Category: Decoders

  • A history lesson on Europe for Donald Trump

    A history lesson on Europe for Donald Trump

    “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it.” So said U.S. President Donald Trump in February. He repeats this assertion whenever U.S.-European relations are a topic of debate.

    Trump voiced his distorted view of the EU in his first term in office and picked it up again in the first three months of his second term, which began on January 20 and featured the start of a U.S. tariff war which up-ended international trade and shook an alliance dating back to the end of World War II.

    What or who gave the U.S. president the idea that the EU was “formed to screw” the United States is something of a mystery. If he were a student in a history class, his professor would give him an F.

    Trump’s claim does injustice to an institution that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 in recognition for having, over six decades, “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” as the Nobel committee put it.

    So, here is a brief guide to the creation of the EU, now the world’s largest trading bloc with a combined population of 448 million people, and the events that preceded its formal creation in 1952. 

    Next time you talk to Trump, feel free to brief him on it. 

    Staving off war

    With Germans still clearing the ruins of the world war Adolf Hitler had started in 1939, far-sighted statesmen began thinking of ways to prevent a repeat of a conflict that killed 85 million people. 

    The foundation of what became a 28-country bloc lay in the reconciliation between France and Germany. 

    In his speech announcing the Nobel Prize, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, singled out then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman for presenting a plan to form a coal and steel community with Germany despite the long animosity between the two nations; in the space of 70 years, France and Germany had waged three wars against each other. That was in May 1950. 

    As the Nobel chairman put it, the Schuman plan “laid the very foundation for European integration.”

    He added: “The reconciliation between Germany and France is probably the most dramatic example in history to show that war and conflict can be turned so rapidly into peace and cooperation.”

    From enemies into partners

    In years of negotiations, the coal and steel community, known as Montanunion in Germany, grew from two — France and Germany — to six with the addition of Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The union was formalized with a treaty in Paris in 1951 and came into existence a year later. 

    The coal and steel community was the first step on a long road towards European integration. It was encouraged by the United States through a comprehensive and costly programme to rebuild war-shattered Europe.

    Known as the Marshall Plan, named after U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the programme provided $12 billion (the equivalent of more than $150 billion today) for the rebuilding of Western Europe. It was part of President Harry Truman’s policy of boosting democratic and capitalist economies in the devastated region.

    From the six-nation beginning, the process of European integration steadily gained momentum through successive treaties and expansions. Milestones included the creation of the European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community.

    In 1986, the Single European Act paved the way to an internal market without trade barriers, an aim achieved in 1992. Seven years later, integration tightened with the adoption of a common currency, the Euro. Used by 20 of the 27 member states, it accounts for about 20% of all international transactions.

    Brexiting out

    One nation that held out against the Euro was the United Kingdom. It would later withdraw from the EU entirely after the 2016 “Brexit” referendum led by politicians who claimed that rules made by the EU could infringe on British sovereignty. 

    Many economists at the time described Brexit as a self-inflicted wound and opinion polls now show that the majority of Britons regret having left the union.

    In decades of often arduous, detail-driven negotiations on European integration, including visa-free movement from one country to the other, no U.S. president ever saw the EU as a “foe” bent on “screwing” America. That is, until Donald Trump first won office in 2017 and then again in 2024.

    What bothers him is a trade imbalance; the EU sells more to the United States than the other way around; he has been particularly vocal about German cars imported into the United States.

    Early in his first term, the Wall Street Journal quoted him as complaining that “when you walk down Fifth Avenue (in New York), everybody has a Mercedes-Benz parked in front of his house. How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany? Not many, maybe none, you don’t see anything at all over there. It’s a one-way street.”

    This appears to be one of the reasons why Trump imposed a 25% tariff, or import duty, on foreign cars when he declared a global tariff war on April 2. 

    His tariff decisions, implemented by Executive Order rather than legislation, caused deep dismay around the world and upended not only trade relations but also cast doubt on the durability of what is usually termed the rules-based international order. 

    That refers to the rules and alliances set up, and long promoted by the United States. For a concise assessment of the state of this system, listen to the highest-ranking official of the European Union: “The West as we knew it no longer exists.”

    So said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the Brussels-based European Commission, the main executive body of the EU. Its top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, a former Prime Minister of Estonia, was even blunter: “The free world needs a new leader.”

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why was the European Union formed in the first place?

    2. How can trade serve to keep the peace?

    3. In what ways do nations benefit by partnering with other countries?

     

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  • Why some viruses are so difficult to stamp out

    Why some viruses are so difficult to stamp out

    The United States is fighting an unexpectedly big measles outbreak, with hundreds of cases in the state of Texas alone. Health experts expect it will last for a year or longer, because the virus has a long incubation period — people can be infected for days before they begin to show symptoms. That, in turn, means it can spread silently.

    Another virus that’s spreading silently right now is polio. Tests of wastewater around the world have turned up alarming levels of the virus, notorious for paralyzing children, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), but also in Europe, in Spain, Poland, Germany, the United Kingdom and Finland.

    These two viruses should not still be around. They only infect human beings, and mass vaccination campaigns have been ongoing for decades to try to wipe them out. And the medical profession keeps coming so close to success. 

    And where do these viruses come from that keep returning despite our attempts to wipe them out? The answer is from us — from other people.

    Smallpox is the only human disease to have been completely eradicated. That was done with a dedicated global vaccination effort in 1972. Because the smallpox virus doesn’t infect any other animal, there wasn’t another place for it to survive and come back to reinfect people. 

    The same should be true for measles and polio, but war, disruption, poverty and a mistrust of vaccines make it difficult.

    Where viruses hide

    So even as vaccine campaigns come close to succeeding, the viruses can still hide out in unvaccinated and undervaccinated people. Travel and human contact do the rest to keep both measles and polio circulating. When an infected traveler hits a community of unvaccinated people — say a neighborhood of ultra-Orthodox Jews in London or a rural West Texas county full of vaccine skeptics — a contagious virus such as measles or polio can take off. 

