Nicholas Kristof

<h1>This is a dispiriting epoch of strongmen and bullies, yet side by side with the worst you find the best. So today let’s find inspiration in two heroes.</h1>

They are women who bravely challenged misogyny and dictatorship, one in Iran, the other in Saudi Arabia. Those two nations may be enemies, but they find common cause in their barbaric treatment of women — and since they are trying to squelch and smother these two women, we should shout their names from the mountaintops.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, 55, is a writer and human rights lawyer who for decades has been fighting for women and children in Iran. Her family reports that this week she was sentenced to another 33 years in prison, on top of a five-year sentence she is now serving, plus 148 lashes.

Loujain al-Hathloul, 29, a leader of the Saudi women’s rights movement, went on trial Wednesday after months of imprisonment and torture, including floggings, sexual harassment, waterboarding and electric shocks.

Her sister Alia al-Hathloul told me that Loujain was finally presented with the charges against her, which included communicating with human rights organizations and criticizing the Saudi “guardianship” system for women.

I previously suggested that Hathloul should get the Nobel Peace Prize, and she has now been nominated for it. So let me revise my proposal: Hathloul and Sotoudeh should win the Nobel together for their courageous advocacy of women’s rights before rival dictators who share one thing: a cruel misogyny.

I know I’ll get notes from people who harrumph that the problem is simply Islam. That’s too glib, but it is fair to say that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei together tarnish the global image of Islam more than any army of blasphemers could.

“This sentence is beyond barbaric,” the U.S. State Department said of Sotoudeh’s reported sentence. Quite true. But the State Department refuses to be equally blunt in denouncing Hathloul’s torture and imprisonment; that’s because it sees the Saudis as allies and the Iranians as enemies.

What the Trump administration doesn’t seem to understand is this: If you care about human rights only in countries that you despise, you don’t actually care about human rights.

Alia al-Hathloul said that her sister was ordered to sign a letter requesting a royal pardon, and did so, and that the torture appears to have ended. I’m hoping that the crown prince is looking for a way to climb down from his brutal mistreatment of the women’s rights activists and will eventually grant the pardon that she “requested.”

Meanwhile, Iran seems to be cracking down harder. Amnesty International reports that Iran arrested more than 7,000 dissidents last year and that the 38-year combined sentence for Sotoudeh, if true, is the harshest imposed against a human rights defender in Iran in recent years. Iran state media suggested that she had been given a shorter sentence, but Sotoudeh and her family have much more credibility than Iran’s government.

“The shockingly harsh sentence against her is a signal of just how unnerved the Iranian authorities have become,” Kumi Naidoo, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, told me. He noted that women’s rights activists in Iran have become bolder, sometimes waving their headscarves on a stick and posting videos on social media.

“With this cruel sentence, the Iranian authorities appear to be seeking to make an example of Nasrin Sotoudeh and to intimidate other women’s rights defenders,” he said.

Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, was separately sentenced in January to six years in prison, for posting updates about his wife’s case on Facebook. The couple has two children, a 12-year-old son named Nima and a 19-year-old daughter named Mehraveh. Hadi Ghaemi of the Center for Human Rights in Iran said that relatives may now have to raise Nima and Mehraveh.

“My dearest Mehraveh,” Sotoudeh once wrote her daughter from prison, “you were my main motivation for pursuing children’s rights. ... Every time I came home from court, after having defended an abused child, I would hold you and your brother in my arms, finding it hard to let go of your embrace.”

Likewise she wrote to Nima last fall, explaining why she was in jail rather than with him on his first day of the school year. “How could I witness the execution of juveniles in my country and be silent? How could I close my eyes to child abuse cases?”

“I just couldn’t, my son.” She added, “That was my sin.”

Here’s my message to Nima and Mehraveh: Your mom is a hero! She inspires people like me worldwide, and no imprisonment or flogging can change that. She will be remembered in history, like Loujain al-Hathloul, as a moral leader, perhaps Nobel Peace Prize winner, who confronted tyrants and changed the world for the better.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8f4ccd8b-3fbd-4290-ab1b-1ccec411e098" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/opinion/hathloul-sotoudeh-iran-saudi-arabia.html">The New York Times</a>.

