh research and nearly 100 interviews with some key players, his retelling of Trump’s foreign policy skillfully synthesizes what’s already known and adds gossipy tidbits… it is the best single account of Trump’s foreign policy to date.” —DEREK CHOLLET, WASHINGTON POST

“A fair and comprehensive overview of Trump’s foreign policy.” —MAX BOOT, FOREIGN AFFAIRS

“Timely . . . insightful . . . Through meticulously documented interviews and research, the author amply shows how the Trump administration has stubbornly stuck with this free-wheeling playbook of slash and burn.” —KIRKUS

“As Bergen, the author of several books on national security, shows, Donald Trump’s relationship to the American military is fraught because he has no understanding of the martial virtues and seems to assume that soldiering is simply a matter of violence, even uncaged brutality.” —NEW YORK TIMES (Editor’s Choice)

OVERVIEW

It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience to the White House than Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer from Queens promised to bring his brash, zero-sum swagger to bear to cut through America’s most complex national security issues, and he did. If the cost of his “America First” agenda was bulldozing the edifice of foreign alliances that had been carefully tended by every president from Truman to Obama, then so be it.

It was clear from the first that Trump’s inclinations were radically more blunt force than his predecessors’. When briefed by the Pentagon on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, he exclaimed, “The next time Iran sends its boats into the Strait: blow them out of the water! Let’s get Mad Dog on this.” When told that the capital of South Korea, Seoul, was so close to the North Korean border that millions of people would likely die in the first hours of any all-out war, Trump had a bold response, “They have to move.” The officials in the Oval Office weren’t sure if he was joking. He raised his voice. “They have to move!”

Very quickly, it became clear to a number of people at the highest levels of government that their gravest mission was to protect America from Donald Trump. Trump and His Generals is Peter Bergen’s riveting account of what happened when the unstoppable force of President Trump met the immovable object of America’s national security establishment–the CIA, the State Department, and, above all, the Pentagon. If there is a real “deep state” in DC, it is not the FBI so much as the national security community, with its deep-rooted culture and hierarchy. The men Trump selected for his key national security positions, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, were products of that culture: Trump wanted generals, and he got them. Three years later, they would be gone, and the guardrails were off.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria and Iran, from Russia and China to North Korea and Islamist terrorism, Trump and His Generals is a brilliant reckoning with an American ship of state navigating a roiling sea of threats without a well-functioning rudder. Lucid and gripping, it brings urgently needed clarity to issues that affect the fate of us all. But clarity, unfortunately, is not the same thing as reassurance.

Deadly shootings like the one in Buffalo could be prevented. Here’s how, CNN.com

Peter Bergen:

The story is all too familiar: A man allegedly armed with grievance and a gun kills fellow citizens who are strangers to him, singling them out only because of their race or creed.

It’s a very American tale of domestic terrorism which appears to have struck once again on Saturday, this time in the city of Buffalo, New York. And it is playing out with increasing frequency in the United States.

Just as school shooters learn from other school shootings, terrorists learn from — and are inspired by — other terrorists. A manifesto allegedly published online by the Buffalo attacker named and celebrated several other racist terrorists.

And like the white supremacists accused in multiple recent mass shootings, the alleged attacker in Buffalo was obsessed with the idea that whites are being “replaced” by other ethnic groups.

This Great Replacement theory animates many white nationalists, like those who attended a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”

In the long shadow of the 9/11 attacks, Americans tended to think of terrorism as emanating from jihadists, but today, far-right terrorists are the leading cause of lethal terrorist attacks in the United States. If we include the 10 people killed in the Buffalo attack, right-wing extremists have killed a total 122 people in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, while 107 people have been killed by jihadist terrorists, according to data compiled by New America, a research institution.

This trend has been accelerating over the past several years. The assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Michael McGarrity, in 2019 testified before a US congressional committee that individuals “adhering to racially motivated violent extremism ideology have been responsible for the most lethal incidents among domestic terrorists in recent years.”

And FBI director Christopher Wray testified last year that in “the past 16, 18 months or so, we’ve more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload, from about a thousand to around 2,700 investigations.”

