Thomas L. Friedman

The first was political, administered by the Democrats’ first debates, which revealed a party whose leading presidential candidates were considerably farther to the left on some key issues — borders, national health care, treatment of illegal immigrants — than many mainstream Democrats, not to mention independents and moderate Republicans looking for an alternative to President Donald Trump.

The second big shock was moral, administered by Trump’s supporters at his North Carolina rally last week. As Trump trashed Rep. Ilhan Omar, who immigrated from Somalia, his supporters broke into chants of “Send her back!”

If you were in that audience chanting, or you’ve been rationalizing how people in that audience could have been chanting, or you were Trump giving 13 seconds for that chanting to echo across the hall and then across the country, you should be ashamed of yourself. That was un-American. It was something out of a 1930s German or Italian fascist newsreel.

Combined, the two shocks help to explain a new poll’s finding that a significant number of voters feel that no candidate speaks to them. This group is often called — usually with a sneer — “centrists,” or “moderates.”

I’m in this group, but I prefer not to call myself a “centrist.” That label implies someone whose views are mush, situated between two clearly defined poles of left and right. My views are not mush. They just emerge from a different approach to politics.

For decades our politics — and that of many industrial democracies — were defined by the same basic grid of left-right binary choices: You were either with capital or labor; for big-government solutions or small-government solutions; open to trade and immigration or more closed to them; prioritizing “green” over growth and embracing new social norms, like same-sex marriage, or opposing them.

If you were in one party or the other, you did — or were expected to — check all of its boxes.

The accelerations we’re now going through in climate change, technology and globalization have made that checklist approach to governing obsolete. This era calls for a different approach — one best articulated by Linton Wells, the defense analyst and expert on resilience. Wells argues that to find the solutions to today’s wicked problems you should “never think in the box and never think out of the box. You have to think without a box.”

Or, as future-of-work strategist Heather McGowan puts it: The accelerations in climate change, technological change and globalization are so interdependent that “our old two-dimensional grid with its binary choices between left and right is insufficient to respond to them. It requires a more complex, three-dimensional set of policy tools and responses.”

I think voters intuit that — that their world is being reshaped and too few politicians are helping them to navigate it.

Trump just threw complexity out the window and went full dog whistle on race to hold and expand his base. Democratic candidates are being more serious, but their need to win primaries tugs them back to the old binary checklist — even though the real solutions require a left-wing wrench, a right-wing hammer and all sorts of new tools and combinations we’ve never imagined.

For instance, if we want to stem the flood of immigration at our southern border, we have to understand what’s driving that immigration. It’s a combination of extreme weather — particularly droughts threatening food security — misgovernance, gang warfare and America’s own drug addictions. Together, these are destabilizing weak Central American states.

The right response has to be a mix of policies: to mitigate climate change; to help improve governance and policing in Central America; to tighten U.S. border security so people cannot just walk in; to tighten rules on who can seek asylum; and to send back those who don’t qualify for asylum. We also need an immigration policy that embraces the desperate who qualify for asylum and welcomes high-energy and high-IQ legal immigrants.

Without answers from Column A and Column B and a few new ones in between, you’ll never have a real immigration solution or a coalition to implement it.

Or take the problem of rapid technological changes in business and work. If we just let raw capitalism reign — when machines and those who own them can replace so many more humans and globalization can enable companies to be winners-take-all across the globe — “we’ll continue getting extreme income inequalities, rapid environmental degradation and giant global monopolies,” notes Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future.

But the answer, Gorbis says, is not socialism and abandoning markets, but a vibrant state that can use taxes and regulations to reshape markets in ways that redivide the pie, grow the pie and create more “public wealth” — mass transit, schools, parks, scholarships, libraries and basic scientific research — so that more individuals, startups and communities have more tools to adapt and thrive.

The right question on education is not whether college should be “free.” It’s what should be taught there and who should teach it. Some Democratic candidates seem to care only about the word “free.” But maybe we should be radically incentivizing companies to go back into the education business, since no one knows better the skills their workers need than they do. That’s thinking completely without a box.

Or take the problem of climate change. To be sure, we need to pass certain laws — to phase out coal plants or improve auto mileage. But climate change can be mitigated in the time we have only by leveraging the power of markets.

Only by reshaping markets — with the right incentives, taxes, standards and regulations, as California has imposed — will we get the scale and the speed of innovation, depth of research and tools of adaptation that we need to cushion the worst of climate change and get the best out of it. And the best would be a whole new clean power export industry. In other words, the right “Green New Deal” is not a choice of government over markets but government with markets.

I know that thinking without a box is the right approach to governance because it’s exactly what many of the local communities in America that are thriving today are doing. In those I’ve visited you see business, labor, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, educators and local or state governments networking together into what I call “complex, adaptive coalitions” to manage all the accelerating changes in their communities.

And their political ideology is pragmatism — experiment on the best ways to blend markets and government and just do what works. Leave your rigid right-left grid on the hook outside the door. That’s actually happening locally. But taking that national is really hard.

Which is why — in this era of accelerating change in climate, technology and globalization — the straddle between how you win a national election and how you have to think and operate to govern effectively has gotten wider than ever.

I’d say never have our problems required a more complex amalgam of tools and constituencies to fix, never has the dominant medium of politics — today, Twitter — been more simplistic and never has the president wielding that medium used it so crudely. That’s a problem.

For Democrats who want to be serious: How do they think without a box against an incumbent president who speaks without a box — without any restraints? How do they offer complex solutions to complex problems when Trump just wants to scare enough white Americans into voting for him by hammering four women Democrats of color as being insufficiently patriotic? And it’s effective!

I don’t have the answer, but I’m working on it! We all should be.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/republican-democratic-parties.html" id="55eb874b-a74a-3712-acdc-2c8ecaf365df">The New York Times</a>.

The American body politic has experienced two big — and enormously revealing — shocks in the past month.

The Answers to Our Problems Aren't as Simple as Left or Right

How so? The period after World War II was one of those incredibly plastic moments in history, and we were incredibly lucky that a group of leaders appeared who understood that this moment of Western and U.S. dominance would not necessarily last. It was vital, therefore, to lock in our democratic values and interests in a set of global institutions and alliances that would perpetuate them.

