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Ever since Germany reformed its military after World War II, the primary role of the German defense minister has been to maintain an army large enough to protect the country, but constrained enough to prevent a return to German militarism.
The role of the incumbent, Boris Pistorius, is different.
As Russia warns that it is ready for war with Europe, Mr. Pistorius’s goal is to make Germany’s military capable of leading the continent’s defense in a major land conflict — and to prepare the country’s pacifist population for this new posture.
Opinion polls in Germany show a pervasive fear of sending another generation into war. Domestic politics play a role, too, with parties on the far right and left that are partial to Russia or that favor dialogue with it.
On Friday, German lawmakers approved the latest part of Mr. Pistorius’s plan: a law that aims to increase the number of German soldiers to 260,000 by 2035, a nearly 50 percent boost. To incentivize recruitment, soldiers will be paid more and receive more training that is useful for civilian careers.
The law is the latest in a sequence of moves that were unthinkable less than a decade ago but that Mr. Pistorius has promoted in order to bolster German defense. In March, he helped lead a successful effort to remove limits on military spending from Germany’s Constitution. That was a major shift for a debt-shy country, and it enabled Mr. Pistorius to spend billions more on arms, tanks, ships and aircraft that the country previously couldn’t buy.
For some, such moves provoke unease, summoning memories of German expansionism during the two world wars.
But Mr. Pistorius remains phlegmatic. Debate is healthy, he said, not least because it is slowly acclimatizing society to the need for action.
“The discussion alone,” he said, is “changing the way many people think about the times we live in, about the threats we face.”
In our interview, Mr. Pistorius acknowledged the weight of German history, but said it had given him and others “a sense of responsibility.”
“Namely, that we must do our part to ensure that we continue to live in peace in Europe,” he said, adding that the expanded German Army will still be much smaller than it was during the Cold War. Back then, Germany had as many as 500,000 soldiers but limited military ambitions, and it never sought to lead Europe’s defense in the way that he now seeks.
Despite pushing for contentious measures, Mr. Pistorius has remained Germany’s most popular politician for most of the past three years, according to monthly opinion polls.
He speaks with the rasp of a drill sergeant who has been yelling all day. His speech is unadorned, to the point, and sometimes self-deprecating. At one point in our interview he compared his work to that of a soccer coach.
I witnessed his brusque charisma on a visit in January to eastern Poland, where a group of German soldiers were helping to staff a missile air-defense system near the border with Ukraine.
Mr. Pistorius’s popularity has allowed him to survive the electoral fall of his center-left Social Democratic party, which led the previous governing coalition until it collapsed last year. Reappointed as part of a new coalition after the center-right won the last election, Mr. Pistorius is Germany’s first defense minister since World War II to serve chancellors from two different parties.
Early in his tenure as defense minister, Mr. Pistorius provoked a national furor by insisting that Germany become “Kriegstüchtig,” or “war-ready” — a provocative term for a country that, since 1945, had sought only to be “defense-ready.”
South Korean officials pleased President Trump last month by presenting him with their nation’s highest honor and a replica of a gold crown. The next day he had a surprise for his hosts.
He gave the green light to South Korea’s long-cherished dream of deploying nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Washington helped build Seoul’s nuclear energy industry in the 1970s on the condition that it would not enrich uranium, even for peaceful purposes, without American approval.
Last month in Gyeongju, South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung made what appeared to be a compelling argument to Mr. Trump. South Korea wanted nuclear-powered attack subs to strengthen its defenses against North Korea and China and reduce the burden on allied U.S. forces, he said, but it needed American support in securing their fuel.
South Korea already runs a fleet of its own diesel-powered submarines, and experts say those can do the job around the Korean Peninsula. Still, Seoul has been gearing up to build nuclear-powered ones, which can stay underwater longer and move faster than the diesel version. They would not carry nuclear weapons, it said.
Washington’s longstanding stance on not allowing Seoul to enrich uranium or reprocess spent nuclear fuel was part of a strategy to contain the technology needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons. South Korea today has a fleet of 26 nuclear reactors, all powered by imported fuel.
Seoul now wants to enrich uranium on its own to build its own fuel supply chain and ensure its energy security. It is also running out of waste storage space at many plants and wants to reprocess the spent fuel for reuse and to reduce waste.
Many in South Korea support uranium enrichment for another reason.
They say that, like Japan and Germany, their country must gain “nuclear latency.” That means possessing the capacity to quickly produce nuclear weapons should the country decide that it could no longer trust the U.S. commitment to protect it from a nuclear attack from North Korea, or that staying under America’s so-called nuclear umbrella had become too costly.
Song Min-soon, a former foreign minister of South Korea, said that talks about nuclear-powered submarines were obscuring a more urgent need for South Korea to gain nuclear latency and provide more options for its diplomacy. If South Korea enriches uranium for nuclear power stations, the problem of nuclear sub fuel will also be resolved, he said.
President Trump insists that U.S. strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment program this summer, but regional officials and analysts have become less convinced in the months since, and they warn another outbreak of war between Israel and Iran is only a matter of time.
The 2015 deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment expired last month. Tough sanctions on Iran have been restored. Negotiations on its nuclear program appear to be dead, at least for now. And Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, enough to make 11 nuclear weapons, is either buried under rubble, as Iran claims, or has been spirited away to a safe place, as Israeli officials believe.
Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Financial Times last week that the organization believes that the majority of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium survived the war, but that its status is unclear without inspections. He estimated that Iran has roughly 400 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium, which is close to weapons grade.
Iran also appears to be continuing to work on a new enrichment site known as Pickaxe Mountain. It has refused to give international inspectors access to that site or any other suspected nuclear sites other than those already declared.
The result is a dangerous stalemate — with no negotiations, no certainty over Iran’s stockpile, no independent oversight. And many in the Gulf believe that makes another Israeli attack on Iran almost inevitable, given Israeli officials’ long-held view that Iran’s nuclear program is an existential threat.
Iran is more isolated from the West than it has been in decades. Arab regional powers like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have enhanced their influence over Washington and Mr. Trump, partly through economic ties and partly through their willingness to work with the United States to try to find a lasting settlement to the Gaza war. The new president of Syria is headed to the White House on Monday to seek American support. Syria had been a strategic ally of Iran’s under the Assad government that collapsed last year.
At the same time, those regional powers are working to preserve their own relationships with Iran, said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. They do not want another regional war, and they respect Iran’s ability, however weakened, to create instability through its own military forces and through proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, she said.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Tuesday that American hostility to Iran is deep-seated.
“America’s arrogant nature accepts nothing but surrender,” he said in an address to mark the anniversary of the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979.
His remarks seemed designed to block any new negotiations with the United States on Iran’s nuclear program.
Last week, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi of Iran said that Washington had offered “unacceptable and impossible conditions,” including direct talks and a complete, verifiable halt to Iran’s enrichment of uranium. He again rejected direct talks and an end to enrichment.
But he repeated that Iran remained open to indirect talks under certain conditions. They include a guarantee of no further military attacks or economic pressure and compensation for war damage, demands Washington is unwilling to accept. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mr. Araghchi also warned Israel of “dire consequences” for any future attack.
Is there a vital American interest at stake? There is, and it’s not just the one the administration keeps talking about: drugs.
But the larger challenge posed by Maduro’s regime is that it is both an importer and exporter of instability. An importer, because the regime’s close economic and strategic ties to China, Russia and Iran give America’s enemies a significant foothold in the Americas — one that Tehran reportedly could use for the production of kamikaze drones. An exporter, because the regime’s catastrophic misgovernance has generated a mass exodus of refugees and migrants — nearly eight million so far — with ruinous results throughout the hemisphere. Both trends will continue for as long as the regime remains in power.
Is there a moral case for regime change? Outside of North Korea, few governments have produced more misery for more of their own people than Venezuela’s. Starvation, political brutality, corruption, social collapse, endemic violence, collapse of the medical system, environmental catastrophes — the only thing more shocking than the self-destruction of this once-rich country is the relative indifference to the catastrophe, at least among the usual do-gooders who otherwise like to anguish over the plight of others. Why hasn’t Greta Thunberg set sail to Caracas with symbolic deliveries of food?
Any morally serious person should want this to end. The serious question is whether American intervention would make things even worse.
Are there viable alternatives to conflict? Economic sanctions against the regime in Trump’s first term have worked about as well as economic sanctions usually do — immiserating ordinary people while allowing the regime to entrench itself through its control of ever-scarcer goods. The Biden administration sought détente with the regime by easing some of those sanctions, only to reinstate them after concluding that Maduro had reneged on promises of democratic reforms. Last year’s elections, which the opposition won in a rout, were stolen. The opposition leader María Corina Machado, winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, lives in hiding.
That leaves two plausible alternatives. The first, suggested by Maduro, is to give the United States a stake in Venezuela’s vast mineral wealth, effectively in exchange for allowing him to stay in power. To my surprise, Trump rejected that quasi-colonialist bargain. The second is to use a show of force to persuade Maduro and his senior officials to flee the country, much as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his cronies did. To my surprise, too, that hasn’t happened, either. At least not yet. On Sunday, Trump said he was mulling talks with Maduro, perhaps to make that latter option more attractive.
What is the balance of risk? Unintended consequences must be weighed against the predictable risks of inaction. If Trump stands down or conducts limited strikes against sites connected to the drug trade while allowing Maduro to survive, the Venezuelan dictator will see it, rightly, as a resounding victory and vindication. The U.S. will have succeeded only in strengthening his determination to hold on to power rather than relinquish it. And Trump’s hesitation will be read, especially in Moscow and Beijing, as a telling signal of weakness that can only embolden them, just as President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan did.
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The circumstances seemed shady.
The man on the phone said he worked for a humanitarian organization that could arrange to fly Ahmed Shehada and his family out of war-ravaged Gaza if he paid $1,600 per person to a crypto account. He demanded the money upfront.
Mr. Shehada thought it was a scam and declined. But after he learned of a friend who escaped Gaza through the same group, he decided to take a chance.
That decision led Mr. Shehada, 37, his wife and their two young children on a jittery 24-hour journey in two separate bus convoys, through tense Israeli checkpoints, onto a flight with an unknown destination and eventually to South Africa, a country to which he had never been.
“The situation in Gaza is so dreadful, you would take such a risk,” he said.
