04 August 22
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That Zawahiri’s killing went so quietly suggests that the cultural and political behemoth that was the war on terror had long preceded him into the grave.
Zahawiri, one of small circle of men responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was reportedly killed by a drone strike on a house in a trendy area of Kabul, Afghanistan. His death came over 20 years after the events that first made his name a byword for infamy.
Members of Gen Z could be forgiven for not knowing who he was, but that no one else seemed to care much seemed odd. Unlike Osama bin Laden’s death more than a decade ago, which prompted an outpouring of street celebrations and chest-beating by U.S. politicians and national security elites, the reaction to Zawahiri’s demise has been noticeably muted.
This won’t be the last drone strike or raid that the U.S. carries out in the Middle East, but the killing of Zawahiri marks the close of a particular chapter in American history. That it went so quietly suggests that the cultural and political behemoth that was the war on terror had already long preceded Zawahiri into the grave.
The United States is now preoccupied with a deadly war in Ukraine, as well as a growing rivalry with China that is likely to put far more strain on its resources than Al Qaeda ever did. After the collapse of the terrorist group the Islamic State, the U.S. has faced almost no jihadist attacks and is instead being hit with wave after wave of deadly far-right terrorism.
President Joe Biden announced Zawahiri’s killing in a sleepy address given Monday evening, saying, “People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.” Very few, though, had been fearing Zawahiri — who had become better known for his conspiracy videos on global politics rather than actual terrorism — for a long time.
Biden’s usual subdued delivery was in this case matched by the reaction. If bin Laden’s death was a blockbuster, Zawahiri’s didn’t even go straight to VHS: NPR’s morning news had the killing as just another news item. By noon, the Zawahiri news had been pushed off the top of the New York Times’s website by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and a Style section story about an iconic New York City guitar teacher.
That Zawahiri’s death did not command much attention is a sign that global jihadism is not much of a priority anymore for the U.S. public — and also for Islamists themselves.
On the latter group, one need only look at the very country where Zawahiri was assassinated. The victory of the Afghan Taliban over the U.S. military and its allies in Afghanistan taught an important lesson to Islamists around the world. Whereas the Islamic State group carried out terrorist attacks against Western civilians that enraged foreign publics and justified crushing military responses, the Taliban laser-focused on the conflict on the ground at home against the Afghan central government, even cutting deals with the Americans to keep their troops out of the fray.
The result for Islamists in Afghanistan was far more successful than bin Laden’s famous idea of targeting the “far enemy” — the U.S. — as a means of drying up support for regional dictatorships. International terrorism was always a departure for Islamist groups, whose focus even in carrying out foreign attacks was to effect changes back home.
It seems likely that, as other analysts have noted, Islamist groups will return to this older model of fighting, which largely leaves the West out of it, rather than continuing with the failed approaches of bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their more radical offspring like the Islamic State group.
The killing of Zawahiri may provide a modicum of justice for the victims of the September 11 attacks. Indeed, it was the rare episode in the war on terror where someone responsible for 9/11 paid a price for it, however extrajudicial the punishment may have been. Only five of the hundreds of men held at the notorious Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp were put on trial for 9/11; they remain there, their cases stalled in pretrial hearings.
While it’s hard to find 9/11 perpetrators who paid for the attack in any way, millions of others have died, been wounded, or driven from their homes because of U.S. military actions following the attacks. The vast majority of these innocent victims had nothing to do with September 11 and indeed had never done any harm to the United States.
The great tragedy and crime of the war on terror was that the United States decided to take revenge for it on entire civilian populations of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, who bore no guilt for the 9/11 attacks. The historical record is a morally ugly one for the U.S., which is what makes it even harder to celebrate the killing of even one deserving terrorist after watching millions of other lives destroyed along the way.
An era is over with the death of Zawahiri, even if a rising generation of young Americans are not even aware of the fact. Jihadist terrorism may yet make a comeback, but I doubt it will do so anytime soon in a manner that affects Americans the way that September 11 did.
Zawahiri paid a price, yes. The great shame, however, are the many, many other criminals in this conflict who harmed innocent people without facing even an illusion of justice, inside the courts or outside them.
A satellite image released by Maxar Technologies taken before an explosion at a Russian prison camp shows disturbances in the ground. (photo: Maxar Technologies)
At a background briefing for journalists in the capital, Kyiv, senior Ukrainian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity outlined evidence to suggest that Russian forces appeared to be preparing for mass casualties in the days before the July 29 explosion.