They were leaders like George Marshall and Dean Acheson and Harry Truman in America, and Jean Monnet, a founding father of the European Union, and Konrad Adenaur, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, across the Atlantic.

In 1989, we saw another plastic moment, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Again, we were lucky that a group of leaders came together who peacefully managed the fall of communism, the reunification of Germany and the rise of a quasi-capitalist China. They were Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand and James Baker.

Now we are at another hugely plastic moment — a moment when the world is experiencing four climate changes at once: There’s a change in the climate of the climate — the hots are getting hotter, the wets wetter, the droughts drier, the forest fires fiercer. There’s been a change in the climate of globalization — we are going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one. There’s been a change in the climate of work — machines can think, reason and manipulate as fast, and increasingly better, than humans.

And there’s been a change in the climate of communications. Smartphones connected to the cloud are superempowering good people to be reporters, photographers, filmmakers, innovators and entrepreneurs — with a global reach — and they’re superempowering bad guys to be cybercriminals and breakers with a global reach.

These four climate changes are creating a whole new set of governing challenges. They are not the obvious challenges of communism and economic dislocation — as occurred after World War II — when building a NATO, a Marshall Plan and an EU were the obvious antidotes. And it is not the obvious challenge and opportunity of spreading democracy and free markets into the vacuum created by the end of communism in 1989. It’s the less obvious challenge of stemming the erosion of the pillars of democracy and order built in the previous two eras — but without a single big, obvious boogeyman or falling wall to galvanize us.

I’m talking about disorder that comes from nation-states fracturing under the pressure of these climate changes and spilling out masses of refugees, triggering populist, nationalist backlashes all across the West. I’m talking about disorder spread by a Russia that wants to keep the West in turmoil.

The Russians are using a new kind of warfare that I call “Deep War.’’ Deep War uses cybertools to disrupt Western democracies and elections to discredit them as an alternative to Vladimir Putin’s autocratic kleptocracy and to maintain Russia’s freedom to intervene around its borders. But it operates deep beneath the surface and is not easy to retaliate against or even identify, and it’s very low cost, high impact.

I’m talking about the disorder that will come from more and more extreme ideas spread by social networks. This poison helps fuel the kind of violence we’ve seen in Sri Lanka, San Diego and New Zealand, and it erodes the truth needed to govern. And I am talking about the crushing of freedom that autocrats can now do so much more efficiently with cybertools, like facial recognition and big data, that favor centralized systems.

But this time it feels like our luck is running out.

The countries and leaders we counted upon in the past to build a global, systematic, strategic adaptation to these challenges — the United States of America and the United States of Europe, i.e., the European Union — are AWOL. And so is their secret sauce.

And what was that? It is beautifully described in a valuable new book, “The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal,’’ by William J. Burns, who retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014, after a 33-year diplomatic career that included serving as ambassador to Jordan and Russia and as deputy secretary of state. Jim Baker called Burns “one of the finest U.S. diplomats of the last half century.’’

Burns’ argument is that what made American (and EU) leadership effective in the first two plastic moments was a spirit of “enlightened self-interest” — meaning that sometimes we assumed greater economic or leadership burdens to build a coalition or buttress allies because in the long run, as the world’s biggest economy, we would benefit most from the stability and the commerce those would generate. It advanced both our values and our interests.

Trump has gotten rid of most of the “enlightened” part of “enlightened self-interest” and focuses only on the “self-interest,” notes Burns. Trump’s approach, he adds, is more “transactional muscular unilateralism.” But its viability is yet to be proven anywhere.

And the EU is fracturing — thanks to a new generation of leaders who are not building big systems but just playing with them, like the Brits breaking the EU. A bunch of Conservative politician-clowns in the U.K. thought that they could push for exiting the European Union — without any preparation and by lying that it would be easy and profitable to do so.

But since “Brexit” won a slim majority, those who pushed this foolishness — disconnecting in a connected world — have become paralyzed: They can’t go forward or backward, because economically they see they can’t really afford to leave the EU and politically they can’t afford to stay and expose all their dishonest promises.

Trump, too, plays with big systems. Trump almost broke Obamacare, without an alternative. He broke America out of the Paris climate treaty, without an alternative. He is breaking a set of arms control agreements with Russia, without an alternative. He has broken the Iran nuclear deal, with an untested alternative of broad oil sanctions, and implicitly pushing for regime change.

Trump lavished flattery on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, suspended large-scale military exercises and canceled tougher sanctions, believing all this would get Kim to surrender his nuclear weapons. It has not. Now what’s Trump’s alternative?

We have never had a greater need for the EU and the U.S. to be led by people motivated by enlightened self-interest, who appreciate that virtually every problem destabilizing the world in this plastic moment is global in nature and can be confronted only with a coalition that is global. But instead, we are saddled with leaders who are much more adept at breaking things than making things — at going for broke rather than making the best of the bad.

It just feels like our luck is running out.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/trump-climate-change.html" id="3a26b7b9-b5d5-3e43-af24-ca2292a84eb8">The New York Times</a>.

The year 2019 will be remembered for a lot of things, but in foreign policy it may well be remembered as the year our luck ran out.

Has Our Luck Run Out?

It’s hard for nongolfers to appreciate the scope of Tiger’s physical and psychological achievement, after he went through four back surgeries and the global tabloid exposure of his industrial-scale marital cheating.

If I think of the news I normally cover, it would be as if Bill Clinton came back and defeated Donald Trump for president in 2020. Or, in technology, it’s the equivalent of Steve Jobs founding Apple, losing Apple and then coming back and winning all four “technology majors” — the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac and the Apple Watch — with a reborn Apple.

The biggest takeaway for me is the reminder of the truism that golf is the sport most like life, because it is played on an uneven surface. Good and bad bounces are built into the game, and so much of success in golf is about how you react to those good and bad bounces. Do you quit? Do you throw your club? Do you cheat? Do you whine? Do you blame your caddie?

Or do you say what the great golfers say when a bounce turns against them or their ball ends in a divot in the middle of the fairway and only a great shot will get them back into the hole? They all say to their caddie the same two words: “Watch this.” And then they pull off a remarkable shot that winds through the trees, over the hill and past the sand trap, avoids the pond on the left and lands right in the middle of the putting green — which is exactly the shot Tiger hit on the 11th hole out of the trees at Augusta National on Sunday.

