Putin Must Lead Russia’s Battle Against the Coronavirus Russia, like the rest of the world, is facing one of its greatest challenges in recent memory. by Doug Klain

As Vladimir Putin re-writes the Russian constitution to extend his presidency by another sixteen years, he is tapping into the Soviets’ victory in World War II—still a deeply personal piece of history for most Russians, who suffered the greatest losses of any country during the war—to bring legitimacy to a reign that will last longer than Josef Stalin’s. But as today’s war against the coronavirus rages, Putin is too busy looking backwards to see a new chance to mobilize the Russian people. 

After an initial downplaying of the pandemic, Russia is fast becoming one of the hardest-hit countries—now with over 200,000 acknowledged cases of COVID-19, making it the third most infected country in the world. But the Russian government has continued to suppress unflattering information about the effects of the pandemic, including the severe lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) that medical personnel have access to.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin was one of several top Russian officials to immediately take advantage of the coronavirus for political ends, quickly blocking protests of Putin’s term-limit reset as Muscovites prepared for mass gatherings in March.

Sobyanin seems to have reversed course as of late, likely because his city appears to be the hardest hit of any in Russia. In late March, he made international headlines by becoming the first high-profile Russian official to contradict the Kremlin’s downplaying of the extent of the virus.

On May 7, Sobyanin went onto the state-owned television station Rossiya-24 to advise the public that the spread of the virus was still worse than reported—with an estimated 300,000 cases in Moscow alone, far above the reported 200,000 nationwide.

Those are grim numbers, but Sobyanin rightly recognized that it’s a good thing to have found so many from testing. “The fact that we have confirmed so many ill persons is not a minus, it’s a great plus,” he told Rossiya-24. “Obviously, the real number of those ill in the city is higher. According to the screening, they account for 2% or 2.5% of all Moscow’s citizens or nearly 300,000.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s government has modeled a culture of downplaying how serious the crisis is, and it’s keeping doctors from adequately speaking up about what tools they need and what precautions the public needs to take.

Dr. Alexander Shulepov went viral after posting a video of himself and another healthcare worker in which Shulepov says he’s been infected with COVID-19 and has been kept on shifts by his head doctor, preventing him from exercising necessary isolation to avoid infecting others. Two days later, Shulepov appeared in another video, posted by the regional health department, in which he claimed he was “emotional” when filming the prior video, and had now been removed from shifts and was being treated in a hospital.

Then Shulepov fell out of the hospital window and suffered a skull fracture, becoming the third doctor in just over a week to fall from hospital windows. The other two had died. Shulepov’s fate remains uncertain.

Russia, like the rest of the world, is facing one of its greatest challenges in recent memory. This is exactly the moment when President Putin should be leading from the front, encouraging the same kind of incredible national movement he likes to remember from the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. Instead, he has delegated responsibility to his governors, secluded himself at his Novo-Ogaryovo estate outside of Moscow, and watched his frontline medical personnel fall out of windows after speaking up.

According to the Levada Center, an independent opinion polling group, the Russian public overwhelmingly distrusts both their government and its official information on the virus. However, this crisis is the perfect opportunity for Putin to restore some modicum of public trust and unify the country.

The virus itself is outside of the Kremlin’s control, but the way the Russian government responds to it is not. There are measures that should be obvious, like working to get medical professionals the equipment they need. But the starting place should be a basic acknowledgment of what is happening, who is affected, and what the government has done about it.

“Do not play down the consequences of the pandemic,” urged one local activist from Ufa. “Lying about the scale of the disaster is the worst that you can do for your countrymen in general, and for the relatives of those who died of COVID-19 in particular.”

Putin fears that the catastrophe of the coronavirus undermines his legitimacy just as he makes the claim that Russia needs him at the helm until 2036, so his natural impulse is to create a national culture of downplaying the crisis. But as things get worse, it will be impossible to hide this truth. Nearly every Russian knew someone wounded or killed in World War II, and it’s likely that everyone today will know someone who contracts COVID-19, if not getting it themselves.

Simply, Russian authorities have little to fear by acknowledging what everyone will be experiencing—if they speak the truth, people may even believe them.