Satellite images taken before the explosion, they said, show what appear to be freshly dug graves within the prison complex. A New York Times analysis of images from Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs confirms that some time after July 18 and before July 21, about 15 to 20 ground disturbances appeared on the southern side of the complex, roughly 6 to 7 feet wide and 10 to 16 feet long at first; some later appeared to have been lengthened and merged with each other. Whether they were graves is unclear.
In addition, a day before the explosion, Russian forces positioned near the camp had opened fire on Ukrainian troops in an apparent attempt to draw return fire, the Ukrainian officials said.
“Understanding that we would not return fire, they carried out a terrorist attack themselves,” one of the briefers said. “How they did this needs to be carefully studied.”
Ukrainian officials, along with independent analysts, have cautioned that assessments so far have been solely reliant on publicly available information, including video published by the Kremlin’s own news services, of the blast site near the town of Olenivka on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine’s Donbas region. A lack of verifiable evidence has made drawing clear conclusions difficult, and the Russian government so far has refused to grant independent investigators access to the site.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has a mandate under the Geneva Conventions to inspect conditions in which prisoners of war are held, requested permission from the Russian government to access the site on the day of the explosion.
“As of yet, we have not been granted access to the POWs affected by the attack nor do we have security guarantees to carry out this visit,” the Red Cross said in a statement on Wednesday. Additionally, the organization said offers to donate supplies like medicine and protective gear have gone unanswered.
Russia’s defense ministry has claimed, without offering any verifiable evidence, that Ukraine’s own military used a highly sophisticated American precision-guided rocket system known as HIMARS to kill the Ukrainian troops.
Military analysts call that unlikely, but impossible to rule out with the available information.
The Russian video and the satellite pictures show evidence of a smaller blast than those typically caused by the HIMARS-fired rockets supplied to Ukraine. The rockets usually leave a crater, but none is evident in the images. The walls of the barracks and much of the interior are blackened but still intact, and there is no apparent damage to an adjoining building. The interior images show beds still upright and lined up in rows, inconsistent with the strong shockwave seen in other HIMARS strikes.
“There’s some evidence pointing away from a HIMARS. But that doesn’t mean that I know or you can tell from the evidence presented specifically what it was,” said Brian Castner, a weapons expert for Amnesty International. He added that “you need to leave open the possibility that a weapon of, you know, from either side fell short, misfired.”
Moscow at first said Ukraine had carried out the strike to dissuade others from surrendering and giving information to Russian interrogators. On Wednesday it offered a new explanation, as Colonel Gen. Alexander Fomin, deputy defense minister, said in a speech that Ukrainian officials had ordered the strike after Russia began publishing video interrogations of captured fighters admitting to attacks on civilians.
“The Kyiv authorities seek to eliminate witnesses and perpetrators of their crimes against their own people,” General Fomin said.
Ukrainian and American officials have rebutted the Kremlin claims, and Ukrainian investigators have hypothesized that an explosive device was detonated inside the barracks. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency issued a statement alleging that soldiers held at the prison had been tortured. Earlier, some officials had speculated that Russian forces had killed the prisoners to cover up evidence of abuse.
The murder of soldiers captured in battle would add to the host of apparent Russian war crimes since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. In the first months, Russian forces massacred civilians in bedroom communities outside of Kyiv. They bombed a maternity ward and a theater where civilians were sheltering in Mariupol on their path to leveling that coastal Ukrainian city. Russian rockets have hit apartment buildings, shopping malls, train stations, busy public squares and fleeing civilians.
In each case, Russian officials have denied the facts on the ground and spun baseless — and often contradictory — conspiracy theories in an attempt to deflect blame. In several cases, such as the bombing of a busy train station in Kramatorsk in April that killed 50 people, Russia has blamed its own attacks on Ukraine, asserting with no evidence that Ukraine is conducting so-called false flag operations to make Russia look bad.
No Russian guards were killed or wounded in the prison explosion in Olenivka, which appeared to leave other structures nearby undamaged.
Some of the prisoners killed were badly wounded soldiers slated to be swapped in a prisoner exchange expected to occur in the coming weeks, said Andrei Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service. These soldiers “should have been in a hospital not in a barracks,” he said in a statement.
Nearly all of those killed were soldiers who had fought in the defense of Mariupol and surrendered in May after an 80-day siege at the sprawling Azovstal Iron and Steel Works.