Mr. Shehada, a doctor, arrived in South Africa with his family last month, among the hundreds of Palestinians who have landed there recently aboard two flights, under conditions that the South African government has deemed suspicious.
The flights were arranged by Al-Majd Europe, a group with a scant public profile that South African officials said they knew little about. South Africa’s foreign minister, Ronald Lamola, suggested on Monday that Israel was behind what he called “a clear agenda to cleanse the Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank” — an accusation Israel has denied.
“It does seem like they were being, you know, flushed out,” said President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, adding that his government had a duty to accept Palestinians because they are “a different and special case of a people that we have supported as a country.”
The Israeli military said it received approval from a third country to send the Palestinian families there, but it did not name the country.
Scrutiny of the flights, and South Africa’s handling of them, comes as the country faces a high-stakes week on the international stage, hosting the first Group of 20 Summit on African soil.
Officials in South Africa, which has been among the most vocal supporters of Palestinians, have faced criticism from local activists who believe the government mishandled the arrival last week of the second plane, carrying 153 Palestinians who were forced to wait on board for at least 10 hours while their immigration status was sorted out.
“The border authorities were unwilling to consider the factors that these people came from Gaza, that there’s a humanitarian crisis,” said Na’eem Jeenah, a South African activist who has assisted the Palestinians. “They were looking at it very narrowly.”
Mr. Shehada, who has worked for a U.N. agency since 2014, said when his flight arrived on Oct. 28, passengers were allowed to get off the plane and go through immigration just like any other international arrival.
He said he and his family were displaced 12 times during the war. He contacted Al-Majd in March after a colleague sent him a link to the website over WhatsApp. He filled out a form there, and in April someone from the organization called him.
When he decided to leave months later, Mr. Shehada, said he paid $6,400 andgot a call shortly before midnight on Oct. 26. The family needed to get to Khan Younis to leave in four hours, an Al-Majd representative told him.
There, they boarded a bus and were told to close the blinds and refrain from using their phones before entering Rafah, he said. Al-Majd instructed them to tell anyone who asked what they were doing, that they were part of the French Embassy evacuation.
“ We said to ourselves, ‘What if they have no connection with the Israeli army and we go into Rafah and they start shooting at the buses?’” Mr. Shehada said.
They made it to the Kerem Shalom border post, where Israeli troops told them to leave all their belongings behind. They walked through several security checks and onto new buses that took them to Ramon Airport in southern Israel to board a charter flight, he said. They were not told until mid-flight that they were going to Nairobi, Kenya.
From there, they flew to South Africa, he said, where he received his last message from Al-Majd, telling him of a guesthouse booked for his family — but for only a week, though the group had promised a month.
A message on Al-Majd’s website on Monday said it was operating as normal and continuing to provide services, and warned of online scams using the organization’s name. Calls and messages to phone numbers listed went unanswered.
Luay Abu Saif was on the flight that arrived last week.
Al-Majd had kept them in the dark about how they ended up in South Africa, Mr. Saif said. “We didn’t even know where we were going.”
After a local aid organization offered accommodation for the entire group, they were allowed into the country on a 90-day visa exemption that South Africa grants Palestinians.
For Mr. Shehada, what resonates most is how his 4-year-old daughter seems to be discovering life after knowing only war. She marvels at being able to walk into a store to buy food or plug a cellphone into a wall to charge it — luxuries she’d only seen in online videos.
“The other day she was telling me, ‘Dad, we are living like the YouTube life,’” he said.
Lead is an essential element in car batteries. But mining and processing it is expensive. So companies have turned to recycling as a cheaper, seemingly sustainable source of this hazardous metal.
As the United States tightened regulations on lead processing to protect Americans over the past three decades, finding domestic lead became a challenge. So the auto industry looked overseas to supplement its supply. In doing so, car and battery manufacturers pushed the health consequences of lead recycling onto countries where enforcement is lax, testing is rare and workers are desperate for jobs.
Seventy people living near and working in factories around Ogijo volunteered to have their blood tested by The New York Times and The Examination, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates global health. Seven out of 10 had harmful levels of lead. Every worker had been poisoned.
More than half the children tested in Ogijo had levels that could cause lifelong brain damage.
Dust and soil samples showed lead levels up to 186 times as high as what is generally recognized as hazardous. More than 20,000 people live within a mile of Ogijo’s factories. Experts say the test results indicate that many of them are probably being poisoned.
Lead poisoning worldwide is estimated to cause far more deaths each year than malaria and H.I.V./AIDS combined. It causes seizures, strokes, blindness and lifelong intellectual disabilities. The World Health Organization makes clear that no level of lead in the body is safe.
The auto industry touts battery recycling as an environmental success story. Lead from old batteries, when recycled cleanly and safely, can be melted down and reused again and again with minimal pollution.
But companies have rejected proposals to use only lead that is certified as safely produced. Automakers have excluded lead from their environmental policies.
Battery makers rely on the assurances of trading companies that lead is recycled cleanly. These intermediaries rely on perfunctory audits that make recommendations, not demands.
The industry, in effect, built a global supply system in which everyone involved can say someone else is responsible for oversight.
All this is avoidable. Lead batteries can indeed be recycled as cleanly as advertised. In Europe, experts say, some recycling factories are spotless. But that requires millions of dollars in technology.
