Since leaving government at the end of the Obama administration, former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has spent the last four years calling for Democrats to put climate change at the center of US foreign policy.

He and his colleagues at National Security Action, a now-closed progressive foreign policy group filled with former Obama officials, said doing so was imperative because it was the world’s biggest long-term threat.

Now some of those same colleagues are in the Biden administration, which just convened a successful two-day international climate summit during which nearly all 40 nations made important commitments to reduce emissions, among other things.

Which means Rhodes’s wish came true. Or did it?

I called up Rhodes to see how he’s feeling now that a Democratic administration has finally put climate change at the “center” of US foreign policy, as explicitly stated by Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines.

But what Rhodes told me came as a surprise.

He’s not convinced yet that climate change is actually the central pillar of Biden’s foreign policy. It’s certainly a top priority, sure, but from Rhodes’s perspective, China is also taking up a lot of space in Biden’s foreign policy. So are democracy promotion and human rights.

Rhodes worries Biden may have to make some unpalatable trade-offs on climate change issues if he wants to make progress on those other priorities. Simply put, Rhodes believes Biden has many tough choices ahead, with traps awaiting him beyond the 100-day mark.

“If you’re a progressive who cares about both climate change and human rights in China, it’s a very difficult call as to which one you’re going to care about more. I don’t think we know how the Biden administration is going to answer that question,” he said.

It’s an important concern. Biden is only a few months into his presidency, and for now he has the wiggle room to push on his priorities. But eventually others (read: China) will push back and could force Biden into an uncomfortable situation.

It’s worth noting that Biden’s team rejects any suggestions that they would make any concessions to China solely for progress on climate change. “That’s not going to happen,” John Kerry, the special envoy for climate change, told reporters in January.

Yet Rhodes, who worked to sell the Iran nuclear deal to skeptics in Washington and now co-hosts the Pod Save the World podcast, firmly believes the hardest part — executing climate change policies while trying not to compromise on other priorities — is yet to come.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Alex Ward

When you were in the Obama administration, you worked with a lot of people who are currently in government. And you worked alongside some of those people, like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, to define foreign policy priorities for the next Democratic president while you all were out of power at National Security Action.

Help me understand why you settled on tackling climate change not only as a key pillar of a progressive foreign policy but also a key tenet of any administration’s national security strategy.

Ben Rhodes

In order to get to something like the Paris climate accord, you had to make the US government do things that it wasn’t designed to do on foreign policy. Two things stand out to me.

First, every bilateral or multilateral relationship increasingly became about climate change. If you were meeting with the leader of China or Brazil or South Korea, suddenly among the top three issues was a climate issue. For China, that’s obviously their overall emissions reduction plan; for Brazil, it’s the Amazon; for South Korea, it’s their financing of coal plants.

To deal with all that, you need an infrastructure in the US government to support everybody from the president of the United States all the way down to embassies. That’s the only way you’re going to prioritize climate change like we’ve prioritized terrorism or other vital US interests. That structure didn’t exist at the beginning of the Obama years; it was an ad hoc arrangement.

Second, similarly, was how to set up an interagency process to handle the climate. You had to make it a separate entity because you needed anyone from a global special envoy to agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy around the table. Leading up to the 2015 Paris agreement, we set up an interagency process that was originally chaired by John Podesta and then was chaired by Brian Deese [who’s now the director of the National Economic Council in the White House].

This matters because it brings the international and domestic together, which you need when promoting clean energy and other things America is working on abroad.

Alex Ward

This sounds like “If you build it, they will come.” By building a federal government infrastructure, you begin to get the tools and processes in place to deal with climate change long term, somewhat independent of who sits in the White House.

Ben Rhodes

There’s also the resource question. How much money is the intelligence community putting into climate reporting? How much money is the Defense Department putting into transitioning their energy sources and scenario planning, contingency planning, around climate effects?

If climate is going to be an organizing principle of American foreign policy and America’s role in the world for the next 30 years — as I’m sure Jake Sullivan and Brian believe — what kind of government do you need to build to do that?

We built a post-9/11 government to fight terrorism. That’s had huge ramifications for all manner of national security agencies. In a way, you have to do something similar for climate change, even though it’s obviously a different challenge.

I think people shouldn’t lose sight of how big of a shift it is in terms of what kind of people you’re hiring, where you’re spending money, how you’re organizing yourself, how embassies are prepared for their relationships. It’s a huge thing to make this a real centerpiece and focal point of American foreign policy.

Alex Ward

With the climate summit, it feels like the work you, Jake, and others now in the administration did over the last four years paid off. Climate change, as you hoped for, is the centerpiece of US foreign policy, at least during the Biden years.

Ben Rhodes

Well, I’ll be totally honest with you, Alex, there are three main elements they’re proposing of a post-post-9/11 foreign policy, if you will.

The first is China, where everything has a China dimension and you’re kind of in a Cold War structure. Another is democracy, pushing back on the authoritarian trend. And the other is climate. I don’t know that they made a choice — I think they’re kind of doing all three of those things.

I couldn’t tell you whether climate or China is how they’re organizing themselves. I think they’re probably considering both, but it’s a little too early to say climate is the organizing principle for their foreign policy. To some extent, democracy is, too, but we’ll obviously have to see what comes out of their process.

Alex Ward

This is interesting, because to make all three “organizing principles” is to invite a ton of tension. Not that there’s a zero-sum problem, but I think it’s fair to say to make progress on one of these fronts, you probably have to sacrifice gains in another.