The FBI has considerably increased its focus on investigating cases of domestic terrorism, but what else can be done?

First, let’s do something simple: Let’s stop naming the terrorists. When an alleged terrorist is arraigned, naming him may be unavoidable, but stories like the one you are reading can function perfectly well without mentioning the names of any terrorists.

These misguided individuals are typically zeros trying to be heroes, so let’s not give them any of the “glory” that they often are hoping to achieve by naming them in the media.

Second, social media continues to be a key source of radicalization for many terrorists, and it’s clear that social media companies are not capable of policing themselves to the extent that is necessary.

There was, of course, plenty of white nationalist violence before the internet ever existed, but now the speed of radicalization for would-be militants is much faster because those who radicalize on the internet can more easily find like-minded believers — as well as a reams of propaganda that can fuel their radicalization.

Social media companies say they are doing their best to self-regulate and to remove content that encourages violence, but in Congress there is a growing sense that they are not doing nearly enough. Some lawmakers have even proposed creating a federal watchdog for social media.

Such a body, if properly resourced and staffed with expert commissioners from both parties, could help the government navigate the complicated technological and First Amendment issues that arise when policing content that could inspire violence.

Third, how do you identify radicalized individuals before they carry out acts of violence? This is not easy, but the growing discipline of “threat management” attempts to address the issue.

Threat management doesn’t focus on any particular ideology such as Islamism or white nationalism, but rather on the actions of suspects who often follow a predictable “pathway to violence.” That pathway begins from nursing a grievance, such as believing in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and can eventually end up with a militant taking violent action.

This is a sound approach, since holding radical ideas in the United States is not a crime.

Fourth, officials need a better understanding of the concept of ”leakage,” which was identified a couple of decades ago as a predictor of future school shooting: A student planning to do something violent would often intentionally or unintentionally reveal something about the impending act.

Similarly, a U.S. government study of dozens of terrorism cases found ”leakage” by the perpetrator to individuals referred to by the FBI as “bystanders,” more than 80% of the time. Bystanders included peers, family members, authority figures such as teachers or clerics, and strangers. Peers had the most useful information about attack planning, but were the least likely to come forward with relevant information to law enforcement.

This finding has important implications for investigating potential acts of terrorism since law enforcement should focus on those who are most likely to have relevant information. Indeed, the Buffalo suspect made a ”generalized threat” a year ago that was investigated by state police.

Fifth, last year, the Biden administration released the first-ever U.S. domestic terrorism strategy which contained useful policy prescriptions. This strategy was long overdue given the fact that the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and was carried out by far-right extremists happened back in 1995.

In that strategy, the administration promised to circulate a booklet detailing “mobilization indicators” to law enforcement officials around the country highlighting potential signs and signals of domestic terrorism. This kind of information can be quite useful to local law enforcement, since terrorists often tread a predicable path toward violence.

The Biden administration said it would also disseminate intelligence about “domestic terrorism iconography, symbology, and phraseology” — information that can be hard to come by, since it is often so tightly held by extremists.

Finally, limiting access to assault rifles that are designed to kill multiple victims would, of course, also cut the number of mass shooting deaths in the United States.

But given the current state of American politics, a limit on the sale of semi-automatic weapons is unlikely, even though it might have helped prevent the sale of such deadly firearms to perpetrators like the alleged shooter in the racist assault in Buffalo.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst.

Michael Osterholm: Covid-19 keeps firing 210-mph curveballs at us, CNN.com

After more than two years, the United States has now passed the tragic milestone of a million Covid-19-related deaths – and the pandemic is not remotely done. To learn more about where we are in the deadliest pandemic in American history, I spoke with Michael Osterholm, who has publicly warned of the dangers of a global pandemic for more than a decade and half and was a member of Joe Biden’s Covid task force during the presidential transition. Osterholm said Covid-19 keeps firing “210-mph curveballs” at us and anyone who tries to predict what will happen in the coming months is using a crystal ball caked with 5 inches of hardened mud.

Osterholm is also the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of The New York Times bestseller “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs.” Our conversation was edited for clarity, and the views expressed are his.