To do that under pressure is stunning, but it is not just luck or even pure physical attributes. It is about practice — hours and hours and hours. Gary Player liked to say, “The more I practice the luckier I get.” And that is where, for me, the meaning of Tiger’s comeback begins: his willingness to commit to endless hours of physical rehabilitation and then endless hours of practice. How many of us have that iron will? But the physical part is the least of it.

Last year I wrote the foreword to a golf instruction book by my teacher, in which I argued that what makes golf so difficult — but also so satisfying when you get it right — is that you have to combine four things: physics, geometry, geography and psychology. Tiger’s genius on Sunday, and so often throughout his career, is his ability to master all four better than anyone else.

How so? Well, every golf swing always starts with a geography quiz: How far away is that target and how is it set in the landscape? Is it elevated? Is it on a ledge? Is in it a bowl? Is it by an ocean cliff, a stream or a pond?

Then comes the geometry lesson: At what angle and speed do I have to launch this little white ball to match, or take advantage of, this geography and get as close as possible to the hole, taking into account the wind and temperature and landscape as well?

Then comes the physics lesson: How do I move my arms and legs and shift my weight — and at what speed, torque, size of backswing, ball position and swing finish — to ensure that my little white ball solves this geography-geometry riddle and lands as close as possible to my target?

And, finally, what emotional and psychological mindset do I need to increase the odds that my body and arms will move into the ideal launch positions — to achieve the geography-geometry solution that I’ve designed in my head. As any golfer will tell you, there is no greater buzz in the world than solving that puzzle with your body and watching your golf ball soar toward its intended target with the perfect geometry against the backdrop of some stunning geography.

Tiger did that several times Sunday, and you could feel the buzz, and none more intensely than on Augusta National’s perilous 16th hole, where he launched his ball on the perfect arc over the water, softly curbing right to left with the terrain and then landing in the precise 2-foot-diameter circle so that it would then roll 20 feet down the slope and stop 15 inches below the hole. Geography, geometry, physics and psychology all working in perfect unison.

You cannot overestimate the psychological aspect of that shot. Golf is such a head game, and if you are distracted by something, you’ll never put the geography, geometry and physics together at the level needed to win in professional golf. That’s why Tiger’s game deteriorated so far after his infidelities had been broadcast all over the world in 2009, and even before his back gave out. You could actually see it when Tiger walked through a golf gallery back then. His eye never wanted to meet those of his fans, because he knew that they knew that he knew that they knew that he’d been a first-class jerk.

What was in his head translated into his hands, and it translated into his scores. For the better part of a decade, he could not win a major until his back was healed and he got the monkey of his own misdeeds off his back — by becoming a good father and a better person to his fans and his fellow golfers. You could see him looking everyone in the eye in the last couple of years, and it finally unlocked his fan base. It gave them permission to root for him again, full-throated, despite all the ways he’d disappointed them. And that clearly unlocked his mind, and I am sure his body too, so he could swing freely again.

And that leads to another way that golf is so much like life. Each and every round is a journey, and, like all of life’s journeys, it’s never a straight line. It’s always full of crazy bounces, self-inflicted mistakes and unexpected detours, and therefore always a journey of discovery about yourself and your playing partners. And, if you love the game, it’s an everlasting journey in search of self-improvement — always trying to get your geography, geometry, physics and psychology in perfect alignment.

And when you see it done at the highest level, on the toughest terrain, under the most intense spotlight by someone who had it, lost it and then got it back, you can only say: “What a privilege! I saw Tiger make his comeback and win the Masters at age 43. What a crazy, wonderful, amazing journey!”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/opinion/tiger-woods-masters.html" id="89e744f4-81e5-384f-a762-8a0ae38cf334">The New York Times</a>.

Although my day job is writing the foreign affairs column for The New York Times — more Persian Gulf than fairway golf — thinking about golf and playing as often as I can is my all-consuming hobby. So like millions of others, I was awed by Tiger Woods’ comeback for the ages by his winning the Masters at 43 years old. What can be learned from it?

Tiger Woods and the Game of Life

You cannot underestimate the psychological aspect of that shot. Golf is such a head game, and if you are distracted by something, you’ll never put the geography, geometry and physics together at the level needed to win in professional golf. That’s why Tiger’s game deteriorated so far after his infidelities had been broadcast all over the world in 2009, and even before his back gave out. You could actually see it when Tiger walked through a golf gallery back then. His eye never wanted to meet those of his fans, because he knew that they knew that he knew that they knew that he’d been a first-class jerk.

They are both men utterly without shame, backed by parties utterly without spine, protected by big media outlets utterly without integrity. They are both funded by a Las Vegas casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson. They are both making support for Israel a “Republican” cause — no longer a bipartisan one. And they each could shoot an innocent man in broad daylight in the middle of Fifth Avenue and their supporters would say the victim had it coming.

As a result, they are each free to cross red lines that their predecessors never dared to. Which is why I believe that four more years of Netanyahu, which is almost certain after Israel’s election Tuesday, and six more years of Trump, which is a real possibility, will hasten the emergence of an America and an Israel where respect for civility, democracy, an independent judiciary and independent media are no longer examples for others to follow.

Instead, both countries will be cautionary tales of how precious are the norms and institutions that bind a democracy, and how easily they can be undermined by leaders who will tell any lie, smear any competitor and wink at any extremist to stay in power.

Netanyahu’s first order of business will be to strike an agreement with his potential coalition partners, most of them far-right, pro-settler parties, in which, as Haaretz reported, those parties will agree to create legislation that gets rid of the multiple indictments for corruption looming in Netanyahu’s future — and in return he will agree to annex West Bank settlements to Israel. And Trump will somehow go along, maybe as part of his own peace plan. It is going to be a dirty business, for sure.

But what else could we expect? The parallels between Trump and Netanyahu are now deep and broad.

Netanyahu has openly embraced a racist, anti-Arab Israeli party and racist, anti-Arab rhetoric, unlike any previous Israeli prime minister. At the same time, he has steadily been erasing the Green Line that separated Israel from the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinians — with the help of Trump’s ambassador to Israel — making it increasingly unlikely that Israel will ever separate itself from that area and increasingly likely that it will become a binational state in which Jews will enjoy rights that Palestinians will be denied.