Ben Rhodes

Looking back on the Obama years, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement was happening right when we were getting the Chinese to be more ambitious on climate ahead of Paris. Whether you think about it or not, there must be a trade-off there — you know, prioritizing democracy might mean making it harder to deal with China on climate change.

Alex Ward

This is something I ask progressives about often. They consider climate change the existential national security threat of our times. If that’s the case, then you’re probably going to have to make concessions on China’s aggressive behavior or crackdown on democracy. Similar problems arise for other nations we want to take climate change seriously.

None of that is good, but at some point you have to prioritize because you can’t have it all. It seems to me that this is an obvious tension and one that’s going to be problematic for this administration or any other that follows a similar playbook.

Ben Rhodes

I think you’re right. And look, nobody in government would want to say that out loud. Having been in government, it’s inevitable that you will face some very uncomfortable decisions between, say, getting the Chinese [government] to stop investing in dirty infrastructure and placing sanctions on China over the mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims and labeling it a genocide.

If you’re a progressive who cares about both climate change and human rights in China, it’s a very difficult call as to which one you’re going to care about more. I don’t think we know how the Biden administration is going to answer that question. But over the course of the next year or two, it will probably become evident, though I couldn’t predict in which direction they’ll go.

In some ways, the US-China relationship is big enough and complex enough. The analogy might be the Soviet Union, where we confront them on a whole bunch of issues, but we still sit down and make arms control agreements together. That’s the ideal, but I have to think that at some point there will be trade-offs made.

Alex Ward

That seems like a tough, and some would say bad, spot for any administration to be in.

Ben Rhodes

It’s going to be difficult.

On the one hand, you could argue that the Chinese have to act on climate and environmental issues for their own sake. They have huge environmental problems of their own.

The problem with that is as China becomes a superpower, we need Beijing to do stuff not just within China but outside of China. They could fix the air quality in their cities while they still build dirty infrastructure along the Belt Road. So I don’t think just appealing to China’s self-interest is going to be sufficient on these climate issues.

That suggests that if you are really provoking the Chinese on really important issues like Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang, I just have to think that makes it harder to reach big, multilateral agreements on climate change.

So, yeah, I’m watching the trade-off space of the Biden team over the next year and a half up through the midterm election. They seem pretty wedded to kind of drawing a firm line with the Chinese. I’m speculating, but the US may just be testing how much they can get on climate from Beijing while still being a hardass on everything else.

Alex Ward

I’m glad you mentioned the midterm elections because there’s a political side to all this. If Biden’s three priorities are climate change, China, and democracy, then that causes headaches because they’re long-term issues. It’s hard to show voters — the few who care about foreign policy, anyway — real-time progress being made on those fronts.

Sure, there’s the coronavirus pandemic response the administration can point to. That’s apart from these challenges. But in the long run, it’s hard to see how this administration can politically boast about progress. It’s hard to show success but easier to demonstrate failure.

Ben Rhodes

It probably doesn’t lend itself to obvious agreements you can trumpet. Climate change, though, is pretty measurable in the sense that you can look at commitments and if emissions are dropping, etc.

With China, you can invest more in technologies to compete with China, that’s good. Though the danger of engaging in long-term competition is that you’re fueling the fires by sending a lot more weapons to Taiwan or sparking attacks on Asian Americans. Ratcheting up too much can have unintended consequences.

They’re going to have to be skilled in how they lay out what success looks like three, five, 10 years on regarding climate change and other challenges. They need to show they’re hitting targets and people feel a sense of progress, even if the problem feels unsolvable.

Alex Ward

That requires disciplined focus. This administration is just working on so much stuff — everything, really. It’s already hard to show progress on a few items, let alone a lot of them.

Ben Rhodes

Absolutely. If these three items are your real focus, then you need to deprioritize other things.

Like, if you guys really want to deal with China and climate change, you can’t spend the same amount of bandwidth on issues like Iran in the way this country has done over the last five years. Iran is a medium-size country, and it just makes no sense that it’s occupying so much of our time. They need to clear the decks a little bit.

Alex Ward

I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if there’s anything the Biden team is doing that you wish you had done during the Obama years.

Ben Rhodes

We could have done more of the structural work inside the US government to embed climate into how the State Department and the Defense Department and the intelligence community operate. We did some of that, and I’m thrilled that the Biden team is being really ambitious in the space.

We could’ve done more on China. We were getting pushed in the South China Sea and couldn’t pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. The TPP would have been a very useful strategic framework for dealing with China right now, by the way. They could use it, but this administration isn’t going to try and revive it for political reasons — both parties don’t like it.

We could’ve done more on democracy. For me, the HR 1 voting rights bill is a foreign policy bill. There are a lot of countries that need HR 1. Thinking of democracy as something that is on a continuum from the US domestic political circumstance to the circumstances in other countries, that’s an area where, if I could go back to like Obama’s reelection in 2012, we should’ve done more on.

Correction, 6:20 pm: A photo caption in an earlier version of this story mis-titled Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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There’s a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, the former British premier: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Churchill’s tongue-in-cheek defense of democracy came just two years after the end of World War II. Totalitarian forces had vied for their chance to lead the world, but democratic powers in Europe and the United States ushered in decades of peace and prosperity instead.

The British leader’s quote came to mind as I listened to President Joe Biden address Congress on Wednesday night on his first 100 days in office, because it was the same kind of full-throated defense of democracy that Churchill made. At a time when democracy around the world is under siege and authoritarian powers like China are on the rise, Biden made it clear that he wants to use his time in the Oval Office to prove democracy right.