BERGEN: There seems to be a big disconnect between the White House recently predicting up to 100 million cases in the fall and earlier this month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only making a recommendation about wearing masks on public transportation.

OSTERHOLM: Yes, I think this has been kind of a whiplash moment for the public on Covid-19. You also had the statement made recently saying that we are on the downside of the pandemic.

BERGEN: And that was by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

OSTERHOLM: Yes, his comment was obviously interpreted by most to mean that the pandemic was over. I realize that he was referring to the fact that we’re out of the big peak of cases right now, which is true.

BERGEN: And he walked that statement back a day or two later.

OSTERHOLM: On the other hand, I’ve seen no data which supports the possibility of a fall or winter surge in the US resulting in 100 million cases. No one should make that kind of statement without providing the assumptions behind that number. Could it happen? Sure, but it’s more likely if a new variant shows up that is more infectious and more likely to evade existing immune protection than Omicron. Any modeling that looks beyond 30 days out is largely based on pixie dust. I worry that the White House has gotten way ahead of their skis on this one, but I understand the administration is trying to emphasize the need for Covid relief money.

I strongly support the administration’s efforts to secure the additional Covid relief money, but it needs to be used efficiently. We don’t need more vaccines right now; we have plenty. What we really need is for people to get fully vaccinated. By my definition, that means at least three doses of vaccine. Only 30% of Americans have had three doses, and that number has changed little in recent months.

One of the key parts of the administration’s request for additional support is the need to secure a variant-specific vaccine. But such vaccines, like the ones being developed for the subvariants of Omicron, may be less effective against any new emerging variant.

And finally, when considering what our future with this virus looks like, we must consider waning immunity protection. How long has it been since people had their last vaccination, booster or previous infection? No one knows what the impact of waning immunity will be in the months ahead. And we must have the humility and the honesty to say that.

We’re currently seeing an increase in cases, but I think they are grossly underreported due to the prevalence of rapid home tests, which are largely left out of official case counts.

If you look at hospitalizations, there has been a very moderate increase so far compared with previous surges. And with deaths, the difference this time around has been even more striking. As of today, we are averaging approximately 325 Covid deaths a day in the US, according to the CDC. During the height of the Omicron surge, we saw 2,600 deaths a day, and during the Delta surge, it was around 2,000 a day, according to the CDC. This is the new phase of the pandemic. Now, with the BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 variants, there is immune protection from previous infections, previous vaccinations or both. It means there’s much less severe illness, and it’s not the same kind of pandemic we saw 18 to 24 months ago.

Now, the problem is that can all change tomorrow. We’re still trying to understand what the emerging Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 portend. Those two subvariants have completely taken over in South Africa, and there is a major increase in cases, but they, too, are milder. And many of the cases involve people who have previously been infected. The data shows that South Africans who have both previous infections and were vaccinated likely have the best protection against BA.4 and BA.5.

I’ve heard people say over and over again, “This thing is as infectious as it’s going to get,” and yet it keeps getting more infectious. Obviously, there’s a limit to that increasing infectiousness. It can’t go to the speed of light, but surely, you can expect to see new variants that survive and capitalize on microbial evolution by being more infectious.

Also, the whole issue of waning immunity is really an underappreciated situation, but the key point is that we don’t know what’s going to happen six months from now. So, we could have 100 million cases, but on the other hand, if we don’t see a new variant develop, maybe we won’t. I think that that’s the uncertainty that we have to convey to everyone and make clear that we’ve got to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

The virus is not done with us yet. We are going to have an ongoing pandemic with this virus for some time now.

I think there was an important event in recent weeks that should have been a clarion call to the world of what we’re up against: Taiwan announced it was no longer going to maintain its zero-Covid policy. The Omicron subvariant is like the wind – you can deflect it, but you can’t stop it.

Taiwan acknowledged that it can’t control Omicron. So, we have to understand that we’re now living with this virus, and no one has the perfect plan to get us out of it.

For the past two years, if I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “Well, if we just did it like China or we did it like Taiwan, we would control this.”

And look what’s happened to each of those countries. Over time, no one in the world had the perfect solution for controlling this virus.

