As lawmakers consider how to prevent future violence in the vein of January’s attack on the US Capitol, the debate has largely turned on one point: whether the US should create a new criminal law penalizing acts of domestic terrorism.

There are existing federal laws that criminalize domestic terrorism. The Patriot Act, which was enacted in the wake of 9/11, defined domestic terrorism as criminal acts that are “dangerous to human life” and are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” or “to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” Experts say that the storming of the Capitol fits that definition.

But no existing laws make domestic terrorism a “chargeable offense on its own” with attached criminal penalties, as the Congressional Research Service recently noted. It can, however, be an element of other federal crimes, such as assault and firearms offenses, and result in an enhanced sentence.

Some have argued that’s not enough to effectively prosecute domestic terrorism. Richard Zabel, a former deputy US attorney overseeing terrorism prosecutions in New York, wrote in the Washington Post that current law “limits our societal condemnation of the defendants and their dangerous ideologies.” The threat of domestic terrorism — which was not prioritized by former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly refused to denounce white nationalists and told those who stormed the Capitol, “We love you” — would be taken more seriously if it were easier for prosecutors to charge people as domestic terrorists, Zabel and others have argued.

But civil rights groups, including the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, are raising concerns that the harms of enacting those legal authorities outweigh the benefits: They argue it would enable law enforcement to target political dissidents, and those in marginalized communities who are frequently the victims of domestic terrorism, in violation of their constitutional rights.

“Such a law is not needed given the broad reach of existing criminal statutes,” Mara Rudman, executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement. “It will not solve the problem of domestic extremism and is likely to lead to unintended harms. … As lawmakers explore options for cracking down on these lawless and hateful acts, they should take care to ensure that the solutions do not create new risks for the communities they are trying to protect.”

At this point, the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act — which passed the House with a bipartisan, two-thirds voice vote last September and was reintroduced this year — is the most viable proposal to improve the federal government’s response to domestic terrorism currently being considered in Congress. Rather than creating new legal authorities to prosecute domestic terrorism, it would instead aim to better employ existing tools, ensure that the issue is being prioritized at the agency level, and improve law enforcement accountability.

“The intent here is the prevention of terrorism, and the aspect of prosecution is left to current statutes,” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), the lead sponsor of the legislation in the House, told Vox.

Law enforcement has a history of targeting marginalized communities

New legal authorities to prosecute domestic terrorism would endanger racial or ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ community, who have been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and have also been most likely to be targeted in terrorist attacks because of their identity, according to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“History is replete with examples of such laws being weaponized and used against vulnerable citizens, especially Black Americans, and against individuals who criticize the government,” Rudman said.

That history goes back to at least the era of J. Edgar Hoover, who targeted “Black Moses” Marcus Garvey in 1919 because of his alleged association with “radical elements” that were “agitating the Negro movement.”

But even in recent history, the FBI’s counterterrorism division identified “black identity extremists” — a category that emerged in a leaked 2017 agency report and for which terrorism experts see no legitimate basis — as a growing threat. The report argued that opposition to racially-motivated police brutality and inequities in the criminal justice system could lead such a group of people to commit premeditated violence against law enforcement. It was dated just nine days before white supremacists held the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, where James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring another 19.

Despite the growing threat of white supremacist violence, the FBI prioritized investigations of “black identity extremists” under an intelligence collection operation it called “Iron Fist,” and used its most sophisticated surveillance aircraft to monitor Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore in 2018 and again in Washington, DC, last June.

If the US were to enact a new criminal statute to prosecute domestic terrorism, there is a “tremendous amount of danger that you’re going to see people suddenly being charged with terrorism at the next Black Lives Matter protests,” Katrina Mulligan, the Center for American Progress’s acting vice president of national security and international policy, said.

Law enforcement agencies have also targeted faith communities in violation of their religious liberties. In 2006, for example, the FBI monitored and infiltrated a Muslim community in Orange County, California, with the aim of gathering information on hundreds of people, including names, telephone numbers, emails, political and religious views, and travel plans, focusing particularly on people who were devout. The agency never brought terrorism charges or obtained criminal convictions against community members and was accused of unlawfully targeting people based on their religious beliefs, breaching their First Amendment rights.

The federal government can combat domestic terrorism using existing legal authorities

Rather than creating a new criminal law for domestic terrorism, law enforcement could put more resources toward using existing legal authorities to prevent terrorist attacks and prosecute those responsible.

Law enforcement has been operating in a post-9/11 paradigm where “radical Islamic terrorism” was considered the biggest threat and demanded the most resources. After the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Trump ignored his advisers’ pleas to reevaluate his administration’s response to the domestic terrorism — and was reluctant to even use the phrase “domestic terrorism” to describe the threats the US was facing. He later redirected resources away from combating domestic terrorism and toward addressing “radical Islamic terrorism” instead.

As a result, less than a quarter of the FBI’s counterterrorism field agents were investigating domestic plots in 2019. By October 2020, DHS had identified white supremacists as the deadliest terror threat facing the country.

With the Biden administration receptive to prioritizing the threat posed by right-wing extremists, law enforcement agencies are no longer fighting an uphill battle. They can fully implement existing criminal laws and financial tools to combat domestic terrorism, make prosecuting hate crimes a higher priority for law enforcement and national security officials, and improve research, data collection, and reporting.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which has been introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and endorsed by the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League among other groups, would help advance those goals.

It would create new offices focused on domestic terrorism within the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI — agencies where efforts to cooperate on prosecuting domestic terrorism have fallen short in the past. It would provide training and resources to state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to identify, prevent, and investigate acts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy, as well as establish an interagency task force to address white supremacist infiltration of the military and federal law enforcement.

The bill would also require law enforcement agencies to jointly report on the state of domestic terrorism threats twice a year to Congress, which will inform how they can focus their limited resources on the most pressing threats facing the US.

“I think the transparency should result in better outcomes,” Rep. Schneider said.

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If the first meeting between the Biden administration and Chinese officials last week underscored anything, it’s that the US and China are unlikely to be friendly in the years to come.

The two sides’ views of how the world should run are diametrically opposed — and competition more than cooperation will guide how Washington and Beijing interact for a long time.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken told his Chinese counterparts at the meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, that the Biden administration wouldn’t accept an international system that runs on Beijing’s concept of power, which he described as “a world in which might makes right and winners take all.” That, the top American diplomat said, “would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”

But Yang Jiechi, China’s top foreign affairs official, rejected that China should abide by the US-backed “rules-based international order” Blinken advocated for, which Yang noted is also “advocated by a small number of countries.” Instead, Yang asserted it was “important for all of us to come together to build a new type of international relations, ensuring fairness, justice, and mutual respect.”

The yawning gap between the two sides makes it clear: “This is the battle for the international system,” Elizabeth Economy, an expert on China at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, told me. “The challenge,” she added, is “fundamental.”

Which is why, even though discord between the two countries is higher now than it’s been in decades, most experts I spoke to said the Biden administration shouldn’t try to improve relations with China. Washington should instead push Beijing hard on issues such as human rights, military aggression, economic coercion, and much more. Anything less, experts said, would implicitly invite China to run roughshod over the world.