“We have to prove democracy still works. That our government still works — and can deliver for the people,” he said during his address on Capitol Hill. “In our first 100 days together, we have acted to restore the people’s faith in our democracy to deliver.”

Those who believe American democracy won’t prevail “are wrong, and we have to prove them wrong.”

It’s a theme Biden has returned to often. During his first press conference in March, the president said “It is clear, absolutely clear … that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.”

And just hours before his Wednesday evening address, Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper and other television presenters that historians would write about “whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century. … The question is: In a democracy that’s such a genius as ours, can you get consensus in the timeframe that can compete with autocracy?”

It’s this idea that seems to animate everything Biden does. Whether it’s pushing trillion-dollar economic and infrastructure plans at home or especially working to outcompete Beijing abroad, the president’s main theme is that democracy is the best form of government, despite all the others.

For some experts, it’s the right note to strike.

“China is arguing that their brand of authoritarian capitalism is predictable and produces prosperity, whereas the American model is socially divisive, politically unpredictable, and economically reckless,” Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, told me. “He’s right” to keep bringing the issue up, she added.

Indeed, it makes sense for Biden to rally around this idea. Former President Trump attacked American democracy and often sided with foreign dictators, so championing democracy conveniently allows for a political separation between the two. Instead of appealing to rationality in an irrational and polarized time, the notion of boosting America’s democracy might calm partisan passions. And at a fundamental level, a functioning US is good for its international standing.

“The American government and American society have to work if the US wants to retain its preeminent international position,” said Justin Logan, a US foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute think tank in Washington, DC. “It may not be able to keep that position, but in the short term, it shouldn’t set its reputation for basic competence on fire, either.”

But beyond being politically expedient, it appears Biden truly believes in his mission. The president, after all, was 3 years old when World War II ended. Biden grew up in a world where democracy was on the rise and bettered millions of lives (some more than others, of course). To lose the world that shaped him — on his watch, no less — is unthinkable, unacceptable, and unwelcome.

Yes, his first congressional address was a boilerplate political speech. It was full of the usual platitudes and won’t change many minds.

But it may be remembered as Biden’s earliest major plea to the nation to join him in proving democracy isn’t as bad as all the other options. It’s the core of the president’s domestic and foreign policy message and, increasingly, the driving force of his presidency.

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Ethiopia’s Tigray region is facing a deepening hunger emergency, with about 350,000 people threatened by famine. It is the most severe starvation crisis in the world right now, and it is almost entirely manmade.

The region, located in the north of the country, has been engulfed in conflict since November, when a political dispute between Ethiopia’s central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that represents the Tigray region, erupted into open warfare. The Ethiopian National Defense Force has since partnered with troops from neighboring Eritrea and other militias within Ethiopia, specifically Amhara forces, in the battle against the Tigrayan defense forces.

The fighting has had horrific consequences. There have been credible reports of atrocities being committed by all parties in the conflict, including mass killings, mass rape, and destruction and looting of property. As of April, more than 1.7 million people had been internally displaced, and more than 60,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Sudan since November.

Aid access has been inconsistent, and in May the United Nations confirmed a CNN report that Ethiopian federal troops and allied forces were blocking humanitarian supplies from entering parts of Tigray — a charge the Ethiopian government has denied.

Taken together, experts and observers feared this would balloon into a crisis of mass starvation. Now that crisis has arrived.

Tunisia’s president has pushed the country’s fledgling democracy into crisis.

Over the weekend, President Kais Saied fired the country’s prime minister and suspended Parliament in what his political opponents have called a coup. But he says the move was justified after thousands of Tunisians took to the streets in recent days to protest the government’s handling of the pandemic, which has deepened the country’s economic woes.

Supporters of the president cheered his ousting of Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi and other government ministers, but those celebrations turned to clashes when those who opposed Saied’s moves also took to the streets to protest.

“One of the big question marks is: Is this a coup?” said Sarah Yerkes, a former State Department and Pentagon official and now a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Middle East Program who focuses on Tunisia. That’s a question a lot of people are asking right now, and it doesn’t actually have a straightforward answer, in part because democracy in Tunisia is still very new.

In 2010, a Tunisian fruit seller set himself on fire to protest corruption after police officers tried to confiscate his goods. That set off a broader revolution in Tunisia against the authoritarian regime of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. In 2011, those protests spread across the Arab world to Egypt, Libya, Syria, and beyond.

The uprisings of the Arab Spring, however, largely failed to bring democracy to those countries as powerful, entrenched regimes launched counterrevolutions and cracked down hard on their citizens — in some cases resulting in outright civil war.

Not so in Tunisia, though, where protests toppled the regime, and civil society helped usher in a democratic transition. That still-fresh democracy is now being tested by Saied’s recent moves — though the toll of the pandemic and increasing polarization had been straining the institutions up until the president’s orders this weekend.

Which is why the verdict is still out on whether Tunisia’s political crisis will turn into a full-blown coup. I spoke to Yerkes to understand why, and what this might mean for Tunisia’s Arab Spring legacy. “I don’t think,” she said, “we should write off the democratic transition yet.”

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

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Jen Kirby

So my understanding is that President Kais Saied fired the prime minister and suspended Parliament over the weekend. So what is happening in Tunisia right now?