President Xi Jinping of China is maintaining his zero-Covid policy: Is he trying to show the power of the Chinese government to suppress this virus? Well, if that’s the case, it sure backfired. Look what’s happened in Shanghai. They locked down. They started to let up. And now they’re shutting down again. China is a clear example of what won’t work.

At the same time, you can’t let this thing just go willy-nilly, and that’s why vaccinations still remain so key. Getting antiviral drugs to those at highest risk for severe disease is also a really important aspect of our response.

BERGEN: What about vaccinations for the under 5s?

OSTERHOLM: I think that we should have them available. We have had major transmission of Covid in schools and day cares to parents, grandparents and other family contacts. So if you can cut down transmission in that group, it would likely have a knock-on effect. Remember that more than 400 children in the US under 5 years of age have died from Covid.

I realize there are a lot of parents of younger kids who say, “Oh, this is an experiment. I’m going to wait. My child is not that high risk of having it happen,” and so I think even if a vaccine is approved in the next weeks, by the time school starts again in the fall, you’ll see only very limited uptake.

BERGEN: Should people get the second booster if they’re over 50 or are immunocompromised?

OSTERHOLM: The whole issue with boosters is going to be a challenge. What is it going to look like in October and November for those people who had their booster in March and April? I don’t know.

The data suggests that people who were vaccinated with mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna are going to need perpetual boosters, but this is going to be a huge challenge. Look at the issue right now with the third dose. The last data I saw, only 46% of people that had two doses got the third dose.

These are not vaccine-hesitant people. We need to better understand why they haven’t gotten a third dose and ask ourselves whether uptake is going to get any better with a fourth dose. And what if we need a fifth dose?

And so I think that we have to take a step back right now and ask ourselves what can we accomplish with our mRNA vaccines, and be prepared for the possibility of a brand-new variant. Will we set ourselves back if we adopt an Omicron-specific vaccine, only for a different new variant to emerge?

We’re very fortunate that the number of deaths per number of cases has decreased dramatically, but if you are in high risk, if you’re over 65, you’re overweight, you have diabetes, you have hypertension, these are all risk factors for severe disease. Vaccinations will surely help provide some critical protection, but I know way too many of my younger, otherwise healthy colleagues right now who are at home, sick for seven to 10 days even though they have been fully vaccinated with the booster dose.

I think the additional challenge right now is that people want to get out and live their lives like they did before the pandemic. But my question is, what do you do if we see a new variant? Will people be willing to adapt, isolate or distance themselves again? I don’t think they will at this point.

BERGEN: Did you go to the White House Correspondents’ dinner?

OSTERHOLM: I wasn’t invited, and if I had been, I would not have gone. I’ve not been out in indoor public places like that.

BERGEN: Was the White House Correspondents’ dinner an accident waiting to happen?

OSTERHOLM: Oh, absolutely, it was. And it’s not just the Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s all the parties around it.

BERGEN: What’s surprised you about the last couple of years?

OSTERHOLM: I’m surprised that more people won’t admit that they’re surprised.

We need to stay humble and realize this virus is throwing 210-mph curveballs at us, day after day. Who would have thought that Omicron, which wreaked havoc in December, January and early February, would rear its ugly head and come back at us with all these subvariants?

We haven’t seen that biologic array of subvariants before. We didn’t see them with Delta or Alpha, Gamma and Beta. What we’re learning is that this virus really has a very dynamic ongoing evolutionary process. And what does that mean relative to the future? That’s a trillion-dollar question I can’t answer.

BERGEN: Speaking of the future, how well-positioned are we for the next pandemic?

OSTERHOLM: We’re not. We’ve suffered numerous setbacks, and our society’s trust in public health is probably at its lowest level since my career began 47 years ago. And public health has relied not just on the volunteerism and goodwill of the people but the ability for the public to understand why we’re sometimes asking them to do difficult things to save lives and to reduce the impact of this illness. Trust in the CDC as an organization has eroded significantly during this pandemic.

Second, at a time when we need more support for better vaccines and more drugs, we have a Congress that is debating whether or not to provide more funding.

Also, 500,000 people in the United States have left the health care field since the pandemic began, in large part due to burnout. We’re shorter-staffed now than we’ve ever been in my career.