Because the supply chain is opaque and diffuse, car companies and battery makers are unlikely to know the precise origins of the lead they use. They rely on international trading companies to supply it.
One such company, Trafigura, has sent recycled lead to U.S. companies from True Metals and six other Nigerian smelters in the past four years, records show. Last year, Trafigura reported $243 billion in revenue by trading oil, gas and metals worldwide.
Until recently, Trafigura’s Nigerian suppliers included one factory, Green Recycling Industries, that tried to live up to its name.
The experts marveled at Green Recycling’s antipollution technology and the machinery that safely broke apart batteries — the sort of equipment featured in promotional videos by American battery makers.
“The equipment and recycling processes are significantly different and of a remarkably higher standard than observed in any other plant in Nigeria,” the experts wrote.
But operating cleanly put Green Recycling at a disadvantage. It had to make up for its high machinery costs by offering less money for dead batteries. Outbid by competitors with crude operations, Green Recycling had nothing to recycle.
Ali Fawaz, the company’s general manager, said his competitors were essentially making money by harming locals. “If killing people is OK, why would I not kill more and more?” he said.
The company shut down this year.
The same experts who praised the conditions at Green Recycling also visited its competitors. What they found most likely amounted to “severe human rights abuses,” they wrote. They concluded that seven plants in and around Ogijo were “in clear violation of international common practice.”
One factory was “shabby” and covered in lead dust. A few months later, records show, that plant shipped lead to the Port of Baltimore, the primary gateway for recycled lead from Africa to the United States.
At another factory, experts wrote that “lead emissions to the workplace and the nearby environment are considered as something normal.” One week later, that plant sent lead to Newark.
At a third factory, experts observed “thick smoke,” broken equipment and “woefully desolate” conditions. About a month later, that plant also shipped lead to the Port of Baltimore.
True Metals stood out as especially hazardous.
Workers there mishandled materials and unnecessarily subjected the surrounding area to toxic smoke, inspectors wrote. A thick layer of lead sludge and dust covered the floor. True Metals’ managers told inspectors that they conducted blood tests on their workers. Yet the company’s records showed only weight, pulse and blood pressure, according to the report.
Some of the hazards cited in the report would have been obvious to anyone inspecting the factories.
Trafigura hires contractors to audit suppliers to ensure they meet government and industry standards. But people involved in lead recycling said those audits had little effect.
One True Metals worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his job, said that visits were announced in advance and that most workers were sent home. Those remaining were given new overalls and goggles and coached on how to respond to questions, he said.
After such audits, consultants issue recommendations that include simple fixes, such as handing out safety gear, and expensive ones, like installing new equipment. The smelters typically do what’s affordable and skip the rest, according to interviews with a Lagos-based consultant who conducts audits, the owner of a Nigerian smelter and a former Trafigura trader who has visited plants throughout Africa. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they remain in the metals industry and feared reprisals.
Exactly who buys lead from Trafigura and other trading companies is not public.
“It’s just a much murkier and unknown industry,” said Samuel Basi, a former lead trader with Trafigura. “It essentially becomes confidential once it comes into the U.S.”
A handful of companies dominate auto battery manufacturing in the United States. The largest manufacturer, Clarios, says that it does not buy lead from West Africa. The second-largest, East Penn Manufacturing, has.
East Penn, a family-owned company, says its recycling roots go back 80 years. It operates the largest battery plant in the world, in tiny Lyon Station, Pa.
In an interview, East Penn executives said that lead shortages forced it to rely on brokers. “Under 5 percent” came from Nigeria, said Chris Pruitt, East Penn’s executive chairman of the board.
Mr. Pruitt said that the company had paid little attention to the provenance of its lead until The Times and The Examination asked questions. East Penn relied on its brokers’ assurances that everything was fine.
East Penn stopped buying Nigerian lead and began tightening its supplier code of conduct after receiving the questions, Mr. Pruitt said. Lead purchases are now subjected to extra scrutiny and executives receive monthly reports about overseas purchases, he added.
IN SEPTEMBER, researchers who conducted the blood and soil testing for The Times and The Examination concluded in a report that most people with high blood-lead levels had breathed in particles emitted by the factories. They wrote that the government needed to move quickly to address the poisoning and begin a comprehensive cleanup.
That month, Nigerian officials closed five smelters, including True Metals.
“Tests have revealed the presence of lead in residents, resulting in illnesses and deaths,” Innocent Barikor, director general of Nigeria’s environmental protection agency, said in a written statement.
The authorities said that those factories had broken the law by failing to operate required pollution control equipment, to conduct blood tests on staff and to prepare environmental impact assessments. The government also cited the factories for breaking batteries apart by hand rather than with machines.
But days later, the factories were running again.
Though Mr. Barikor had threatened to revoke the factories’ licenses, he didn’t. In an interview, he said that he had met with leaders of the factories. He said that they had agreed to properly dispose of waste, upgrade to cleaner technology and, within six months, install automated battery-breaking machines. “Our meeting was very, very fruitful,” he said.
The waste-disposal promise has already been delayed as state authorities look for a dump site. A copy of the agreement, signed by True Metals and reviewed by The Times and The Examination, says nothing about automated breaking systems. The company agreed to a timeline of two to three years to “transition to cleaner recycling technologies.”