In Ukraine, these soldiers have become war heroes, their likenesses seen on billboards throughout the country. The idea that Ukraine’s military would seek to kill them is beyond comprehension, said Maj. Mykyta Nadtochii, the commander of the Azov Regiment, a unit within Ukraine’s national guard whose fighters made up the majority of those killed at Olenivka.
“We understand what it means to be a prisoner,” Major Nadtochii said in an interview. “We understand that they are working them over, and not in the nicest way.”
Since the explosion, Major Nadtochii said, he had been scrambling to gathering information about the condition of his troops, but remained largely in the dark. The few soldiers he had been able to contact at Olenivka, who were in another location the night of the explosion, described only hearing two bangs. He confirmed that the lists of dead and wounded provided by the Russian government consisted primarily of Azov troops, though he suspected Russian authorities were hiding the true scope of the carnage.
“Honestly nothing surprises me in this war anymore, but somewhere deep in my soul there was hope that nevertheless they were human and might adhere to agreements and rules for conducting war,” he said. “But I’ve become convinced that these are not people, they’re animals.”
The Azov Regiment has become central to the Kremlin’s war narrative. Though now incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, its origins as a strongly nationalist volunteer paramilitary group with ties to right-wing fringe figures has been used by the Kremlin to falsely paint all of Ukraine as fascist and to claim that Russia is engaged in “denazification.”
On Tuesday, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the Azov Regiment a terrorist organization, raising fears in Ukraine that Russian prosecutors could eventually charge captive Azov soldiers with grave crimes and block their return to Ukraine in prisoner swaps.
In response to the designation, Ukraine’s National Guard issued a statement reaffirming the Azov Regiment’s place within the chain of command of the Ukrainian armed forces.
“Following the horrible execution of prisoners of war in Olenivka,” the statement said, “Russia is searching for new excuses and justifications for its war crimes.”
Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Mich., participates in the news conference on the Invest to Protect Act outside the Capitol on Thursday, May 12, 2022. (photo: Bill Clark/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Amy Davidson Sorkin | A Bad Democratic Bet in the GOP Primaries
Democrats made the dangerous bet that helping the MAGA candidate elected would clear the path for flipping the seat come November.
That’s the big takeaway from Tuesday’s West Michigan primary upset that saw a MAGA, election-conspiracist candidate prevail over freshman incumbent Republican Rep. Peter Meijer.
The state’s 3rd Congressional District was watched nationally because of the Trump dynamics at play. Meijer is one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump last year after the Jan. 6 riot. The vote made him a pariah to the Trump faithful.
Oddly, it also made Meijer a target of Democrats, who dumped nearly half a million dollars on a TV ad that boosted Meijer’s opponent John Gibbs by showcasing his far-right Trump credentials. The amount the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent on this ad is more than Gibbs raised during his entire campaign.
A dangerous bet by Democrats
Democrats made the dangerous bet that helping get the MAGA candidate elected would clear the path for flipping the seat come November. Attorney Hillary Scholten, the Democrat whom Meijer defeated by 6 points in 2020, is again making a run for the seat.
Oakland University political science professor David Dulio told me Monday that if Meijer had won the primary, he likely would have prevailed in November. A Gibbs win, meanwhile, is an all but certain Democratic victory in a district that now leans more left after recent redistricting.
Democrats' fingerprints on election
In a piece for Common Sense, Meijer put it this way: “If successful, Republican voters will be blamed if any of these (Trump-endorsed) candidates are ultimately elected, but there is no doubt Democrats’ fingerprints will be on the weapon. We should never forget it.”
Democrats' risky gamble doesn’t support their purported defense of democracy, which they’ve broadcast loudly during weeks of televised congressional hearings investigating Trump’s involvement in what went down Jan. 6, 2021.
Democratic leaders probably hope that everyone will forget their meddling in the race, and you can bet they’ll use Republicans’ “choice” of Gibbs as rationale for painting the whole party as tinfoil-hat wearing extremists.
The cost of impeachment vote
So far, Meijer is one of two Republicans who voted to impeach Trump to suffer a primary loss. Two others from Washington state survived their primaries Tuesday. Four of the 10 aren’t seeking reelection at all.
The most prominent of the 10 Republicans is Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who is up next in her Aug. 16 primary. It’s not looking good for her, especially given her very public role as vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee. Cheney has already faced punishment from the party, losing her leadership role in the House after her impeachment vote and continued criticism of Trump.
Trump has had mixed results as GOP kingmaker, but the message Tuesday seems to be that candidates who cross him risk a backlash at the ballot box.
Let's stop rehashing 2020
I would love to see the party move past Trump and rehashing the 2020 election. And I know most moderate Republicans and mainstream conservatives feel the same.