And there is going to be a long tail to this pandemic that we still have not fully appreciated, given that so many people have long Covid. I think our response to this issue in the United States has been really lacking.

From a public health standpoint, I’m not seeing any systematic changes that would suggest we’re in better shape to face future pandemics. Our health care systems have done little to reform themselves around the world.

We still have all the challenges of low vaccination rates in the low- and middle-income countries. What does that mean? What happens if we need to vaccinate the world for a new avian influenza virus that becomes the next influenza pandemic virus?

BERGEN: Isn’t the CDC setting up some kind of early warning system?

OSTERHOLM: Yes, but if you have a virus that is highly infectious early on even before symptom onset, you’ve already lost control of virus transmission. All you can do is try to contain the impact globally. Think about what happened with Omicron and what we saw happening in South Africa after scientists there sounded the alarm. Countries responded by issuing travel bans against South Africans.

It turns out that wastewater surveillance retrospectively found the Omicron variant circulating in New York City before South Africa had announced its emergence. It was already around the world before we even knew it existed.

That doesn’t mean you give up. What it says is you’ve got to be prepared. If you can’t prevent the fires from happening, you’ve got to have a good fire department. And what we don’t know yet is how would we make new vaccines for the next bad bug. We were fortunate with the mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives. That may not work for the next pandemic.

Retired US major general: What it will take for the Ukrainians to win, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst,
Updated 10:00 AM EDT, Thu May 5, 2022

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.

The former commander of the US Special Operations Command in Europe, retired US Army Maj. Gen. Mike Repass, says the international community has to greatly increase its support for Ukraine if the embattled nation is ever going to be able to drive the Russians out.

Repass has advised the Ukrainian military for the past six years on a US government contract. Last month he visited Poland and western Ukraine to get a better feel for the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. I spoke to him Friday and Monday.

He says the Ukrainian supply chain for military equipment is inefficient and that additional military forces are required to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.

To win the war in Ukraine, Repass advocates that the US and its allies build up a Ukrainian strategic force amounting to five brigades of up to 40,000 soldiers capable of mounting offensive operations to force the Russians out of their country.

Disclosure: Repass is on the advisory council of the Global Special Operations Foundation, where I am the chairman of the board. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.

BERGEN: What did you learn on your trip?

REPASS: One, that Ukraine still needs a lot of help. Two, NATO is moving too slow. Three, we don’t have visibility on what happens to military equipment when it gets into Ukraine.

The military equipment supply business is personalized as opposed to professionalized: The senior leadership establishes the distribution priorities and, from what I could observe, those priorities are not based on an understanding of consumption rates, or of future operations or objective data. It’s based on commander of brigade X or sector Y calling and saying, “Hey, I need 27 Javelin missiles.” So, it’s highly personalized, and that is not how to run wartime logistics. What should be going on is there should be an understanding of what the consumption rates are on important things like fuel, ammunition, batteries.

BERGEN: Is the likely outcome in Ukraine a bloody conflict that just goes on and on and on?

REPASS: The three obvious future scenarios are: Russia has a battlefield decision in their favor, the Ukrainians have a battlefield decision in their favor, or there’s a stalemate. Two out of three of those outcomes give Russia a victory.

In the stalemate scenario, Russia would simply claim victory based on facts on the ground and continue its occupation over expanded terrain in Ukraine into the indeterminate future. This would give Russia a less than total victory over Ukraine, but a victory with significantly expanded terrain under Russian control nonetheless.

So, what are we, the West, collectively doing to ensure that two out of those three possibilities don’t happen? Everybody is thinking about the immediate fight right now, which means we’re running supplies to the Ukrainians. The problem is that the Ukraine’s army needs additional capabilities to be able to drive Russia out of Ukraine.

BERGEN: Why?

REPASS: Because they don’t have enough combat power to do that, meaning enough equipment, firepower and trained soldiers at the moment.

Russia is always going to have more forces, not necessarily better forces, but more of them. As Stalin once said, “quantity has a quality all its own.” Most people recognize that this is going to be a battle of attrition and, at some point in time, it will start to tip in Russia’s favor unless additional Ukrainian forces are generated.