Meanwhile, Trump is increasingly turning America into a banana republic, firing Cabinet officials and senior bureaucrats who refuse to carry out his impulsive orders, which are often illegal and mostly related to preventing legal and illegal immigration or asylum requests along the Mexico-United States border. Trump prefers to govern through “acting” Cabinet secretaries — he has fired their bosses and not replaced them — who are much more vulnerable to his whims and more accepting of his more than 10,000 lies and falsehoods since taking office.

Netanyahu, for his part, prefers to simply hold multiple portfolios: For a good chunk of his last term he was prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister and health minister.

Both men have no close friends. The one major difference between them is that Netanyahu is very smart, an avid reader and a deft tactician in managing relations with Israel’s neighbors and big powers, such as America, Russia, India and China. Trump is clever but probably has not read a book in years. He gets his information from Fox News and other right-wing media, and rather than playing Vladimir Putin, has been played by him.

Both Trump and Netanyahu are being investigated for serious financial improprieties. Israel’s attorney general has recommended that Netanyahu be indicted on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust in three corruption cases.

Trump has been cleared by the special counsel on charges of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, but he remains under investigation, as Reuters noted, on “issues including his businesses and financial dealings, personal conduct, charitable foundation and inaugural committee.” Five close Trump aides have already admitted to crimes, mostly financial, or been convicted.

Neither man is interested in being a leader for all their people. Each has chosen to rule by dividing his people, not uniting them. They each just want to win by 50.01 percent, by using fear of the outsider and drawing cultural or religious distinctions between their citizens to garner just enough votes to squeak by.

Netanyahu’s strategy was to demonize Israeli Arabs, and Trump’s was to demonize Muslims and Mexicans and immigrants from what he called “shithole” countries. Both men have rebuilt their parties around themselves and their personal politics, and both believe that as long as they can hold their bases by stoking enough fear and cultural division, they can win — and they’re willing to sacrifice any values or norms to do so.

Neither man is entirely wrong about the world around him. America does have an illegal immigration problem that Democrats have not taken seriously enough. Israel has real enemies like Iran and its proxies. But Israel’s external enemies are well-deterred. The existential threat to Israel is internal — that it will annex the West Bank with its Palestinian population and look to the world as an apartheidlike South Africa.

My critique of both men is that they consistently try to use these real threats for political gain — to feed fears, rather than to think creatively about how to defuse them. Because for Netanyahu to think imaginatively about how to separate from the West Bank and for Trump to think creatively about how to defuse our immigration problem with a coherent national strategy would require each to disappoint or confront the extreme ultranationalists who form the core bases of their support. Neither has the courage or the desire to do so.

Indeed, Netanyahu has gone so deep into the gutter that in this last election he agreed to partner with a small, racist, anti-Arab Israeli party — a party so vile that the Israeli Supreme Court barred its leader from running. In response, Netanyahu’s allies immediately threatened to gut the Supreme Court if they win. I don’t have to tell you where Trump has gone in indulging white supremacists.

Netanyahu will go down in history as the Israeli leader who concretized the distinction between “Israelis” and “Jews,” noted Bernard Avishai in a smart essay in The New Yorker: “The menace, Netanyahu has implied, is not just the Arabs but what might be termed Israeliness — a legal and cultural identity available to any citizen who participates in Hebrew-speaking civil society, including the 20 percent who are Arab.”

While Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s opponent in the recent election, has argued that, broadly defined, “Israeli identity is increasingly plausible for, among others, young, middle-class Arabs, who accounted for more than 16 percent of students in bachelor’s degree programs in 2017,” that is not Netanyahu’s view.

“Netanyahu’s version, in contrast,” Avishai explained, “is a state essentially reserved for Jews, including those in the diaspora, who can prove their Jewishness by either rabbinical certification or maternal descent — one that is democratic only in the sense that Jews constitute the majority, the general will of Jews necessarily prevails, and non-Jews are in the state by sufferance, not really by right.”

That is why Netanyahu passed the recent Nation-State Law, which stipulated that Israel is “the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” However much American Jews — and traditional, secular American Jewish supporters of Israel — “may try to shield Netanyahu, it is increasingly clear that he is at odds with their democratic standards, which are already under assault,” Avishai concluded. “American Jews, like Israeli voters, have choices to make.” Is Israel a state for Jews or for all its citizens?

Trump has dabbled in the same kind of tropes. He may not say it explicitly, but his whole worldview, evident from his dog whistles, is that real Americans are primarily white Judeo-Christians — certainly not Muslims — and that all black or brown immigrants are suspect.

Finally, both Trump and Netanyahu worship only one thing — raw, naked power, and they are not afraid to exercise it. Netanyahu is convinced that if Israel is strong militarily, economically and technologically, the world will bend to its will and beat a path to its door. The Palestinians will surrender; the Arabs will deal with Israel under the table; and China, India and Russia will all come to buy Israeli software. And so far he has been right. Netanyahu is convinced that liberal American Jews are worthless, that they’ll soon disappear via intermarriage and that the country’s Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians will be powerful enough to do Israel’s bidding in Washington.

Trump too has an obsession with raw power; his favorite insult is to call someone “weak.” He lives by the credo: Never apologize, no matter how foul your actions or how big your lie. Just stand firm and everyone will eventually bend your way. It has worked for him too. But at what long-term costs for both societies?

Trump is replacing the entire logic of U.S. foreign policy since World War II — that more global integration and stronger global rules and institutions will make for a more prosperous world, and if America pays a little more than others for that we will reap far more benefits because we are the world’s biggest economy — with a philosophy of competitive nationalism.

For Trump, all the global institutions built after World War II — NATO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations — are just tools for small countries to rip off America or stick it to Israel. Trump actually wants the European Union to crack up, because he thinks that if the United States just negotiates with every nation bilaterally, it will be able to impose asymmetrical trade agreements on them.

So have no doubts: Four more years of Netanyahu and six more years of Trump won’t just change the United States and Israel. It will change the world — and not for the better.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/netanyahu-trump-israel-election.html" id="9ccd4786-3d9b-3999-a1ee-37ae77b27d23">The New York Times</a>.