Progress can still be made despite the tensions. Where interests align — on climate change, North Korea, Afghanistan, and other issues — both sides can find common ground. But the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper told me cooperation for cooperation’s sake shouldn’t be the desired outcome. “The goal should be a results-oriented relationship,” he said. “What’s the point of discussion if we’re not actually going to resolve any of the problems?”

Experts said this isn’t quite a new Cold War, though it may feel like it. That’s because the real sticking points are about trade, technology, and the rules of cyberspace rather than the threat of nuclear annihilation.

This is a superpower rivalry for a new era — and it’s likely going to get worse before it gets better.

“The relationship has deteriorated to the worst point that I’ve seen in the last two decades,” said Economy. While ties haven’t reached rock bottom, “we’ve got conflict in pretty much every single policy area.”

Engagement with China didn’t work. Biden is pursuing a course correction.

Engagement with China, meaning consistent and significant dialogue on areas of mutual interest, defined Washington-Beijing relations since the Nixon era. There was bipartisan agreement on that in the US, and recent presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both approached Beijing in this way.

Both wanted China to become a “responsible stakeholder.” That’s a wonderfully wonky Washington term that mostly means they hoped Beijing would come to abide by the global rules of the game on everything from trade to military affairs to international relations, even as the country gained immense power.

Instead of bullying or threatening China to force it to stop doing things like cheating on international trade rules, stealing other countries’ intellectual property, and grievously violating human rights at home (among other things), the strategy was to develop close economic ties with China and encourage it to become more integrated into the world economy. The hope was that would lead Beijing to start acting more responsibly on its own because it would be in its self-interest to do so.

That didn’t happen, though. Instead, China under President Xi Jinping became more authoritarian internally and far more aggressive on the world stage.

Among many acts, China has forcibly placed roughly 2 million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps, stripped Hong Kong of its democracy, and turned Taiwan into a global flashpoint that could erupt into a much larger conflict.

And its aggressive behavior toward the US and its interests continues. Beijing has stolen US technological and personnel secrets for its own advantage, antagonized US allies in the South China Sea, killed or imprisoned more than a dozen American informants, and taken millions of US jobs over the past two decades. Most recently, China reportedly hacked America’s payroll agency.

The Trump administration, then, felt it was time for the US to correct course. “What do the American people have to show now, 50 years on from engagement with China?” Trump’s then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked a crowd at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum last month. “The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”

Trump’s team confronted China mostly via a trade war, aiming to hurt Beijing’s economy by displacing it from the center of global supply chains and barring it from exporting some of its technology to the US and partner nations.

That approach partially worked, in that some jobs in China moved elsewhere, Beijing suffered an economic slowdown, and certain allies were made more skeptical of Chinese technologies companies like Huawei. Trump’s actions also socialized the idea in Washington that competition with China was a worthwhile endeavor, even if his methods didn’t receive bipartisan support.

But most experts warned that the administration’s unilateral plan of attack, without significant buy-in from other countries, wouldn’t be enough to compel Beijing to alter its behavior. They were right.

As Trump left office, China, for example, proceeded to imprison Uyghurs and take more control of Hong Kong while doing little to change its trading practices with the US. All that bluster, then, didn’t accomplish Trump’s goal of fundamentally changing the way Beijing acted in the world.

Enter the Biden administration.

Biden’s China strategy is competitive by nature

Biden has been clear on the need to counter China. “American leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States,” he said during a February speech.

“We’ll confront China’s economic abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance. But we are ready to work with Beijing when it’s in America’s interest to do so,” he continued.

Pushing Beijing to protect human rights and not use force or coercion to achieve its goals, while leaving the door to cooperate on areas of mutual interest, is the Biden administration’s China game plan.

“Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be,” Blinken said during a March 3 foreign policy address.

To do that, the Biden administration has two main plays.

First, they hope to enlist allies and partners in an international effort to compel Beijing to change its ways. Biden firmly believes the US will only get the upper hand on China by proving it has a coalition of friends willing to thwart Beijing’s most troublesome policies in unison.

Think of it like a geopolitical gang-up: the US and its crew versus a mostly lonely China. “We need to rally the democratic world together more than ever,” a former Biden staffer told me last year. “It’ll be a democratic alliance to save the world.”

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Biden’s meeting earlier this month with “the Quad” — a coalition of anti-China nations featuring India, Australia, and Japan — is case in point. While they don’t openly say the express aim of the group is to counter Beijing’s actions in the Indo-Pacific, most experts say that is very clearly the point of the group.

Second, the Biden administration wants to revitalize America at home. That means, among other things, improving the nation’s democracy, pursuing racial equity, becoming more competitive economically and technologically, and rebuilding trust in the US as the world’s leader.

This is an important part of the China plan, experts say. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, DC. “It’s a whole issue of rejuvenating America.”

The thinking, most experts and US officials note, is that a stronger America working in lockstep with allies will give it more leverage to challenge China’s aggressions and influence when working with Beijing on shared concerns.

The problem with this competitive approach, some assert, is that it limits the opportunities for the US and China to build trust with one another. Which means the potential for conflict — even a military skirmish over Taiwan or in the South China Sea — remains very real.

Another concern is that treating China like an enemy could further fuel anti-Asian sentiment and even hate crimes, which are already on the rise in the US.

“When America China-bashes, then Chinese get bashed, and so do those who look Chinese,” Russell Jeung, a history professor at San Francisco State University who helped found Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy group focused on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, told the Washington Post last week. “American foreign policy in Asia is American domestic policy for Asians.”

Biden has tried to address this, including by ordering the federal government not to use the kind of racist language Trump often used when discussing the coronavirus, and has called the recent rise in “vicious hate crimes” against Asian Americans “un-American.”

But some experts worry that despite the change in rhetoric, the administration’s framing of China as an adversary still risks engendering anti-Chinese and anti-Asian prejudice.

“Biden and Trump have very different tones on China,” said Van Jackson, a former Obama Pentagon official for Asia. “[National Security Adviser] Jake Sullivan hasn’t and isn’t going to say ‘kung flu’ racist bullshit, for example. But beyond the more restrained rhetoric, the only difference seems to be a desire to leverage allies and multilateralism to take on China.”

“We can oppose and mitigate undesirable Chinese conduct in foreign policy without a narrative of strategic competition or ideological rivalry,” he continued.

Yet most experts I spoke to still believe it’s critical that the US confront China. “I don’t see seeking a better relationship as a goal in and of itself,” said CSIS’s Glaser. “If the Chinese see that, they will take advantage of it and see the US as weak.”

It seems that the Biden administration agrees. On Monday, for example, the US alongside its allies announced sanctions on two Chinese officials for “serious human rights abuses” against the Uyghurs.

“The administration has identified its overall orientation, and they’re very comfortable with it,” said Hoover’s Economy.

North Korea tested its first missiles since President Joe Biden took office, launching two short-range projectiles last weekend off the country’s west coast and into the adjoining Yellow Sea.