In October, researchers gathered residents to disclose their test results. Anxious workers and parents lined up to speak to nurses and to collect multivitamins and calcium tablets, which can limit lead absorption.
But those treatments are just part of what experts recommend in lead poisoning cases. Generally speaking, the first thing doctors advise is to reduce exposure. Cover or seal chipped lead paint. Replace lead water pipes. Put clean topsoil over contaminated dirt.
There is no playbook for reducing exposure when people’s homes are being sprinkled with lead dust from the sky.
During three hours of interviews driving to and from a quail hunting site outside Fort Myers, Mr. Carlson was by turns indignant, reflective and seething — and thoroughly unrepentant for having roiled the conservative movement with the interview, or for his own escalating attacks on those who support Israel.
“Israel does not matter,” he said from behind the steering wheel, casually contradicting the view of Mr. Trump and every president before him, while his two spaniels sat in the back seat. “It’s a country the size of what, Maryland? It has a population of nine million. It has no resources. It’s not strategically important. In fact, it’s a strategic liability.”
Last month, Tucker Carlson’s genial interview with the white nationalist Nick Fuentes detonated a bomb that further fractured the Trump-era conservative movement he once helped galvanize. This month, Mr. Carlson decided to escape the wreckage for weeks of bird hunting in Maine, South Dakota, Nebraska and Southwest Florida.
In choosing not to challenge Mr. Fuentes’s antisemitism during their discussion on his popular YouTube show, Mr. Carlson focused furious new attention on whether he was deliberately mainstreaming views that were once embraced only on the fringes of American politics — and, in particular, whether he was seeking to further inject far-right ideology into the Republican Party as it begins to think about what it will stand for after President Trump leaves office.
On one level, the debate brought into focus by Mr. Carlson is about the line between free speech and hate speech. On another, it is about whether American conservatism needs to do more to expel racism and extremism from its dialogue and policies. The fissures over those questions are growing more pronounced among Republicans, a shift that is evident in the angry reaction among many on the right to Mr. Carlson’s handling of Mr. Fuentes and his increasingly vocal criticism of American policy toward Israel.
The interview was in many ways the culmination of Mr. Carlson’s growing feud with conservative fellow travelers. Long a standard-bearer for President Trump’s “America first” mantra, Mr. Carlson, 56, openly criticized the president in June for straying from his principles and for “being complicit in the act of war” by bombing three Iranian nuclear sites in cooperation with the Israeli government.
In the months following the airstrikes, Mr. Carlson continued to question Israel’s strategic value to the U.S. In early September, after the Turning Point USA conservative activist Charlie Kirk vowed that Mr. Carlson would still be speaking at the group’s events, a pro-Israel donor angrily revoked a $2 million pledge to Turning Point.
“I’ve never gotten along better with him,” Mr. Carlson said of the current status of his relationship with Mr. Trump. “He’s never been nicer.” But, Mr. Carlson conceded, his attacks on Israel, along with his gentle treatment of Mr. Fuentes, cost him friendships and led to death threats.
“I just want to be clear about this: I knew what would happen,” Mr. Carlson said of the reaction to his anti-Israel posture. “And I felt that, at this point in my life, I can take it. And it’s worth it, because I want to force a rational public conversation about what’s in our country’s interest.”
“The most dispiriting fact of the last nine months is that huge proportions of the institutional Republican Party all kind of hate free speech every bit as much as the left does,” he said. “They are every bit as censorious as some blue-haired, menopausal Black Lives Matter activist. And I just didn’t know that. And I’m disgusted. I feel betrayed. I take it personally.”
Mr. Carlson, who has often been derided for his claim that he is “just asking questions” when his questions center on conspiracy theories, is starting to find some conspiratorial answers. On a recent show, he described the race-related riots of 2020 as “a manufactured crisis” that had been staged in an effort “to effect broad social change.” In another episode, Mr. Carlson referred to the coronavirus pandemic as a “creation.” The Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol? “The whole thing was managed.”
Mr. Carlson has also produced a documentary about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. government, he said, “had foreknowledge” of the attacks on the World Trade Center, as did “other actors.”
But Mr. Carlson said that his foremost concern is what he sees as America’s misplaced priorities. Instead of U.S. policymakers attending to domestic challenges like skyrocketing housing costs and a crumbling health care system, he said, “We’ve spent the last 80 years administering a global empire. It’s commanded a massive percentage of our attention and money. That’s the core problem, which no one wants to say.”
In particular, Mr. Carlson said during the interview, America’s devotion to Israel was misplaced. He scoffed at its characterization as America’s one abiding ally in the dangerous neighborhood of the Middle East, saying, “Israel is not only not our most important ally in the Middle East, I’m not even sure they are an ally.”
Mr. Carlson went on to say that he did not altogether blame the Israeli government for “trying to get what it can” from the U.S. Rather, he found fault with American leaders in both parties for “handing over their sovereignty to an irrelevant country in exchange for campaign contributions or, in some cases, protection from blackmail. They’re the ones I have contempt for.”
Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government. Still, his characterization of the Jewish state as a devious manipulator leeching resources from a great power is a familiar trope that has aroused suspicions.