There are two countries that I’ve been professionally, emotionally and intellectually involved with my entire journalism career — the United States and Israel. I’ve never been more worried about both, because President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are essentially the same person, and they pose the same threat to their respective nations.

Bibi Trump and Donald Netanyahu

The storm swept through Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe, killing hundreds. My friend Greg Carr, who runs the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, told me that the lions, elephants and zebras sensed the storm coming and moved to higher ground to avoid the flooding. Among the people and birds that survived, many of the former lost their homes and the latter their nests and eggs.

While this historic weather disaster was unfolding, President Donald Trump was urging Republicans not to kill the Democrats’ Green New Deal proposal — not because Trump wants to work with it, but because he wants to run against it in 2020.

Trump wants to take the Green New Deal, co-sponsored by Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx, and mock its aspiration to urgently decarbonize our electric grid, transportation sector, industries and buildings, while pairing all that with programs to ensure that every American can get a job and have access to health care and “safe, affordable, adequate housing,” as well as other social goods.

AOC’s rejoinder: “For everyone who wants to make a joke about that, you may laugh, but your grandkids will not.”

She is right. And given the choice between a “Green New Deal” that envisions scaling justice for all and Trump’s “Black New Deal,” which protects profitable pollution for the 1 percent, my heart is with the greens. But my head says you can’t transform our energy system and our social/economic one at scale all at once. We have to prioritize energy/climate. Because for the environment, later will be too late. Later is officially over.

And if Democrats approach this right — with a barrage of political ads paired with a focused green strategy, like the “Green Real Deal” proposed by Ernie Moniz, Barack Obama’s energy secretary, and Andy Karsner, George W. Bush’s assistant energy secretary for renewable energy — they can win on this issue in 2020 and make Trump the laughingstock.

Here are the kinds of political ads I’d run:

The Department of Energy’s 2017 U.S. Energy and Employment Report revealed that solar energy was employing more workers than the traditional coal, gas and oil industries combined. But Trump says he prefers big, beautiful coal. How do your kids feel about that?

The heartland of America’s wind energy system today is Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming, North Dakota and Iowa, which all voted for Trump in 2016. But Trump says noise from wind turbines “causes cancer.” Do you buy that?

Cyclone Idai devastated some of the greatest wilderness areas in Africa. Trump couldn’t care less. Do you? Because another decade of storms like that, and the only lions, elephants and zebras your grandkids will ever see will be in a Disney movie.

Newsweek just reported that a study published in the journal Nature found that the replenishment of new coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, one of the true natural wonders on our planet, “fell by a staggering 89 percent following two severe mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, which were caused by significant spikes in water temperature. The two bleaching events were the worst in recorded history, leading to a catastrophic die-off in many regions of the 3,800 individual reefs that comprise the world’s largest reef system.” Your grandkids may never see a real coral reef. Trump couldn’t care less. Do you?

I’d pound Trump with these points, but they will be effective only if married to a “Green Real Deal.” For Moniz and Karsner, that would involve every state or city adopting its own version of a plan California approved last year called S.B. 100.

S.B. 100, which was spearheaded by state Sen. Kevin de León, an unsung hero of the green movement, mandated that power companies steadily increase carbon-free electricity on their grid until it reaches 100 percent by 2045.

As David Roberts wrote for Vox, de León kept “the bill simple and direct enough to command broad support. … Somehow, everyone saw themselves in S.B. 100. Labor and business, nukes and renewables, markets and mandates, cats and dogs — somehow the bill hit the sweet spot. It contained enough substance to matter, but not so many bells and whistles that everyone found something to hate.”

The law sets a steadily rising standard for California power generation companies: 50 percent renewables by 2026, 60 percent renewables by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free — so as to include energy sources that aren’t actually renewable, but don’t emit carbon dioxide— — by 2045. So wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, large hydro, nuclear power and natural gas paired with carbon capture and storage (CCS) can all play, plus whatever new clean power gets invented. And the steadily rising California standard guarantees they’ll all have a growing market to sell into.

A Green Real Deal would be a nationwide effort to inspire and enable Democrats and sensible Republicans to come up with state and local versions of S.B. 100 and thereby stimulate America’s earth race — not space race — to get to national net-zero emissions by 2045, or earlier.

It could garner a lot of GOP support in wind states, businesses could make money off it, and it would put Trump totally on the defensive.

As Moniz and Karsner wrote in an essay on CNBC.com: “Climate deniers, as well as those with demonstrably impractical, short-term, feel-good solutions, are moving us sideways when forward motion is essential.”

A Green Real Deal, they argue in The Santa Barbara Independent, would set “ambitious, but achievable, stretch goals that can be flexibly met and spur innovation and prosperity.”

Trump is vulnerable to a bipartisan, industry-friendly plan like this. Last year, The Atlantic reported that “a coalition of 34 student groups from around the country — including 23 chapters of the College Republican — announced the formation of Students for Carbon Dividends, a bipartisan group calling for national legislation to fight climate change. … It marks the first time that a coalition of College Republican groups has publicly backed a climate-change policy.”

Glenn Prickett, founder of Rock Creek Strategies, which advises organizations and companies on how to incorporate the value of nature into economic development, remarked to me: “I have been sensing something in the air that I have not felt since the late 1980s — when global warming first became prominent and Time magazine made Planet Earth the Person of the Year — and that is that people really want the government to take this issue seriously. I have to give AOC credit for helping get it back on the agenda.”

Prickett added: “I spent 25 years talking about what would happen if we don’t address this issue. Now I have to correct myself and say what is happening.” The impacts are real and they are here, “but what is new is that while the politics remain polarized, business leadership is getting behind this issue and we now have the technologies to create scale solutions.”

I repeat: Later will be too late. So let me end where I began — with Greg Carr in Mozambique’s Gorongosa Park, 1 million acres of wilderness, which has been protecting both wildlife and the 200,000 people living around it.

First of all, Carr noted by phone, “nearly half of Gorongosa Park is now a lake,” thanks to Cyclone Idai, but it’s trees and soils “acted like a giant sponge and absorbed tons of water,” so flooding of communities downstream was not as bad as it could have been. Parks mitigate climate extremes. “Hurricanes are going to be more of a problem, and more nature is the solution. I am talking to the government about creating another 250,000 acres of wetland conservancy to the south of us to soak up more water, because this will not be our last cyclone.”

