The System That Actually Worked How the internet kept running even as society closed down around it. by Charles Fishman

Here’s a question that should make you shudder: What if, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the internet had buckled?

What if, just as the medical-care crisis started to spiral in New York City, in Detroit, in New Orleans, the internet in those places had stopped working—an hour at a time, a couple of hours in the late afternoon? What if the internet had slowed to half its normal speed? What if it had worked only as well as the U.S. distribution system for toilet paper or N-95 masks did?

“Oh my God,” says Avi Freedman, the CEO of Kentik, a company that helps big customers such as Zoom and Dropbox maximize internet performance, “it would all be over.”

Almost the entire nation now seems to be online at the same time, many of us using two or three devices at once—for urgent work meetings and talking with Mom, for college chemistry lectures and neighborhood yoga classes, for grocery shopping and video binge-watching. Digital life has rushed to fill the gaps created by social distancing, allowing some semblance of normalcy and keeping some parts of the economy open for business. Indeed, the things the internet lets us do are a big part of the reason people are comfortable staying confined to home, and are able to. To the degree that any institution is keeping American society knitted together during this crisis, it’s the internet.

In the United States, internet traffic carried by AT&T, one of the nation’s largest internet providers, rose almost immediately by 20 percent starting in mid-March. By the end of April, network traffic during the workweek was up 25 percent from typical Monday-to-Friday periods in January and February, and showed no signs of fading. That may not sound like much, but imagine suddenly needing to add 20 percent more long-haul trucks to U.S. highways instantly, or 20 percent more freight trains, or 20 percent more flights every day out of every airport in the country. In fact, none of those infrastructure systems could have provided 20 percent more capacity instantly—or sustained it day after day for months.

Yes, there have been hiccups. Freedman notes that “we are seeing an increase not only in traffic, but in short-duration outages.” Your laptop—or the apps you’re trying to use on it—may well be advising you, from time to time, that your internet connection is weak. But that’s hardly surprising, or alarming, Freedman says, given that we’ve taken growth “that would happen over a year or two and compressed it into six weeks.”

The story of how that happened may not involve the sort of life-threatening heroics we’ve seen from medical personnel in New Orleans or New York. But amid so much highly visible dysfunction in the American response to the coronavirus, it’s worth appreciating the internet as an unsung hero of the pandemic. It has stayed on because people out there are keeping it on. The internet’s performance is no accident, but rather the result of long-term planning and adaptability, ingenuity and hard work—and also some characteristics that have become part of the personality of the internet itself.

With 250,000 employees and $181 billion in revenue, AT&T is the nation’s largest telecom company by far, and the third-largest broadband-internet provider, after the cable companies Comcast and Charter Communications. It is also one of the largest carriers of internet traffic, and it helps manage the internet backbone—the crucial superhighway of hidden fiber-optic cables that form the bulk of the internet’s carrying capacity, spanning the U.S. and crossing the oceans to Europe and Asia. So as I tried to understand why the internet hasn’t buckled under the current strain, AT&T seemed like a good place to start.

Internet companies don’t routinely reveal their own network performance. But when I reached out, AT&T agreed to pull back the curtain, sharing data and allowing me to interview key staff. In some ways, the story they told is particular to AT&T, but in others, it paints a picture of the industry as a whole, revealing how the pandemic has changed our use of the internet, and also what it has taken to keep the internet running.

In the pre-pandemic world, weekdays on the internet were pretty placid. Most of the normal routines of work are undemanding for the network: emails, Slack messages, loading websites, sharing files.

Web traffic in the U.S. would typically pick up around 9 p.m., as millions of us settled in to decompress with Hulu or Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime Video. Netflix has 60 million U.S. subscribers (and many are multiuser memberships). Hulu has 30 million subscribers, Disney+ 30 million, Prime Video 40 million. Even accounting for overlap, more than half of Americans can watch streaming video on any particular Tuesday night. (One study says that 70 percent of U.S. households have a streaming subscription.) And streaming video takes huge amounts of internet bandwidth. Internet traffic across the network rises each night as people tune in.

“The peak in backbone traffic used to be Saturday and Sunday nights,” said Chris Sambar, who runs AT&T’s technology operations, a division with 22,000 employees who build, maintain, and operate the company’s global network. On Sunday nights, Americans “don’t go out. We stay home and watch videos and movies. Sunday night has always been the high-water mark for traffic.” At least until mid-March 2020.

On Friday, March 13, AT&T told its employees that everyone who could should start working from home, and the following Monday, more than a third of the company’s staff—some 90,000 people—reported to work from their kitchen table. That same week, lots of companies with employees who could work from home did the same. Stay-at-home orders soon followed from state and local governments. Immediately, Sambar said, “we started to see peaks in the middle of the week.” Use was rising sharply during the normally quiet daytime hours, and also on weekday evenings. “We started seeing multiple days during the week equivalent to Sunday.”

Two big things were happening.

First, tens of millions of Americans who normally met face-to-face with colleagues or classmates were now doing so over the internet, using audio- and videoconferencing, Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, Webex. All of a sudden, the daytime internet was filling up with high-demand video traffic.

And second, all those connections were being made from dining-room tables and couches at home. Big downtown office buildings, sprawling office parks—those have robust internet connections because so many people rely on them, and because some work functions (such as stock trading) require superfast, super-responsive connections that don’t slow at all. Residences do not.

In the month since businesses closed and people started working from home, AT&T data show that the amount of phone calling we did using Wi-Fi as the initial connection (so-called “Wi-Fi calling”) nearly doubled during the day. We were jumping on our cellphones at home to talk with our colleagues, and often the phone was deciding that the cellular network itself was so busy that it was best to use Wi-Fi to connect the call.