Sarah Yerkes

The president has, I would say, extralegally, or outside of normal legal channels, fired the prime minister. He is allowed to do that, although he has to consult with Parliament — but he also suspended Parliament. And so that is certainly not something he’s allowed to do.

He has fired other ministers, too. So he declared himself kind of the chief executive. He normally functions as the head of state, and then the prime minister is the head of government. The president, in normal times, just has control over foreign affairs, defense, and national security. The prime minister oversees everything else. But now the president is overseeing everything.

Some of the other ministries are still functioning, some of the more technocratic ministries. But for the most part, the country is now in this suspended animation, where the president is the only real figure operating with any sort of power.

Jen Kirby

And so what are the fired prime minister and suspended Parliament doing? Is Parliament still trying to operate?

Sarah Yerkes

The prime minister hasn’t really been too active, but the Parliament is certainly not taking this sitting down.

When the president made the declaration, he said he was following Tunisia’s Constitution. There is this article, Article 80, that allows the president to take on emergency powers. But I’ve been following various Tunisian legal experts on social media and through other conversations, and it seems that Article 80 does not really apply to how the president carried things out.

So one of the big question marks is: Is this a coup? Especially sitting in Washington, a coup has really clear legal implications for the ability of the United States to provide assistance to Tunisia, and has implications for other countries, as well.

But back to the Parliament. The main party there that Saied is unhappy with is the Ennahda Party, the Islamist party, which has a plurality of seats in Parliament. They only have about 25 percent of the seats, though. It’s a very fractured parliament.

But Saied’s really been in opposition to them from the get-go. And so a lot of people are also framing this as kind of an anti-Islamist move. That’s where there are a lot of comparisons to Egypt, where the current leader ousted the Muslim Brotherhood in a coup. It’s not an entirely accurate parallel, but there is certainly an element of that.

But Ennahda is not taking this sitting down; they are issuing statements, they are trying to rally international attention to say this has been done illegally, this is a coup, and that people need to step in and remove [the president from] power, or at least put him back in his place as president and let the other institutions function as they’re supposed to be functioning.

There’s also been a ton of protests throughout the country. We’ve seen the supporters of the president take to the streets, cheering and singing the national anthem, excited that he’s ousted the prime minister, who a lot of people were very unhappy with over his handling of the pandemic and his inefficiency. But then you’ve also seen supporters of Ennahda and others who are opposed to the president take to the streets as well. You’re seeing these violent clashes of the two sides who are trying to protest what’s going on.

Jen Kirby

Is the president affiliated with a particular political party?

Sarah Yerkes

He is independent. He does not have a political party that he’s affiliated with, and that was a part of his appeal when he won election in October 2019. He really didn’t campaign a lot.

He was part of this populist wave that took over the whole world. And Tunisia got to populism a little later than some other countries. But Saied came in as an outsider, and that’s a lot of his appeal to people.

Jen Kirby

And so is the president right-wing or left-wing, or do those terms not really apply here?

Sarah Yerkes

It’s hard to separate into right and left. The Islamist/non-Islamist divide is certainly one of the pieces that’s at play. The president, he’s not secular by any means. He’s a religious man. He’s very conservative. But he’s not a fan of the Islamist party.

The other important political player right now is a party that’s hard to classify on a US or Western spectrum, but they are promoting the return to authoritarianism, the return to the [Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali regime. It’s the Free Destourian Party — destour means “constitution” in Arabic — led by Abir Moussi, who’s a really outspoken member of Parliament — other people have tried to beat her up in Parliament. She’s the third wing of the different factions that are operating right now.

Jen Kirby

Interesting. So for that third faction, are they supportive of what the president has done?

Sarah Yerkes

They are definitely not a fan of him. But they’re also being interestingly silent. They’re very anti-Islamist; they’re probably the most anti-Islamist faction that’s out there. So you would expect them to be really happy about the fact that the president kicked the Islamists to the curb. But I think they’re trying to wait to see what happens.

Jen Kirby

Why is there this tension between the Islamist parties and the other factions?

Sarah Yerkes

It goes really to the debate over the role of religion and change in Tunisian society. Tunisia, before the revolution, really prided itself on being one of the more secular states in the region, and valuing religious freedom, and being this kind of safe space for people who didn’t really want to practice Islam.

If you ask any Tunisian, they’ll say they’re Muslim; so it’s not that they’re not Muslim, it’s more like the American conception that people are Christian, but they don’t necessarily go to church every week.

So it goes to this history of Tunisia as a more secular state, where religion and politics were very much separated. The Islamist party had been thrown in jail and banned and Islamists were tortured under Ben Ali. But after the revolution, when they were welcomed back, that led to a lot of tension with people who really wanted Tunisia to continue to be a country that was more secular in nature and not become an Islamist country.

Jen Kirby

Is there a reason the tension seems to be heightening now, or has it constantly been brewing below the surface?

Sarah Yerkes

It’s always been there. The difference is the polarization — before, there was kind of a consensus government and all the parties put aside their differences. And now, people are literally beating each other up in the Parliament. And you also have the more extreme parties, including the one I mentioned before, Abir Moussa’s party, but also you have the Al-Karama coalition, which is a much more conservative Islamist party that is trying to fill in the gap; they don’t think Ennahda is religious enough or promoting religion in the state enough, so you have them entering the fray.

Before, you’ve had more centrist parties. Now, with this more fractured government, you have more of the extremists in power.

Jen Kirby

That’s helpful background. But back to this overarching question that you brought up: Is this a coup? What were the justifications that the Tunisian president used to take these actions?