It was also Carr’s 260 park rangers who delivered 100,000 pounds of food, rescue teams and new seeds for replanting flooded crops to all the villagers living around them. (To help, go to gorongosa.org/cyclone_relief_fund.) Carr wants to see national parks in Africa transformed from just tourist sites to economic development engines, absorbers of climate change and first responders to disaster.

Low-lying coastal cities in America should be thinking the same. Nine out of 10 homes in Beira — Mozambique’s fourth-largest city, on its coast — were devastated by Idai. Gorongosa is upstream from Beira and absorbed enough water to prevent that port city from being wiped off the face of the earth, Carr said.

A Green Real Deal — if framed and focused properly — could wipe that smirk right off Trump’s face.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/opinion/trump-2020-green-deal.html" id="8c5b6ff5-5451-3409-ae2b-3b9591507ff8">The New York Times</a>.

Here’s some news you may have missed. Southeastern Africa got hit in March with a cyclone that United Nations officials say was one of the worst weather disasters to ever strike the Southern Hemisphere. “Ever” is a long time.

A Green Real Deal, for Real Results, Real Soon

The first thing we have in common is that I was raised in the 5th District of Minnesota, specifically the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. I lived there until I was 20. It was a freaky place — a crazy mix of Minnesota Jews (we called ourselves “the Frozen Chosen”) and Scandinavians that produced a uniquely tolerant civic culture and an interesting group of neighbors: Al Franken, the Coen brothers, Peggy Orenstein, Norm Ornstein, Michael Sandel, Sharon Isbin, Marc Trestman and lots of others you can find on the St. Louis Park Wikipedia page. Our little town was immortalized in the Coen brothers’ 2009 movie “A Serious Man.'’

I still feel very close to the community there and go home often. St. Louis Park welcomed Jews who wanted to get out of the inner city of Minneapolis back in the 1950s — when other suburbs still had restrictions on selling homes to “Hebrews.” So I was proud to see St. Louis Park also welcome Muslim Somali refugees like Omar a half-century later, and then elect her to Congress.

The other thing that Omar and I have in common, as others have noted, is that we both don’t like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the organization at the center of the Israel lobby — and have spoken in very blunt language about its strong-arm political tactics.

But that is also where our differences begin.

I don’t like AIPAC because I strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to build a nation-state in their ancient homeland — a nation-state envisaged by its founders to reflect the best of Jewish and democratic values. And I believe AIPAC for many years has not only become a rubber stamp on the right-wing policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has resulted in tens of thousands of Israeli settlers now ensconced in the heart of the West Bank, imperiling Israel as a democracy. AIPAC has also been responsible for making support for Israel a Republican cause, not a bipartisan issue, which poses a real danger to Israel’s support in America in the long run, and particularly on college campuses.

I dislike AIPAC because I am devoted to Israel as a Jewish democracy and because I believe that only a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians can ensure that. Given how AIPAC has let itself become the slavish, unthinking tool of Netanyahu, who opposes a two-state solution, I believe AIPAC works against Israel’s long-term interests.

AIPAC is a self-appointed lobby that does not represent my feelings as an American Jew. But neither does Rep. Omar.

Everything I have heard from her leads me to conclude that she dislikes AIPAC because she dislikes Israel, because she does not really believe the Jewish people have a right to an independent state in their ancestral homeland. She seems to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, known as BDS.

When Omar was asked at an August primary debate held in a St. Louis Park synagogue about her stance on BDS, she said that the movement was “not helpful in getting that two-state solution,” Haaretz reported on Nov. 14.

But after she was elected, Muslimgirl.com reported that on Nov. 11, her campaign told a reporter for the website that “Ilhan believes in and supports the BDS movement and has fought to make sure people’s right to support it isn’t criminalized. She does, however, have reservations on the effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution.”

According to Haaretz, her campaign confirmed that she had voted against an anti-BDS bill while she was a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, explaining that she was inspired by how BDS had worked to undermine apartheid in South Africa. “I don’t want to be part of a vote that limits the ability of people to fight towards that justice and peace,” she had said.

I am not a BDS supporter. The movement’s main website says that it “does not advocate for a particular solution to the conflict and does not call for either a ‘one state solution’ or a ‘two state solution.'” Rather, it calls for ending the Israeli “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall, recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality” and “respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

By being specific about the rights of Palestinians to return to their home and not unequivocally committing to a two-state solution, the movement leaves me and many others to believe that BDS is just code for getting rid of the state of Israel. I do not believe in passing laws against BDS — people can boycott whomever they want — but I do believe it is not a helpful movement at all. And I believe Omar’s waffling on the issue, depending on her audience, is equally unhelpful and troubling.

If she thinks the only reason that Americans support Israel is because of AIPAC and campaign contributions, she is dead wrong. Americans’ affinity with Israel is rooted in a respect for Israel’s ability to maintain a democracy, albeit with flaws, in a sea of autocratic regimes; it is rooted in a Judeo-Christian religious affinity; and it is rooted in respect for Israel’s contributions to technology, medicine and science. AIPAC is the beneficiary of that support, not the cause of it.

But AIPAC has abused that privilege. And it is utterly fooling itself if doesn’t understand that there are more than a few Americans, especially on college campuses but not only there, who are enjoying watching Omar give it a punch right in the face. She is saying something others want to say but are afraid to do so — including some members of Congress, I am sure.

Why? Maybe it’s because they watched how President Barack Obama put together a $40 billion, 10-year military aid package for Israel — a high-tech powerhouse that is not poor — and rather than receiving effusive thanks from Netanyahu, Obama was criticized by Bibi and his cat’s paw, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, as “not generous enough,” because it required that aid to be spent purchasing American arms, benefiting our workers, not on Israeli-made arms. AIPAC went along with Netanyahu’s ungratefulness.

As Haaretz reported on July 28, 2016, “Last week, Graham visited Israel and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister said he was unhappy with both the level of aid the Obama administration was offering in the new deal and the conditions the administration was attaching to it.”