And in those same four weeks, as we settled in to the fresh daily routine of video meetings and back-to-back conference calls, AT&T says the number of minutes of audio- and videoconferencing across the network, on every platform, went up fivefold—an astonishing jump that squares with everyone’s daily Zoom immersion.

In other words, we began using much more data-demanding technologies, all at once, in precisely the place not designed to handle that kind of demand. “This is an event,” Sambar said, “unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

As people who explain the internet always say, it’s not one place, and no matter where you’re going, there is not just one route: It is, famously, a web of connections. AT&T’s website reports, with an air of odd precision, that every time you make a call on its mobile network, the call can be connected by 134 different routes. The same is essentially true of any journey you take through the web. If something goes wrong on the best route, the call, the email, the Amazon order takes another.

In that sense, the internet is very much like the highway-and-road system in the U.S. There are small two-lane roads that lead to homes and businesses. There are larger, secondary roads that have larger businesses and residential complexes on them. And there are interstate highways, where the traffic goes fast for long distances without a lot of entrances and exits. The internet has almost exactly the same network of connections—big, high-speed, high-volume ones that cross continents and pass under the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; medium-size ones inside cities; and “last mile” connections directly to individual homes and businesses.

Having many paths to any given destination is part of the internet’s original design, a characteristic that’s been retained as the network has expanded. It’s much of what gives the internet its adaptability and resilience. Just as the closure of a single road for maintenance doesn’t prevent people from driving where they need to go, so specific local problems or outages in internet technology don’t typically derail traffic.

But it’s also the case that residential areas aren’t designed with the capacity and flexibility of the higher-capacity sections of the internet—any more than a residential street is designed with the capacity of I-95.

Even if you have a fiber-optic connection right to your house, it’s nothing like the connection to an office building. The internet and the mobile-phone network both still rely on a huge array of central switching offices—modeled on the central offices of the telephone system from a century ago—that collect calls and internet traffic from neighborhoods and route them into the larger network, and vice versa. Your home’s fiber-optic connection is part of what’s called the “last mile” infrastructure of the internet—leading from those central offices out to subdivisions and small businesses. In your own neighborhood, there’s less “route flexibility” than in your city or region—just as there is with streets or the electric grid. And it’s turned out that the last mile is what’s preoccupying many internet engineers and technicians today.

Another, more recent element of the internet has turned out to be indispensable for the moment we’re in: the cloud. Much of the software and information that we rely on—our Gmail inboxes, Slack channels, all kinds of essential corporate and government databases—isn’t stored away in a series of tall cabinets behind a locked door on the 24th floor of our company’s office. It’s in the hands of Amazon and Microsoft, Google and IBM, in enormous facilities run by professional data wranglers, who have additional enormous facilities as backup. Amazon and IBM don’t care where we are when we sit at our keyboards and access the data. This cloud infrastructure, combined with the resilience of the internet’s own web of connections, frees us to do our work wherever we happen to be.

It didn’t used to be that way—you used to have to be in the building where both the work and the computers were to do that work. The internet of 20 years ago, Avi Freedman says, would have struggled to help us in a crisis similar to the pandemic. “We are performing right now much better at our worst than the internet did at its best in the 1990s.”

The cloud, too, has efficiency and extra capacity built in as part of its operating structure—the ability to add computing capacity at the click of a mouse—because somewhere, Google and Microsoft have servers waiting. That is part of what they offer fast-growing digital companies, in fact: the power to add capacity instantly, without those companies having to buy and configure their own computers. The cloud means that we can do everything from anywhere.

And it turns out that, during the pandemic, among the things being run from home is the internet itself.

Amanda graham has been at AT&T for two decades—she started in customer service, then got an electrical-engineering degree, and for the past 13 years she’s been a network engineer for the company.

         Graham can see into the internet. When something goes wrong—when a car accident takes out a piece of equipment, when a switch or a network router fails—she can click through to the component that’s not working and get a list of the business customers who are relying on that router or switch, and who might be losing their internet connection.

That’s her job: to keep business customers connected, to see the problems coming if she can and scramble repair service. Graham doesn’t talk directly with AT&T’s customers, but when trouble erupts, she makes sure the people who take care of those customers know what’s happening, often before corporate IT departments figure it out and call AT&T.

Graham spent more than three years doing that at AT&T’s network headquarters, the Global Technology Operations Center (which AT&Ters call the “Gee-tock”) in Bedminster, New Jersey, 40 miles west of the Holland Tunnel. The GTOC has the air of mission control: quiet, dimly lit, with three rows of workstations facing a curved video wall that is 12 feet tall and 250 feet wide, almost the length of a football field. The wall is composed of 141 screens showing the people in the room any kind of vital sign about AT&T’s network, and the internet, that they might want. The video wall also shows real-time weather data and the 24-hour news channels—because the weather and the news often tell you when something is about to happen to the internet. The GTOC has three shifts, every day of the year; inside, 2 a.m. and 2 p.m. don’t feel that different (although our use of the network is).

Graham more recently has worked in a smaller version of the GTOC in Dallas, doing the same job she did in Bedminster. Starting Monday, March 16, she began logging on for her regular shift, from 5:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., from her living room.

Graham can spot congestion in the network—the indicators are red instead of green, just as your route in Google Maps is red when things slow down. But now, instead of watching the cities, the downtowns, the skyscrapers, and the office parks where her business customers are clustered, Graham is watching the suburbs—where the employees of those customers live, and now work.