Mayor Sobyanin seems to have shown a desire to meet this painfully low standard, and Muscovites are being given reason to trust what their city government says—this will be essential when the country does start to lift quarantines and finally re-open, with people likely returning to normal activities when they feel confident they won’t be infected by those around them.

But most Russians are receiving contradictory and incomplete information from authorities, and those who try to inform the public are being punished. Whatever chance at nationwide solidarity the country has is being wasted, and at exactly the time that it’s needed most. The irony of Putin celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of victory over the Nazis, an overwhelming past mobilization of the Russian people, is compounded by how liberally he’s squandering a chance at the same kind of national unity.

No One Has a Clue What to Do About China "Washington’s policy toward China has been incoherent for decades. China’s economic growth, closely tied to global trade, was producing a relatively more powerful China. Everyone liked trade, but everyone disliked a more powerful China. Nobody wanted to square up to this contradiction, so America muddled along, with U.S. economic policies making American military objectives more difficult and costly to achieve." by Justin Logan

It’s been clear since before the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s even clearer now: Everyone is anxious about China’s rise and nobody has a clear idea of what to do about it.  

The Trump administration has been consistent on the point—in its planning documents, if not in the various eruptions from the presidential podium. Both the 2017 National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy turned from the Middle East and pointed their crosshairs on Beijing. “Great power competition” became the watchword. 

But in the wake of the coronavirus, politicians and pundits are climbing over one another offering proposals to poke Beijing in the chest. Revoke China’s sovereign immunity in the U.S. courts to allow Americans harmed by coronavirus to sue the Chinese government? Check. Get into a snit with the G-7 about whether to call the coronavirus the “Wuhan Flu?” Check. Freeze American contributions to the World Health Organization as a reaction to China’s influence there? Check. Somehow isolate the U.S. debt owed to China and renege on some of it? Check. Throw America’s diplomatic weight fully behind Taiwan? Check. 

Now the administration is allegedly preparing unspecified retaliatory actions against China for its mishandling of the virus. For his part, Joe Biden used the occasion of his first foreign policy ad to promise that he would be tougher on China than President Donald Trump. With apologies to Seeley, America seems to have jumped into an epochal struggle with China in a fit of absence of mind.

The combination of Chinese misconduct in handling the virus and elite opinion in the United States appears to have turned American opinion against China. According to Pew, 72 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats have a negative view of China. Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones reports “Americans’ views of China have rarely been positive over the past four decades, but they have never held the country in lower regard than they do today.” 

For all the demonizing, no one has suggested a policy that would slow China’s ascent. Three factors are preventing a coherent U.S. response to China. First, U.S. economic and security policies are working at cross purposes. Our economic policies make our security goals harder to achieve. Second, American allies are shirking their share of their own defense. Their economic atrophy and ambivalent attitudes to their defense load a disproportionate share of the burden onto Americans’ shoulders. Finally, the United States remains bogged down in the Middle East. From Syria to Iran to Iraq, American elites have baggage in the Middle East they are reluctant to leave behind. Before jumping headlong into an epochal struggle with China, Washington needs to face these fundamental flaws.

Washington’s policy toward China has been incoherent for decades. China’s economic growth, closely tied to global trade, was producing a relatively more powerful China. Everyone liked trade, but everyone disliked a more powerful China. Nobody wanted to square up to this contradiction, so America muddled along, with U.S. economic policies making American military objectives more difficult and costly to achieve.

The solution one hears most often is “decoupling” the American economy from China’s. As the Belfer Center’s Paula Dobriansky puts it, the United States just needs to “set up new supply chains, restructure trade relations, and start to create an international economic order that is less dependent on China.” Wang Jisi, a leading Chinese scholar of U.S.-China relations, calls decoupling “already irreversible.” 

People should show their work. Decoupling makes logical sense given Washington’s desire to constrain Chinese power, but it is extremely difficult to see how policy can achieve this goal in a timely fashion at an acceptable cost. China is simply too big, and too central a part of the global economy to isolate and deny access to the American economy. If Washington somehow erased China’s contributions to global production, then who would take its place? These are enormous problems that are only beginning to garner attention in Washington. 