Sarah Yerkes

The most direct precipitating event was a series of protests over the weekend that were over the government’s response to the pandemic. Tunisia is currently facing its worst wave of the pandemic. They’re having their highest number of cases that they had the entire pandemic right now.

So people are, understandably, incredibly frustrated, and are in the streets protesting. The president, for several months, has been foreshadowing this sort of power grab. There was a leaked memo that may have been real, or might have not been real, a couple of months ago that outlined basically exactly what’s happened, how the president would throw away the Constitution and take power and dissolve Parliament and all that.

So it’s not a surprise that he’s doing this. But he probably saw these protests and thought, “This is a way I can get goodwill — by coming in right now and saying, ‘Okay, we have to stop this.’ People are so angry, I’m going to take over.”

A few days ago, the president decided to have the military take over the operation of dealing with the pandemic. So he’d already been playing into this. And then I think, again, saw this opportunity of, “Well, people are really angry at the government, I’m going to come in and be the savior now and get rid of them and step in and take charge.”

Jen Kirby

And so it sounds like his supporters are happy with this move? But is there a divide between them and people who were understandably frustrated with the government but see this potential power grab as a step too far?

Sarah Yerkes

There was a lot of euphoria, frankly, over him acting and doing something. There’s really been this stalemate, where there’s been no action and no activity. So I think the supporters are a combination of people who like this idea of a strongman leader, or just someone taking charge, but also people who are glad to see Prime Minister Mechichi kicked out of government. And there is really a big opposition camp as well, who’s very unhappy with what the president is doing.

Jen Kirby

And so what about the civil society, particularly some of these groups that helped bring about democracy in Tunisia? Where do they stand on this situation?

Sarah Yerkes

They are also divided. I would say a lot of the democracy activists are really, really worried — and rightfully so. A lot of people have been really concerned about the president for some time. He is someone that they see as anti-democratic and who really just doesn’t abide by democratic norms and procedures.

There’s a lot of nuance, but if I can generally categorize the view of civil society, I would say it’s that they are really concerned with what they see as these really anti-democratic moves.

Jen Kirby

So it seems like there are two threads going on here. One is that many people were really unhappy with the inaction of the government, especially around Covid-19. And the Tunisian president took action. But I guess when it comes to whether this was a coup or not, that really depends on what happens next.

Sarah Yerkes

I think that’s true. If we give the president the benefit the doubt — if he were to come in and put in a new prime minister, someone who’s independent, who’s respected by all sides, and either say Parliament’s reinstated or call for elections in a couple of weeks, that would point to this scenario that maybe he really was just trying to reset things.

I don’t think that’s likely to happen, because he has been pretty vocal about his disdain for Parliament as an institution — not just this particular Parliament — even when he was campaigning. He had weird ideas of wanting to have direct democracy instead of representative democracy, which meant the Parliament wouldn’t exist.

So again, I don’t know. I hate to speculate too much. But we need to see how things unfold over the next few days. It will be really crucial to see which way things move.

Jen Kirby

What are you looking for as something that might give you a clue as to how this might play out?

Sarah Yerkes

A couple of things. One is just what the president does — what he does and what he says. If he slow-rolls this, then I’d be quite concerned.

The other piece of it is the role of the security services. Tunisia, not directly related to this, has seen a rise in police brutality over the past six months or so. And that, I think, is something to really pay attention to — the prime minister’s out, President Saied is the only guy in charge, and it’s up to him to rein in the police and the security forces. Is he going to try to use them to be his personal, self-serving security forces? Or is he going to let them do their job? Is he going to try to get the military into the streets? Is he going to try to use the military as national symbols as we see authoritarians do?

You know, what are we talking about here? Is he trying to really, fully consolidate all the power into his own hands? Or is he taking a couple of emergency measures that he’ll then release?

One of the things that’s been a little frightening is we saw that they shuttered the Al Jazeera offices in the capital, Tunis. Obviously they’re closer to Ennahda, to the Islamists, but shuttering a media organization is right out of the authoritarian playbook.

Jen Kirby

Of course, the background for all this is that Arab Spring began in Tunisia in 2011, and it was the one place that successfully transitioned to democracy after uprisings and protests. How does the relative newness of the government factor into what we’re seeing right now?

Sarah Yerkes

I think that’s a big factor; and part is the newness of the Constitution, which is even younger — it was only officially written in 2014.

A lot of things are being tested, directly related to the Constitution. And the Constitutional Court, which is Tunisia’s Supreme Court equivalent, doesn’t exist yet. They are the ones who right now would be coming out to say “this is a coup” or “it’s not a coup” or “he’s operating extralegally” or “he’s not.”

The president himself is to blame for it not being in existence. Parliament chose the final members — it had been a years-long process — but Saied recently refused to sign off on the members that Parliament had chosen.

I think that’s a lot of foreshadowing, too — okay, he doesn’t want there to be a Constitutional Court because he’s going to do stuff that’s extraconstitutional. I do think a lot of it is related to just how young the democracy is.

Jen Kirby

You mentioned that there is a strain within Tunisia that wants to see the return of authoritarianism. Is this sense of disillusionment with the democratic transition something that’s broadly felt in Tunisia?

Sarah Yerkes

There’s been some nostalgia for the old regime that’s been there the whole time, but that’s really resurfaced. This woman I mentioned before — Abir Moussi, who wants to return to the Ben Ali era — she’s really fed on that and tried to nurture that.