I think there’s a growing realization among NATO countries and the international community that we’re going to have to do something besides resource Ukraine’s current fight. So, there are four things that the US and its allies need to do. First, we need to weaken Russia by strengthening Ukrainian capabilities. Second, we need to further deter Russia by increasing our own and NATO’s capabilities. Third, is degrading Russia’s armed forces and capabilities. Finally, we need to ensure Russia’s defeat in Ukraine, and that is done by building a strategic and operational reserve force for Ukraine that can do offensive operations to kick the Russians out of Ukraine and secure its borders.

BERGEN: What does that look like in practice?

REPASS: You need to have the US, French, Poles, UK and the Germans each build a brigade’s worth of Ukrainian combat power. Those nations have significant military capacity and could generate forces by equipping Ukrainian units and then training them in their own nations. So, that would be five brigades, in five operational sectors. And you would need probably six to eight months to implement that. These five brigades would have Western equipment fighting in Western ways, an integrated air-land battle approach where you have all the means available to you, to include NATO-interoperable tanks, close-air support and air defense.

BERGEN: Five brigades is not a huge number, right?

REPASS: No, it’s not. I think it’s doable in the near term. There are up to 8,000 soldiers or so in a brigade, so that’s up to 40,000 people in five brigades. I believe the Ukrainians are capable of finding that many soldiers given the current national emergency.

Historically, when a Western military has come up against an army that has been supplied by the Russians, the Russian-backed army has been totally annihilated by an inferior number of forces, as was the case, for instance, during the first Gulf War when the US military destroyed much of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait. We know that the Western armaments have a significant qualitative edge over Russian equipment, so numbers and force ratios are skewed when it is Western military equipment up against Russian-made equipment.

BERGEN: Why do the Russians stick to a model that doesn’t really work well?

REPASS: They are hidebound in their ways. Specifically, what they tried to do at the beginning of the war in Ukraine was a coup de main, taking out Kyiv with a rapid strike. That didn’t work. Russian troops got their asses handed to them. So, they brought all their firepower around to the east and to the south by employing massive artillery fires on the objective or along their avenues of approach. Once they have destroyed almost everything in front of them, then they advance their troops methodically. So, it’s not maneuver warfare. It’s attrition warfare by fire. It’s a fire-based army as opposed to what we have in the West, which is a maneuver-based army.

BERGEN: What do you make of the new Russian commander in Ukraine, Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov?

REPASS: He is a dyed-in-the-wool, fire-based, attrition warfare guy. He’s not a maneuver warfare guy. He’s going to do everything that he’s done all his life, which is blow up and destroy everything in his path, and then send the troops in. Those troops will forcefully evacuate Ukrainian citizens to ensure there is no potential for a resistance movement in the land bridge from Russia through Donbas to Crimea.

BERGEN: How would you characterize the state of the war in the east and the south right now? Are the Russians, in their own minds, winning?

REPASS: The state of play today is Russia is making methodical advances both in the north and the south. It’s trying to fix forces defending in the east and envelop the Ukrainian defenders, then defeat them in the south. The Russians also want to encircle Mykolaiv, reduce the defense and destroy the defenders, and then have a free run at Odesa. They can’t get to Odesa until they either envelop or destroy the forces around Mikolaiv.

BERGEN: And Odesa is the prize because?

REPASS: Because that completes the cutoff of Ukraine from the Black Sea, and it’s also the gateway to Transnistria and Moldova.

BERGEN: What did you make of the comments by the Russian general about going on to Moldova? Do you take them at face value?

REPASS: I do take it as a serious threat, and I do think they have their eyes on Moldova. If they can take it, they will. To be specific, they talk about going to Transnistria. If they can build a southern land bridge to Transnistria, they will do it. That will put Russia on Moldova’s doorstep and Moldova won’t be able to effectively defend against a Russian invasion.

BERGEN: Is the Ukraine war widening?