But you won’t find the Biden administration threatening “fire and fury” any time soon. In fact, two senior US officials waved off suggestions that the test was a big deal or that it was meant as a direct challenge to the new US president.

“We’ve been in administrations where the North Koreans have really tested with provocative actions: nuclear tests, long-range systems,” one of the officials told journalists about two hours after the Washington Post first reported on the launches. “I would say, generally speaking, what we saw this weekend does not fall in that category.”

Biden himself told reporters on Tuesday that “according to the Defense Department, it’s business as usual. There’s no new wrinkle in what [North Korea] did.” Asked if the test would affect any diplomatic efforts, the president just laughed and walked away.

The administration’s collective shrug is the right response, most experts told me. “It seems to me that these latest launches were probably not actually intended as a challenge to the Biden administration at all,” said Markus Garlauskas, the US national intelligence officer for North Korea from 2014 to 2020.

There are good reasons why. Former President Donald Trump implicitly made a deal with North Korea while he was in office: Test anything you want as long as it’s not an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) or a nuclear weapon that could threaten America. Short of that, go nuts.

That stance wasn’t a wise one, experts told me at the time, as it essentially allowed Pyongyang to steadily improve its arsenal with no repercussions. But experts did note that Trump’s dictum helped lower tensions by not turning every missile launch into a crisis requiring a forceful American response.

It looks as though Pyongyang learned from its experience with Trump and is still abiding by that general deal. North Korea launched what appear to be short-range cruise missiles that don’t violate UN Security Council resolutions on the country’s weaponry. In other words, the North Korean regime had every right to try out its missiles and plunge them into the sea.

North Korea didn’t even announce the test as it usually does, signaling even Pyongyang felt it was all routine. Some experts, and even Biden administration officials, say the launches were part of “normal military activity” by North Korean forces.

Pyongyang’s soldiers often participate in military exercises before they assist with the country’s spring planting, the period when all citizens must grow rice and other crops to fulfill the country’s agricultural needs.

Sure, it’s never nice when North Korea tests weapons — it can for sure feel scary, especially if you live within striking distance of said weapons — but this launch shouldn’t worry Biden, US allies, or the global public. “This is such a nothing story,” said Jenny Town, director of the Stimson’s Center 38 North program, which tracks North Korea’s political and military developments.

How we’ll know when North Korea wants to send a message

It’s important to note that North Korea has stepped up its belligerence in recent days.

Blasting a joint US-South Korea military training exercise that took place this month, Kim Yo Jong — the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — released a statement saying, “We take this opportunity to warn the new US administration trying hard to give off a powder smell in our land … if it wants to sleep in peace for the coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

And after the Biden administration repeatedly said it sought the “denuclearization of North Korea” — implying only Pyongyang would have to make major nuclear concessions while the US would still maintain its nuclear defense of South Korea — the regime clapped back.

“What has been heard from the US since the emergence of the new regime is only lunatic theory of ‘threat from North Korea’ and groundless rhetoric about ‘complete denuclearization,’” said Choe Son Hui, the first vice minister of foreign affairs. All US attempts to reach out to North Korea for dialogue, which Biden’s team has tried unsuccessfully to do, were a “cheap trick,” she added.

That comment, which seemed to close the door (at least rhetorically) to direct US-North Korea diplomacy, “was much more of a direct challenge” to the administration than last weekend’s missile test, said Garlauskas, now at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.

These comments and the missile test will certainly feature in the administration’s North Korea review, which Biden officials say will conclude soon. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will discuss the outcome of that review next week with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.

Whatever the result, experts say a clear challenge to Biden would be an ICBM or nuclear bomb test, effectively crossing the red line Trump set. The ICBM launch would be even more provocative if it was the new model displayed during a parade last October.

It’s not only the biggest ICBM ever seen in North Korea, but also the largest road-mobile missile with its own truck-based launcher in the world. Which means that, in case of a war, North Korea’s military could roll one of these missiles out of underground bunkers, place it somewhere on land, and shoot it at the United States.

Furthermore, experts suspect its bigger size allows the weapon to hold multiple nuclear bombs, roughly three or four (along with decoys, perhaps), which could overwhelm US missile defenses. The US has just 44 ground-based interceptors (missiles) in Alaska and California to shoot weapons out of the sky, using four interceptors to destroy each individual warhead.

Until that ICBM flies through the air or another similarly provocative test happens, experts say, Biden should respond with a dismissive chuckle.

“On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being a test of a new intercontinental ballistic missile and one is Kim farting in our general direction, this is a two,” Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Middle Institute of International Studies, told CNN on Tuesday.

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A massive container ship stuck sideways in Egypt’s Suez Canal has been blocking one of the world’s busiest waterways for over 24 hours, disrupting global trade and launching a tidal wave of memes on social media.

On Tuesday morning local time, the Ever Given, a 1,312-foot-long container ship capable of carrying more than 220,000 tons, was traveling from China to the Netherlands through the canal when Egyptian authorities say a dust storm brought low visibility and heavy winds that caused the ship to run aground.

With the bow of the ship touching the eastern wall of the canal and the stern against the western wall, the vessel completely blocked the waterway, leaving dozens of smaller ships stranded for hours on both sides.

Ever Given’s technical manager Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM) said in a statement that all the ship’s crew members are “safe and accounted for” and that “There have been no reports of injuries, pollution or cargo damage.”

Shipping traffic also appears to be moving slowly again; the New York Times reports that the canal authority is diverting ships through an older section of the canal to help ease the backup.

But real-time satellite imagery from the online shipping tracker Vessel Finder showed the Ever Given still lodged firmly in the narrow channel as of late Wednesday.

Tania Aubid began her hunger strike on Valentine’s Day.

“Valentine’s Day is about love and having that love for your partner — but for me to have the love, I need to start from the ground up, which is Mother Earth,” Aubid told me. Her hunger strike is in protest of the Line 3 oil pipeline project that is being built in Minnesota.

Aubid is Anishinaabe, a term that refers to a group of Native tribes found in parts of Canada and the US, and comes from what she describes as “a little village called East Lake, Minnesota.” When I spoke to her, her hunger strike was on day 33. She’s surviving on “pretty much anything that’s liquid water,” including “nourishment tea from the Seneca nation, which heard about my hunger strike and sent some tea so I can drink,” Aubid said.

Aubid is one of the many Indigenous and climate activists protesting to try to convince President Joe Biden to cancel the Line 3 pipeline project, the way he canceled the Keystone XL with an executive order back in January.

The fight over the roughly 340-mile Line 3 pipeline expansion project, which when completed will transport 1 million barrels of tar sands oil per day from Alberta, Canada, across much of northern Minnesota to Superior, Wisconsin, has been heating up since December, when Enbridge, the Canadian multinational energy transportation company responsible for the project, began construction on the new portion of the pipeline.

Enbridge says the project will create thousands of jobs and pump billions of dollars into Minnesota’s economy. The company also said via email that it has done everything required under the law to receive approval for the pipeline and ensure it operates safely.