In part, the pandemic really decimated the economy. So a lot of people are much worse off than they were 10 years ago. And so what has democracy brought you? You can criticize the government, yes, but you can’t feed yourself — is that worth it? Do you want that trade-off? And for a lot of people, the answer is, “No, I’d much rather prefer to eat and be silent than vice versa.”

Obviously, it’s a false equivalency. Had the pandemic not occurred, the economy was starting to improve, and there were a lot of positive signs related to the [democratic] transition. But I do think people are willing to put up with more repression because the economy is so bad, and because the situation with the pandemic is so bad that [some political actors are] trying to take advantage of some of that nostalgia.

Jen Kirby

That’s true for a lot of places, of course. And it’s probably a bit too early to say, but I’m curious what you think all of this means for Tunisia’s Arab Spring legacy?

Sarah Yerkes

I still think we should consider it a major success. I don’t think we should write off the democratic transition yet. I do think that these actions in the past few days have been — and will continue to be — a major threat to the democratic transition.

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But I still think the fact that you have protesters, you have people questioning what’s going on, you have members of Parliament trying to hold steady, speaks to the strength of Tunisia’s democracy. And I hope that the democracy prevails. I think it’s possible that the Tunisian people are strong, civil society is strong, and I really, really hope that this does not break down or become the end of the democratic transition.

One of the emerging tenets of the Biden presidency is that the United States and China are locked in ideological conflict over the fate of democracy.

In March, during his first press conference as president, he declared that “this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” In April, during his first address to a joint session of Congress, he labeled this struggle “the central challenge of the age” — and that China’s Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest about becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world.”

More recently, in last week’s CNN town hall, he warned that Xi “truly believes that the 21st century will be determined by oligarchs, [that] democracies cannot function in the 21st century. The argument is, because things are moving so rapidly, so, so rapidly that you can’t pull together a nation that is divided to get a consensus on acting quickly.”

Inasmuch as there is a Biden doctrine, the notion that the US needs to protect democracy from China’s authoritarian model is at the center of it. “Biden’s administration [is] framing the contest as a confrontation of values, with America and its democratic allies standing against the model of authoritarian repression that China seeks to impose on the rest of the world,” Yaroslav Trofimov writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Biden’s thinking captures an important insight: that the struggle over democracy’s fate will be one of the defining conflicts of the 21st century. But his analysis is crucially flawed in one respect: China is not an especially important reason why democracy is currently under threat — and centering it is not only wrong, but potentially dangerous.

In countries where democracy is at real risk of collapse or even outright defeated — places like India, Brazil, Hungary, Israel, and, yes, the United States — the real drivers of democratic collapse are domestic. Far-right parties are taking advantage of ethno-religious divides and public distrust in the political establishment to win electorally — and then twist the rules to entrench their own hold on power. Leaders of these factions, like former US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aid and abet each other’s anti-democratic politics.

More traditional authoritarian states, even powerful ones like China or Russia, have thus far played at best marginal roles in this struggle.

“Much of the recent global democratic backsliding has little to do with China,” Thomas Carothers and Frances Brown, two leading experts on democracy, write in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. “An overriding focus on countering China and Russia risks crowding out policies to address the many other factors fueling democracy’s global decline.”

This misdiagnosis has real policy stakes. Leaning into competition with China could lead the US to excuse anti-democratic behavior by important partners, like Modi or the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, in a manner reminiscent of US relations with anti-communist dictators during the Cold War. Moreover, too much emphasis on competition with China could distract from the place where Biden has the most power to affect democracy’s fate — the home front, an area in which voting rights advocates increasingly see him as indefensibly complacent.

There are real problems associated with China’s rise. Its increasing military belligerence, predatory economic practices, and horrific human rights abuses in places like Xinjiang are all very serious concerns. But the fact that China is the source of many real issues doesn’t mean it’s the source of democratic erosion worldwide — and positioning it as such will do little to advance the democratic cause.

Democracies are rotting from within, not without

In his public rhetoric, Biden often argues that the US needs to prove that democracy “works” — that it can “get something done,” as he said last week — in order to outcompete the Chinese model.

While he hasn’t spelled out the nature of this competition all that precisely, the concern seems to center on Chinese policy success: that its rapid economic growth and authoritarian ability to make swift policy changes will inspire political copycats unless democracies prove that they can also deliver real benefits for their citizens.

“I believe we are in the midst of an historic and fundamental debate about the future direction of our world,” the president wrote in a March letter outlining his national security strategy. “There are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward. And there are those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting all the challenges of our changing world.”

But at this point, the fear of Chinese political competition is mostly hypothetical. While the Chinese government and state media frequently tout the superiority of its political model to American-style democracy, there’s little evidence that these efforts are all that influential globally — and certainly not in the countries where democracy is most at risk.

A look back at the Soviet Union, the last major challenge to the hegemony of liberal democracy, is telling. ln ideological terms, there’s no comparison: Soviet communism was a far more powerful model than Chinese authoritarian state capitalism is today.

Marxist ideals inspired revolutionary Communist movements and governments around the globe, successfully toppling Western-backed governments in countries ranging from Cuba to Vietnam to China itself. By contrast, there are vanishingly few foreign governments or even political parties today openly vowing to emulate modern China. While the Soviets had the Iron Curtain in Europe, modern China’s most notable client state is North Korea — perhaps the most isolated and mistrusted government on the planet.

In the countries that observers worry most about — established democratic states experiencing “backsliding” toward authoritarianism — Chinese influence is minimal at best.