“At best, I’d say he’s antisemitic-adjacent,” said Matthew Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
For that matter, Mr. Carlson himself once offered a similarly skeptical appraisal of the conservative politician Patrick J. Buchanan — who, Mr. Carlson said* on a political TV program in 1999, may protest that he was merely speaking “truth to power” and may very well have Jewish friends. But, Mr. Carlson said, “I do believe there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah.”
Mr. Carlson acknowledged that, on certain levels, he is not who he once was. “I’ve changed my opinion on almost every big topic over the years,” he said, citing in particular his previous advocacy of the Iraq war as “one of the worst things I’ve ever done.”
Mr. Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition compared what he called “the fawning way’’ that Mr. Carlson handled Mr. Fuentes with his openly hostile interview of Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, the month before. The two argued over Israel, Russia and the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. Mr. Cruz wondered aloud about Mr. Carlson’s “obsession with Israel,” causing Mr. Carlson to respond that the senator was accusing him of antisemitism “in a sleazy, feline way.”
“I have contempt for Ted Cruz,” Mr. Carlson said as he drove back from the quail hunt, where he managed to bag six birds. “Not just in his public positions, but in the way that he lives.” (Mr. Cruz, in a speech the previous evening, said of Mr. Carlson’s interview with Mr. Fuentes that he had “spread a poison that is profoundly dangerous.”)
With Russia on the verge of capturing Pokrovsk, a strategic city in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv faces a cruelly familiar choice. It could pull back, concede defeat and save lives. Or it could fight on, delaying a symbolic and tactical victory for Moscow but risking heavier losses of its own.
It’s a dilemma that has haunted the Ukrainian military throughout the war, as it has struggled to contain Russian advances. Ukraine chose to hold on amid grinding battles in cities like Bakhmut and Avdiivka, both of which ultimately fell to Moscow. Critics argued that a timely retreat could have saved soldiers, Kyiv’s most precious resource in a war of attrition against a much larger adversary.
Ukraine’s argument for holding cities as long as possible is that it forces the Russian Army to expend vast numbers of troops, leaving it weakened in the battles to come. There is also a political element, as the two sides wage a battle of narratives. Kyiv wants to prevent Moscow from claiming successes that could sap morale at home and that the Kremlin could use to persuade the Trump administration that supporting Ukraine is a losing wager.
If Ukraine keeps fighting for Pokrovsk, it risks being drawn into protracted urban combat as Russia continues to pour its superior resources into the battle. While Moscow has proved capable of replacing its losses through regular army recruitment campaigns offering sizable payouts, Ukraine has long struggled with troop shortages.
Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Myrnohrad said that they had received no orders to retreat, and that they were focused on inflicting as many casualties on attacking Russian troops as they could.
Pokrovsk, with a prewar population of 60,000, would be the largest Ukrainian city to fall since Bakhmut in May 2023. Its capture would give Russia a platform to push north and pursue its stated goal of capturing the Donetsk region, about three-quarters of which it already controls.
The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.
The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.
Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.
And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.
“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” a group of managers wrote in a letter reviewed by The New York Times to the club’s leadership in June.
That spiral helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.
“As long as climate change and environmental protection are viewed as just being concerns for a limited group of elites, we lose,” Loren Blackford, the group’s new executive director, said in a statement. “We only win by building a powerful, diverse movement.”
The downside, according to interviews with people involved with the group and a review of financial records and internal documents, was that the Sierra Club lost its focus, then its strength.
By 2022, the club had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition.
It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.
The club hired Mr. Jealous, its first Black executive director, that year to stop that slide, but his tenure accelerated it as accusations of sexual harassment, bullying, and overspending piled up.
The club became one in a string of “resistance” groups from Mr. Trump’s first administration that arrived at his second already exhausted from liberal infighting.
“It’s almost like uprooting a sequoia and converting it into an ax handle,” said Aaron Mair, a former board president.
The club’s current leaders rejected the idea that their decisions had caused the declines in revenue and membership. Instead, they blamed external factors: diminished alarm among environmentalists after the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, post-pandemic inflation and a stock-market dip in 2022.
The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to protect the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but it grew into a giant of American environmentalism.
It helped expand national parks, keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and establish Earth Day.
In 2016, the club was at the height of its success, leading what many in the green movement consider the most successful environmental campaign put on by anyone in the 21st century: “Beyond Coal.”
Its secret was focus, according to activists involved. The club put its energy behind the single, measurable goal of closing all of the country’s 500-plus carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. Armed with more than $120 million from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, they used lawsuits, petitions and protests to convince regulators and utilities that coal plants were too dirty and expensive to keep operating.
By 2017, half of the plants were slated to close, the result of this intense activism, plus tighter regulations and an influx of cheap natural gas flooding the energy sector.
“The game plan was clear, and it was working,” said Abigail Dillen, president of the environmental group Earthjustice, which also took part.
Then Mr. Trump was elected. Fund-raising jumped by $2 million in the two weeks after Election Day. The number of volunteers surged. By 2019, the club’s internal records counted 4 million “champions” — a group that included dues-paying members as well as supporters who had donated, signed petitions or participated in events.
As Mr. Trump sought to roll back a broad range of progressive victories, the club’s leaders decided their old strategy was too small for the moment.