    With both measles and polio, it takes immunization rates of more than 90% to protect a population. When rates drop below that, a community becomes vulnerable to outbreaks. A virus can take hold and spread among people, picking up steam.

    That’s happened in Pakistan and Afghanistan with polio, where efforts to reach remote populations fall short because of geography, conflict and mistrust. And in Gaza, where continuous Israeli attacks have destroyed virtually all healthcare facilities, United Nations agencies have struggled to vaccinate Palestinian children against polio outbreaks. 

    Polio is also complicated because of the different vaccine types. One of the vaccines is given orally, and it’s made using a live, but weakened, form of the virus. This gives good immunity but in rare cases the virus can mutate in someone’s body and return to infectious strength — becoming what’s called vaccine-derived virus. 

    A follow-up vaccination with a second type of vaccine made using a fully killed virus will protect against this, but when vaccine campaigns can’t be completed, vaccine-derived viruses can emerge.

    How viruses spread

    In Europe, no cases of polio have been seen, but wastewater evidence suggests the virus is surviving in people’s bodies, and could burst out to cause sickness if it gets to someone unvaccinated. Polio spreads via the fecal-oral route — in contaminated water, via poorly washed hands, on surfaces and also via sneezes and coughs.

    Fully vaccinated communities are safe but in 2022, an unvaccinated man in New York State became paralyzed after he caught polio. Investigation showed a vaccine-derived strain had been spreading quietly in the state.

    Measles is the most infectious disease known and that makes it particularly hard to eradicate. In a podcast interview I did for for One World, One Health, Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, explained just how infectious it is. 

    “If someone has measles, and especially before they get the virus and stop feeling very sick, they’re releasing the virus into the atmosphere,” Hotez said. 

    Even if they leave the room, that virus will linger in the atmosphere for a couple of hours.

    “So you can walk into an empty room that has the measles virus from someone who was there a couple of hours before and become infected,” he said, noting that one measles patient will infect up to 18 other people.

    A virus reemerges.

    Nine out of 10 unvaccinated people who are exposed to the measles virus will become infected. What is disappointing to public health experts in the latest U.S. outbreak is that so many people have become infected when measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000 and in all of the Americas in 2016.

    But pockets of people who are not vaccinated against measles can act like tinder. The spark is usually a traveler who goes to a country where measles is still common because vaccination rates are low — usually due to poverty. 

    In a November 2024 report the WHO said that measles is still common in many places, particularly in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

    “The overwhelming majority of measles deaths occur in countries with low per capita incomes or weak health infrastructures that struggle to reach all children with immunization,” the report said. Measles kills more than 100,000 people a year, mostly children. But before the vaccine was introduced in the early 1960s, it killed 2.6 million a year.

    The COVID-19 pandemic badly hurt all childhood immunization efforts, WHO and other global health authorities say. Routine childhood vaccines have not caught back up to where they were before the pandemic, leaving children and adults susceptible to vaccine-preventable diseases including measles and polio but also meningitis, hepatitis, tetanus, cervical cancer and rotavirus — a disease that causes diarrhea and vomiting in babies and young children. 

    The retreat of the United States from global health efforts — the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, its plan to cut $1 billion in funding to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and its withdrawal from the World Health Organization — will further weaken global vaccination, experts say.

    And that means many more children will likely die who might otherwise live healthy lives. 

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. How can vaccines help prevent the spread of diseases?

    2. What role should personal choice play in being vaccinated against deadly diseases?

    3. How can global cooperation help in fighting the spread of disease?

     

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  • Decoder: The Silence of America

    Decoder: The Silence of America

    Iconic photos from the Cold War cover the corridors of the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, news networks created by the U.S. government to counter censorship and disinformation from the Soviet Union and their East European satellite nations during the Cold War.

    Images from 1989, the year communist rule melted away in more than a dozen countries, were reminders of earlier days when Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty had broadcast news in Polish, Czech, Slovakian and the Baltic languages; those countries are now robust democracies as well as members of the European Union and NATO.

    Those historic photos jostle with more recent images from countries where human rights and democracy are not observed, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan and other nations across Central and South Asia. In total, the two networks broadcasted in 27 languages to 23 countries providing news coverage and cultural programming where free media doesn’t exist or is threatened.

    The journalists who broadcast there often do so at great risk. 

    Many are exiles unable to return to their own countries. Three of their journalists are currently jailed in Russian-occupied Crimea, Russia and Azerbaijan. The charges against them are viewed as politically motivated.

    Countering power with news

    On 14 March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order which cut the funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It also cut the funding of Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Network, the Voice of America — the “official” voice of the United States — as well as Radio & Television Marti which broadcasts to Cuba.

    The funding cuts would effectively silence these networks. In response, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. 18 March that argued that Congress has exclusive authority over federal spending and that cannot be altered by a presidential executive order. Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz filed suit 26 March. 

    On March 27, the Trump administration announced it had restored the funding for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. 

    Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came into being after the end of the second World War when Europe became a divided continent. While the wartime allies, including Britain and the United States, focused on rebuilding their economies after years of war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sent his army to occupy most of Eastern Europe. 

    Despite promises made at a meeting in the Crimea, known as the Yalta Conference, during the final months of the war in 1945, Stalin refused to allow free elections in East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 

    Neither were free elections held in the three Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — which the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940. The crushing of democratic rule in so many nations was characterised by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as “an iron curtain” that had “descended across the continent.” 

    After years of fighting Nazi Germany, half of Europe was now ruled under a Soviet dictatorship.

    Containing communism

    The United States responded with a policy of ‘containment’ that aimed to halt the spread of communism without using soldiers and tanks. Radio Free Europe started broadcasting in 1950 followed by Radio Liberty in 1953. 