For their part, China doves like Daniel Drezner tend to elide the security dimension, emphasizing instead that decoupling “would harm both economies and worsen the security situation.” The question hawks would ask is “harm whom more?” The doves are right to argue that the panic in Washington outstrips the gravity of the situation, but the trend lines on security are headed in the wrong direction if one supports U.S. aims in Asia. 

American elites would be at peace with a much wealthier China that behaved as China behaved in the 1980s or 1990s, but that defies most of what most people know about international politics. Even relative doves like Robert Zoellick admit they want Washington to remain “the umpire of China’s choices.” Beijing, for understandable reasons, doesn’t like this idea, preferring fewer restrictions on its choices.

The unfortunate fact is that just as realists predicted, as China’s power has grown, so has its view of its interests and assertiveness in pursuing them. Just in recent weeks, Beijing has engaged in naval exercises off the coast of Taiwan, including an aircraft carrier; formally claimed Chinese-controlled islands that are the subject of territorial disputes with Vietnam and other nations; attributed the coronavirus to a U.S. conspiracy; and sent coast guard vessels into waters disputed with the Philippines. This is the picture of the future. 

But in this context, the United States is carrying a disproportionate share of the burden of defending China’s neighbors. Washington is focused on finding more U.S. resources and attention to devote to China. Congress inserted a provision in the 2020 defense budget requiring the commander of Indo-Pacific Command to draw up a wish list by March. That commander has done so, asking for more than $20 billion in additional funding, all of which is focused on competing with China in its border regions. 

American allies have been sleepwalking. According to figures from the IISS Military Balance reports, in 2009, Japan was spending roughly 75 percent as much as China on defense. By 2019, that figure was down to under 27 percent. In 2009 Taiwan was spending roughly 14 percent as much as China. Even with increases during the decade, by 2019 the figure dropped to 6 percent. (To be sure, Chinese spending has increased in relation to U.S. spending as well.)

What China is buying is relevant here. China’s focus on A2/AD capabilities can support modest, defensive goals, not global domination. Beijing is trying to push the United States out of its face. Instead of buying gold-plated American systems, American partners in the region should be pressed to emulate China, complicating any Chinese plans for offense just as Beijing has complicated any American plans for an offense.

Finally, American policymakers have shown that they are incapable of strategic focus. For instance, an unbelievable amount of attention in 2019 was devoted to Trump’s December 2018 false promise to remove U.S. troops from Syria. Whether from inertia, the influence of interest groups, or sheer laziness, American elites have been slow to realize that the Middle East is, from a military point of view, mostly a waste of time. 

If policymakers are as worried about China as their rhetoric suggests, they should do two things. First, they need to make the U.S.-China relationship the organizing focus of American statecraft. To the extent Washington is set on continuing to try to run the Middle East, this is detrimental to clarity and focus on China. Big, powerful states matter more than small, weak states. If American elites focus on the latter, then it is to the detriment of their policy regarding the former. 

Second, American policymakers should make a public show of examining allied burden-sharing. Until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ended them in 2004, the Defense Department issued annual Reports on Allied Contributions to the Common Defense. DOD mostly acted as a lawyer for America’s allies, but Trump should instruct the Pentagon to start issuing the reports again, with particular emphasis on Asian allies. (DOD should take care not to conduct the burden-sharing discussion as a protection racketeer, as Trump tends to.) 

And if the executive branch will not lead a discussion on burden sharing, Congress should. In 1988, the House Armed Services Committee issued the Report of the Defense Burdensharing Panel, which had convened testimony and hearings in the months before. That report concluded pointedly that “As long as Americans pay most of the cost and assume most of the risks and responsibilities for the defense of the free world, the allies will be prepared to let the United States do so.” In 2019, bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to reinvigorate discussions of burden-sharing in Europe and the Middle East. There is no reason for Congress to leave these questions to the executive branch. Burden-sharing discussions die in darkness. 

Decoupling is both a logical predicate for achieving American policy aims, and unthinkable. Equitable burden-sharing is both vital for American strategy and hard to envision. Clear-eyed focus on China as the most important issue for American statesmen is both essential and foreclosed by bureaucratic and domestic politics. If Washington wants to influence China’s role in the world, then it needs to reconcile these contradictions. 