They are women who bravely challenged misogyny and dictatorship, one in Iran, the other in Saudi Arabia.

Two women, heroes for our age

<h1>President Donald Trump claimed in June to have ended the practice of separating immigrant families at the southern border. “We are going to keep the families together,” he declared from the Oval Office.</h1>

Mr. President, meet Clemente and his daughter Wendy, both fleeing gang violence in Guatemala. Your administration separated them six months ago and kept them apart.

These family separations, continuing but at a lower level than before, are an element of the real “emergency” at the border — the one also involving physical and sexual abuse of immigrant children in U.S. custody and systematic deception from Washington.

The paradox is that Trump’s cruel policy to deter desperate immigrants appears counterproductive; apparently the furor it provoked drew attention to the possibility of migration. The result is a surge of Central American families traveling to the United States, with the number crossing the border far higher than a year earlier.

Clemente, 34, is from a small Guatemalan village. He doesn’t want to use his last name because of all he has been through at the hands of the U.S. government. There is no way to verify parts of his story, but individuals who work with immigrants say it rings true.

A gang in Guatemala murdered his cousin, and last year gangsters stabbed Clemente’s father and sent warnings to Clemente: “It’s now your turn.”

Terrified, Clemente fled with his eldest daughter, Wendy, then 15, leaving his wife and five other, younger children, whom he did not believe the gang would target. He feared that the gang would abduct Wendy, an excellent student who loves books, and he could not bear that thought.

They crossed Mexico without serious incident, then waded across the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to Border Patrol officers, requesting asylum. That was Aug. 20, two months after Trump said he had ended the family separation policy. But officials promptly separated Clemente and Wendy.

Clemente was put in a “hielera,” or ice box, notorious detention rooms predating Trump that are kept cold. Clemente, wet from the river crossing, was soon freezing as well as hungry and weak because he had given his food to Wendy. “As a dad, the last thing you want is for your daughter to suffer,” he explained simply. “So I gave everything to her.”

In this frail state, he caught pneumonia and passed out. Many hours went by before he was taken to a hospital, unconscious and gravely ill. Inadequate health care in detention centers is common, and two migrant children died in December in Border Patrol custody.

“I woke up in the hospital, and I didn’t know where I was,” Clemente told me. “It was a nightmare. My first question was, ‘Where’s my daughter?'” After he was released from the hospital and later from detention, he found himself on the streets of Brownsville, Texas.

“He was distraught and he was crying,” recalled Sergio Cordova, a volunteer in Brownsville who does heroic work with immigrants, funded by donations, and discovered Clemente at the bus station. “I gave him a hug and he started saying he can’t find his daughter, he doesn’t know where his daughter is.”

Eventually, Clemente discovered that she was in a shelter. She was allowed to telephone him once a week, but not return to his care; his voice broke as he described her as “an angel from God.”

Immigration is a complicated challenge, but ripping families apart isn’t the solution. Perhaps the best approach is to help improve security in Central America so that people like Clemente need not flee. Some anti-gang initiatives there have been very successful in reducing murder rates that drive migration.

“If it were peaceful, I’d like to be back there where I grew up,” said Clemente, who received help from Immigrant Families Together in his quest to reunite with his daughter. “I’d love to be in the land where I was born.”

The Texas Civil Rights Project found that at least 272 adults were separated from a child family member in the six months after Trump supposedly ended family separation. The youngest to be separated was an 8-month-old girl taken from her mother.

Officials are less likely now to separate parents from children, but they continue to separate grandparents from grandchildren, siblings from siblings. The day I spoke with Cordova, the volunteer, he was helping two brothers from Honduras who had no other family left: Junior, 21, had raised Andy, 7.