    With a system of transmitters pointing east, news programmes that countered the state propaganda were beamed to the countries in the Soviet bloc, eventually in 17 languages. These were tactics that came to be known as ‘soft power’.

    Based in Munich, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL as they became known, attracted dissidents who opposed the Soviet-imposed governments. Their audiences grew during the Cold War, despite threats of prosecution. 

    In addition to news, broadcasts covered music, sports and science. Banned literature written by dissidents who challenged the communist systems could be heard on RFE/RL. Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was one of those voices.

    The Berlin Wall tumbled down in November 1989. It was followed by the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Czech government and installed as its president, the former political prisoner Haval. He invited RFE/RL to move their base from Munich to Prague. 

    “My confinement in prison might have lasted longer had it not been for the publicity I had through these two stations,” Haval said at the time. 

    An outcry in Europe and elsewhere

    The news that the Trump administration would shut down the radio networks spread quickly. Listeners, viewers and supporters who had lived through the Cold War years when only pro-government broadcasts were legal, shared their stories on social media:

    “In Romania, they [RFE] lightened communism with the hope of freedom.”

    “As a small girl, living under a communist regime in Poland, I remember my grandfather listening every night to Radio Free Europe, to get uncensored news from around the world, to get different opinions on the world’s affairs, and probably hoping that one day, he would live in a free world. It was illegal to listen to this Radio, and the quality was very poor, and yet, he would do it every night … ” 

    Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski recalled how his father had listened to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. “This is a great shame,” he wrote. “My grandfather was listening to RFE in Soviet-occupied Poland in 80s. It’s how we learned basic facts about our own countries because communist propaganda was so tightly controlled.”

    On 17 March the Czech Republic asked the foreign ministers of the European Union to support RFE/RL so the journalism could continue. 

    One diplomat who was in the meeting said that stopping RFE/RL’s broadcasts would “be a gift to Europe’s adversaries.” Already Russia’s state broadcaster, Russia Today, had tweeted that cutting the funding for RFE/RL was an “awesome decision by Trump.”

    When Vaclav Havel welcomed Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to Prague after democracy had been restored to Czechoslovakia, he said that having RFE/RL in the Czech capital was equivalent to having three NATO divisions. 

    The supporters of the networks are hoping that the soft power of free media is indeed able to pack a powerful punch for free media.

    Update to this story: As of 30 March, Radio Free Liberty has informed News Decoder that, while two weeks worth of funds have been received, the rest of U.S. government funding had not yet been restored. We will continue to update this story as we learn of further developments. 

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why, during the Cold War, were radio broadcasts across closed borders one of the few ways people could receive news that was not controlled by the government?
    2. In what ways are people limited in accessing news, culture and music?
    3. In what ways might a free media be important in a democracy?

     

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  • Decoder: The Paris (Dis)Agreement

    Decoder: The Paris (Dis)Agreement

    The newspapers dubbed it “unprecedented”, “historic”, “landmark”.

    Then-U.S. President Barack Obama called it a “tribute to strong, principled American leadership”.

    When 195 countries came together nearly 10 years ago to adopt a legally binding agreement to try to avert the worst effects of climate change, it was considered a triumph of diplomacy and a potential turning point for the world. The deal that emerged is now so well-known it is referred to simply as “the Paris Agreement” or “the Paris Accords” — or sometimes just “Paris”.

    But with a stroke — or several — of his black-and-gold pen, U.S. President Donald Trump has taken the United States out of the fight to stop global warming, casting the future of the pact and everything it hoped to accomplish into doubt.

    Has the departure of the United States doomed the campaign to cut greenhouse gas emissions to failure? And if not, who will take up the torch Trump has cast aside?

    Uncharted waters

    The good news is that climate change experts believe the benefits of a transition to renewables — from energy independence to cleaner air — are so compelling the shift will go with or without the United States.

    The bad is that Trump’s actions will give many countries and companies an excuse to leave the battlefield. And that may make it impossible to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of holding temperature rises to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

    Listing all the steps Trump has taken so far to undermine the climate campaign would take hundreds of words. So here are just a few.

    Since 20 January 2025, the newly-minted U.S. government has:

    • Withdrawn from the Paris agreement for the second time – joining the ranks of Yemen, Iran and Libya as the only countries outside the pact.

    • Said the Environmental Protection Agency would look at overturning a 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases threaten the health of current and future generations – effectively gutting the agency’s legal authority to regulate U.S. emissions.

    • Rolled back dozens of Biden-era pollution rules.

    • Abandoned a deal under which rich countries promised to help poorer ones afford to make the transition to sustainable energy.

    • Eliminated support for domestic and international climate research by scientists.

    • Halted approvals for green energy projects planned for federal lands and waters.

    • Removed climate change references from federal websites.

    • Set the stage to fulfil Trump’s promise to let oil companies “drill, baby, drill” by declaring an energy emergency, which will allow him to fast-track projects.

    Eliot Whittington, chief systems change officer at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said that the United States is entering genuinely uncharted waters.

    “The Trump administration is making changes far in excess of its legal authority and drawing more power into itself and away from Congress, states and the courts,” Whittington said. “It is doing so in service of an explicitly ideological agenda that is hostile to much green action — despite the popularity of environmental benefits and high level of environmental concern in the U.S.”

    Alibi for inaction

    Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — called the scientifically-proven fact that mankind’s actions are leading to planetary heating a hoax. In November 2024, following the onslaught of deadly Hurricane Helene, he said it was “one of the greatest scams of all time”.

    For a hoax, climate change is packing a painful punch.

    Last year was the hottest on record, and yet even with countries touting net-zero gains, emissions also hit a new high. According to World Weather Attribution, the record temperatures worsened heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that killed thousands, displaced millions and destroyed infrastructure and property.