With AIPAC’s support, Netanyahu also got the Republican House to invite him to give one of America’s highest honors — a speech to a joint meeting of Congress — over the objections of Obama. Netanyahu used the opportunity to castigate the White House at the height of both the Iran negotiations and Netanyahu’s own re-election campaign. That really made me mad as an American. Netanyahu used our Congress to attack our president and further his re-election campaign. No other foreign leader would have dared to do that.

Around 60 Democrats boycotted the speech, saying it was an overreach by Speaker John Boehner, Netanyahu and AIPAC — one also designed to make it look as if Republicans were more pro-Israel than Democrats.

According to Talking Points Memo, the Israelis and Republicans worked out the details of Bibi’s congressional speech “without notifying the White House,” so that, Boehner said, “there was no interference” from the administration. Not only did that violate diplomatic protocol — an opposition party working directly with a foreign government — but of political protocol as well, with congressional Republicans developing their own foreign policy independent of, and at odds with, the White House.

Plenty of Americans resent that kind of overreach. And it was enabled by AIPAC. On Feb. 28, 2015, The Washington Post reported: “Worried that lawmakers might boycott the speech altogether, a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee prodded local AIPAC activists to apply pressure on Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to attend.”

But I come back to Omar. She is a brand-new member of Congress. She is free to raise any issues she wants. And one issue she seems to have seized on is the alleged dual loyalty of Jews to America and Israel. I am not dual loyal. I always put America first, but I want to see Israel thrive — just like many Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Indian-Americans and others feel about their ancestral homelands.

When I see that dual-loyalty charge coming from a congresswoman who first signaled opposition to BDS and then support for it, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who has never been to Israel, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who, to my knowledge, has never criticized the Palestinian leadership for its corruption and failure — time and again — to seize on peace overtures from Israeli leaders who, unlike Netanyahu, actually wanted to forge a two-state solution, when I see it coming from a congresswoman who seems to be obsessed with Israel’s misdeeds as the biggest problem in the Middle East — not Iran’s effective occupation of four Arab capitals, its support for ethnic cleansing and the use of poison gas in Syria and its crushing of Lebanese democracy — it makes me suspicious of her motives.

So let me end where I started. Ilhan Omar represents, among other neighborhoods, a significant and liberal Jewish community — my hometown. I can tell you that a vast majority of Jews there would be proud if their congresswoman used her links to American Jews and Muslims to be a bridge builder for peace in the Middle East and America, not just another AIPAC/Israel basher. She is young and very new to the national spotlight. Friends of mine back home tell me her humanistic instincts are impressive and authentic. I don’t know if it’s her or her advisers, but she’s gotten herself into a bad place — a huge missed leadership opportunity.

Which only reinforces a fundamental rule I have: I love the Israelis and the Palestinians, but God save me from their American friends. When they recreate and fuel their conflict here in America, and on college campuses, they only sow more division, distrust and make things worse. And that’s the last thing the good people in Israel and Palestine need.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/israel-ilhan-omar.html" id="95edaa35-8e22-338f-a45a-ac0ede967844">The New York Times</a>.

I’ve been watching with more than a little interest the controversial statements about Israel and the Israel lobby by Ilhan Omar, a freshman Democratic congresswoman from the 5th District of Minnesota, because it turns out that we have a lot in common — up to a point.

Ilhan Omar, AIPAC and Me

Why? Because recent advances in the speed and scope of digitization, connectivity, big data and artificial intelligence are now taking us “deep” into places and into powers that we’ve never experienced before — and that governments have never had to regulate before. I’m talking about deep learning, deep insights, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition, deep voice recognition, deep automation and deep artificial minds.

Some of these technologies offer unprecedented promise and some unprecedented peril — but they’re all now part of our lives. Everything is going deep.

Which is why it may not be an accident that one of the biggest hit songs today is “Shallow,” from the movie “A Star Is Born.” The main refrain, sung by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is: “I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in. ... We’re far from the shallow now.”

We sure are. But the lifeguard is still on the beach and — here’s what’s really scary — he doesn’t know how to swim! More about that later. For now, how did we get so deep down where the sharks live?

The short answer: Technology moves up in steps, and each step, each new platform, is usually biased toward a new set of capabilities. Around the year 2000 we took a huge step up that was biased toward connectivity, because of the explosion of fiber-optic cable, wireless and satellites.

Suddenly connectivity became so fast, cheap, easy for you and ubiquitous that it felt like you could touch someone whom you could never touch before and that you could be touched by someone who could never touch you before.

Around 2007, we took another big step up. The iPhone, sensors, digitization, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and cloud computing melded together and created a new platform that was biased toward abstracting complexity at a speed, scope and scale we’d never experienced before.

So many complex things became simplified. Complexity became so fast, free, easy to use and invisible that soon with one touch on Uber’s app you could page a taxi, direct a taxi, pay a taxi, rate a taxi driver and be rated by a taxi driver.

Over the last decade, these advances in the speed of connectivity and the elimination of complexity have grown exponentially. Because as big data got really big, as broadband got really fast, as algorithms got really smart, as 5G got actually deployed, artificial intelligence got really intelligent. So now, with no touch — but just a voice command or machines acting autonomously — we can go so much deeper in so many areas.

Scientists and doctors can now find the needle in the haystack of health data as the norm, not the exception, and therefore see certain disease patterns that were never apparent before. Machines can recognize your face so accurately that the Chinese government can punish you for jaywalking in Beijing, using street cameras, and you will never encounter a police officer.

Indeed, with today’s facial recognition technology, I can dispense with the card reader at my office’s security gate and instead use each employee’s face as an ID.And cars can drive on their own.

DeepMind, the artificial intelligence arm of Google’s parent, developed an AI program, AlphaGo, that has now defeated the world’s top human players of the ancient strategy game Go — which is much more complex than chess — by learning from human play.

As The Times reported, DeepMind “showed yet another way that computers could be developed to perform better than humans in highly complex tasks” and to “mimic the way the brain functions.” DeepMind’s next breakthrough, AlphaZero, did not even need to learn from humans. It learned even faster by repeatedly playing against itself!

Today “virtual agents” — using conversational interfaces powered by artificial intelligence — can increasingly understand your intent when you call the bank, credit card company or insurance company for service, just by hearing your voice.