Primaries typically play to the party faithful, however, and Democrats are doing everything they can to help the most extreme GOP candidates whom they think they can defeat more easily in November, when a broader base of voters heads to the polls.
It’s despicable, and as Meijer said, don’t forget it.
Signs for U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., are seen at campaign headquarter on Aug. 1, 2022, in St. Louis, Mo. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty)
Bush’s constituents didn’t show “buyer’s remorse,” but statewide voters rejected populist Lucas Kunce for Trudy Busch Valentine.
“They don’t like the fact that we don’t accept any corporate money. They don’t like that I speak the way that I speak because I came from this community and I sound like my community. They don’t love the fact that, instead of being what they call dignified, I show up as a protestor, that I’ve been on the frontlines forever,” Bush told the crowd at her election-night speech. “But our work isn’t based on what they like. Our work is based on what folks need.”
A former nurse and activist, Bush gained prominence locally as the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets in 2014, after Ferguson police shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Since her election to Congress in 2020, Bush has pursued a confrontational style of politics that has rallied activists but has often put her at odds with party leadership, becoming one of the only congressional Democrats willing to say “defund the police,” and bucking party leadership in a row over decoupling an infrastructure bill from a wider progressive agenda.
Bush riled St. Louis’s old guard two years ago by unseating longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay, the scion of a political family. This year, in her first primary challenge as an incumbent, that old guard came gunning for Bush in the form of state senator and minority caucus whip Steven Roberts Jr.
Roberts was fond of saying that St. Louis voters had “buyer’s remorse” over Bush, including in remarks to Fox News on Monday. St. Louis Democrats, who broke for Bush by a margin of more than 2-to-1, appeared to disagree.
Himself the son of an influential St. Louis businessman and former alderman, Roberts was the face of a campaign that leaned on a pair of outside groups with eyebrow-raising ties — including one linked to his campaign treasurer and business parter, and another funded by Clay and a company linked to Roberts’s father. Despite the influx of outside spending, Bush carried an overall financial advantage. While she raised and spent well over $1 million to secure her reelection, Roberts raised less than half a million, including a $135,000 loan from himself.
Roberts faced scrutiny over public accusations of sexual assault by two women. Both women reported their accusations to the police, but Roberts has denied both allegations, settled lawsuits with both women, and was never charged. In the weeks before Roberts launched his congressional campaign, someone using an IP address on the grounds of the Missouri state Capitol repeatedly removed information about both allegations from his Wikipedia page.
If Bush’s primary was about securing the gains progressives have made in recent election cycles, Kunce’s campaign represented a progressive movement on offense. But his efforts fell short Tuesday night, as Busch Valentine claimed 43 percent of the vote to Kunce’s 38 with 90 percent of ballots counted.
A Marine veteran and former policy wonk at the American Economic Liberties Project, a D.C.-based anti-monopoly advocacy organization, Kunce centered his pitch on his ability to regain ground with disaffected working-class voters that the Missouri Democratic establishment is rapidly losing. By embracing calls for universal health care and swearing off corporate PAC money, he tried to recreate a populist progressive model that has fueled the surprisingly resilient careers of Midwestern senators like Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.
His opponent was in many ways the perfect foil. An heir to Anheuser-Busch fortune, Busch Valentine came under fire for her past participation in the “Veiled Prophet Ball,” a white supremacist ritual that had for years been protested by advocates for racial equality.
Throughout the race, Busch Valentine’s knowledge of the issues and commitment to Democratic priorities were called into question. She botched an interview with Missouri’s largest newspaper — which endorsed Kunce — and, in a widely shared video, stumbled when asked about her thoughts on the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, which she had earlier campaigned on overturning.
Though Kunce outraised her at first, Busch Valentine relied on her personal wealth for an influx of funding as the race neared its end, finishing with almost $5.9 million — $5.3 million of which she gave to her own campaign. Kunce raised just under $5 million.
In November, Busch Valentine will face Michigan Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who on Tuesday won the Republican primary, a race characterized by the leading candidates’ pursuit of “Make America Great Again” credibility.
Schmitt’s victory is a repudiation of Missouri’s Republican former Gov. Eric Greitens, who was seen as the frontrunner for the nomination in June but floundered in the final weeks of the race as the value of his MAGA credentials appeared insufficient to protect him from his unseemly reputation.