In backsliding democracies, authoritarian-inclined leaders win and hold power through the electoral system for domestic reasons. Corruption scandals in India and Hungary, violent crime in the Philippines, a racist backlash against America’s first Black president: These are some of the key factors in the rise of authoritarian populists, and they weren’t created or even significantly promoted by China.

Elected authoritarians still bill themselves as defenders of democracy while in power — even after they start undermining the electoral system with tactics like extreme gerrymandering and takeovers of state election agencies. Their political appeal isn’t grounded in an overt rejection of democracy in favor of a Chinese model, but rather a claim to be taking democracy back from corrupt elites in the name of the “true” people, typically defined in ethno-nationalist terms.

The ideology driving modern democratic decline is vastly different from the sort that China promotes at home and through official state media. It represents a home-grown challenge inside the democratic world, rather than an externally stoked, Cold War-style threat.

That’s not to say China does nothing to undermine democracy outside its borders. It has, for example, exported surveillance technology and provided training in “cybersecurity” for foreign officials that amount to teaching them tools for controlling public opinion — underscoring its role as a global pioneer in using technology to repress dissent.

Yet even in this area, China’s influence can easily be overstated. Backsliding countries typically do not ban websites outright or arrest online dissidents in the way China does. Instead, they rely on spreading misinformation and other more subtle uses of state power. When they do use more traditional authoritarian tools, they often don’t need China’s help in doing so — as shown by recent reporting on Israel’s NSO Group, a company with close links to the Israeli state that sold spy software to India and Hungary (whose governments allegedly used it to surveil journalists and opposition figures).

In his recent book The Rise of Digital Repression, Carnegie Endowment scholar Steven Feldstein attempts to systematically document the use of digital tools and tactics for undermining democracy around the world. He found that while such practices were indeed becoming more widespread, this is largely due to domestic factors in authoritarian and backsliding countries rather than Chinese influence.

“China really wasn’t pushing this technology any more so than other countries were pushing advanced technology or censorship technologies,” he told me in an interview earlier this year. “What I saw — when I spoke on the ground to intelligence officials, government officials, and others — was that there were many other factors at play that were much more determinative in terms of whether they would choose to purchase a surveillance system or use it than just the fact that China was trying to market it.”

The problem with blaming China for democracy’s crisis

Biden and his team recognize that many of the challenges to democracy have domestic roots. But in casting the rise of anti-democratic populism as part of a grander ideological struggle against an authoritarian Chinese model, they conflate two distinct phenomena — and risk making some significant policy errors.

Again, an analogy to the Cold War is helpful here. One of the most grievous errors of America’s containment policy was its repeated willingness to align itself with anti-communist dictators. The perceived need to stop the expansion of Soviet influence consistently trumped America’s commitment to democracy — with horrific consequences for the people of Iran, Argentina, Indonesia, and Bangladesh (to name just a handful of examples from a very long list).

The more China is treated like the new Soviet Union — the principal ideological threat to democracy whose influence must be curtailed — the more likely the US is to repeat that mistake.

Take India, for example. In the past six months, Biden has courted Modi’s government as a potential counterweight to China. “There are few relationships in the world that are more vital than one between the U.S. and India. We are the world’s two leading democracies,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a July 28 press conference in New Delhi.

Yet this is an Indian government that has assailed the rights of its Muslim citizens, strong-armed US social media companies into removing critical posts, and arrested a leading protest figure. Earlier this year, V-Dem — a research group behind the leading academic metric of democracy — announced that India under Modi was an “electoral autocracy,” rather than a true democracy. It’s easy to see how an emphasis on China could lead to these problems getting swept under the rug.

“There has long been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that India is a critical ally in its attempt to check Chinese influence in Asia,” the Indian intellectual Pankaj Mishra wrote in a June Bloomberg column. “In overlooking the Modi government’s excesses, Biden probably counts on support from a US foreign policy establishment invested more in realpolitik than human rights.”

If you take the notion that democracy’s crisis is emerging from within seriously, then it follows that very best thing that Biden could do for democracy’s global future has nothing to do with China or even foreign policy. It’s arresting creeping authoritarianism at home.

Biden has acknowledged this at times, writing in his March letter that his global strategy “begins with the revitalization of our most fundamental advantage: our democracy.” And yet that urgency hasn’t translated into action — legislation necessary to safeguard American democracy from the GOP’s increasingly anti-democratic politics appears stalled out. Biden, for his part, has refused to publicly endorse more aggressive action to break the logjam — like abolishing the filibuster for voting rights bills.

The New York Times recently reported that “in private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression’” — an implausible claim that reflects an administration that, according to activists, has “largely accepted the Republican restrictions as baked in and is now dedicating more of its effort to juicing Democratic turnout.”

Shoring up American democracy after the recent attacks it has suffered should be the top priority of any US government concerned with democracy’s global fate. But for all of Biden’s lofty language about out-competing China and winning the future for democracy, there’s a striking lack of urgency when it comes to the perhaps the most important backsliding country — his own.

In this sense, China has very little influence over the future of democracy globally. The key battles are happening not in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait, but in the legislatures of New Delhi and Washington. If there really is to be a grand struggle for democracy’s survival in the 21st century, it needs to start there.

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Which of these Chelsea greats would make our Super Eagles-Black Stars combined XI?

Goal/GettyGhana-Nigeria Combined XI

Ahead of this week’s World Cup qualifying double header between Nigeria and Ghana, GOAL Africa are picking our dream combined XI between these two West African heavyweights.