The Coronavirus Crisis Presents a Unique Challenge for the U.S. Federal System Washington is going to have to learn to herd the states under the federalism framework crafted by the Founding Fathers. by Ramon Marks

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan recently bought a half a million coronavirus testing kits from South Korea in the absence of the help he felt needed from Washington. While the Trump administration claims it is supplying states with all necessary support, governors are telling a different story. They say that in a vacuum created by Washington, they have been forced to fend for themselves to do whatever it takes to try to find the equipment and supplies they need to combat the virus.

Meanwhile, for ordinary Americans, the scene looks like one giant mess as the states and federal government engage in histrionics and compete and jockey for medical supplies and resources. In this free-for-all, prices are bid up, accompanied by a crazy quilt of conflicting demands and delivery priorities. The process looks entirely broken—but ironically, for better or worse, the system is working exactly as our Founding Fathers intended. 

The United States is dealing with a governance structure, unique to this country. Unlike Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Seoul or Beijing, the United States cannot respond to the pandemic with a centralized, coordinated response completely controlled by Washington, DC. The U.S. Constitution simply forbids that, granting the national government only certain, enumerated executive, legislative and judicial powers. However vast those powers may be, they are not absolute, and all others are reserved exclusively to the states under Article X of the Constitution. One bedrock principle of constitutional jurisprudence, stretching back at least to the early nineteenth century, is that “police powers” fall within the primary control of state governments. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall, characterized those powers as an “immense mass of legislation, which embraces everything within the territory of a State, not surrendered to the federal government,” including “quarantine laws” and “health laws of every description.”

Hence, Trump was on shaky constitutional ground when he asserted—in response to hearing that regional governors were conferring on coordinated guidelines for reopening their economies—that he alone, as “[t]he president of the United States calls the shots,” and that “[t]hey can’t do anything without approval of the president of the United States.” In fact, the governors do have major sway on deciding such issues of pandemic response consistent with their constitutionally based police powers. Founded on the architecture of the document he principally drafted, James Madison might well find it strange that Trump should make such an extreme assertion. Madison might also find it equally strange that state governors would complain that Washington has somehow abdicated its responsibilities in the current situation since the Constitution envisioned that states would handle health concerns under their police powers. 

Article II of the Constitution conferred on Congress, however, the vast authority to regulate interstate commerce. Over time, federal legislation has become the overarching body of law controlling the economy including food, drug and health matters, to the extent considered to fall within the ambit of interstate commerce. To protect that federal role, the federal courts have developed the judicial doctrine of preemption, ensuring that constitutionally protected federal laws take precedence over any diverging state laws.

Courts have also traditionally recognized that the president possesses inherent executive authority to act in certain situations, particularly in times of war. One notable example of this kind of executive authority was when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeus corpus during the civil war based on an act passed by Congress.

The coronavirus crisis presents, however, a unique challenge for the U.S. federal system. Both the federal government and state governments have constitutionally protected roles to play in this situation with no clear structure provided by the Framers as to how such cooperation should operate in practice. Hence, the political sparks have flown as state governors hold press conferences simultaneously complaining about inadequate control and support from the federal government while insisting on their prerogative to handle the crisis in their own states. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gone back and forth, sometimes asserting that it is mainly up to the states to handle the challenges while at other times insisting that it is the federal government that must call the shots.

In the middle of all this, an obscure piece of federal legislation first passed during the Korean War in 1950, has taken center stage, the Defense Product Act (DPA). This law was passed by Congress principally to authorize the president to marshal the US defense industry to provide equipment and material for the Korean war effort. It has been adapted today to meet a different kind of nonmilitary challenge, but the fit for current circumstances is not as comfortable.

The DPA can empower the president to direct emergency production of medical supplies and set reasonable pricing, but it certainly provides no institutional framework for then allocating such supplies among the states, unlike the Korean War when there was no question but that all resources would go to the armed forces, not to some kind of allocation among fifty states. The DPA also lacks absolute preemptive power over the states. The president cannot outright bar state governors from making their own supply orders as such gubernatorial action falls within their own constitutionally protected, police powers to combat the pandemic. Such modern Supreme Court decisions as United States v. Lopez, and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, where the Court respectively invalidated federal legislation intruding into state gun control and health matters, show that Congress, under the Commerce Clause, does not necessarily have infinite power over states to dominate how pandemic emergencies should be handled.