While Schmitt campaigned on his defense of the former president as Missouri’s top prosecutor — citing lawsuits he backed that aimed to force the reinstatement of Trump-era immigration and climate policies — Greitens had long seized on the belief that he was Donald Trump’s unspoken choice.
The former president called the disgraced former governor — who resigned in 2018 amid a variety of criminal investigations, including one for sexual misconduct — “tough and smart” last month, and Trump’s future daughter-in-law, Kimberly Guilfoyle, served as a national co-chair for Greitens’s campaign. Schmitt’s campaign, meanwhile, benefited from support among the Missouri Republican establishment, which sponsored a slate of GOP-backed ads highlighting Greitens’s past scandals in the final weeks of the race.
Schmitt also focused more of his messaging on his fierce opposition to abortion rights — which appears to have worked among a constituency celebrating the death of Roe v. Wade. His office joined an amicus brief in the case that eventually overturned the abortion rights established in Roe. (In neighboring Kansas, which also held elections Tuesday, voters rejected an amendment that would have allowed state lawmakers to further restrict abortion rights, which are currently protected by the Kansas Constitution.)
In a sign of Trump’s central role in the Missouri GOP primary, the former president dealt a death blow to the candidacy of a one-time frontrunner, U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, by endorsing against her last month, though he did not say who his choice would be. In a bizarre move on Monday, Trump made his final endorsement in the race: “ERIC” — last name not specified.
“I trust the Great People of Missouri, on this one, to make up their own minds, much as they did when they gave me landslide victories in the 2016 and 2020 Elections,” Trump said in a press release, “and I am therefore proud to announce that ERIC has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”
In a fitting conclusion to a contest marked by groveling to the former president, both candidates rushed to lay claim to Trump’s ambiguous endorsement in the final hours of the race.
Alex Jones, the founder of right-wing media group Infowars, addresses a crowd of pro-Trump protesters after they storm the grounds of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty)
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January 6 Texts By Pentagon
Jones’ lawyers in a Sandy Hook defamation case fumbled three years worth of texts and emails. The committee would like to know more about any contacts with Donald Trump’s team regarding the Jan. 6 Capitol attack
On Wednesday, Sandy Hook victims’ attorney Mark Bankston told Jones that his attorney had mistakenly sent Bankston three years worth of the conspiracy theorist’s emails and text messages copied from his phone.
Now — a source familiar with the matter and another person briefed on it tell Rolling Stone — the January 6th committee is preparing to request that data from the plaintiff attorneys in order to aid its investigation of the insurrection. These internal deliberations among the committee, which is probing former President Donald Trump’s role in causing the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, began within minutes of the lawyer’s revelation being heard on the trial’s livestream on Wednesday afternoon.
Jones has already featured prominently in the panel’s investigation for his role in whipping up public support for the insurrection and for his close ties to alleged conspirator Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia. Jones frequently hosted Rhodes as a guest on his InfoWars channel and his militia provided security for the Texas-based conspiracist.
The committee initially subpoenaed Jones in November 2021 and asked for him to turn over documents and participate in a deposition. Jones, according to a letter sent by the committee, was initially told by the White House on January 3, 2021 that he was “to lead a march to the Capitol, where President Trump would meet” with protesters.
It’s unclear what, specifically, the committee will be looking for in Jones communications but attorneys for the Sandy Hook plaintiffs have accused the InfoWars host of intentionally withholding relevant communications about the Sandy Hook shooting and lying about having conducted a search for them. A committee spokesman declined to comment.
The documents were turned over after Jones’ attorney “did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way and as of two days ago it fell free and clear into my possession,” Bankston told Jones in court Wednesday. “That is how I know you lied to me.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., right, welcomes Paivi Nevala, minister counselor of the Finnish Embassy, left, and Karin Olofsdotter, Sweden's ambassador to the U.S., on Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2022. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Wednesday's 95-1 vote — for the candidacy of two Western European nations that, until Russia's war against Ukraine, had long avoided military alliances — took a crucial step toward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its 73-year-old pact of mutual defense among the United States and democratic allies in Europe.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer invited ambassadors of the two nations to the chamber gallery to witness the vote.
President Joe Biden, who has been the principal player rallying global economic and material support for Ukraine, has sought quick entry for the two previously non-militarily aligned northern European nations.
"This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan U.S. commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow," Biden said in a statement Wednesday evening.
"I look forward to signing the accession protocols and welcoming Sweden and Finland, two strong democracies with highly capable militaries, into the greatest defensive alliance in history," the president added.