    In other words, the need to curb emissions is only growing more urgent.

    Alister Doyle, a News Decoder correspondent who authored “The Great Melt: Accounts from the Frontline of Climate Change“, believes Trump’s anti-green policies will slow but not stop the move away from fossil fuels.

    “But while other nations will stick with the Paris Agreement, almost none are doing enough,” he said. “Trump’s decision to quit will provide an alibi for inaction by many other governments and companies.”

    Voters look to their wallets

    Ambivalence about net-zero policies had been on the rise even before Trump took office, stoked by populist political parties.

    There are clear long-term economic benefits of the transition — from faster growth to the avoidance of costs linked to natural disasters. But Whittington said that the short-term sacrifices and infrastructure spending it will require have proven a tough sell when voters are facing difficult financial circumstances at home.

    “After a global inflation shock post-pandemic, governments have little financial space to defray the costs of upfront investment and generally voters feel like they don’t have the space to take on additional costs, even as a down payment on a better future,” Whittington said.

    This is further complicated by a powerful lobby against climate action led by oil and gas companies, which have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort. While most have also made public commitments to green goals, the sentiment shift has led several to abandon most or all of these in the past few weeks.

    Whittington believes that, despite these setbacks, the energy transition will eventually gain enough momentum that even fossil fuel producers will be unable to step on the brakes. It will be led by multiple countries and propelled by a variety of forces.

    Chief among these is the need in today’s politically fractured world for energy security: the guarantee a country will have access to an uninterrupted — and uninterruptible — supply of energy at a price it can afford. This is particularly important to countries dependent on imported energy.

    China leads the way.

    In its pursuit of energy self-sufficiency, China — both the world’s largest fossil fuel importer and the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter — has earned itself a less dubious distinction: it now leads the globe in the production of renewable energy and electric vehicles.

    “The International Energy Agency says that China could be producing as much solar power by the early 2030s as total U.S. electricity demand today,” Doyle said.

    Europe, meanwhile, has been on a quest to wean itself of Russian oil and gas and has rapidly increased its adoption of renewables. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is currently the world’s second-largest wind power producer and plans to double capacity by 2030.

    “Europe as a whole — including the UK — generally is leading the world in showing how to cut emissions and grow the economy,” Whittington said.

    The United States, he added, will likely stay involved in areas where it holds a technical edge, such as battery development.

    Even the Middle East will have an increasingly compelling motive for going green(er): the need for other sources of income as fossil fuel demand falls from a peak expected in 2030.

    Public pressure itself may again become a driving force for change.

    As hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves and other climate-related disasters increase — and as a younger, more climate-aware generation finds its voice — voters may start worrying less about their personal finances and more about the future of the planet.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is meant by the “green economy”?
    2. How can a government encourage or discourage climate action?
    3. What, if any, changes to your lifestyle have you made to help our planet?

     

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  • Do fixed borders guarantee peace?

    Do fixed borders guarantee peace?

    The crumbling of the Soviet Union brought bloodshed. I remember covering clashes in Kyrgyzstan’s Osh province in 1990 between ethnic Kyrgyz, who were mainly animal herders, and ethnic Uzbek, who were mainly farmers, with very different needs and interests.

    Since then, disputes over grazing and water rights have also boiled over along the borders of Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region and Tajikistan’s Sughd region. In autumn 2022, in the worst fighting over the border since the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens were killed and thousands forced from their homes.

    It was after this that the leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan started working on new demarcation lines. Now, after successful diplomacy to deal with the root cause of the problem, the two nations have agreed to shift their borders.

    “Negotiations have reached the final point and can be discussed openly,” Kamchybek Tashiev, head of Kyrgyzstan’s secret service, told the Kyrgyz parliament in March. “After parliamentary consideration, our presidents will sign the ratification.”

    Under the deal, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan will swap small areas of land and make better arrangements to share water resources. A number of disputed roads will be declared “neutral” and made available to both nations, according to the Defense Post.

    Which all goes to show that to secure friendship and good neighbourly relations, you sometimes have to define your boundaries.

    Recommended reading: “Prisoners of Geography” by Tim Marshall, an excellent account of how geography affects history and politics.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Why might there be disputes over borders?
    2. Why does the world generally agree that existing borders should remain untouched?
    3. What does the case of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan tell us about changing borders?

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  • What’s all the flap about bird flu?

    What’s all the flap about bird flu?

    Avian influenza has scared doctors and scientists for a generation. But its arrival in the United States might finally give the H5N1 bird flu virus the combination of factors it needs to cause a global pandemic.

    Those factors include a new carrier; dairy cattle; a regulatory system that protects farmers at the expense of human health; and a government bent on taking down an already weak public health infrastructure.

    The H5N1 avian influenza virus making headlines around the world — and driving up the price of eggs — in the United States is no youngster. It’s been around since at least 1996, when it was first spotted in a flock of geese in Guangdong in southern China.

    Since then it has spread around the entire world, tearing through flocks of poultry in Asia, Europe and the Americas and wiping out birds and mammals on every continent, including Antarctica. H5N1 bird flu only rarely infects people but as of the end of January 2025, the World Health Organization reported 964 human cases globally and 466 deaths, although many milder cases are likely to have been missed.

    Vets and virus experts have had their eyes on H5N1, in particular, for decades. It didn’t look like a serious threat when it killed geese in 1996. But the next year the virus caused an outbreak in people just over the border from Guangdong in Hong Kong.

    It infected 18 people and killed six of them before it was stopped. That got people’s attention. A 30% fatality rate is exceptionally high for a virus — something approaching the mortality of smallpox.

    Mutations and swap meets

    The virus gets its name from two prominent structures: the hemagglutinin, or H designation, and the neuraminidase, or N. All influenza A viruses get an HxNx name. The current circulating viruses causing human flu misery right now are H1N1 and H3N2, for example, as well as influenza B, which doesn’t get any fancy name.