But Indigenous groups and climate activists say Line 3 poses a significant risk of oil spills that could destroy precious water resources, wetlands, and ancestral lands. Line 3 will have the equivalent climate impact of bringing 50 new coal plants online, according to one report.

At this point, the Line 3 project, which is actually a rerouting of an existing pipeline, would see the original pipeline abandoned and a more than 300-mile section laid through new Minnesota land, is about 50 percent complete. Enbridge will begin what it says is a planned pause on construction for two months beginning April 1.

In the meantime, there are both state and federal lawsuits challenging Enbridge’s permits, but activists are holding out hope that Biden will cancel the pipeline altogether.

Here’s what the Line 3 project would mean for the region, why Indigenous groups and climate activists are opposed to it, and what if anything can stop it from becoming operational later this year.

Line 3, briefly explained

First built in the 1960s, the current Line 3 crude oil pipeline stretches more than 1,000 miles from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, through Minnesota, and on to Superior, Wisconsin, where it ends.

In 2014, citing corroded pipes and the demand for more oil, Enbridge began the designing and permitting process to reroute Line 3 farther south across more than 330 miles of northern Minnesota. The expansion would add a new pipeline corridor and double the amount of oil transported through the pipeline to 1 million barrels per day. The old pipeline has been operating at half capacity.

Enbridge says it has done the necessary work and received the necessary permits for the Line 3 replacement and that modifications have been made to minimize the pipeline’s environmental impact.

In an email to Vox, Enbridge spokesperson Juli Kellner said Line 3’s replacement is “the most studied pipeline project in Minnesota history [and] has been the subject of more than six years of science-based review by regulatory and permitting bodies.”

Kellner said the process included “more than 70 public hearings, a 13,500-page Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), four separate reviews by independent administrative law judges, and 320 route modifications in response to stakeholder input and reviews and approvals.”

Enbridge claims that, over two years, Line 3 will create 4,200 jobs in Minnesota, half of which will be for local union workers, and that it will provide a $2 billion jolt to the Minnesota economy during project design and construction. But according to the Star Tribune, so far only 33 percent of workers on Line 3 are from Minnesota.

Enbridge also argues that the Line 3 expansion is needed to safely deliver tar sands oil and prevent leaks, because otherwise that oil would travel by train.

“Line 3 is not like the Keystone XL pipeline. It already exists,” Enbridge’s Senior VP Mike Fernandez told CNN. But on this point, Fernandez is mistaken. The Keystone XL pipeline was also an extension of existing pipeline infrastructure, so Line 3 is in fact very much like Keystone XL.

And activists are arguing Biden should cancel Line 3, just as he canceled Keystone XL.

Concerns about oil spills, land impacts, and climate change are driving Indigenous-led opposition to Line 3

Opposition to Line 3’s new route stems from the risk of oil spills, disruption to the land, and its contribution to climate change.

Line 3 will deliver oil from Alberta’s tar sands — a thick, dense substance called bitumen — which is more expensive, more difficult, and even worse for the environment to extract than other forms of oil.

And if the oil spills, activists worry Enbridge won’t have the ability to clean it up. A 2016 report found that tar sands oil is much more difficult to clean up than non-tar sands oil.

Most of Alberta’s tar sands oil is trapped beneath the boreal forest, which means trees must be cleared for companies like Enbridge to get access to the oil. Once the forests are cleared, a lot of the tar sands oil requires in situ mining, in which hot steam is pumped underground to help liquefy the tar sands oil so it’s ready for extraction.

Once pulled from the ground, the trouble doesn’t end there: Throughout its lifetime, a gallon of gasoline made from tar sands oil emits 15 percent more carbon dioxide than one made from conventional oil, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

“It’s the spills — which always happen with pipelines. It’s the disruption itself of just the pipeline going into 800 wetlands, 200 bodies of water. Then there’s the climate change piece, emissions of this 50 coal plants, absolute insanity,” attorney Tara Houska of Couchiching First Nation, founder of the advocacy organization Giniw Collective, told CNN in a March 18 interview about the Line 3 project.

Concerns about oil spills are understandable. In 1991, the original Line 3 pipeline leaked 1.7 million gallons of crude oil into the nearby Prairie River in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Luckily, it was the dead of winter and the river was covered by thick ice, which prevented the oil from entering and polluting the water used by millions of people downstream on the Mississippi River.

Activists say the 1991 spill is proof oil pipelines are too dangerous in Minnesota, but concerns about oil pipelines in the region don’t stop there.

In 2010, there was the Kalamazoo River Oil Spill in Michigan — the second-biggest inland oil spill in US history. Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline ruptured, spilling more than 1 million gallons of crude oil into Talmadge Creek, which spread to the Kalamazoo River.

It took Enbridge 17 hours to notice the spill, raising concerns about whether the company could properly monitor its pipelines for leaks. Cleanup for the spill took years and ultimately cost Enbridge $1.2 billion.

Line 3 activists are concerned that the same or worse could happen along the more than 300 miles of proposed pipeline that would extend across bodies of water, wetlands, and wild rice beds in northern Minnesota.

Water is of particular concern to the Anishinaabe women who see themselves as responsible for protecting it.

“We consider water not a resource — not something to be bought or sold, but a living, thinking, sentient relative and the portal through which everything comes to life,” Simone Senogles, the Food Sovereignty Program coordinator at Indigenous Environmental Network, told me. For some, Senogles admits, “it can sound ‘New Age-y,’ but it’s not. It’s just a worldview that Anishinaabe have.”

“It’s a way that has allowed us to live in this place forever and not to have done harm the way colonizers have done,” Senogles said. “They’ve only been here 500 years and they’ve already screwed it up.”

The Line 3 extension would also cross through the Leech Lake and Fond Du Lac reservations — land where, according to the terms of an 1855 treaty, Ojibwe tribes have the right to gather, hunt, and fish. For this reason, Anishinaabe activists say the pipeline violates the terms of the treaty.

“What is spelled out in the treaty — the pipeline could pollute food sources, water sources, everything spelled out in the treaty what we as Anishinaabe people can do — hunt, fish, gather food, medicine. Line 3 goes against what we do spiritually as a people,” Aubid told me.

In her email, Enbridge’s Kellner said the company “has demonstrated ongoing respect for tribal sovereignty.” Citing negotiations with tribal leadership that led to routes that avoided reservations, Kellner said that “Both Leech Lake and Fond du Lac have spoken and written repeatedly in support of project permits.”

When asked about the tribes who agreed to Line 3’s expansion, Aubid says when faced with the decision, “the [tribal] leadership pretty much had a Sophie’s Choice type of deal: either this or that.”

Aubid also blamed some of the Native support for the pipeline on lateral violence, in which members of a marginalized group act in counterproductive ways that end up harming their community. “They try to speak for all Native communities which they do not have the right to do,” Aubid said of the members who approved Line 3.

But Aubid also stressed that when faced with the fact that there are already pipelines running through Minnesota reservations, it’s a case of “damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”

Beyond concerns about the land and water resources, a January 2020 report by 13 environmental groups found the proposed reroute of Line 3 would reverse any gains Minnesota has made in its fight against climate change.