“We can’t defend the environment by shutting ourselves up in a big, green box labeled ‘environmental issues,’” the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, wrote to members in 2017.
By broadening the mission, they also hoped to recruit more young people, who they thought cared as much about social justice as coal plants.
First, they sought to transform their own workplace, demonstrating a commitment to fair wages.
The club agreed to expand the number of staff covered by an employee union, and to raise union members’ salaries by an average of more than 30 percent over five years. Even the union was surprised.
“We were thrilled,” said Larry Williams Jr., who was president of the union at the time. “I had people calling me crying, saying, ‘Because of your contract, I was able to buy my first bike and bike to work,’ or pay my rent.”
Because of increased salaries, health care costs and additional hiring, labor costs would double between 2016 and 2024, according to an internal club budget document.
At the same time, the club asked its supporters to agree with positions farther from the environmental causes that had attracted them in the first place.
It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.
The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.
Mr. Mair, who had been the group’s first Black board president, wrote a rebuttal defending the founder. The Sierra Club refused to publish it, and censured him when he published it elsewhere.
“Do we want to still be the Sierra Club anymore?” Mr. Mair said he thought at the time.
In late 2020, the club surveyed its dues-paying members, its most hard-core supporters. The members said they supported racial justice, but when asked to choose among priorities they ranked climate change first, and racism tied for last.
More than half of members also said they were worried that the club’s shift toward social justice “will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment” and alienate conservatives, according to a copy of the survey obtained by The New York Times.
Jim Dougherty, an environmental activist and Sierra Club director, said he had raised objections to a 2019 budget that called for the equivalent of 108 full-time employees to work on a “national equity investment.” Most of those were not new hires; rather a refocus of the responsibilities of many current employees.
The club said that was meant to address the “problematic lack of diversity and inclusion in the environmental movement and to make the Sierra Club a welcoming and supportive place to work for all employees.”
“I said, ‘We have two F.T.E.s devoted to Trump’s war on the Arctic refuge, and we have 108 going to D.E.I., and I don’t think we have our priorities straight,’” Mr. Dougherty said, using the acronyms for “full-time employees” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Mr. Dougherty said no other board members agreed, and the budget passed.
In 2021, Mr. Trump left office, removing the common enemy that had helped hold the Sierra Club’s shaky coalition together. The numbers of donations and “champions,” which both peaked in 2019, began to drop further.
The presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr. brought significant policy victories, as the Sierra Club helped lobby for sharp increases in funding for clean energy.
But internally, big gambles began to go bad.
In 2022, a group of union members asked the Sierra Club to “follow [its] values of antiracism and justice” and cancel sightseeing trips it operated in Israel, in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said in an interview. “People are a huge part of our environment.”
The club postponed the trips. But Sierra Club officials said the club heard a backlash from donors including Mr. Bloomberg, the major funder of “Beyond Coal” who also gave to humanitarian causes in Israel. His staff declined to comment. The Sierra Club said he is still a donor.
Within days, the Sierra Club reversed itself and announced more trips to Israel.
The back and forth meant few people were satisfied. The next month, the group’s count of champions fell by 130,000, one of the largest decreases in a single month.
Internally, the club’s commitment to a progressive workplace curdled into a culture of allegations and investigations.
After accusations of past sexual misconduct involving current volunteers emerged in 2020, the club re-examined its systems and expanded a mechanism to discipline volunteers. While in some cases this new system empowered staffers to sever volunteer relationships that could not be fixed, it also resulted in a system where some volunteers said they were investigated, without being told why.
Delia Malone, an ecologist and volunteer for the club’s Colorado chapter, said she heard from attorneys hired by the Sierra Club, seeking to interview her as part of an investigation against her.
“I said, ‘What’s the claim, and who made the claim?’ And they said, ‘We can’t tell you that,’” Ms. Malone said.
Ms. Malone thought that someone else in the chapter had filed a complaint. She recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.
“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’" Ms. Malone said.
The Colorado chapter declined to say why Ms. Malone was investigated, but said that “no one was investigated or accused of values misalignment on the basis of wolf conservation efforts.”
She still volunteers for the club. Other activists simply left, saying in interviews that they believed others in the club had weaponized the system against them, recasting policy disagreements as bullying or toxic behavior.
The Sierra Club said it now tells people why they are being investigated.
By 2022, the club’s myriad problems, many of which increased costs and decreased revenues, had snowballed into a fiscal crisis. The group faced a projected budget deficit of nearly $40 million, according to an internal document.
To lead them out of this moment, the club chose a new leader, Mr. Jealous, who had experience running another large advocacy organization with social justice at its core.
He promised employees to make the Sierra Club “the most progressive and inclusive employer in the movement, if not the nation.”
Mr. Jealous arrived to face a budget in the red, though he says now that club leaders concealed the scale of their problems.
Mr. Jealous began three rounds of layoffs, eliminating at least 80 people from a staff of about 805.
At the same time, he hired several longtime associates at high salaries. In 2022 there were two people making $300,000 or more at the Sierra Club. By 2024, there were 10. Mr. Jealous said in a statement that those salaries were typical for a large nonprofit.
Mr. Jealous also found himself in a feud with one of the group’s unions, which threatened to strike and accused the club of abandoning its commitment to a progressive workplace.