“The local level is the business level now,” she said, “which is very different. We’re very aware of the stress that people are feeling.” Everyone needs their phone and laptop to stay connected; each of us has become our own IT help desk. “The other day, right here in Texas, we had an outage of U-verse”—AT&T’s residential internet service, the equivalent of Verizon Fios. An ethernet card in the network had failed. “About 1,000 customers down,” Graham said. “It’s very routine.” It’s not pleasant, of course, if you’re one of those customers, but it’s not much different from a brief electric-power failure.

The internet is now so complicated, the traffic is now so enormous and fast-moving, that at AT&T and other companies that manage the internet, much of that management is automated. The network uses artificial intelligence to improve efficiency; it reroutes around backups and outages. All this is watched over by network engineers, but adjusted more quickly than human beings would be able to keep up with in most circumstances.

The network isn’t typically programmed to reroute traffic for small neighborhood outages, though—partly because so few users are involved, partly because that last-mile part of the network doesn’t have much flexibility.

The pandemic is changing that.

When this particular local outage happened at midday, Graham said, “I got a message from one of our sales reps.” The neighborhood is home to a huge concentration of employees from one of the five largest banks in the U.S.—hundreds of at-home users who couldn’t connect. It would normally take a couple of hours for an AT&T tech to get to the right central office and swap out the bad circuit board. And on a typical weekday, with maybe 120 people at home in that neighborhood, AT&T would consider that a reasonable pace of repair.

“But now that’s a bigger deal,” Graham said. It was, in essence, a virtual bank office building with hundreds of people who couldn’t do their jobs. “We wouldn’t take an outage like that and try to reroute it normally.” But in this case, she and her team were able to find a way to do that, so internet service was restored before the actual physical repair could be made.

The surge in traffic, on the internet as a whole and on AT&T’s part of the network, is extraordinary in a way that the phrase 20 percent increase doesn’t quite capture. AT&T’s network is carrying an extra 71 petabytes of data every day. How much is 71 petabytes? One comparison: Back at the end of 2014, AT&T’s total network traffic was 56 petabytes a day; in just a few weeks, AT&T has accommodated more new traffic every day than its total daily traffic six years ago. (During the pandemic, the AT&T network has been carrying about 426 petabytes a day—one petabyte is 1 million gigabytes.)

That puts pressure on the company to ensure that as many routes through the web as possible are open and uncongested at any given time. And the company also has scrambled to add capacity where it’s needed as internet usage has shifted geographically. At one point in March, for instance, traffic was rising so fast in Chicago and Atlanta that dozens of technicians and engineers in those cities worked all night, adding fresh fiber connections and routers. AT&T’s network is designed “to have plenty of headroom,” said Sambar, the network chief. “But we are playing whack-a-mole all over the country.”

The simplest explanation for why the pandemic hasn’t broken the internet is that the internet was designed to be unbreakable, at the very beginning. (The early precursor to the internet, ARPANET, was designed to survive a nuclear attack by rerouting network signals.)

That principle still infuses the way it is built, and also the way it is managed and maintained. And it’s reflected in the sheer number of resources—staff and infrastructure—that network companies such as AT&T and cloud companies such as Amazon devote to minimizing interruptions and slowdowns, even in a normal environment.

Reliability—“uptime”—is a key selling point in the broadband world; internet-service providers staff up to ensure it. They build in excess capacity to enable an effective response to crises, and to stay well ahead of the astonishing growth of internet demand. In the process, the internet’s near-perfect uptime has become an operating characteristic of the internet itself—an assumption built into all kinds of our daily uses, from managing mission-critical systems such as power grids and air travel to sending messages on Slack and streaming music and video. Businesses and government institutions—and each of us, as well—assume an always-on connection that reaches everywhere.

That design philosophy is very different from the way much of the rest of the U.S. economy operates. The pandemic has shown us the downside of perfectly optimized systems—from the supply of ICU beds and virus-sampling swabs to the availability of baker’s yeast. We’ve been desperately short of all three of those things precisely because we’ve spent years tweaking supply chains so we have only exactly the amount we can use right now, without the “waste” of empty ICU beds or idle swab-making machines. In that way, what has saved the internet—redundancy, flexibility, excess capacity—reflects not just a different design philosophy, but a different underlying economic philosophy as well.

At&t rehearses for disaster. Last May, the company ran an internal war game on how a pandemic would affect its ability to keep phone and internet service running. The company does these exercises routinely to try to get ready—to build teams of people and their reflexes, and also to understand what they will need on the ground.

Some of it is simple. In crisis mode, Sambar said, “we do something called ‘hands out of the network.’ Any maintenance that’s not critical, we stop doing. We call it a network freeze. Because any kind of routine software upgrade runs the risk of a human error … we want to do only things that are absolutely critical right now.”

Some of it is considerably more elaborate. The internet doesn’t feel physical as we’re using it every day, but for the companies that build and run it, the internet is intensely physical. AT&T runs 485,000 miles of undersea cable and 1.3 million miles of fiber in the ground—enough wiring to stretch to the moon and back three times. In the U.S., the company has 80,000 cellphone sites and hundreds of central switching offices.

So AT&T has 100,000 technicians, repair people, and engineers in the field—people who mask up, glove up, and make sure that there’s enough service for hospitals, or that failed equipment is replaced quickly. The company has set up dozens of mobile cell units at coronavirus testing sites, to make sure that those places have strong internet connections, for the people standing in line who fear they are sick, and also for the health-care professionals doing the testing through open car windows.