When gang members brutally beat up Junior for refusing to sell drugs for them, he fled with Andy to the United States — and officials separated them on arrival six months ago. So little Andy is now in a shelter, apart from the only person who has loved and protected him.

“I see this all the time,” Cordova told me. “They cry with me, I cry with them.”

Finally, there was a break in Clemente’s case. On Wednesday night, authorities released Wendy to him. After six months apart, they had a teary reunion.

“I thought I might never get her back again,” Clemente said. “I am very thankful.”

So, yes, President Trump, you’re right that there’s an emergency at the border. It’s a humanitarian crisis of family separation that you helped create.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in <a id="f17589b0-7c64-4f5f-ac9c-2d6f85d51501" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/sunday/family-separation-border.html">The New York Times</a>.

Mr. President, meet Clemente and his daughter Wendy, both fleeing gang violence in Guatemala. Your administration separated them six months ago and kept them apart.

The cruelty at the border continues

<h1>In his testimony before Congress last week, Michael Cohen in effect warned of a coup:</h1>

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Cohen said.

That fit neatly into the concern in some liberal circles that President Donald Trump may not simply undermine democracy but actually overturn it. References to the Nazi takeover of Germany have proliferated, and cautionary tales about fascism are now ubiquitous, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning.”

The polarization also leads Trump supporters to worry about a coup — by the “deep state” against Trump — and some make glib references about resorting to violence.

“We are in a civil war in this country,” Joseph diGenova, a prominent conservative commentator on Fox News and other programs, told Laura Ingraham in her podcast. He added, “As I say to my friends, I do two things — I vote and I buy guns.”

I think Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, has a point when he says: “This is a moment of great peril for our democracy.” But just past the midpoint of the Trump presidency (I hope!), it’s worth examining how the country has weathered the challenge — and my takeaway is that American institutions and norms have shown impressive strength and resilience.

One of the most troubling elements of Trump’s presidency has been his systematic assault on our institutions: the FBI, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the news media, the courts. Yet, for the most part, they have stood up to his bullying.

To take one example, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reports that Trump in 2017 told aides to block a merger between AT&amp;T and Time Warner, apparently to punish CNN (a unit of Time Warner) for its news coverage while helping Fox News. This was utterly inappropriate, so aides ignored him.

“I’ve mentioned it 50 times,” Trump raged, according to Mayer’s account. “And nothing’s happened.”

The Justice Department did in fact bring suit to block the merger, but courts foiled Trump and allowed it to go ahead.

Likewise, Trump’s efforts to block meaningful investigations into his conduct have backfired, leading to the Robert Mueller inquiry and to congressional inquiries of obstruction of justice. His dangling of federal pardons before former associates encouraged state investigations. He has personally genuflected before Vladimir Putin, but his administration policy on Russia has ended up rather tougher. And his rogue behavior helped Democrats seize the House of Representatives.

Trump has regularly demonized journalists as “enemies of the people,” but reporters have not been intimidated. As I’ve often written, I thought we in the news media did not do well during the 2016 campaign, but the competition today between The Washington Post and The New York Times is the best kind of newspaper war, keeping America straight.

Gallup finds that public approval of newspapers, while still low, is up a little since 2016 even as Trump has excoriated them.

The best book warning of authoritarianism is, for my money, “How Democracies Die,” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors of government at Harvard. It’s a brilliant book, wise and nuanced, so I reached out to the authors and asked how they think the U.S. has done in the Trump presidency.

“The U.S. is not 1930s Germany or contemporary Hungary, Venezuela or Turkey,” Levitsky told me. “The U.S. has much stronger democratic institutions than these countries, and it has a much stronger opposition. So whereas in Hungary and Venezuela autocrats steamrollered weak oppositions, Trump faced pushback on multiple fronts, including, very importantly, the electoral front in November 2018. So, yes, U.S. democracy is hard to kill.”

Still, Levitsky and Ziblatt caution that an underlying polarization and erosion of norms made Trump’s election possible, and they persist. Moreover, while the Democratic victory in the House is good news for accountability, it also results in a divided government that can’t get anything done.