Approval from all member nations — currently, 30 — is required. The candidacies of the two prosperous Northern European nations have won ratification from more than half of the NATO member nations in the roughly three months since the two applied. It's a purposely rapid pace meant to send a message to Russia over its six-month-old war against Ukraine's West-looking government.
"It sends a warning shot to tyrants around the world who believe free democracies are just up for grabs," Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in the Senate debate ahead of the vote.
"Russia's unprovoked invasion has changed the way we think about world security," she added.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who visited Kyiv earlier this year, urged unanimous approval. Speaking to the Senate, McConnell cited Finland's and Sweden's well-funded, modernizing militaries and their experience working with U.S. forces and weapons systems, calling it a "slam-dunk for national security" of the United States.
"Their accession will make NATO stronger and America more secure. If any senator is looking for a defensible excuse to vote no, I wish them good luck," McConnell said.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who often aligns his positions with those of the most ardent supporters of former President Donald Trump, cast the only no vote. Hawley took the Senate floor to call European security alliances a distraction from what he called the United States' chief rival — China, not Russia.
"We can do more in Europe ... devote more resources, more firepower ... or do what we need to do to deter Asia and China. We cannot do both," Hawley said, calling his a "classic nationalist approach" to foreign policy.
Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, like Hawley a potential 2024 presidential contender, rebutted his points without naming his potential Republican rival.
That included arguing against Hawley's contention a bigger NATO would mean more obligations for the U.S. military, the world's largest. Cotton was one of many citing the two nations' military strengths — including Finland's experience securing its hundreds of miles of border with Russia and its well-trained ground forces, and Sweden's well-equipped navy and air force.
They're "two of the strongest members of the alliance the minute they join," Cotton said.
U.S. State and Defense officials consider the two countries net "security providers," strengthening NATO's defense posture in the Baltics in particular. Finland is expected to exceed NATO's 2% GDP defense spending target in 2022, and Sweden has committed to meet the 2% goal.
That's in contrast to many of NATO's newcomers formerly from the orbit of the Soviet Union, many with smaller militaries and economies. North Macedonia, NATO's most recent newcomer nation, brought an active military of just 8,000 personnel when it joined in 2020.
Senators' votes approving NATO candidacies often are lopsided — the one for North Macedonia was 91-2. But Wednesday's approval from nearly all senators present carried added foreign policy weight in light of Russia's war.
Schumer, D-N.Y., said he and McConnell had committed to the country's leaders that the Senate would approve the ratification resolution "as fast as we could" to bolster the alliance "in light of recent Russian aggression."
Sweden and Finland applied in May, setting aside their longstanding stance of military nonalignment. It was a major shift of security arrangements for the two countries after neighboring Russia launched its war on Ukraine in late February. Biden encouraged their joining and welcomed the two countries' government heads to the White House in May, standing side by side with them in a display of U.S. backing.
The U.S. and its European allies have rallied with newfound partnership in the face of Putin's military invasion, as well as the Russian leader's sweeping statements this year condemning NATO, issuing veiled reminders of Russia's nuclear arsenal and asserting Russia's historical claims to territory of many of its neighbors.
"Enlarging NATO is exactly the opposite of what Putin envisioned when he ordered his tanks to invade Ukraine," Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday, adding that the West could not allow Russia to "launch invasions of countries."
Wednesday's vote by Republicans and Democrats stood out for the normally slow-moving and divided chamber. Senators voted down a proposed amendment by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., intended to ensure that NATO's guarantee to defend its members does not replace a formal role for Congress in authorizing the use of military force. Paul, a longtime advocate of keeping the U.S. out of most military action abroad, voted "present" on the ratification of Sweden and Finland's membership bid.
Senators approved another amendment from Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, declaring that all NATO members should spend a minimum of 2% of their gross domestic product on defense and 20% of their defense budgets on major equipment, including research and development.
Each member government in NATO must give its approval for any new member to join. The process ran into unexpected trouble when Turkey raised concerns over adding Sweden and Finland, accusing the two of being soft on banned Turkish Kurdish exile groups. Turkey's objections still threaten the two countries' membership.
A mix of sounds from different National Parks includes birds, insects, and amphibians. Photo and audio by the National Park Service. (photo: National Park Service)
From warbling loons to chirping toads, rising temperatures threaten some of the Earth’s most iconic sounds.
Even after years of summer vacations in Maine, at the southernmost reaches of the loon’s habitat, Wells hasn’t tired of their calls. When their moody warbles echo across the pond, he still beckons family members to gather on the patio to listen. But loons, like so many other birds, are threatened by climate change. Rising summertime temperatures and warmer lake waters may eliminate important swathes of their habitat, and elevated precipitation is putting their nests at greater risk of flooding.