Whatever the lessons from the current crisis, the country must deal more effectively with the reality that under constitutional principles of federalism, both state and federal governments have protected roles to play. Washington is going to have to learn to herd the states under the federalism framework crafted by the Founding Fathers. 

CDC Report: Coronavirus Pandemic May Have Killed 24,172 in NYC That’s nearly three-fourths of all deaths during this time period. by Matthew Petti

The coronavirus pandemic may have killed 24,172 people in New York City from March 11 to May 1, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said. 

The New York metro area has suffered the worst coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with over confirmed 14,482 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) deaths in the city alone. But the true number of deaths is almost definitely higher than the official death toll, with virus testing lagging behind and thousands dying at home.

A paper by federal authorities and the city health department, published on Monday, tried to put a number on the unknown by comparing deaths this year to the baseline number of deaths in previous years.

Health officials reported 32,107 deaths in New York City from March 11 to May 1, nearly a third higher than the seasonal baseline. This includes 13,831 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases and 5,048 “probable” COVID-19 cases.

New York City allows doctors and medical examiners to mark deaths as probable COVID-19 cases at their discretion, and is not testing all deceased persons for the virus. Some critics say that the system is undercounting COVID-19 deaths.

The paper noted that the probably and confirmed case count “might not include deaths among persons with [novel coronavirus] infection who did not access diagnostic testing, tested falsely negative, or became infected after testing negative, died outside of a health care setting, or for whom COVID-19 was not suspected by a health care provider as a cause of death.”

The total number of “excess” deaths was between 22,980 and 25,364, with 95% confidence, including 5,293 deaths that were neither confirmed nor “probable” COVID-19 cases.

“Tracking excess mortality is important to understanding the contribution to the death rate from both COVID-19 disease and the lack of availability of care for non-COVID conditions,” the authors wrote. Some of the excess deaths “might have been directly or indirectly attributable to the pandemic,” but the percentage of them directly caused by COVID-19 will “require further investigation.”

Excess deaths peaked at over 1,100 on April 7, including nearly 300 that were not confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths.

The number of excess deaths has since fallen to around 200 per day, nearly all of them confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths.

Random antibody testing of supermarket shoppers suggested that around a fifth of New Yorkers had been exposed to the novel coronavirus by late April.

COVID-19 has killed 81,795 people total in the United States as of Monday night. Over one million people are known to be currently infected by the novel coronavirus, and 262,225 people have recovered from COVID-19.

Interview with Senator Chris Murphy: Coronavirus Means It’s “Time For Congress To Step Up” The Democratic heavyweight says it’s urgent to undo the damage of the past three years. by Matthew Petti

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has always wanted Congress to take a more active role in foreign policy. Now, it’s more urgent than ever.

Murphy is quickly stepping into his role as the “McCain of the left” —the face of foreign policy consensus in the Democratic Party.

Over the past five years, he spearheaded the opposition against U.S. involvement in Yemen, helping push Congress to pass its first war powers resolution in history. And he’s met with political players around the world, from Ukrainian protesters to the foreign minister of Iran.

The United States is stumbling into an era of great power competition with one hand tied behind its back, Murphy now warns, and the next administration and the current Congress both have to play a role in fixing the damage.

The National Interest spoke to the senator about issues around the world, from the coronavirus pandemic to the political crisis in Venezuela. Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Great to meet you, Senator Murphy. Thank you for your time. I know it’s pretty busy for everyone, especially with coronavirus. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.

You’ve long been an advocate of Congress taking a bigger role in foreign policy, which is gaining more and more traction, especially on the progressive side of things. Could you tell me how Congress could play a more productive role in this global crisis that’s calling into question U.S. leadership?

The virus is a clear indicator that a threat can emerge to the United States on the other side of the world, and result in the death of tens of thousands of Americans within months. When it comes to non-conventional threats like pandemic disease, borders don’t matter. Today, with the Trump administration, you’re witnessing the consequences of our withdrawal from the world.

We took two thirds of our scientists out of China in the years approaching the breakout of coronavirus. We shattered our alliance with our European partners just at the moment that we needed to be working with them to hold China to account, make sure that we have enough medical equipment in the United States to fight the disease.