The company’s network-recovery division maintains warehouses filled with equipment—four across the U.S., one outside the U.S.—to be ready to repair the network under a wide range of conditions. Those warehouses have the usual truck- and trailer-based mobile cell towers, portable generators, spare parts of all kinds—all regularly tested to make sure that they work in an emergency. The warehouses also have more exotic supplies—drones and small blimps to provide aerial internet service in the worst disasters, hazmat suits, and MREs in case techs need to take their own food to the site of an outage.

Despite the country’s intense reliance on the internet, the pandemic hasn’t been good for AT&T’s business. The company has closed 60 percent of its retail stores (leaving the rest open for emergency service); at the start of April, 20,000 of its staff were sidelined by the pandemic, sick from or vulnerable to the virus themselves or taking care of family members who were. And AT&T has waived late fees and data-overage fees for its subscribers. On March 19, the company canceled a $4 billion stock repurchase in order to preserve cash for the uncertainty ahead.

But like other businesses and institutions that are indispensable during this period, Sambar said, there is a sense of urgency and mission. “We’re trying to keep the economy going.”

And to keep people who have been ordered to stay apart connected. The data show Americans’ intense desire to keep communicating. On AT&T’s network, customers are spending 33 percent more time talking on their cellphones, and they’re sending 40 percent more text messages, compared with January and February. Twice during the pandemic customers set a record for text messages,—once in mid-March as it started to build, and again on Easter weekend, sending more than 23,000 in a single second, besting the old record of 15,000, set on New Year’s Eve.

The pandemic is even managing to revive a technology long thought passé—the original network technology. We’re talking on our landline home telephones again: Weekday minutes are up 45 percent; Sunday minutes are up 64 percent. America’s cities may be quiet—the malls, the highways, the coffee shops, the downtowns all deserted. But we’re talking with one another every way we can. Your mom appreciates the call.

In a Pandemic, All Some People See Is Your Color What COVID-19 reveals about our fraught relationships. by Calvin Baker

The last night i went out in the city was in late February. I met my friend Grant (whose name has been changed) at the Standard, on Bowery, and we walked over to Bohemian, on Great Jones, to celebrate the 50th birthday of a Broadway producer. After dinner we went down the street to Acme, where a tech entrepreneur was having a dance party to celebrate his 40th. Grant sipped his tequila and began to grow irate because there were so few people of color around. It felt like the 1950s. We were talking to a beautiful Ghanaian woman whom I’d met once before, and when she mentioned a house party in Harlem that a mutual acquaintance was throwing, Grant and I invited ourselves. But as we glided up the FDR we heard the party was a bust. We dropped her off at home and headed to Koreatown, as though we knew it would be one of the last nights we could go out. We ended up in a bar on 34th Street, giving each other the kind of questionable advice that pours out after midnight, when Grant started to thumb at one of his phones.
“It’s Fan,” he said. (Her name has also been changed.) “She’s been under strict quarantine for a month now, and is getting bored.” I shot him a skeptical look as they began to have a text war. They had one of those relationships that reminds you the root of passion is suffering. His parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and he believed he could only ever be happy with an Asian woman. I wasn’t sure I believed him. She wasn’t always as nice to him as she could be. He spoke of his own failings, explained that the friction between them was cultural, and insisted I’d never understand. When he visited China he felt seen, and free of the constant weight of race. I couldn’t argue with that, so I shrugged the way you do when a friend in whom you have faith is navigating something complicated. He told me that weeks in isolation give you time to reflect. “With all that’s going on, though, who knows when I’ll see her.” Neither of us knew we would also go into isolation soon. But before the skylarking ended he told me he’d heard that the official numbers in China were underreported: “They say there were five crematoriums burning around the clock.”

In the United States, the virus was still mostly centered on the West Coast then, but when I spoke with Grant a few days later he told me three cabs had passed him as he was trying to get to a meeting. “I’ve seen it happen to my college roommate. I’ve just never experienced it directly,” he said. “Even an Asian guy looked into my face and kept going.” I wanted to say maybe the cabbie knew about his girlfriend in Sichuan province, but thought better of it. He was still in pain from the affront. Both Grant and his former roommate, who is African American, are Ivy League lawyers, held in high regard by corporate chiefs and presidents. They thought being brilliant, ethical, and successful would protect them. But no matter who you were, or what you had achieved, it could all collapse at any time into race.

Grant’s parents came to America after World War II, part of the second significant wave of Chinese immigration, driven by the new spirit of global cooperation. The first wave had been more than a century earlier, during the California gold rush of the 1850s. But in 1882 Congress passed a law ending further immigration of laborers from China, and the Supreme Court upheld it in 1889. Yet just three years before that, the justices had ruled in Yick Wo v. Hopkins that the Chinese people already here, citizens or not, were entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, the Court was engaged in a series of rulings that stripped Fourteenth Amendment rights from the people for whom it had been enacted in the first place: formerly enslaved African Americans. In Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan referenced the Wo decision in his famous dissent, in which he wrote:

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race [cannot].

The messages are more mixed than those in a fraught relationship—sometimes you’re a vile threat; other times you are useful.

Between 1948, when President Harry Truman integrated the armed forces, and 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, the legal protections that had been ripped away from African Americans post-Reconstruction were slowly restored. That changed with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968: The re-embrace of racist policy began, and white grievance became a core tenet of the Republican Party, culminating in the 2016 election of Donald Trump. By the logic of the radical extremism our current president represents, a global pandemic that began in a province of China was called the “Chinese virus.” Rhode Island sought to bar New Yorkers. Gun sales around the country skyrocketed. My friend was snubbed by taxi drivers, even though the vectors of disease were not Asian Americans but the conditions of global existence. With breathtaking swiftness, he lost his individual status, as well as the group status of model minority (always a muddy buffer between whiteness and the continuing oppression of African Americans). The sense of belonging and accomplishment had been doled out and revoked according to the perceptions and needs of whiteness—a bait and switch that Arab Americans know all too well. This was merely the beginning of the ways the pandemic continues to expose the racism beneath the facade of American diversity and exceptionalism.