As a result, loons’ songs are in danger of fading from many parts of the world.
Similar consequences are playing out for iconic songbirds — and other vocal animal species — everywhere. According to a 2018 report from the Audubon Society, over 300 North American bird species could lose half their ranges due to climate change in the next 60 years. A widely-cited report published in 2019 showed that nearly 3 billion North American birds across every biome have disappeared since 1970 — a “staggering” loss driven not only by climate change but by suburban sprawl, toxic chemicals, and other stressors.
Among the bird species facing ongoing climate pressures are the whippoorwill of the Southern United States, whose “lonesome” call has been immortalized by country music star Hank Williams, as well as the seemingly ubiquitous black-capped chickadee, whose call involves simply repeating its own name: “chickadee-dee-dee!”
A robust and growing body of research suggests that a smaller population of chirping individuals can also cause those that are left to sing more quietly and with less variation. The crashing population of the Australian regent honeyeater, for example, has caused “song culture” to break down, leaving remaining individuals to simply copy other species’ calls. Hawaiian honeycreepers’ songs have also become less complex as their numbers have plummeted.
Insects, which are less beloved but just as cacophonous as their avian relatives, are also facing intense pressures from habitat loss, climate change, and the rampant use of agrochemicals. A staggering 40 percent of insect species are in decline around the world, with an additional one-third of them threatened with extinction. Some species of crickets, for example, have been listed as “critically endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, thanks to the combination of wildfires, industrial agriculture, and a precipitous decline in forest and wetland habitats. Entomologists have also warned of metabolic disturbances in insect species as a result of warming weather, making some species more likely to swarm or, in the case of Brood X cicadas, emerge earlier than anticipated.
These same environmental factors — plus a nasty, human-spread fungus that experts have called “the most destructive pathogen ever described by science” — have put one-third of amphibians at risk of extinction too, threatening to wipe many of iconic croaks, grunts, barks, and bellows off the face of the planet.
David George Haskell, a biologist and author of the book Sounds Wild and Broken, said he experiences the diminished soundscape as a “very thin, worn cloth,” comparing the richness of an untrammeled soundscape to the texture of thickly woven tapestry. “It’s a ground-up soundscape where thousands of species are finding their way within this whole,” he said. “It’s a lot more anarchic than the very controlled experience of listening to a band or an orchestra.”
More and more, researchers are documenting the fragility of the planet’s natural soundscape; many say the changes to Earth’s acoustic fabric speak to just how much new, unpredictable climatic conditions are messing with the Earth’s natural balance. One 2019 paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution argues that climate-related changes to the nonliving world — higher ocean temperatures, more intense rainfall — may have cascading effects on the soundscape, since qualities of the air, earth, and water affect the propagation of sound.
Compared to dire climate consequences such as extreme weather, famine, and human conflict, the degradation of our planet’s normal soundscape seems fairly minor. But many scientists and environmental advocates say that in that growing silence, we risk losing something unrecoverable — not only the melodies of nature and the symphony they create as a composite, but something that speaks to our awareness of the natural world around us.
Catriona Morrison, a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., said it’s as if musicians in nature’s orchestra were slowly exiting off of stage left. “It might not be noticeable to start with,” she said, “but eventually you end up at a point where you’ve got very few instruments or players left.”
In the 1960s, marine biologist-turned-journalist Rachel Carson published the book Silent Spring. In it, she implored readers to imagine a world made quieter by the “grim specter” of widely used pesticides like DDT, which when ingested by songbirds can cause eggshells to thin and break.
“On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices,” she wrote, “there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.”
Now considered an environmental classic, Carson’s book awakened a generation to the hazards of many industrial chemicals. DDT was banned and over the next 20 years, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. These three policies still form the backbone of federal environmental law.
But the threat to the natural world hasn’t been averted — neither for the environment nor for the sounds of the natural world. DDT’s phaseout addressed just one of many threats to Earth’s sounds, and new dangers are emerging in every corner, from the malignant spread of plastics to human-made developments encroaching on animals’ habitats. Climate change in particular threatens to disrupt the planet’s soundscape by pushing a million species to extinction and shifting others to areas where they’ve never lived before.
According to Wells, it’s not just those who simply like to listen to a lush field at twilight who will lose out as a result of these alarming trends. The deterioration of the planet’s soundscape is likely to have adverse impacts on human culture and people’s connections with the natural world. “Sometimes our bodies reach out to make those connections without even trying, and sound is one of the ways we do it,” he said.