The report estimated that the Line 3 expansion and the resultant doubling of its capacity would have the same impact on CO2 emissions as adding 50 new coal plants or 38 million additional gasoline vehicles to the road.

And each year the pipeline operates, it will release 193 million tons of harmful greenhouse gases — from oil extraction to burning — which is more than Minnesota released in all of 2016, according to the report.

Legal challenges could halt construction. So could President Biden.

Line 3 is currently facing legal challenges at both the state and federal level.

“There are very important concerns that have not been appropriately addressed by the state or the federal government — climate, issues concerning tribes and tribal citizens’ well-being, and water quality,” said Moneen Nasmith, staff attorney at Earth Justice, a nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.

Nasmith has been working on Line 3 litigation for several years and has worked closely with the Red Lake and White Earth tribes as well as Honor the Earth, a Native-led nonprofit environmental justice organization, and other local groups.

On March 23, oral arguments began in the first of two Minnesota state lawsuits. In that suit, the Minnesota Department of Commerce is joined by the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians, White Earth Band of Ojibwe, Honor the Earth, the Sierra Club, and other organizations in suing the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. The lawsuit claims that oil demand does not justify the extension of Line 3 and that the oil spill analysis was improperly done.

Minnesota Public Utilities Commission executive secretary Will Seuffert said via email that the commission “extensively considered the impacts of climate change in making its decision, in particular Chapter 5 of the Environmental Impact Statement [which] addresses air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change issues.”

On the issue of tribal rights to the land, Seuffert said: “The Commission does recognize the Treaty of 1855. Several tribal nations participated in the proceedings, taking different and competing positions, and the Commission considered all of that input, and the Treaty of 1855, in making its decisions.”

Senogles, who attended the hearing, told me: “It was a pretty good hearing. The judges asked questions that gave me hope that they are understanding our argument and seeing what we’re trying to express.”

In the second state lawsuit, Friends of the Headwaters, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, the Sierra Club, and Honor the Earth argue that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, which has regulatory control, didn’t consider the long-term or climate impacts of the project.

Had they been properly considered, Nasmith told me, “there’d be no way for the project to proceed.”

At the federal level, the same five plaintiffs are challenging the Army Corps of Engineers for issuing the water permit for the project without doing a proper assessment of its environmental impact.

“If we were to win any of the cases, it would stop Line 3,” Nasmith said.

“We’ve had four administrative law reviews and we’ve gone through all this work with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Indian Affairs — it’s a little bit like the election, where we’ve gone through the entire process but people don’t want to accept that process,” Enbridge VP Fernandez said in a March 6 interview with PBS.

But those fighting against Line 3 aren’t convinced.

“There’s a lot of unjustified blind faith that this company that has a troubled track record, to say the least, will build and operate this pipeline in a way that is sufficiently protective of the waterways and wetlands that it’s crossing,” Nasmith said.

They’re not relying just on the lawsuits to stop the project, though. They’re calling on President Biden to stop the pipeline.

Legal experts told me the Biden administration could halt construction on Line 3 and make Enbridge apply for another permit that more fully considers the project’s potential impact on the environment, Indigenous rights to tribal lands, and climate change.

Back in August, when she was still president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Biden’s domestic climate czar Gina McCarthy tweeted her support for “Indigenous leaders and climate activists in urging @GovTimWalz to oppose Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline and protect Minnesotans’ health, water, and land.”

Now that she’s in the administration, though, it’s unclear whether McCarthy still supports opposing the pipeline. It’s also unclear what recently confirmed Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland — a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the first-ever Native American to be appointed to a Cabinet position — thinks about Line 3. Vox reached out to a representative from Haaland’s office for comment but did not receive a response as of time of publication.

The White House declined to comment on the record for this story. However, a spokesperson speaking on background told me that “President Biden has proposed transformative investments in infrastructure that will not only create millions of good union jobs but also help tackle the climate crisis.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration will evaluate infrastructure proposals based on our energy needs, their ability to achieve economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050, and their ability to create good-paying union jobs,” the spokesperson added.

But the pressure on the Biden administration to act to stop Line 3 is growing.

Resistance on the ground has grown with the warmer temperatures. There are now multiple protest camps along Line 3’s expanded route, with activists committed to doing everything they can to get Biden to revoke the federal permit. Some protesters have been arrested while putting their bodies in the line of construction or simply for being in the area.

For Senogles, the experience of being arrested while defending the land is one she knows firsthand. She told me she spent a night in jail back in December after attending a protest against Line 3 at the Palisades site, one of the biggest protest camps.

“There was a boy sitting in a tree who had been there for 10 or 11 days and they were coming to take him down and we were all gathered there trying to get in the way,” Senogles said. “They arrested us, flopped us around a little bit, made us sit outside with our hands behind our backs in below-zero weather.”

“While we were still standing there, they just came, got him down, and tore down the tree while we were still standing there — that’s how fast they work,” she said.

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For her part, Aubid is staked out about two football fields away from the Mississippi River, where she’s watching Enbridge to make sure they don’t start drilling. When asked what would cause her to stop her hunger strike, Aubid replied: “When they shut down Line 3.”

But while Aubid is determined to continue her protest, she’s not letting it get in the way of her participation in traditions.

“Right now, we’re in our maple sugar season time. We’re boiling down maple sap into maple syrup and maple sugar. Those are the things we do as Ojibwe people,” Aubid said. “Life goes on as we are fighting this pipeline up here.”

Correction, August 17: A previous version of this story misstated the amount of crude oil leaked in the original Line 3 pipeline spill and the Kalamazoo River spill. For Line 3 it was 1.7 million gallons; for Kalamazoo it was 1 million gallons.

North Korea’s second missile test in a week is increasing the pressure on President Joe Biden to respond, inching the nuclear-armed state further up the administration’s long list of global challenges to address.

Officials in the US, South Korea, and Japan announced that North Korea had launched two short-range ballistic missiles at around 7 am local time Thursday (Wednesday evening in America). The missiles flew nearly 40 miles high and traveled around 280 miles, landing harmlessly in the Sea of Japan, outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which is considered an extension of the country’s sovereignty out into the waters.

This test was far more provocative than North Korea’s test of two cruise missiles this past weekend. That launch did not violate UN Security Council resolutions, whereas Thursday’s test, which involved ballistic missiles, did. Further, the cruise missiles fired over the weekend plunged in the Yellow Sea to the west of the Korean Peninsula; the missiles on Thursday were fired eastward — in the direction of one of Washington’s regional friends.

Why is North Korea suddenly testing all these missiles?

Experts are split. One potential reason is that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to slowly ratchet up pressure on Biden and get his attention.

“North Korea usually begins its new military threats-cum-psychological warfare cycle through graduated escalation,” Sung-Yoon Lee, an expert on Pyongyang’s politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told me.

“The apparent start of the new cycle means Kim Jong Un, having determined that the heady days of summit pageantry with Donald Trump are over, needs to re-weaponize his weirdness,” he added.