In the days before the quarantine I did what everyone else was doing: I bought face masks, hand sanitizer, food. I called family and friends around the world. I heard from a friend in California whose brother works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She told me he’d said not to worry. Two days later he told her that was only the official line. A friend in Spain wrote, saying: “I’m afraid.” Someone mailed me a thermometer. Buying one had become impossible. I took my temperature three times a day. I called my mother, who was alone on her birthday, only to be met with reproach after I chided her for going to the grocery store. She needed ingredients to make herself something special, couldn’t I understand? I got into an argument with my oldest friend, the kind of friend you’ve been arguing politics with since before you could vote, when he said that we’d beat this soon—“Come on, Cal,” he said, “we’re Americans.”

I’d never thought very deeply about universal health care or a universal basic income until I saw the people who had inveighed against it anxiously awaiting the stimulus package, and cheering when the government saved Wall Street. I saw what was possible when there was something people really wanted to accomplish. Billionaires and celebrities made ostentatious displays of their concern. But it was plain to see that some problems are so large, only a government can solve them—in fact, is designed to solve them. Transportation, war, poverty, education, public health.

A friend of a friend was intubated. A classmate was assigned to an ER in a part of Brooklyn where people weren’t practicing social distancing. Another was running the COVID‑19 unit at a hospital uptown. A third, usually an ice-cold bastard, broke down in tears on the way home from work. We were told there would be no difference in the ways medical care was allocated. People in medical circles were using the word apocalypse. But what happens before you get to the hospital?

By early April, it was well established that black people across the country were dying from the disease at about twice the rate of white people. As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio noted, there is “a striking overlap of where this virus is doing the most damage and where we’ve had historic health-care disparities.” The situation is much the same in Latino and Native American communities. “We could get wiped out,” the CEO of the National Congress of American Indians, Kevin Allis, said. The virus doesn’t discriminate, but the world we occupy does. In addition to the damage wrought by environmental pollution—higher in communities of color—and discrepancies in quality of care, there is also the stress of racism on the black body, most obviously manifest in the greater frequency of conditions such as high blood pressure. Even in normal times, black people’s life expectancy is more than three years lower than white people’s.

I debated for weeks whether to leave the city—looking for places that had good hospitals and where I’d be socially comfortable—before finally deciding to stay. “You can’t outrun a virus,” I replied to an ex, who had reached out to me from another country, recalling how things were after 9/11. In those days, I would wake early and read Marcus Aurelius before taking long walks next to the river at sunrise, thinking about the first Dutch settlement, the English takeover, the British campaign to hold the city during the Revolutionary War, and the market at the foot of Wall Street where Africans and Native Americans were sold. The ways the country changes and the ways it never seems to. You know how the mind wanders at that hour. Staring down at the streets of Brooklyn now, I think less about the plague and the 1918 flu than smallpox-infected blankets knowingly given to Native Americans; the syphilis transmitted by Europeans into a population that had never encountered the disease before; the yellow-fever epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries that spread, port to port, from the Caribbean, like a florescent trace mark of the economics of slavery; and the malaria-ridden swamps where Africans died by the boatload to produce cotton, rice, and sugar. Homegrown tragedies for a nation that is as frail as it has ever been, and has still less care for the world.

How To Keep the World Free From China After Coronavirus The global pandemic demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of leaving Beijing unchecked. Just as we need a vaccine to deal with COVID-19, we need a prophylaxis to deal with a belligerent, uncooperative Chinese Communist Party.

Let’s be realistic. No consensus exists on the future of relations between China and the West. Yet, clearly that is changing. 

Previously, many looked at Beijing as little more than a “checkbook,” an opportunity to make a quick buck and buy cheap stuff. That is quickly becoming the minority view. Even those still anxious to continue to engage know we are heading into troubled waters.

Left unaddressed, the influence of China’s communist government will threaten the freedom, prosperity, and security of the transatlantic community. Only together can the U.S., Canada, and its European partners ensure a stable future that allows free nations to thrive.

It is also not realistic to think the world will harden into new Cold War camps. We live in an interconnected world; a world of independent nations doing business around the clock; where the “freedom of the commons,” including the freedom to cross the seas and transit the skies, is a right.

That means the future is going to be messy. We can’t just wish China away.

To get through this, the family of free nations in the transatlantic community can’t be neutral in our approach to global affairs and China’s role. After all, we believe in popular sovereignty, human rights, and free enterprise. The Chinese Communist Party does not. If we do not stand together and defend these equities, we will lose the world we love.

Increasingly, leaders in Europe and the United States recognize that doing business as usual with China is risky business. So what do we do?

In part, the issue of China has come to the forefront because of the appalling behavior of the Chinese Communist Party in responding to the outbreak in Wuhan of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. No question, the Chinese government allowed people to travel internationally, knowing they had the potential to be highly contagious.

Further, China delayed reporting under international health regulations and did not provide live samples of the coronavirus to other countries for research and vaccine development. The regime’s behavior is not an aberration. China has a long history of bad behavior.

The global pandemic demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of leaving Beijing unchecked. Just as we need a vaccine to deal with COVID-19, we need a prophylaxis to deal with a belligerent, uncooperative Chinese Communist Party. Let’s get to it.