    But influenza viruses are exceptionally mutation-prone, and even the extra designation doesn’t tell the whole story about the changes the virus has undergone. Every time a flu virus replicates itself, it can make a mistake and change a little. This is called antigenic shift. As if this wasn’t enough, flu viruses can also meet up inside an animal and swap large chunks of genetic material.

    The result? The H5N1 viruses now circulating are very different from those that were seen back in 1996 and 1997, even though they have the same name.

    This is what’s been going on over the past 30 years. H5N1 has been cooking along merrily in birds around the world. So, after the 1997 outbreak, not much was seen of H5N1 until 2003, when it caused widespread outbreaks in poultry in China. Researchers discovered it could infect wild waterfowl without making them sick, but it made chickens very sick, very fast. And those sick chickens could infect people.

    The best way to control its spread among poultry was to cull entire flocks, but if people doing the culling didn’t take the right precautions, they could get infected, and the virus caused serious, often fatal infections. Doctors began to worry that the virus would infect pigs. Pigs are often farmed alongside chickens and ducks, and they’re a traditional “mixing vessel” for flu viruses. If a pig catches an avian flu virus, it can evolve inside the animal to adapt more easily to mammals such as humans. Pigs have been the source of more than one influenza pandemic.

    Pandemic planning

    In the early 2000s, scientists and public health officials took H5N1 so seriously that they held pandemic exercises based on the premise that H5N1 would cause a full-blown pandemic. (Journalists were included in some of these exercises, and I took part in a few.)

    But it didn’t cause a pandemic. Vaccines were developed and stockpiled. Pandemic plans were eventually discarded, ironically just ahead of the Covid pandemic.

    However, flu viruses are best known for their confounding behavior, and H5N1 has always been full of surprises. It has evolved as it has spread, sometimes popping up and sometimes disappearing, but never causing the feared human pandemic. It has not spread widely among pigs although it has occasionally infected people around the world, as well as pet cats, zoo animals, wild seals, polar bears, many different species of birds and, most lately, dairy cattle.

    It’s this development that might finally be a turning point for H5N1.

    For a virus to start a human pandemic, it must acquire the ability to infect people easily; it must then pass easily from person to person; and it must cause significant illness.

    Competing interests

    So far, this hasn’t happened with H5N1. It has infected 68 people in the United States, mostly poultry or dairy workers. Mostly, it causes an eye infection called conjunctivitis, although it killed one Louisiana man. But it is spreading in a never-before-seen way — on milking equipment and in the raw milk of the infected cattle.

    “The more it spreads within mammals, that gives it more chances to mutate,” said Nita Madhav, a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher who is now senior director of epidemiology and modeling at Ginkgo Biosecurity. I interviewed her for a podcast for One World One Health Trust. “As it mutates, as it changes, there is a greater chance it can infect humans. If it gains the ability to spread efficiently from person to person, then it would be hard to stop,” Madhav said.

    And while some states are working to detect and control its spread, the federal government is not doing as much as public health experts say it should. Two agencies are involved: the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

    Dr. John Swartzberg, a health sciences clinical professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley said in an interview with the UC Berkeley School of Public Health that the USDA is charged with two responsibilities that only sometimes work in concert.

    “One of the responsibilities they have is to assure a healthy agricultural industry for the United States,” Swartzberg said. “The second responsibility is to assure safety of the human beings who consume agricultural products in the United States.”

    More information, not less, is needed.

    Dairy farmers feared they’d lose money if their farms were identified as sources of infection. And it’s a lot more expensive to cull cattle than it is to cull chickens.

    “And I think what we’ve seen with this bird flu problem is that the USDA is tilted in favor of protecting the industry, as opposed to protecting the health of humans,” Swartzberg said. “CDC is also involved, but the CDC has no authority to go into states and tell them what to do. It has to be done state by state.”

    On top of that, U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the CDC to take down websites reporting on avian flu and other issues. He is withdrawing U.S. membership from WHO, crippling the ability to coordinate with other countries on controlling outbreaks of disease.

    He notably tried to suppress reporting about Covid during his previous presidency and promoted unproven and disproven treatments.

    His newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary, who will oversee CDC and other agencies charged with human health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, is a vaccine denier, proponent of raw milk and has no public health qualifications.

    The stubbornness of people in the United States doesn’t help. When public health officials warned against drinking raw milk last year, raw milk sales actually went up.

    “Food safety experts like me are just simply left shaking their heads,” Donald Schaffner, a Rutgers University food science professor, told PBS News.

    The big fear? That in flu season, someone will catch both seasonal flu and H5N1, giving the viruses a chance to make friends in the body, swap genetic material and make a deadly new virus that can infect people easily.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. How can politics affect public health risk?
    2. How does public understanding and trust affect the risk of disease?
    3. Countries often blame one another for the spread of disease, but should they?

     

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  • Can regional leaders help bring peace to DR Congo?

    Can regional leaders help bring peace to DR Congo?

    Critics abroad and in Congo accuse DRC president Tshisekedi and his government of being distant, corrupt and ineffective and continually failing to meet promises or even talk to the rebels. 

    “I am exhausted with Tshisekedi’s governance,” said one Congolese citizen.

    There have been strong and repeated accusations by the United Nations and others that the M23, which is now part of the broader Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), receives both funding and tangible support from Rwanda and its army, that it has been responsible for excessive violence — including reports of rape in a Goma prison last week — and that it has benefited from the increasing control of lucrative mineral mines in the region.  

    A multinational push for peace

    The actual truth is much more complex, nuanced and difficult to distinguish, especially given the direct involvement of national army soldiers on the ground, not just from the DRC and Rwanda but from other countries, such as Burundi, South Africa and Tanzania. 