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In other words, the North Korean leader wants the tests to bother Biden so much that the US engages in some kind of diplomacy with North Korea to stop the launches. Once at the negotiating table, Pyongyang would seek an end to US sanctions on the country before agreeing to dismantle (at least some parts of) its nuclear program, while Washington would push for the opposite — North Korea first verifiably dismantling at least some parts of its nuclear program before the US lifts any sanctions.

That broad standoff has plagued US-North Korean relations for decades, but it’s particularly irksome to Kim right now. The sanctions hurt his country’s economy, which the dictator has promised to improve, and are especially biting during the Covid-19 pandemic. His new round of testing, then, is a message to the White House: End the sanctions, or America’s relations with North Korea are about to get a lot more tense.

“With the United States hinting that it will seek to tighten the sanctions regime, North Korea will be looking to expand its arsenal by ramping up testing,” said Jean Lee, director of the Korea program at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington, DC.

The other potential explanation experts gave me for the recent tests has less to do with the US and more to do with simply improving North Korea’s military capabilities.

“These launches are not a cry for attention, nor are they a cry for help with North Korea’s broken economy. Such launches are a sign of North Korea’s clear determination to continue advancing its ballistic-missile programs as part of making good on the ambitious plans for North Korea’s weapons programs,” said Markus Garlauskas, the US national intelligence officer for North Korea from 2014 to 2020.

Getting stronger militarily, after all, was a promise Kim made to top North Korean officials and his people during a January meeting. “If these [launches] go unchecked by the international community, this is likely to lead to launches of bigger and more capable systems, including those capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads,” added Garlauskas, who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank in DC.

Whatever the reason, though, it’s important to note that Kim could have chosen to be even more aggressive than he has been.

North Korea’s tests are troubling, but it could have been much worse

North Korea has many more powerful weapons it could test, namely big new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), or even a nuclear device. Testing any of those would surely lead to a more forceful reaction by the Biden administration.

Experts say such a brazen move isn’t likely any time soon. Instead, Pyongyang has two goals in mind with these lower-level tests. First, the tests simply let Kim check to make sure the weapons actually work as intended. Second, avoiding testing the flashier weapons helps keep tensions from spiraling out of control even as they ratchet up. In effect, the tests are partly calibrated to get Biden’s attention but not draw his ire.

The question now is how Biden will react. Trump implicitly made a deal with North Korea while he was in office: Test anything you want as long as it’s not an ICBM or a nuclear weapon that could threaten America.

But some experts suspect Biden won’t be as forgiving. We may get a clue to his thinking on Thursday during a highly anticipated press conference, where reporters in the White House briefing will likely ask him his thoughts on the tests. If not, the administration says it’s in the final stages of its North Korea policy review, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan is expected to discuss its outcomes with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.

We’re nearing the start of the next stage in the decades-long saga between the US and North Korea. Pyongyang just wanted to make sure to get a word in before it begins and catch the new administration off guard.

“As Mike Tyson said, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,’” Fletcher’s Lee told me.

“In Guam, even the dead are dying,” Chamorro author and activist Julian Aguon writes in his new book The Properties of Perpetual Light.

Aguon, a human rights lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, has watched with anguish as his home island, along with the rest of the Marianas archipelago, has been environmentally degraded due to growing militarization. Known as Guåhan to its residents, Guam has been a US territory since 1898, and today, the Department of Defense occupies roughly 30 percent of its land — a share that’s only growing.

Most recently, the Pentagon decided to relocate roughly 5,000 Marines from Japan to Guam as part of a larger realignment of US military forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the ongoing construction of the newest US Marine base, Camp Blaz, is nearing completion, despite major opposition from the island’s local residents. Further aggravating Guam’s native Chamorro people, military officials last summer found human remains and cultural artifacts dating back to the island’s pre-colonial Latte period during the excavation of the land, as they seemingly broke ground on ancient villages.

Guam’s pristine northern coastline has also recently been impacted by the construction of a massive firing range complex, which is an extension of the Marine base. It not only sits atop numerous historical sites, but it’s also dangerously near the island’s primary source of drinking water and would gravely damage the island’s natural resources and biodiversity — including more than 1,000 acres of native limestone forest and species, such as Guam’s slender-toed gecko.

On top of this, and in concert with a pandemic that’s taken the lives of hundreds of native Pacific Islanders, Aguon’s book comes at a time when Indigenous Chamorro people face growing erasure. Many Americans still don’t know that people born on the island are US citizens — citizens who enlist in and die serving the military at a higher rate per capita than anyone in the country yet cannot vote in US elections. In fact, earlier this month, QAnon espouser Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Guam a “foreign country” that shouldn’t receive American tax dollars.

As such, Pacific Islander authors and their perspectives in literature are hard to come by, which Aguon hopes to change by inspiring future generations to challenge the dominant framework that centers white experiences and make their own art to take up space. While Aguon does not settle on one structure in The Properties of Perpetual Light — going from prose to poetry to political commentary — the common thread is grief, which he uses to talk about climate change; the colonial history and rampant US militarization of the Pacific Islands; and the generational trauma that’s been passed down for centuries. But he also finds power in hope.

“There’s so much beauty,” Aguon told Vox. “And as I say in the end [of the book], ‘A human being is here to be enjoyed, like a sunset or tangerine. We’re not oxen, we’re not here to endlessly plow the earth.’ We’re more than our suffering.”

As someone born and raised in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory just north of Guam, I talked to Aguon about home, his new book, and the need for more Pacific Islander representation in the literary world and beyond. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Rachel Ramirez

First, I want to talk about the title, The Properties of Perpetual Light. In the book, which at its core is about loss, you reference the prayer we say for the dead during rosaries in the islands: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord — and let perpetual light shine upon them.” Then later you write, “Perpetual Light is the Ancient Beauty.” Tell me more about what “perpetual light” means to you.

Julian Aguon

The whole book is really a process of interrogation, really interrogating the language that we use. The Catholic prayer for the dead — as I say in the introduction, I’ve recited those words thousands of times. But it is only in compiling this manuscript that I really reflected on their meaning. As kids on Guam, we’re always coming back from somebody’s rosary. It’s so common. We memorize these things, but we don’t necessarily really dive deep or interrogate the meaning of those words.

In the same way that the earth metals have different properties, what about their spiritual counterparts? I thought of hope and faith, but this idea of perpetual light has always spoken to me. We know from the Bible, the only thing to perceive light is love, and I was like, wow, that’s such a powerful idea. Our love brings things into being. To me, when we’re saying this prayer, we are sort of offering up the only thing we have, which is our love to light the way of the people we’ve lost, and this book has a lot of loss in it.

Rachel Ramirez

Being from the Mariana Islands myself, I know how rare it is to find a book written by a Chamorro author, or even a native Pacific Islander author, or even a book about the islands. Why was writing this book so significant to you as an Indigenous activist, lawyer, and author?