NATO is vital. The alliance needs to take the China threat seriously. Chinese actions and power could well erode NATO’s capacity to exercise self-defense.

From telecommunications to industrial control systems, from space and cyberspace to bridges, railroads, and ports, China already has a heavy footprint presence throughout the transatlantic community. NATO will need all this infrastructure to deter conflict and defend itself.

Yet if China controls the off switch or has the capacity to conduct malicious or denial activities, NATO’s capacity for self-defense will be severely compromised. NATO must be willing to prevent China from having the capacity to interfere in the defense of the alliance’s area of responsibility.

NATO nations all must continue to demonstrate the capacity for self-defense against other external threats.

The U.S. is a global power with global interests and responsibilities; in addition to participating in protecting the transatlantic community, the U.S. must face China in the Indo-Pacific and achieve a stable Middle East. For the U.S. to do all three well, NATO must do its part—particularly in dealing with the great external threats to European security.

NATO’s top priority must be countering the destabilizing activities of Russia. The second major threat is that the problems of the Middle East may spill over into and destabilize Europe. To confront all those very real possibilities, NATO needs to have the capacity and capability to look and act south toward the Middle East.

In short, a strong NATO allows the U.S. to focus more on responding to the global China challenge.

The European Union has a role. In addressing the destabilizing China threat to Europe, the EU is America’s other indispensable partner.

European leaders have seen in the past how China has used its relationships with individual European states to divide and conquer, play one country off against another, and undermine European solidarity to act in its own self-interest. 

Further, the EU manages many of the competencies required to restrain Chinese predatory behavior, particularly in the areas of trade, finance, and investment.

Another area where EU-U.S. cooperation is vital is in taking on the challenges in Africa. Some African nations face a diversity of challenges, from human rights and lack of economic freedom to terrorism and environmental and public health issues, complicated by poor governance and public safety.

China’s incursions into Africa have served only to exacerbate all these problems. The Chinese have enabled corruption, employed predatory lending practices, and spread disinformation. The EU could be a partner for tackling many of these challenges together.

International organizations. Joint U.S.-European efforts to bring greater transparency and accountability in international organizations is also important.

For years, the Chinese Communist Party aggressively has attempted to inject staff and leaders into international organizations who are beholden to the Beijing regime. The World Health Organization is an ice shaving on the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. needs partners to tackle this threat.

U.S.-Europe economic recovery. The U.S. and Europe can’t handle China if our economies are not strong and resilient. The economic recovery of the transatlantic community is intertwined.

We need a joint U.S.-European economic recovery program. This program would not consist of traditional foreign aid but instead rely on investment and partnership engaging the private sector. 

The United States and Europe need each other more than ever. It is time for leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to invest in strengthening the world’s most important partnership.

Coronavirus Vaccine in 2020? Don't Get Too Excited Good research takes time. by Simon Kolstoe

Donald Trump may be “very confident” we will have a vaccine for COVID-19 by the end of the year, but the rest of us should be more cautious. Billions of dollars are being spent trying to develop vaccines and treatments as a more permanent solution to the crisis than the lockdowns currently being enforced around the world. 

As of May 2020 there are 182 treatments and 99 different vaccines being developed globally. But, based on recent history, only one or two are likely to be transformative, a couple may be partially helpful, some will be shown as downright dangerous, and the majority will have conflicting evidence as to their effectiveness.

This is because medical research is a slow and painstaking process. It is also very complicated and easy to come to the wrong conclusions.

Trusting the experts

One good thing to have come out of the coronavirus pandemic seems to be a renewed trust in experts. The routine presence of scientists at government briefings seems to recognise that rather than deserving our suspicion, we need these people to beat the virus.

But more trust in experts means more scrutiny of science as it happens – the latest studies showing promising results are now headline news. This can be worrying because, while there is no doubt that treatments for COVID-19 will eventually be found, it is easy for enthusiasm to turn into cynicism if expectations are not met as quickly as the public and politicians may hope.

There seems to be little recognition that, while thousands of drugs have shown promise in early animal or clinical tests – for example, the vaccine trials at the University of Oxford – the vast majority that show early promise will never make it into routine clinical use. On average it takes 12 years and over US$1 billion (£805 million) to get a drug to market.

Good research takes time

I chair research ethics committees. Over the last few years I have reviewed thousands of research protocols representing the very best, and occasionally some quite poor, examples of medical research.

Good research is defined as rigorous and reliable, producing results that are not only interesting, but are practical, useful and in some cases transformative. They are also reported clearly, transparently and in the context of previous studies. This is precisely the type of research we need to address the COVID-19 crisis.

But such good research comes at a cost. Much of society thinks of cost in terms of dollars and pounds, and indeed mindful of our own survival, scientists and researchers are of course always going to lobby for more investment. While it is very helpful to have the funds to order any chemical that is needed, access highly specialised equipment, or pay others to conduct experiments and analyse results quickly, we must take care never to underestimate the importance of taking time to think carefully about what results actually mean.

It is only once researchers have taken the time to understand the context of results that they can start turning them into effective applications or treatments. The real cost of good research is therefore time.

The frustrating truth about medical research is that the majority of experiments appear not to work because the subject being studied is so horrendously complex. In fact, rather than “not working”, many experiments are simply inconclusive. To make progress you have to slow down, look at the evidence and take time to think very carefully about what the results might mean.

The thinking needed for this takes years. I was involved with one project that was delayed for almost ten years while the team tried to work out why a single animal showed cardiovascular complications. Another project I worked on showed promise reducing an Alzheimer-like pathology in mice, yet 18 years later similar effects have yet to be conclusively shown in humans. Commendably, the team is still working on it.