We are walking away from the WHO [World Health Organization] at the moment when only WHO can effectively stand up a future global public health infrastructure that can stop the next pandemic.

We warned the administration that there would be consequences for its wholesale retreat from the world, and we are now living with those consequences.

You ask what Congress can do. Congress has largely abdicated its responsibility to be a coequal branch with respect to foreign policy. Now is the time for Congress to step up.

We could pass legislation requiring the administration to rejoin the WHO. We could pass legislation joining the United States to the global vaccine development effort.

We could pass legislation increasing foreign aid to make sure that we’re beating the virus everywhere, because we know that so long as it exists in a refugee camp somewhere in the Middle East, it’s still a threat to the United States

Congress has lots of mechanisms by which we could stand up the kinds of public health programming that are needed to muster the short-term and long-term responses we need to pandemic disease.

You’ve said that “the reason we’re in this crisis is not because of anything China did,” because we should have been prepared for it ourselves, but a lot of Republicans have introduced this idea that China should somehow be held to account or “pay” for the pandemic.

Where do you stand on this issue, and are there areas where you do think we need to push back harder against the Chinese government?

Well, first, I advise you to watch the whole clip, not just the three words that were picked out of it, because what I’ve said has been consistent: China bears responsibility for its efforts to cover up the initial extent of the virus and its continued efforts to obfuscate the scientific information we need to develop vaccines and treatments.

But there was no greater cheerleader for China’s coverup in January and February than President Donald Trump. On twelve different occasions, he praised China’s response. He lauded their transparency.

He was asked a point-blank question on February 7th as to whether China was covering up anything about the virus. He said, “no, they’re running a model response.”

Nobody frustrated the world’s efforts to try to get China to change its early behaviors more than Donald Trump did.

My point is that, while China bears much responsibility for this crisis, it was not inevitable that a hundred, two hundred thousand Americans had to die. The president has run an abysmal response to the virus, which has resulted in it being much worse in the United States than it had to be.

And so there’s lots of responsibility to go around. The Chinese bear much of it, but there is no way that the mistakes made in China needed to result in seventy thousand, a hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand Americans dying.

The question is, what do you do about it? Is the right response to withdraw from the WHO? Because if your complaint is that China has too much influence at the WHO, you essentially are exacerbating the problem that you’re seeking to solve by pulling the United States out.

I just haven’t seen any action from this administration that actually addresses the complaints they make about China.

Another country that’s been struck with the coronavirus, and has maybe been criticized for its own lack of transparency, is Iran. You and several other members of Congress have called for engagement with Iran over this coronavirus crisis, which the Trump administration has really been dragging its feet on.

How do you think the United States should be engaging Iran, both on coronavirus and in general, and what role should Congress be playing in this?

The case that we tried to make is that the Iranian people are not our adversary. The Iranian regime is our adversary. That’s a hard case to make when our sanctions are, in part, responsible for the death of innocent civilians due to coronavirus.

There’s no doubt that our current sanctions make it harder for Iran to stand up a response to this epidemic.

And our sanctions make it easier for the Iranian regime to make the case to their people that it’s the United States that’s standing in the way of medicines and medical technologies being delivered to the Iranian people.

The regime’s always engaged in propaganda that’s divorced from the truth, but it is true that our sanctions are hindering the Iranian medical response. What I think we should be doing is making sure that none of our sanctions are resulting in innocent people in Iran dying of coronavirus. I also think this is an opportunity for engagement.

This is a moment when the number one threat to Iran and the number one threat to the United States is the same thing—a virus. It could be a mechanism by which we could start talking to each other.

The Trump administration has said from the beginning, whether you believe them or not, that their goal is engagement, and that they see sanctions as a pathway to engagement. Maybe this isn’t the pathway that you initially envisioned, but it’s an opportunity, and right now, it’s an opportunity that the administration is ignoring.

I’m wondering specifically what you think Congress’ role in this can be, because a lot of these sanctions are up to executive discretion, but Congress also holds a lot of power over this.

There’s a majority in Congress that voted for the war powers resolution. I’m wondering what opportunities you see there.

Very few.

I think, A, it’s difficult for Congress to micromanage sanctions policy. What I’m talking about is nuanced: decisions about what is subject to and what is exempt from sanctions.