    There are also about 14,000 UN peacekeeping forces in the region, as well as more than 100 other militia groups and even mercenaries from Eastern Europe. Rwanda recently ensured the safe repatriation of 300 of them back to Romania.

    And then there are powerful political and business leaders in the United States, Europe, Russia and China who somewhat cynically want to ensure the continued supply of precious minerals — such as cobalt, coltan and tantalum — for their cars, cellphones and computers. 

    On a more personal level, I live with my Rwandan wife and young son in a newly-built house just south of Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, which lies only 150 kilometres away from the current conflict zone and which has been repeatedly threatened by DRC president Tshisekedi and leading government officials.

    Just last week, Rwanda’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, James Ngango, accused the DRC of amassing a stockpile of weapons — including rockets, kamikaze drones and heavy artillery guns — that are pointed straight at Rwanda.

    Fears that violence will cross borders

    My wife Merveille — whose father and three brothers may well have been murdered by some of the current FDLR militia fighters in eastern DRC — still has nightmares about them possibly attacking or even taking back Rwanda.

    A Rwanda security expert texted me that the threat to “attack Rwanda immediately” was real before the M23 rebels took over Goma and there are still concerns about large weapon stockpiles in South Kivu province. He added that if the M23 can now secure the regional capital of Bukavu and the nearby Kavumu airport “all security risks against Rwanda will be reduced/mitigated.”

    This will allay our personal concerns but we are still worried about the security of some close friends in Goma, who fell silent for five whole days after the M23 rebels took control of their city in late January but thankfully got back in contact right after power and WiFi service were restored.

    Daily life in Goma has returned to something like normal over the last week or so but the nighttime is different.

    One of our friends texted me on Tuesday: “Safety in Goma is degrading day in, day out. Getting armed looters at night. From this night alone we register more than seven deaths. A friend was visited as well. He let them in and his life was spared and his family. He said this morning that it was hard to determine their identity because they had no military uniforms but we all suspect they are they are the Wazalendo or prisoners who escaped from Munzenze prison. They come in to steal, rape and kill who ever shows resistance.”

    The Wazalendo — meaning “patriots” or “nationalists” — are a group of irregular fighters in North Kivu province, who are allied with the Congolese army and opposed to the M23.

    Our friend in Goma said that he still has enough security in his house but when asked about the potentially revitalised multilateral peace process, he said: “I am actually speechless right now, I don’t know what to think about all this. So much has happened.” 

    The weekend summit’s joint communiqué did call for an immediate end to the violence and for defense ministers to come up with concrete plans for sustainable peace measures, such as the resumption of “direct negotiations and dialogue with all state and non-state parties,” including the M23 that DRC president Tshisekedi has long tried to resist.

    Observers see this as a positive sign and there are renewed hopes — along with lingering doubts after so many earlier failed initiatives — that this unusual and timely degree of coordinated Africa-based action and support at the highest levels could mean that the fighting, killing and disruption may wane soon and a long-lasting, peaceful solution can be reached.

    In the words of the sadly-departed Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the UK: “The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities, discovering a genesis of hope.”

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why is the situation in Eastern DRC so difficult to sort out?
    2. Think of a time when you, someone you knew or someone you respected used “direct negotiations and dialogue” to achieve a positive outcome to a challenging problem.
    3. What would you say or do if you were one of the regional African leaders trying to achieve a sustainable, non-violent solution to the Eastern DRC crisis?

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  • How foreign aid helps the country that gives it

    How foreign aid helps the country that gives it

    In international relations, nation states vie for power and security. They do this through diplomacy and treaties which establish how they should behave towards one another.

    If those agreements don’t work, states resort to violence to achieve their goals. 

    In addition to diplomatic relations and wars, states can also project their interests through soft power. Dialogue, compromise and consensus are all part of soft power. 

    Foreign assistance, where one country provides money, goods or services to another without implicitly asking for anything in return, is a form of soft power because it can make a needy nation dependent or beholden to a wealthier one. 

    In 2023, the U.S. government had obligations to provide some $68 billion in foreign aid spread across more than 10 agencies to more than 200 countries. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) alone spent $38 billion in 2023 and operated in 177 different countries. 

    Spreading good will through aid

    USAID has been fundamental to projecting a positive image of the United States throughout the world. In an essay published by the New York Times, Samantha Power, the former administrator of USAID, described how nearly $20 billion of its assistance went to health programs that combat such things as malaria, tuberculosis, H.I.V./AIDS and infectious disease outbreaks, and humanitarian assistance to respond to emergencies and help stabilize war-torn regions.

    Other USAID investments, she wrote, give girls access to education and the ability to enter the work force. 

    When President John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961, he said in a message to Congress: “We live at a very special moment in history. The whole southern half of the world — Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia — are caught up in the adventures of asserting their independence and modernizing their old ways of life. These new nations need aid in loans and technical assistance just as we in the northern half of the world drew successively on one another’s capital and know-how as we moved into industrialization and regular growth.”

    He acknowledged that the reason for the aid was not totally humanitarian.

    “For widespread poverty and chaos lead to a collapse of existing political and social structures which would inevitably invite the advance of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area,” Kennedy said. “Thus our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperilled. A program of assistance to the underdeveloped nations must continue because the nation’s interest and the cause of political freedom require it.” 

    Investing in emerging democracies

    The fear of communism was obvious in 1961. The motivation behind U.S. foreign assistance is always both humanitarian and political; the two can never be separated. 

    Today, the United States is competing with China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for global influence through foreign assistance. The BRI was started by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2023. It is global, with its Silk Road Economic Belt connecting China with Central Asia and Europe, and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road connecting China with South and Southeast Asia and Africa and Latin America.

    Most of the projects involve infrastructure improvement — things like roads and bridges, mass transit and power supplies — and increased trade and investment. 