REPASS: It’s a fact that Belarus has been a haven for Russia since the start of the war on February 24. It’s an article of faith with the Europeans that I’ve talked to that Belarus is a client state and is controlled and essentially ruled by Moscow. Belarus has not contributed military units to the fight, but they’ve housed, based and supported Russia forces. They’ve allowed them to launch operations from their territory – both ground, air, and precision strike missiles have been launched from there.

Putin’s officials have also said that the Baltic have no historical basis and they’re illegitimate states – the same thing they said about Ukraine before the war. The three Baltic states, and Poland, firmly believe that after Ukraine that they’re next on Russia’s hit list. They see Russia as an existential threat. And there’s no evidence that Putin is willing to stop at Ukraine.

BERGEN: What about all this nuclear saber-rattling? Do you think it’s just mostly posturing?

REPASS: Yes, I think it’s mostly posturing. It would be one thing if Putin said it. To have Foreign Minister Lavrov say it is another thing. I think it’s posturing if it comes from Lavrov. On their nuclear doctrine, they will use so-called tactical nuclear weapons if they feel that there’s a significant threat to the Russian homeland. Those are the kind of circumstances that Russia has communicated to the West where they would use their nuclear weapons.

BERGEN: So, it’s a high threshold.

REPASS: Right.

BERGEN: As a result of the sinking in mid-April of the Moskva, the Russian missile cruiser serving as the Black Sea Fleet flagship, do you think that the Chinese are looking at this and doing a little bit of soul-searching about whether attacking Taiwan would be wise?

REPASS: Yes, I do. Not only the sinking of the Moskva, but also the ability of a well-trained solid opposition to halt an invasion. Russia is getting very heavily degraded by a numerically inferior force, and they don’t have a water bridge to cross. They’re crossing Ukraine by land, while the Chinese would have to cross 100 miles of water to get to Taiwan. So, they must be thinking that this is going to be a lot harder than expected.

BERGEN: If you’re Putin today, how are you feeling?

REPASS: Probably better than the day after the Moskva was sunk. I think he’s probably feeling conflicted and confused but realizes that he has to press forward to get a victory here. And he’s held captive by a beast of his own creation in that he rarely uses the internet himself. You’ve never seen him at a computer, and, at least as of late 2020, he reportedly didn’t have an iPhone.

He has no connection to the outside world and all his information is either given to him by his inner circle or by what he reads in the Russia news media, which is, of course, controlled by the state and only puts out state-controlled messages. So he’s in a North Korean-like echo chamber and he is not getting accurate information.

BERGEN: Starting a war, that’s often the easy part. Wars have their own logic. Unfortunately, this war might go on for a year or even two years.

REPASS: I fear that you’re right. This will be a grinding, agonizing war if it lasts more than a year, and I think it’s going to last at least two years. But we can’t let it get into a stalemate. If it gets into a stalemate, Putin’s going to claim success followed by a brutal occupation of the Ukrainian territory that he controls.

Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies The Challenge of Long-Term Thinking Amid Uncertainty, New America online

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[ONLINE] – Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies
The Challenge of Long-Term Thinking Amid Uncertainty
Event

How can American policymakers adequately value the long term given the uncertainty of the future and the resulting pressure to focus on the short term? In his report, “Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies,” New America International Security Program Senior Fellow J. Peter Scoblic examines how the Coast Guard and other national security agencies have planned for the future, with a particular focus on the practice of strategic foresight. Among the report’s recommendations is a call for the president to establish an office to lead strategic foresight efforts at the national level in order to coordinate current piecemeal efforts.

To discuss how the U.S. government and the national security establishment engage in long-term anticipatory thinking, J. Peter Scoblic is joined by Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, who served as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department from 2009-2011. In addition to authoring the report, J. Peter Scoblic is a Senior Fellow with New America’s International Security program and co-founder of Event Horizon Strategies, a foresight consultancy. Anne-Marie Slaughter is also the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Join the conversation online using #StrategicForesight and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speakers:

J. Peter Scoblic, @PeterScoblic
Author, “Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies”
Senior Fellow, New America International Security Program
Co-Founder, Event Horizon Strategies

Anne-Marie Slaughter, @SlaughterAM
CEO, New America
Former Director of Policy Planning, U.S. State Department

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America
When
May. 9, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
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