The reality is that the long road to a vaccine or drug for any disease is littered with trials that did not lead to expected results. Even when a study is successful, it takes a long time to go from the lab to the general public.

The pressure to find a cure

One worrying aspect of the current situation is the pressure on researchers to work quickly and come up with solutions for COVID-19 almost immediately. For perhaps the first time, financial resources are not a limiting factor, and so politicians and the public are expecting researchers to take the cash and provide the answers. This has been coupled with significant pressure on regulators to streamline or even suspend some of the normal processes so that treatments can get to the clinic as quickly as possible.

Lured by promises of unlimited funding, and perhaps fame should their chosen idea work, some researchers may be tempted to engage in questionable research practices. History shows that whenever a large amount of money is involved, the temptation to commit, fraud, misconduct or other questionable practices increase. The UK spent more than £400 million during the 2009 swine flu outbreak stockpiling a drug whose effectiveness had been inflated by the manufacturers due to publication bias – where negative or inconclusive results from a trial are not published in scientific journals, but positive results are.

Without appropriate scrutiny there is a real risk that ineffective, or even harmful, treatments begin to get used. This may be considered an acceptable risk in the current crisis, but if so, it is important that any new treatments are monitored very closely and withdrawn without hesitation if the harms mount up.

Given time – maybe two, three or perhaps even ten years – researchers will be able to take stock of the evidence from experiments and trials, perform a meta-analysis and systematic review, hold international conferences, and then, following careful thought, tell the world what the best treatment for COVID-19 is.

The world clearly needs scientific and medical answers to the current pandemic as soon as possible, but we need to recognise that initially we may only find partial or tentative answers. Instead of a quick vaccine that completely prevents COVID-19, a variety of partial successes will be combined until eventually a full solution is found.

There may even be some blind alleys with promising, but ultimately futile, treatment ideas. This is not a failure of research, or misuse of resources. Above all, researchers need to be supported to work with integrity, and not be made scapegoats for the challenges that undoubtedly lie ahead.

The Coronavirus Is Changing How the War in Afghanistan Is Being Waged The pandemic has caused the Taliban to shift its tactic from mainly targeting densely populated cities to attacking rural areas. This shift in strategy is likely due to the Taliban strategizing to avoid exposure to the virus by steering away from the cities that have been hit the hardest by it. by Sabera Azizi

As the coronavirus continues to spread in Afghanistan in April, Gen. Austin Scott Miller, the head of NATO’s Resolute Support Mission and United States Forces–Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, met with the Taliban in Qatar.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the increased attacks carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan—a violation of the deal signed between Washington and the Taliban. Since the signing of the deal, the Taliban has carried out more than 2,162 attacks across Afghanistan. The Taliban’s insistence on posing as a security threat led Washington to retaliate by carrying out an airstrike against the Taliban just days after the signing of the agreement.

Despite the increased pressure from Washington, the Taliban continues to launch attacks throughout the country. However, the pandemic is changing the dynamics of the war.

The coronavirus outbreak has caused the Taliban to shift its tactic from mainly targeting densely populated cities to attacking rural areas. This shift in strategy is likely due to the Taliban strategizing to avoid exposure to the virus by steering away from the cities that have been hit the hardest by it. Instead, the terror group has focused on attacking areas with low numbers of reported coronavirus cases.

Despite the Taliban’s rejection of the Afghan government’s call to a ceasefire for the month of Ramadan, it has also expressed an interest in halting violence due to the coronavirus. Zabihullah Mujahed, the Taliban’s spokesperson, told the Associated Press that “If, God forbid, the outbreak happens in an area where we control the situation then we will stop fighting in that area.” What’s apparent is that the Taliban’s willingness to agree to a ceasefire will be a calculated decision based on its interests via the threat of an outbreak in its areas. Although the Taliban has yet to implement a ceasefire, a glimmer of hope for reduced violence remains.

As much as the Afghan government and the Taliban disagree on key elements of the peace process, the coronavirus outbreak could increase cooperation between the Afghan government and the Taliban. The Taliban expressed a willingness to cooperate with government health-care workers and nonprofit organizations to assist populations in need. Additionally, the Taliban has launched initiatives, such as distributing guidelines and launching workshops in its controlled-areas to prevent the spread of the virus. The Taliban, too, is taking social-distancing seriously. A civilian told Al Jazeera, “They have cancelled all public gatherings, weddings and have asked people to pray at home instead of the mosques.” Even though such deliberate measures are intended to prevent the spread of the virus to the ranks of the Taliban and to neighboring countries who provide safe havens for the Taliban—it has led to a rare readiness by the Taliban to cooperate with Kabul.

Khalilzad has previously used the coronavirus to push the Afghan government and the Taliban toward the prisoner exchange process. This, he argued, would prevent a humanitarian disaster in overcrowded jails due to the high risk of contagion. Thus, with Washington’s support, both sides have released prisoners. Despite the hurdles involved, these exchanges are likely to continue until the agreed threshold in the peace deal has been met. That threshold consists of five thousand Taliban prisoners and one thousand Afghan security force personnel.

Additionally, Washington began the process of troop withdrawal soon after signing the deal on February 29. Currently, there are about twelve thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. According to the agreement, approximately thirty-four hundred American soldiers would withdraw from Afghanistan within 135 days. However, the coronavirus complicates the withdrawal process. Although the Pentagon has halted U.S. troop movements overseas for sixty days, Afghanistan remains an exception. The Defense Department underscored that the drawdown would continue. Yet, Miller noted that in some cases U.S. troops in Afghanistan will remain “beyond their scheduled departure dates to continue the mission” due to the pause on troop rotations.