    As of 2013, 149 countries have joined BRI. In the first half of 2023, a total of $43 billion in agreements were signed. Because of its lending policy, BRI lending has made China the world’s largest debt collector.

    While the Chinese foreign assistance often requires repayment, the United States has dispensed money through USAID with no direct feedback. Trump thinks that needs to be changed. “We get tired of giving massive amounts of money to countries that hate us, don’t we?” he said on 27 January 2024. 

    Returns are hard to see.

    Traditionally, U.S. foreign assistance, unlike the Chinese BRI, has not been transactional. There is no guarantee that what is spent will have a direct impact. Soft power is not quantifiable. Questions of image, status and prestige are hard to measure.

    Besides helping millions of people, Samantha Power gave another more transactional reason for supporting U.S. foreign assistance.

    “USAID has generated vast stores of political capital in the more than 100 countries where it works, making it more likely that when the United States makes hard requests for other leaders — for example — to send peace keepers to a war zone, to help a U.S. company enter a new market or to extradite a criminal to the United States — they say yes,” she wrote.

    Trump is known as a “transactional” president, but even this argument has not convinced him to continue to support USAID. 

    Soft power is definitely not part of his vision of the art of the deal.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is “foreign aid”?
    2. Why would one country give money to another without asking for anything in return?
    3. Do you think wealthier nations should be obliged to help poorer countries?

     

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  • What nations have the strongest democracies?

    What nations have the strongest democracies?

    In my capacity as a globetrotting Asianist, I frequently encounter people from the United States who want to brag about democracy. They are often surprised to discover how healthy it is in many Asian countries.

    The United States as the world’s longest standing democracy stands in contrast with its great geopolitical rival, China, one of the world’s most authoritarian political regimes. The U.S. Constitution came into effect in 1789, and famously begins with “We the people…” affirming that a government must serve its citizens.

    What’s more, U.S. law declares the promotion and protection of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms to be “principal” and “fundamental” goals of U.S. foreign policy. 

    But over the years, politics has evolved across both sides of the Pacific Ocean. By the measure of democracy set by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) the United States now falls short.

    The EIU considers it a “flawed democracy” and ranks it 29th out of the 167 jurisdictions surveyed. The demotion from “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” came in 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected to his first term as president.

    The EIU assesses democracy worldwide based on five criteria: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture and civil liberties. In other words, there is a lot more to democracy than simply having elections.  

    Measuring democracy by world standards

    In this context, the United States scores poorly for its political culture. “The U.S. score is weighed down by intense political and cultural polarisation,” its report noted. “Social cohesion and consensus have collapsed in recent years as disagreements over an expanding list of issues have fuelled the country’s ‘culture wars’.” 

    Fault lines have deepened in particular over LGBTQ+ rights, climate policy and reproductive health. 

    Polarisation has long compromised the functioning of government in the United States and the country’s score for this category is also particularly low.  

    “Pluralism and competing alternatives are essential for a functioning democracy, but differences of opinion in the U.S. have hardened into political sectarianism and almost permanent institutional gridlock,” the EIU reported.

    Freedom House, a think tank which analyses freedom across the world, has also observed that democratic institutions in the United States have eroded. It cites: “Rising political polarisation and extremism, partisan pressure on the electoral process, mistreatment and dysfunction in the criminal justice and immigration systems and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity and political influence.”

    Democracy in Asia and the Pacific

    Across the Pacific, we find five “full democracies”: Australia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Taiwan, although the EIU’s report preceded the current political turmoil in South Korea. The region also has 10 “flawed democracies,” including Malaysia, India, The Philippines and Indonesia.

    Singapore, a country which is often criticised for its soft authoritarian political system, is also assessed to be a flawed democracy. But there can be little doubt about the government’s effectiveness in delivering services to its citizens. Singapore’s technocratic and managerial style governance have generated one of the world’s most prosperous and efficient economies. 

    Its GDP per capita, which is a way of measuring the economic wellbeing of a country, is $148,000 — among the very highest in the world, and ahead of the United States, Germany or Japan.  

    When it comes to economic freedom, Singapore leads the world according to the Heritage Foundation, while the United States ranks a mere 25th out of the 176 jurisdictions surveyed. Other Asia-Pacific economies which rank well are Taiwan (4th) New Zealand (6th), Australia (13th) and South Korea (14th). 

    Human capital has long been a key ingredient in Singapore’s economic success story. Singapore’s students topped the OECD’s 2022 Programme for Student Assessment which assessed the capabilities for 15-year-old students from 81 countries and economies for reading, science and maths. Indeed, Japan and South Korea are also ranked in the top 10 countries. The United States was ranked 34th with a similar score to Vietnam.

    Education is key to democracy.

    When it comes to universities, the United States is still the world leader, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University all being ranked in the top 10 by Times Higher Education.  

    But Asian universities are now climbing the ladder, with China’s Tsinghua University now number 12, Peking University 13th, National University of Singapore 17th, the University of Tokyo 28th and Nanyang Technological University Singapore 30th.

    Asian citizens also enjoy much higher life expectancies than U.S. citizens or those of most other developed countries. Hong Kong tops the list of the world’s highest life expectancy at 86 years, with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore all being in the top 10.  

    In comparison, the United States ranks just 48th in the world; Americans live on average some six years less than Hong Kongers. 

    And while Singapore and many other Asian countries are notorious for restrictions on personal freedoms, the trade-off is a safe society and an efficient economy. For example, Singapore is estimated by research group Numbeo to have a much better crime index and safety scale than the United States or France.  

    No monopoly on democratic values

    My American friends seem insistent that their open and free-wheeling society represents a unique source of creativity and innovation.  

    There is no doubt some truth in this perception — U.S. companies dominate Forbes list of the world’s most innovative companies. At the same time, companies from India, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, China and Japan are now climbing up the Forbes list.  