It means machines can answer so many more questions than nonmachines, also known as “humans.” The percentage of calls a chatbot, or virtual agent, is able to handle without turning the caller over to a person is called its “containment rate,” and these rates are steadily soaring. Soon, automated systems will be so humanlike that they will have to self-identify as machines.

Automation is also going deep, fast. The Times’ Kevin Roose quoted Mohit Joshi, president of Infosys, a technology firm that helps other businesses automate their operations, as saying in Davos last week: “People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their workforce. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?' ”

But bad guys, who are always early adopters, also see the same potential to go deep in wholly new ways.

They can fake your face and voice so well that they can create a YouTube video that will go viral of you saying racist things or make it look like the president of the United States just announced a nuclear attack on Russia.They can use technology to fake a bank manager’s voice so well that it can call your grandmother, and, with a voice command, ask her to transfer $10,000 to an account in Switzerland and she’ll do it — and you’ll never catch them in time.

That’s why the adjective that so many people are affixing to all of these new capabilities to convey their awesome power is “deep.”

On Jan. 20, The London Observer looked at Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff’s new book, the title of which perfectly describes the deep dark waters we’ve entered: “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”

“Surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff wrote, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behavior.”

Unfortunately, we have not developed the regulations or governance, or scaled the ethics, to manage a world of such deep powers, deep interactions and deep potential abuses.

Two quotes tell that story: Last April, Sen. Orrin Hatch was questioning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a joint hearing of the commerce and judiciary committees. At one point Hatch asked Zuckerberg, “So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”

Zuckerberg, clearly trying to stifle a laugh, replied, “Senator, we run ads.” Hatch did not seem to understand that Facebook’s business model is to mine users’ data and then run targeted ads — and Hatch was one of Facebook’s regulators.

But then Zuckerberg was also clueless about how deep the powers of the Facebook platform had gone — deep enough that a few smart Russian hackers could manipulate it to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

When faced with evidence that fake news spread on Facebook influenced the outcome of the 2016 election, Zuckerberg dismissed that notion as a “pretty crazy idea.” It turns out that it was happening at an industrial scale, and he later had to apologize.

Regulations often lag behind new technologies, but when they move this fast and cut this deep, that lag can be really dangerous. I wish I thought that catch-up was around the corner. I don’t. Our national discussion has never been more shallow — reduced to 280 characters.

This has created an opening and burgeoning demand for political, social and religious leaders, government institutions and businesses that can go deep — that can validate what is real and offer the public deep truths, deep privacy protections and deep trust.

But deep trust and deep loyalty cannot be forged overnight. They take time. That’s one reason this old newspaper I work for — the Gray Lady — is doing so well today. Not all, but many people, are desperate for trusted navigators.

Many will also look for that attribute in our next president, because they sense that deep changes are afoot. It is unsettling, and yet, there’s no swimming back. We are, indeed, far from the shallow now.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/opinion/artificial-intelligence-surveillance.html" id="d2f3648c-ef94-3995-a0b2-99dd3195fdae">The New York Times</a>.

Around the end of each year major dictionaries declare their “word of the year.” Last year, for instance, the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com was “justice.” Well, even though it’s early, I’m ready to declare the word of the year for 2019.

Warning! Everything Is Going Deep: 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'

It was the moment when you had to ask whether we really can survive two more years of Trump as president, whether this man and his demented behavior — which will get only worse as the Mueller investigation concludes — are going to destabilize our country, our markets, our key institutions and, by extension, the world. And therefore his removal from office now has to be on the table.

I believe that the only responsible choice for the Republican Party today is an intervention with the president that makes clear that if there is not a radical change in how he conducts himself — and I think that is unlikely — the party’s leadership will have no choice but to press for his resignation or join calls for his impeachment.

It has to start with Republicans, reflecting both the numbers needed in the Senate and political reality. Removing this president has to be an act of national unity as much as possible — otherwise it will tear the country apart even more. I know that such an action is very difficult for today’s GOP, but the time is long past for it to rise to confront this crisis of American leadership.

Trump’s behavior has become so erratic, his lying so persistent, his willingness to fulfill the basic functions of the presidency — like reading briefing books, consulting government experts before making major changes and appointing a competent staff — so absent, his readiness to accommodate Russia and spurn allies so disturbing and his obsession with himself and his ego over all other considerations so consistent, two more years of him in office could pose a real threat to our nation. Vice President Mike Pence could not possibly be worse.

The damage an out-of-control Trump can do goes well beyond our borders. America is the keystone of global stability. Our world is the way it is today — a place that, despite all its problems, still enjoys more peace and prosperity than at any time in history — because America is the way it is (or at least was). And that is a nation that at its best has always stood up for the universal values of freedom and human rights, has always paid extra to stabilize the global system from which we were the biggest beneficiary and has always nurtured and protected alliances with like-minded nations.

Donald Trump has proved time and again that he knows nothing of the history or importance of this America. That was made starkly clear in Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’ resignation letter.

Trump is in the grip of a mad notion that the entire web of global institutions and alliances built after World War II — which, with all their imperfections, have provided the connective tissues that have created this unprecedented era of peace and prosperity — threatens American sovereignty and prosperity and that we are better off without them.

So Trump gloats at the troubles facing the European Union, urges Britain to exit and leaks that he’d consider quitting NATO. These are institutions that all need to be improved, but not scrapped. If America becomes a predator on all the treaties, multilateral institutions and alliances holding the world together; if America goes from being the world’s anchor of stability to an engine of instability; if America goes from a democracy built on the twin pillars of truth and trust to a country where it is acceptable for the president to attack truth and trust on a daily basis, watch out: Your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world.

The last time America disengaged from the world remotely in this manner was in the 1930s, and you remember what followed: World War II.

You have no idea how quickly institutions like NATO and the EU and the World Trade Organization and just basic global norms — like thou shalt not kill and dismember a journalist in your own consulate — can unravel when America goes AWOL or haywire under a shameless isolated president.

Up to now I have not favored removing President Donald Trump from office. I felt strongly that it would be best for the country that he leave the way he came in, through the ballot box. But last week was a watershed moment for me, and I think for many Americans, including some Republicans.

Thomas L. Friedman

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