B, there’s just not the political will in the Senate with Mitch McConnell as majority leader to pass a bill that eases medical-related sanctions on Iran today.

I just think, realistically, this is an endeavor the administration has to undertake.

I know that you met with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif in Munich. He had said, after meeting with a different senator, that he engages with American lawmakers “just for clarifications, not for negotiations.”

I’m curious how he approached his conversation with you.

I’ve met with Foreign Minister Zarif on a number of occasions. I’ve met with him during the Obama administration and during the Trump administration.

That is my responsibility as a member of the [Senate] Foreign Relations Committee, to meet with foreign ministers, frankly regardless of whether they’re coming from a friendly country or an adversary.

My belief is that it’s important to keep dialogue open with Iran, even if that’s just through informal parliamentary channels. When I’m talking to Zarif, I’m not negotiating for the United States of America, just like when I’m talking to the French foreign minister, I’m not negotiating for America.

The administration conducts official international negotiations, not the Congress, unless the Congress is specifically authorized to do so. 

There’s a big looming deadline with the arms embargo on Iran about to expire. You told Al-Monitor two months ago that you’d support trying to re-up this embargo and “the nuclear deal doesn’t exist today,” so we would need more leverage going back into it.

Right now, the Trump administration is hinting that they want to re-up the arms embargo with this controversial unilateral snapback mechanism. Russia has said that it’s a non-starter, Iran has said that this will cause the deal to “die forever,” and the Europeans don’t seem very thrilled with it.

Do you think this is the path to go down to restore the embargo, and if so, how much political capital should we be willing to spend on it?

The JCPOA [nuclear deal] does not exist any longer. We violated the terms of the agreement, and thus compliance with it by other parties is now voluntary. It’s ridiculous for the administration to suggest that it can pick and choose the parts of the JCPOA that it wants to observe and enforce.

That’s a wonderful way to approach an international agreement: “I will not comply with the portions that my country is subject to, but I expect you to the portions that your country is subject to.”

I believe that the arms embargo is important and it needs to stay in place, and I think the Trump administration has put us in an awful position, because it is harder than ever to reimpose the arms embargo outside of the JCPOA.

I don’t have a lot of creative advice for the administration, other than get back inside the JCPOA, because if you’re inside the JCPOA, it makes an arms embargo much easier to reinstate.

They just vetoed the war powers resolution [related to Iran], which, if I’m correct, is the second time both houses of Congress have ever passed one. The first one was the Yemen war, which you were very much a part of. I’m curious why you chose Yemen as the test case for taking back war powers for Congress from the executive.

Obviously, Yemen and Iran are very different. We were and, to an extent, still are, actively engaged in fighting in Yemen. There’s a partial ceasefire today, but during most of the last five years, the United States has been actively involved in a war inside Yemen without authorization from Congress.

The Iranian war powers resolution is a little different, because we are not actively engaged in active hostilities with Iran. That war powers resolution was, frankly, more forward-looking to make sure that we didn’t fall into an unauthorized war with Iran.

But in Yemen, there were people dying every day due to U.S. planes and U.S. bombs.

It was a war that was making the United States less safe, every single day. Al Qaeda and ISIS were growing their power every day inside Yemen. Yemenis were being radicalized against the United States. The humanitarian catastrophe was being looked upon globally as the responsibility of the United States. It was cratering our reputation internationally.

It was a disaster on all fronts. I felt it was imperative that we pull the United States out of it. I still feel that way.

I’m glad that Congress passed the war powers resolution, and I’m sorry that the president still sees fit to blindly follow the Saudis into a war that may be in the Saudis’ best interest but is certainly not in ours.

We’re going to jump all the way across the world [now]. In Venezuela last week, we saw this very bizarre armed clash—it’s unclear exactly what happened, but apparently there were Americans involved.

You told the Trump administration that “[e]ither the U.S. government was unaware of these planned operations, or was aware and allowed them to proceed. Both possibilities are problematic.”

What do you think we could be doing better in terms of our Venezuela policy, both in terms of the incident that just happened and our more general stance towards [rival claimants to the Venezuelan presidency] Guaidó and Maduro?