    And while Switzerland, Sweden and the United States might top the Global Innovation Index, Singapore, South Korea, China and Japan are not far behind.

    Comparing the quality of democracy and governance is a complex exercise, something that a short article like this cannot sufficiently tackle.  

    But it is clear, based on a number of factors, that many Asian countries are doing quite well in developing systems of democracy and governance. The United States faces many deep challenges in contrast and could draw lessons from its Asian friends across the ocean.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is one common measure of democracy?
    2. In what way does the United States fall short on measures of democratic strength?
    3. What do you think is the most important characteristic of a democracy?

     

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  • What a peaceful transition of power looks like

    What a peaceful transition of power looks like

    On 20 January, Donald Trump will take the office of president of the United States for the second time. It remains to be seen how this second term — interrupted by the four-year term of Joe Biden — will play itself out. 

    The first time around, President Barack Obama had left Trump a relatively stable nation and world. Trump’s term proved so disruptive, 41 of his 44 top aides, including his own vice president, refused to back him for a return to office. The next four years are likely to be a bumpy ride.

    Americans have long prided themselves on the peaceful transition of leadership.

    Traditionally, on the morning of the transfer of power, the outgoing president meets with the incoming president for coffee at the White House, they share a ride to the Capitol, trade places and say goodbye. Trump scorned that tradition by flying home to his Mar-a-Lago club in the state of Florida a few hours before the inauguration.

    Before Trump, outgoing presidents tried to ease the transition by leaving notes offering advice and best wishes to their successors in the top drawer of the desk in the Oval Office. George H.W. Bush’s note to Bill Clinton, with whom he’d waged a bare-knuckles election campaign a few months earlier, was especially gracious. 

    “I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you,” Bush wrote.

    Peaceful transition signals a healthy democracy.

    The tradition of a peaceful transfer of power, which dates back to George Washington, crumbled four years ago when Trump, refusing to accept the voters’ rejection of his bid for another four years of office in the 2020 U.S. election, inspired an angry mob to storm the halls of Congress. Their aim was to block certification of Joe Biden’s election to succeed Trump, something that is generally considered a formality. The would-be insurrection failed.  

    Trump is now poised to again assume the highest office in the United States. To the surprise and disappointment of nearly half the country, he narrowly prevailed over Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, in last November’s bitterly contested presidential race. Bowing to tradition and a sense of decency, Harris conceded the election.

    “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” Harris said in her concession speech. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” 

    The current transfer of power has proceeded peacefully and the inauguration itself is expected to follow the historic norm.

    While the transfer is usually thought to include just a few procedural events and the presidential oath-taking, it consists of much more and begins almost immediately after voters cast their ballots in the fall. 

    Handing over the reins of power

    If the election winner is new to the office of president, they and their team are briefed on issues and challenges they’ll face and undergo background checks to assure their avoidance of conflicts of interest and qualification to handle sensitive information.

    Normally, the focus of a transition is on appointments to top government positions and on policy changes. 

    With the Trump transition, both have been controversial. Some of the people he’s chosen for some of the most critical jobs are far out of the U.S. political mainstream. And some of the policies he says he intends to pursue — a massive nationwide roundup and deportation of illegal immigrants, the annexation of Greenland and a takeover of the Panama Canal to mention a few — are raising alarms in the United States and abroad.

    With the recent passing of former President Jimmy Carter, I can’t help remembering a time of sharp contrast to the one we are in now. 

    The 20th of January 1981 was one of the more memorable days in U.S. history. Carter had lost his bid for reelection in large part because he had been unable to secure the release of 53 U.S. diplomats and citizens who’d been held hostage in Iran for more than a year. He’d been up until 4 a.m. that day trying to sew up a deal for their release.

    It was almost done but still incomplete as he and incoming president Ronald Reagan rode up Pennsylvania Avenue together for the inaugural ceremony in a big black armored presidential limousine known as “The Beast.”

    Front row seat to a presidential transition

    I was one of the newsmen covering Carter that day. So I got a firsthand view of how the transfer of power unfolded. When we reached the U.S. Capitol, one of the television networks aired a report that the hostages had been freed. It was premature. 

    In a final indignity to Carter, the Iranians waited until minutes after Reagan was sworn in to let an Algerian aircraft chartered to bring the hostages home take off.

    What the new president said in his inaugural speech was all but lost in the celebrations over the end of the hostage ordeal. Once the formalities were over, Carter and his entourage — his wife Rosalynn, family members, top aides and a small group of reporters — walked to a small motorcade waiting outside the Capitol building. 

    In place of “The Beast” and a long trail of support vehicles was a small sedan and several vans. We slowly made our way to Andrews Air Force Base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. where a military transport plane waited to take Carter home to Georgia. 

    Although it was the same plane he’d flown on as president, its radio call sign was no longer “Air Force One.” Now it was identified as “Special Air Mission” followed by the aircraft’s tail number, “Twenty-Seven Thousand.” Reagan was president. Carter was history.

    Before turning south, the plane flew over the White House and dipped a wing. Many aboard were in tears. But the tears turned to laughter when a young Carter aide, Philip Wise, humorously borrowed a line from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the martyred U.S. civil rights leader. “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last,” Wise shouted.

    Witnessing the most powerful office in the world change hands was like living a real-life version of the storybook “Cinderella” and seeing the coach turn into a pumpkin.

    Having witnessed so many times in so many places where a change at the top was brought about by armed conflict or a military coup, this turnover from Carter to Reagan showed the world the power of a peaceful transition.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Can you think of a recent changeover from one national leader to the next that wasn’t peaceful?
    2. If a new leader is appointed by the old one without an election, would you consider that a peaceful transition of power?
    3. If you were in an important leadership position, do you think you would find it difficult to step down?

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