As of late March, four coalition troops tested positive for the coronavirus, with thirty-eight other service members having flu-like symptoms. In Afghanistan, there are more than 784 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Should the virus rapidly spread across the country and exacerbated by Kabul’s inefficient measures and lack of resources, then it’s likely that congressional pressure would compel the Pentagon to expedite the withdrawal process to protect the wellbeing of its soldiers.

That said, a troop withdrawal wouldn’t indicate that the United States is abandoning Afghanistan. Washington continues to support the Afghan government and the U.S. army’s spokesperson for Afghanistan has made it clear on numerous instances that the United States will defend the Afghan army when needed. Further, during Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s surprise visit to Kabul, he offered $15 million in aid to assist the Afghan government in tackling the coronavirus.

Secretary Pompeo emphasized that “We will constantly re-evaluate our posture with respect to Afghanistan, not only the security assistance and humanitarian aid and assistance we provide to them.” Although the pandemic is severely affecting the American economy, it’s highly unlikely that Washington will pull the plug on its financial assistance to the Afghan government due to its strategic importance. The United States has invested significant resources to ensure that the Afghan government remains intact to protect America’s interests and uses its aid as leverage accordingly. Since less than 1 percent of America’s GDP is expended on foreign aid, it’s probable that Washington will continue to finance the Afghan government, who’s more than 75 percent of its budget depends on foreign aid.

The coronavirus adds complexities to the peace deal and intensifies Afghanistan’s challenges. Since 9/11, Washington has assisted the Afghan government in alleviating political crises. Now, as the world faces a global health crisis, and as Washington and Kabul are both impacted by the virus, the pandemic tests the enduring partnership between Washington and Kabul.

Why the Coronavirus Won't Transform International Affairs Like 9/11 Did Have we entered into a “new era” in international affairs? Will March 2020—specifically 9/11, the day in which the United States began to reconfigure its domestic social and economic structures to cope with the coronavirus pandemic—become this generation’s 9/11 moment? The answer is likely “no.” by Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Have we entered into a “new era” in international affairs? Will March 2020—specifically 3/11, the day in which the United States began to reconfigure its domestic social and economic structures to cope with the coronavirus pandemic—become this generation’s 9/11 moment? 

Over the past month, there has been a plethora of pieces arguing that the coronavirus crisis has changed everything and that this modern-day plague marks a bright dividing line between the uncertain present and the preceding “post–9/11” era. Just as Derek Chollett and James Goldgeier coined the “11/9 to 9/11” tag to describe the period between the Fall of the Berlin Wall (the end of the Cold War) and what George Will famously described as the end of America’s “holiday from history,” does the coronavirus mark a similar sharp break? In the future, for instance, when we resume flying, will screen at the airport be less concerned about three ounces of liquids and gels and more focused on whether we are wearing masks, with body scanners reconfigured to detect temperatures and health conditions rather than concealed weapons?

In the weeks following the September 11 attacks, including at a special symposium held at the National Interest, the question was raised as to whether the fight against Al Qaeda and international terrorism would become the new central organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. After all, Osama bin Laden’s rash strike and his penchant for making enemies had produced a rare convergence where, in the remaining months of 2001, the United States, its NATO allies and its partners in East Asia, but also Iran, Russia, China, India, and Saudi Arabia were all on the same page regarding the threat posed by Al Qaeda. At least for a time, bin Laden had ameliorated great-power competition. 

In talking about the pandemic, Bill Gates could repurpose statements made by President George W. Bush and simply substitute “coronavirus” for terrorism. Gates believes that the threat of this pandemic unites all countries in a common fight and that eradicating this scourge ought to become the central task of every country’s foreign policy. If, over the last several years, the fight against terrorism was losing its luster and the post–9/11 proviso that the United States was threatened more by problems emanating from weak states than strong ones was being replaced by a return to competition among the great powers, then will the coronavirus cause countries to disavow power politics and place a greater emphasis on health and human security?

Make no mistake, the coronavirus is having an impact. It is testing existing alliance relationships and causing fractures in the current setup of globalization. It is challenging the wisdom of over-relying on a single great global-market continuum to provide goods and services necessary both for prosperity and security. But we have not had that one single shock, as in 9/11, which leads to a pause. The coronavirus has not led North Korea to cease its provocations across the DMZ or to stop missile testing; it has not induced the Islamic Republic of Iran to abandon its nuclear program; it has not paused Chinese efforts to create a “new normal” in the South China Sea nor caused Russia to disgorge Crimea. Coronavirus is not becoming the central organizing principle but rather one more factor that countries must deal with in charting their foreign policies.

Nor is it automatic that the damage caused by the pandemic is viewed equally by all states. What we have seen instead is a mix of cooperation and confrontation, based on how each power assesses its interests. China and Russia will not hesitate to take advantage of any openings that are created by the friction that coronavirus has created in the U.S. relationship with its allies, while the United States will not be disappointed if the challenges of coping with the pandemic create serious strains for Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin in terms of their domestic governance. China has made its opening bid to encourage Europe to distance itself from the United States, while the U.S. hopes that the aftermath of the pandemic will strengthen calls for decoupling between the West and China.

So, I am skeptical that we are on the verge of a massive shift in international affairs. The coronavirus was a “gray swan”—for years we have expected that a massive infectious disease event with global reach might occur, even if the specific cause and timing were unknown. If we are in a new period of global affairs, and if we are no longer in a post–9/11 world, then that shift has been gradually occurring. The pandemic is not going to end competition within an anarchic global system—it will just become another factor.