Julian Aguon

We need artists more than we believe we do, especially in hard times. 2020 was exceedingly difficult for so many of us. Here on Guam, the pain and trauma of living in the reality of a militarized colony really became very clear in an almost palpable way — you could feel it in the air that we breathe. For example, US military personnel last March came off of these ships, came into the community, infecting the community, violating numerous executive orders, local ordinances, running around — and I was just like wow, this is really symbolic of a larger thing that’s happening. All of these really deep, longstanding, entrenched inequalities were really laid bare for the whole world to see, and it really made us realize so much of what we think is an illusion.

I’ve been influenced by so many writers with different writing traditions. In the islands, we take so much information, but we don’t have enough of our own locally produced literature. I want this book to burn our illusion about certain things, and really dive deep into the pain, and to really explore, walk around, and fill the walls of the cave. As a community, I really feel like we were avoiding these really painful conversations. I want this book to blow all of that wide open.

Rachel Ramirez

Relatedly, I want to touch on invisibility. As a kid growing up on Saipan, I never saw our home islands as something largely unnoticed by the world, nor did I realize that not many people knew we were US citizens. It wasn’t until I moved to the mainland US that I really started to understand that there were misconceptions and a dearth of knowledge. Can you speak to this invisibility, particularly the indigeneity of Pacific Islanders who often don’t see themselves represented in literature?

Julian Aguon

With this book, in some ways, I was trying to cultivate in the reader a sense of respect for small things. What Arundhati Roy would call the “the whisper and scurry of small lives” — that’s partly what gets rendered invisible so often.

When I wrote the chapter “Yugu Means Yoke,” I had just lost my father from pancreatic cancer. My nuclear family was falling spectacularly apart. And I was just alone on a red dirt mountain, and I had to find my way in the world with so little guidance in that particular moment. In some ways, you could say I learned empathy from insects. I was just curious about these small lives. I was wondering if these snails could ever evade their predators. I was paying attention to how slowly they moved and really wanting them to move swiftly enough to save their own lives — and wanting the same thing for myself, even without knowing that. I was a young child growing up and would soon be struggling with being Indigenous and queer and questing or searching for oneself.

Diving into and understanding literature, I found that good books are lighthouses, that they light the way when we’re alone. I want this book to be that little lighthouse for the young readers who are also navigating really difficult terrain. Books are lighthouses, but they’re also mirrors in which our faces do or do not appear. I wanted young people from the Marianas or even the wider Micronesian islands to be able to read this book and see a piece of themselves in it, and also inspire them to write their own books or call out the art that’s just latent in them.

Rachel Ramirez

The way you used grief and trauma throughout the book as a theme to highlight issues that haunt native Pacific Islanders and the islands is profound. There’s your dad’s passing as you mentioned, but also human remains that were found during the military buildup excavation. Was this approach something that was intentional from the beginning before you started putting together the book?

Julian Aguon

I would actually be lying if I said that it was premeditated. The book sort of revealed itself to me while I was writing it because I didn’t really have an agenda or a plan. With all the noise of 2020 and isolation and suffering in every corner, I was just writing because I couldn’t not write. I was thinking about loss and processing it and I thought about how it all started with my first major loss, which is the loss of my father.

Most people use or handle grief in such a way that has an isolating effect. It cuts us off from other people. This book does exactly the opposite: It uses grief, but it tries to bring it into the heart of the village. It brings people together. I tried to use grief, in some ways, in an Islander way. Our funerals back home are deeply sad like everyone else’s, you know this, but they’re also oddly celebratory. They’re like parties. We’re celebrating the life that one has lived, and the only way to grieve the enormity of certain kinds of loss is to grieve it together. This book is an invitation to do that, and that’s the one aspect of it that made it quite special to me.

Rachel Ramirez

I’m really curious about how you didn’t settle with just one structure in the book. You used prose, poetry, political commentary, as the chapter changes. For me, it allowed room for processing and understanding what all that grief meant. In one chapter you talk about the time Guam made headlines because of the threat from North Korea, the next you talk about something personal about your father, then you get into a poem. What inspired you to write it that way?

Julian Aguon

A good book can be like a record or like a music album with different notes — and you’re hitting the listener in different places. They do range in form like prose and poetry, but they also range in occasions. There’s eulogies marking an actual death versus commencement speeches to young people who are about to step into the world as it actually is, not as they wish it to be. It’s almost like a kaleidoscope of life experiences. I tried to meet readers where they’re actually at no matter where that is in the spectrum of life. What you’re getting into with the switching up of the medium or the styles, is that it’s in some ways like this collage, right? It’s like a lovely mess, but life is a lovely mess. Part of my playing around with some of the structure was about that, and on the other hand, playing around with the structure is also because I think you can only say certain things in certain ways. Poetry does something that the other styles can’t.

At the end, for example, I’ve just said many things, and I ended with this poem, which was about a flower. It’s just a simple poem about a flower, but about our respect for strength, as opposed to power. I feel like that is such a theme in the book, and I wanted to leave the reader with this impossibly gentle image of this flower, thriving in such rugged and hostile territory. Not only because it’s about an appreciation of beauty, or an announcement of the presence of the beautiful, but also because it’s primarily about an insistence on it, paying attention to small things. The book is not prescriptive. I’m not prescribing the answer. I’m not answering a question. Rather, I’m just enlarging the question.

Rachel Ramirez

I remember attending a panel of UN delegates from Guåhan at New York University in 2019, and the panelists asked the room something to the effect of, “When you hear Guam, what do you think of?” Then immediately there was a chorus of the words “island” and “military.” What can you say about this outside perception, which in a sense conceals the growing issue of climate or militarization in Micronesia?

Julian Aguon

I think it has something to do with what Toni Morrison would have described as writing beyond the white gaze — and in my book, I was trying to stretch that analogy and write beyond the colonial gaze, not what outsiders see. There’s so much beauty, and as I say in the end, “A human being is here to be enjoyed, like a sunset or tangerine. We’re not oxen, we’re not here to endlessly plow the earth.” We’re more than our suffering.

Part of what happens is this standard narrative gets cast and that account shows we’re suffering and we’re fighting this largest military buildup in recent history — all of that is true; we are on course to becoming one of the most militarized places on earth — but it is also true that we come from wayfinders, that we have such rich, spiritual and intellectual sources or knowledge to draw upon. Our homeland is so beautiful. I mean, it’s arresting. So it also is important to highlight what we’re fighting for — the beauty and the richness and the diversity.

Rachel Ramirez

Speaking of beauty, you also center and highlight women a lot — from the chapter “My Mother’s Bamboo Bracelets,” where you told a story about a group of women weaving their hair together to build a giant net to save the island from being eaten by a giant fish, to “Fighting Words,” about your grandmother surviving a traumatic event. Why was deploying that feminist insight such an important theme?

Julian Aguon

There are definitely several feminist currents swimming throughout the book. There’s “the personal is political,” which is a quintessential feminist insight. There’s also the beautiful celebration of defiant people and writers who swam so squarely against the tide. And I have been nourished by Black feminism and other theories of liberation, which have clearly impacted me and my work.