Our Venezuela policy has been an absolute disaster. All it’s done has made Maduro stronger. It’s built on fantasy, and it needs to be based on reality.

What we did was play all of our cards right at the initial moment, which is generally Trump’s overall strategy in foreign policy. There’s no nuance. There’s no strategy. There’s no long-term play.

We should have built a regional and international coalition to ratchet up pressure on Maduro, and give him a way out. Instead, we immediately recognized Guaidó.

We put perhaps the worst possible person in place as our envoy—a capable diplomat, but somebody who is ready-made to be cast as an American imperialist by the Venezuelan regime.

And ultimately, we came off looking powerless, weak, and feckless, because we backed Guaidó and we couldn’t do anything about it.

I think it’s really hard to restart at this point. I’ve suggested imposing an aid-for-food program, in which we—I’m sorry, an oil-for-aid program—in which we relax some of our sanctions policy in exchange for any revenues going directly to aid the Venezuelan people.

I think that our totally dysfunctional relationship with Russia and China greatly hamstrings our ability to try to pressure the Venezuelan regime. The next administration’s going to have to find a way to work with Russia and China on Venezuela policy.

Having no diplomatic relationship with Cuba also hurts.

The Trump administration is in a position where they can’t win in Venezuela, and the next administration is going to essentially have to restart our Venezuela policy from scratch.

I don’t know what happened last week. I trust that the American government wasn’t involved. But if we didn’t know that this operation was being planned, that shows you how disconnected from reality we are inside the country.

We’re going to get another administration in either less than a year, or in four years. What’s your advice to them to undo the damage that’s been incurred?

The first thing Joe Biden’s going to have to do is convince hundreds of capable diplomats who fled the Trump administration to come back. We simply don’t have the personnel right now to represent the United States abroad. We’re going to have to restock our diplomatic corps.

Second, a Democratic administration is going to have to recognize that we are [unintelligible] in terms of where our resources are. We’re spending $13 billion on global public health today compared to $740 billion on military operations. That makes no sense.

We’re going to have to change the way that we spend our money.

And we’re going to have to do some hard work to prove to the world that the Trump administration’s wholesale withdrawal from global institutions was an anomaly.

There’s just not as much room as there used to be at the table for the United States, because China has taken up so much of it.

We’re going to have to do some hard work to rejoin international forums and convince countries to join us, rather than the Chinese, who have gradually stepped into the vacuum we’ve created.

Question: Could Sewage Systems Help Track the Coronavirus? A revolutionary idea. by Ethen Kim Lieser

In hoping to add another weapon to keep close track of future coronavirus outbreaks, scientists are eyeing a new strategy that involves monitoring sewage systems.

Researchers from MIT’s wastewater analytics spinout Biobot, Harvard University, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have started a venture that will look for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in fecal matter in sewage systems.

“We are establishing protocols to test sewage for SARS-CoV-2. If successful, this data will give communities a dynamic map of the virus as it spreads to new places,” Biobot says on its website.

The site adds: “We analyze viruses, bacteria and chemical metabolites that are excreted in urine and stool and collected in sewers. This information is a readout of our health and wellbeing as a community. We map this data, empowering communities to tackle public health proactively.”

Other countries like China and France have already jumped on board in utilizing this newfound method to gain keen insights into where the next potential outbreak could occur.

Last month, researchers from China discovered that SARS-CoV-2 could be found alive in fecal matter, meaning it is indeed possible to transmit the contagion through sewage systems. The team published its findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In Paris, researchers were able to sample sewage across major parts of the city, and they detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that corresponded to outbreaks in the region.

Researchers said this particular study was the first to prove that this technique could, in fact, detect a sharp rise in COVID-19-positive concentrations in sewage before confirmed cases exploded in clinics. The team posted the study on medRxiv.

The diverse team from Biobot, Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital is made up of biologists, epidemiologists, data scientists, urban planners and engineers.

Armed with such knowledge in different fields, the data garnered from the sewage systems will be used to assist with measuring the scope of the outbreak and impact on hospital capacity, providing decision support for officials, tracking the effectiveness of outbreak-curbing measures and providing early warning for the reemergence of the virus.

Although all of the work is done pro bono, Biobot is asking interested communities to cover the costs of the sampling kit, along with shipping, which comes to about $120.