In a statement, Mr. Jealous said he had made significant progress in cutting the club’s budget and rebuilding its support, but had been undercut by the union’s public attacks.
There is no doubt, he said, that the “campaign attacks that the union carried out against the organization before I was hired and doubled down on after I became executive director were weakening efforts to raise money and to do the work.”
Mr. Jealous accused the union in an internal presentation of using racist tropes to attack him, citing an X account that called him a “Civil Rights grifter” and a clown. The union said it had no connection to the account.
At the same time, the Sierra Club began to face tougher opposition in the coal fight. Demand for electricity was increasing, thanks in part to the needs of data centers and artificial intelligence. The pace of victories slowed, and some plants reversed or canceled their plans to close.
Even Mr. Trump’s return could not solve the Sierra Club’s problems.
“We didn’t have a direct ‘Trump bump’ in the same way we did for the first Trump administration,” Ms. Blackford said in an interview.
In the month after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, the club’s internal count of the group it called champions declined. As of August, internal tracking documents show it stood at 1.5 million, down about 60 percent from its high in 2019. The Sierra Club said it had reduced its efforts to recruit these more casual supporters in 2023, after the bulk of this decline occurred.
Its hardest-core supporters have also dwindled: The number of dues-paying members has fallen by 27 percent from its level at the start of 2021.
By this summer, groups of both volunteers and staff had called for Mr. Jealous’s ouster, accusing him of bullying, financial mismanagement, and weak leadership.
In addition, at least one employee filed a claim with the board accusing Mr. Jealous of sexual harassment, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss a personnel matter. Mr. Jealous and the club declined to comment about complaints against him.
It is unclear what the outcome of the complaints was, but in July, the Sierra Club’s board voted unanimously to fire Mr. Jealous for cause, without stating publicly what the cause was. In response, Mr. Jealous filed a discrimination complaint against the club in California, where it is headquartered. A spokeswoman for Mr. Jealous said that claim was in arbitration.
Since he left, the Sierra Club has shown no signs of reverting to its focus on strictly environmental issues.
In recent weeks, supporters who clicked on the group’s website for “current campaigns” were presented with 131 petitions, some out of date, like calls to support clean-energy funding that Mr. Trump has already gutted, or to support a voting-rights bill that died in 2023.
Patrick Murphy, the club’s current board president, who has helped lead the group since 2020, said in an interview that he could not name any decision he regretted.
“I have a hard time pinpointing how I believe we should have made different choices,” Mr. Murphy said. “And I’m happy with where we are today.”
Dick Cheney and Kenneth Adelman were thick as thieves for decades. They worked side by side in Republican administrations, their wives and children were close, their families spent Thanksgiving together, they shared the same wedding anniversary.
Their relationship broke over the Iraq war.
Donald J. Trump brought them back together again.
Iraq, of course, was a defining moment of Mr. Cheney’s life in government. Like many Americans, Mr. Adelman supported the war at first, only to grow disenchanted. He and Mr. Cheney stopped speaking for 16 years. Then Mr. Trump came along, and Mr. Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney spoke out against him. And so, one day, Mr. Cheney and his old friend were on the phone again, putting “the void years,” as Mr. Adelman put it, behind them.
Their reconciliation speaks to the complicated place Mr. Cheney occupies in the public life of the nation at this point in its story. When he left office in 2009 as the most influential vice president in history, Mr. Cheney was to many the embodiment of an unpopular and bloody war. By the time he died on Monday night, he had become an unlikely voice of resistance to what he saw as a different kind of threat to America, allied not just with those who had soured on him, like Mr. Adelman, but even with others who used to call him a war criminal.
It led to the head-spinning moment in 2022 when Mr. Cheney joined his daughter on the floor of the House as the only Republicans there to mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Democrats who once considered Mr. Cheney the chief villain of Washington rushed up to greet him warmly. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker who used to joust with Mr. Cheney, held his hand as she spoke with him. And it led to his statement last fall that he would vote for Vice President Kamala Harris over Mr. Trump.
He was the steady hand on Sept. 11, 2001, helping coordinate the response to Al Qaeda’s attacks from the bunker under the White House, and he was a powerful advocate for the robust counterterrorism campaign that followed, including extreme interrogation techniques like waterboarding that were widely viewed as torture. He never entertained doubts about those policies and believed that preventing another Sept. 11 justified them. “I firmly believe that it was the right thing to do,” he said after leaving office. “It worked.”
With a trademark crooked grin, he had a dry wit and embraced his dark image. When his friend David Hume Kennerly jokingly asked, “Have you blown away any small countries this morning?” Mr. Cheney replied, “You know, that’s the one thing about this job I really love.” At another point, he puckishly tried on a Darth Vader mask that aides had bought and posed for a picture. When he later tried to put the picture in his memoir, his wife, Lynne Cheney, talked him out of it.
After leaving office, he settled into semiretirement in a house in McLean, Va., that he and Mrs. Cheney had designed, the first they had ever built for themselves. He told a visitor he would never do it again. “There are thousands of decisions — doorknobs, by God!” he said.
A correction was made on Nov. 5, 2025: An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated Dick Cheney’s position in 1991. He was the defense secretary, not the secretary of state.
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