That’s also where we come from in Guam and in many of our Micronesian islands. We are matrilineal. Originally, for example, the land tenure was passed on the mother’s side or that Chamorro women didn’t use to take their husband’s name. We organized our society based along those lines. That’s naturally where I gravitate to. And in my personal life, my father died very early so my mother raised me, along with random amazing women, mostly women of color, who showed up in my life and nourished me and nurtured me and taught me and instructed me as my life progressed.

Rachel Ramirez

I want to close with what’s probably the most basic question. Even though grief is an overarching theme of your book, you also talk about light and hope. Where do you find hope?

Julian Aguon

I don’t think the two — grief and hope — are really disconnected. I think we need to have a deeper understanding of hope. Hope is earned. You have to put in the work. On the ground, when you’re in community with other people and you’re trying to build power, there is nothing like that. That it’s a high that can barely be explained because you’re all together and you realize you’re moved by your shared fate. You realize that our fates are intertwined.

I’ve never felt more robustly alive than when I’m in community with other people who believe that they can change the world. Solidarity and community-building and building power in and across our communities is the work we have to do.

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President Joe Biden all but said during his first formal press conference on Thursday that the United States would likely extend its 20-year military campaign in Afghanistan for at least a few more months beyond the May 1 withdrawal deadline set by the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban.

That’s his prerogative, of course. But some experts and advocates of withdrawing say his stated reason for keeping US troops in harm’s way for a while longer — that in terms of sheer logistics, it would be hard to pull the remaining 3,500 US troops out the country by that date — is weak.

Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump made a deal with the Taliban requiring all American service members to leave Afghanistan at the start of May. If they don’t withdraw by then, the insurgents will end a months-long moratorium on targeting US troops, potentially adding to the 2,400 Americans already killed in the war since 2001.

The choice facing Biden was always a tough one: Abide by the Trump-era agreement and leave by May 1 — risking the Taliban’s hostile takeover of the country as soon as the US departs and the reversal of progress on women’s and children’s rights that would inevitably follow; or violate the agreement and stay in order to pressure the Taliban to strike a peace deal with the Afghan government, risking more dead American service members in the meantime.

Neither is a great option, which may explain why Biden seems to have chosen a sort of muddled middle path: withdraw, but likely later this year — and make it look less like a strategic decision about the US’s role in the country’s peace process going forward and more like merely a function of logistical realities on the ground.

“It’s going to be hard to meet the May 1 deadline,” Biden said during the press conference. “Just in terms of tactical reasons, it’s hard to get those troops out.”

“If we leave, we’re going to do so in a safe and orderly way,” he continued, though he also said he “can’t picture” US troops still being in Afghanistan next year.

But while there are legitimate logistical challenges to pulling out US troops by that tight deadline, some experts I spoke to aren’t convinced that’s what’s really driving Biden’s foot-dragging.

Most analysts and even top congressional Democrats acknowledge that, at this point, the US can’t withdraw from Afghanistan safely by May 1, even if Biden were to order that today.

The main problem isn’t removing the service members themselves, but rather all of their equipment, from the landlocked country. America and its allies could leave things like vehicles and guns behind as part of a hurried exit, but then the Taliban or other terrorist groups could use them for their purposes.

“It takes a while to do [this] methodically and well,” said Jonathan Schroden, an expert on the war at the CNA think tank in Arlington, Virginia.

But some experts and advocates for withdrawal cite two reasons for why Biden’s rationale rings hollow.

First, the timing: “If what he wanted was the fastest possible out, that could have been the order in January,” said Andrew Watkins, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Afghanistan.

Simply put, the administration is surely aware of how long a safe withdrawal takes. Biden, then, effectively made the decision to keep troops in the country beyond the deadline by not making a decision until he’d passed the point where that was possible.

Second, some say that despite its harsh rhetoric demanding “all foreign troops…withdraw on the specific date,” the Taliban probably wouldn’t consider it a violation of the agreement and start targeting American troops even if the US hadn’t gotten every last person or piece of equipment out of the country by May 1, as long as Biden had announced his order to withdraw and it was genuinely underway.

“I don’t think the Taliban are going to say ‘gotcha!’” Alexander McCoy, political director of the anti-intervention and veterans group Common Defense, tweeted after Biden’s Thursday statements.

Put together, experts say Biden’s case to the nation for why the US should remain in Afghanistan a little longer doesn’t hold up. Biden’s true intention, they divine, is that the president and his team believe their long-shot push for a diplomatic solution to the 20-year war requires prolonging America’s military presence.

Biden likely wants a limited Afghanistan extension to see his diplomatic effort through

Earlier this month, the Biden administration watched as two of their secret Afghanistan documents leaked to the public, revealing their behind-the-scenes push for a peace agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

The first was a strongly worded letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. In it, Blinken said the US planned to ask the United Nations to bring together nations with interests in Afghanistan — the US, Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, and India — to hash out what each party would like to see in a peace deal.

“It is my belief that these countries share an abiding common interest in a stable Afghanistan and must work together if we are to succeed,” the secretary wrote.

Biden referenced this effort during the Thursday press conference: “There’s a UN-led process that’s beginning shortly on how to mechanically get people — how to end this war.”

Further, Blinken’s letter said the US planned to ask Turkey to host “a senior-level meeting of both sides in the coming weeks to finalize a peace agreement.” That meeting, scheduled for April in Istanbul, sounded like a new version of the US-brokered 2001 Bonn conference that appointed a transitional government in Afghanistan.

The second leaked document was a list of guiding principles meant to address the concerns and demands of both the government in Kabul and the Taliban. They included making Islam Afghanistan’s official religion, and ensuring the constitution guaranteed the protection of women’s rights and the rights of children, among many others.

All of that was important, experts said at the time, but the timeline was a problem. It would be nearly impossible to get all the countries involved to agree on a way forward in Afghanistan — let alone get Kabul and the Taliban to agree on terms — by May 1. Processes like that take many months in the best of cases.

As a result, some experts said that if a diplomatic solution is the goal, Biden needs to keep US troops in Afghanistan a while longer to signal continued American commitment to the peace process.

“If extending US troops beyond May 1 promotes the recent diplomatic initiatives, especially the Istanbul conference and the increased role of the UN, then it may prove worthwhile,” said retired Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as a top Afghanistan official in the White Houses of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

This is why most experts I spoke to believe Biden’s decision to extend America’s military mission is about diplomacy, not military logistics.

Withdrawing US troops now would remove the Biden administration’s primary source of leverage over the Taliban and the Afghan government, and show foreign nations the US wants a role in the country’s future. By staying longer, Biden can try to see the diplomatic push through to its hopeful end.

So why didn’t Biden just say that during the press conference?

Some experts said the US may still be working to agree to an extension with the Taliban, and openly stating America will remain beyond May 1 to keep the insurgents at the table wouldn’t play well until there’s an understanding. Plus, citing logistical concerns might draw less backlash from the American public than extending the military presence in search of an unlikely peace deal.

That, it seems, is Biden’s true play here. Whether or not it pays off could be a defining moment of the president’s first year of foreign policy.

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