Both the Super Eagles and the Black Stars have storied histories in continental and global competition, and our shortlist for this combined Dream Team was overflowing with elite African talent.

However, only eleven stars can make the cut between these two West African giants, which of these two Chelsea greats would make the cut?

International Career

Despite being a part of an excellent Ghanaian generation, Essien only featured in three Africa Cup of Nations tournaments—largely a consequence of the injury problems that undermined his career.

While he reached the final in 2010, the Black Stars ultimately fell short at the hands of Egypt. Mikel went one further as part of Stephen Keshi’s fine side, and got his hands on the big one in 2013.

The Nigerian also went on to reach four Afcon semis during his international career, most recently finishing third in 2019.

He missed out on three editions between 2012 and 2017, but did feature in three World Cups, reaching the Last 16 at Brazil 2014.

While Essien was present for Ghana’s debut display and their run to the Last 16 in 2006, injury denied him a place in the team that reached the quarters four years later.

Winner: Mikel

Club Career

These two are immensely decorated at club level, with the majority of their silverware coming ast part of Chelsea’s magnificent flurry of successes under the likes of Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and Roberto Di Matteo.

Essien won two Premier League winner’s medals at Chelsea, and was an unused substitute in the 2012 Champions League final, where Mikel did feature in the victory over Bayern Munich.

The pair each won three FA Cups with Chelsea, although while the Nigerian was still around for the Europa League triumph of 2013—by which point Essien had departed—The Bison did win two Ligue 1 titles as part of a magnificent Olympique Lyonnais side.

Winner: Essien

Getty ImagesIndividual Accolades

Essien comfortably outclasses Mikel here, probably testament to him being seen as a far more dynamic and impactful player during his peak years.

The midfield powerhouse never won Caf’s African Footballer of the Year award—among the finest continental stars not to do so—although he did clinch the BBC version of the prize.

He did make Caf’s podium on five occasions though, and indeed, no one has finished in third place more times than the Ghana star.

The midfielder was Ligue 1 Player of the Year for 2005, only the third African player after Ali Benarbia and Didier Drogba to win the award, and was named in Caf’s Team of the Year on four occasions.

Mikel was never really in contention for these kinds of honours during his senior career, having won plenty of individual accolades as a youngster, for both Chelsea and at the Fifa World Youth Championship.

He twice made the Nations Cup Team of the Tournament, once finished runner-up in the African Player of the Year award, and twice made Caf’s Team of the Year.

Did Mikel deserve more individual accolades during his career?

Winner: Essien

Ability

In his prime, before injury struck, Essien was a complete central midfielder, and offered a level of performance that Mikel could not match.

He could tackle, he could drive forward with the ball at his feet, he could pass, and, on occasion, would weight in with a goal or two.

His strength, energy and determination were all key attributes, and Essien was intelligent enough, and versatile enough, to be drafted into a right-back role when required.

The Bison was twice signed by Jose Mourinho, who he refers to as Daddy, and could have had an even higher score here had injury not intervened.

While Mikel once threatened to become Nigeria’s next great midfield playmaker, he ultimately ended up being viewed as a consistent and dependable—if somewhat limited—water-carrier in midfield.

11 years of service and 250 Premier League games tells the story of a player who held his own at the highest level, only once (in 2014-15) making fewer than 22 appearances in a season under the likes of Mourinho, Ancelotti and Guus Hiddink.

He was comfortable playing against the very best in the business end of the Champions League, and also flexed his muscles more offensively while in action for the Super Eagles.

Winner: Essien

Who makes the cut?

It’s another tight contest with both of these midfielders.

The Nigeria midfielder enjoyed more international success with the Super Eagles than Essien did with Ghana—although that would have been different had The Bison not suffered from such devastating injuries at such crucial moments—although that’s his only ‘victory’ of the four categories.

Essien’s quality at his peak, the edge he gets from his pre-Chelsea successes with Olympique Lyonnais, and his greater individual recognition during his career, sends him through to the Last Eight.

Winner: Essien

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The Argentina icon was not among the seven Barcelona figures included in the shot-stopper's list

Marc-Andre ter Stegen has named his dream XI of current and former team-mates, and there is no place for Lionel Messi in the side.

The goalkeeper’s time with Borussia Monchengladbach, Barcelona and Germany has seen him play alongside many top stars.

With a wide range of big names to choose from, Ter Stegen has listed a solid XI, but omitted the seven-time Ballon d’Or winner.

What has been said?

Ter Stegen opted to line his team up in a 4-4-2 diamond formation and listed seven former or current Barcelona heroes.

Gerard Pique, Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets, Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Frenkie de Jong were all given the nod.

But the likes of Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez were all snubbed by the 29-year-old.

Meanwhile, goalkeeper Janis Blaswich, Chelsea defender Antonio Rudiger and Germany team-mates Marco Reus and Mario Gotze were also named in the team.

The full XI is: Blaswich; Alves, Pique, Rudiger, Alba; Busquets; Xavi, Iniesta; De Jong; Reus, Gotze.

Click Here: Why did Ter Stegen leave Messi out?

Ter Stegen did not mention his former team-mate when listing his team and did not explain why he did not make the cut.

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But the shot-stopper suggested that the pair did not always get along when he posted a farewell message on Instagram after it was confirmed Messi had left Camp Nou.

He wrote in the caption: “Although from time to time we did not share the same opinion, we always went in the same direction and each of us grew as a person regardless of winning or losing.”

Further reading