In other words, even those who are not actively listening to the chorus of the natural world are still hearing it. Many individual sounds can have special significance. They can convey a sense of place, such as loon songs — which have been described as giving voice to “the wildness of the north” — or the chirping of cicadas, a staple of prairie life. Other sounds, such as the jingling chorus of spring peeper frogs — which are also threatened by climate change — herald the changing of the seasons, or good or bad luck.
Bernie Krause, one of the world’s leading bioacoustic engineers, has recorded more than 1,100 marine and terrestrial soundscapes over the course of decades-long career. Not one of them, he says, has been untouched by climate change. The loss of half of the world’s coral reefs since 1950, for example, has dramatically reduced habitat for grunting, gurgling, and croaking reef fishes. The destruction of one-third of the world’s tropical and temperate forests has quieted them, too. And “without these ambiences to lure us outside, to calm us and restore our flagging spirits,” he told Grist, “human culture becomes dystopic and pathological.”
Simon Butler, an associate professor of biology at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., expressed a similar sentiment. As a result of natural soundscapes’ “chronic decline,” he said, one of our key pathways for connecting to nature is in danger, not only making people less likely to care for the natural world but depriving them of the physical and mental health benefits that come from exposure to natural sounds.
These benefits are well-documented. One meta-analysis published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, found that exposure to sounds like running water and chirping insects were linked to significant improvements in key health metrics such as blood pressure and cognitive ability. The study’s lead author told Everyday Health that this is because “an environment that is filled with natural sounds feels safe and allows us to let our guard down.”
Unwanted noise, by contrast — like the blaring of a car alarm — makes people feel like they’re in danger, increasing people’s “stress and annoyance.” And for all the sounds the Earth is losing each year, there certainly are many new and more grating ones to take their place.
“Anthrophony” is a term that acoustic experts use to refer to sounds created by humans, such as revving car engines or heavy industry. Others might call this “noise pollution,” a nod to its unwanted nature. It’s ubiquitous in urban centers, driven by a nearly inescapable chorus of noisemakers like jackhammers, air conditioners, lawn mowers, airplanes, and — of course — cars. Some experts say the din is getting louder.
The ocean is perhaps the place most violently impacted by elevated anthrophony. Over the past 50 years, the rapid acceleration of coastal development, trawling for fish, shipping, deep-sea oil and gas exploration, and other activities have caused an exponential increase in ocean noise. Compounding the problem is the fact that warmer water temperatures — a product of climate change — increase the speed at which sound travels, making for an even noisier ocean. Some underwater noises are loud enough to cause fatal damage to whales’ lungs and digestive systems, while softer ones can foil the search for food and mates.
“Noise disrupts all sorts of ecological things happening in the ocean that we’re just starting to understand,” said Ben Halpern, a professor of marine ecology at the University of California Santa Barbara.
The racket is bad for people, too, and disadvantaged communities tend to be the most heavily impacted. The sounds of construction, industry, roadways, and more cause disproportionate damage to eardrums in low-income communities and communities of color. Haskell, the biologist and author, urged policymakers to rectify this environmental justice through city planning. “We have an opportunity,” he said, “to prioritize sensory awareness and giving everyone the opportunity to experience the songs of birds and the absence of obnoxious levels of noise.”
Today’s world looks — and sounds — quite different from the world in which Rachel Carson published the first edition of Silent Spring. Some 86 percent of Americans live in urban areas, often in metropolises whose population density nears 300 people per square mile. Here, the sounds of nature must compete with the din of traffic, construction, industry, advertisements, and other human activity. To the majority of Americans who now live at such a remove from the bucolic soundscapes described in Rachel Carson’s writings, does the fear of a “silent spring” still hold the same power for people as it once did?
Some worry that the answer is no, that quieter, less varied, and less beautiful sounds could hinder people’s connection to the natural world, preventing people from taking action to protect it.
There is so much action needed to preserve remaining soundscapes, from reducing shipping speeds on the open ocean to reversing the decline of boreal forests. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, is working through his nonprofit — Quiet Parks International — to track noise levels and certify areas that are free from human noise pollution. He told Grist he hopes the certification will save quiet from the “road to extinction” by incentivizing policies to protect it, such as aligning flight paths over already-noisy roadways. But as a simple first step, he and others like Krause argue that people should open their ears to the symphony that — while now diminished — continues to set the backdrop for all of life’s activity.
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