“U.S. democracy is sliding into dysfunction,” Levitsky said, noting that this can increase the appeal of other demagogues. Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell have also refused to stand up to Trump and have allowed certain authoritarian values to infect a wing of the party. Almost a quarter of Republicans said in a poll last year that “President Trump should close down mainstream news outlets, like CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times.”

So there’s plenty to worry about, but let’s acknowledge that the American system has shown itself resilient. In my more hopeful moments, I think that we are seeing a backlash to Trumpian authoritarianism that may ultimately strengthen the rule of law, as happened after Watergate.

For those still wringing their hands and unconvinced, here’s my bottom-line reassurance: Trump won’t manage a coup, and he seems to me more likely to end up a felon than a president for life.

This article originally appeared in <a id="aa71a348-1747-4ebd-8486-8e04c77c83de" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/michael-cohen-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

That fit neatly into the concern in some liberal circles that President Donald Trump may not simply undermine democracy but actually overturn it.

We will survive ... probably ...

<h1>More than 45 years ago, as a 14-year-old farm kid in Oregon, I watched on a flickering black-and-white television as Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel, John Dean, testified about presidential misconduct in the Watergate scandal — and the second-most-corrupt administration in American history began to crumble.</h1>

Now, watching Michael Cohen testify before Congress, I sense a similar historic temblor, only this time it may be the No. 1-most-corrupt administration that is beginning to teeter.

Cohen’s testimony was staggering because of the cumulative sum of alleged misconduct, because of the overall portrait it provided of Donald Trump as a “mobster.”

“I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen said, summing up what he learned working at Trump’s side for a decade. “He is a racist, he is a con man, and he is a cheat.”

The range of Trump cons that Cohen outlined was extraordinary, from rigging an auction for the sale of a Trump portrait, to apparent bank fraud, to apparent perjury, to secret hush money payoffs to women, to apparent advance knowledge of a WikiLeaks dump of Democratic emails.

There was even a tantalizing suggestion of other criminal conduct that the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York is investigating that we may know nothing about.

Watergate started with a “third-rate burglary” that Nixon apparently had no advance knowledge of. But the investigation into the burglary led to revelations of a cover-up, of obstruction of justice, of mind-boggling abuses of power. One difference is that Trump’s illegal behavior seems to be more broad-ranging than Nixon’s.

Trump may have been so cavalier because he never expected this office or this scrutiny. I wish the hearing hadn’t taken place precisely during Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un, because of the risk of undermining nuclear diplomacy, but the irony is that according to Cohen, those Trump-Kim negotiations are a historical fluke.

“He had no desire or intention to lead this nation — only to market himself and to build his wealth and power,” Cohen said. “Mr. Trump would often say, this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’ He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election.”

What was almost as dispiriting as the range of misconduct alleged was the behavior of Republicans on the committee. They seemed less interested in ferreting out the truth than in covering it up; all they wanted to do was protect Trump and discredit Cohen.

It was three hours into the hearing before a Republican even asked Cohen a question about Trump.

The Republicans argued that we should not believe Cohen because he is a proven liar. But if a proven liar should not be believed, why do these same Republicans believe Trump? After all, Trump has made 8,718 false or misleading statements since taking office, according to The Washington Post’s count.

Cohen said he had no knowledge of any sex video obtained by Russia as leverage over Trump, and added that he didn’t have proof of collusion with Russia, only “suspicions.” But he described a kind of kompromat: “Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it” and then “made clear to me” that “he wanted me to lie” to Congress.

Cohen shot down some of the rumors going around. He said he has no knowledge of Trump having a love child or paying for an abortion, and Trump would “never” physically harm Melania. But the sum total of his testimony was devastating; decades from now, historians will continue to analyze it.

On his first day testifying to the Senate Watergate committee back in June 1973, John Dean said: “To one who was in the White House and became somewhat familiar with its interworkings, the Watergate matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate” in which expediency trumped law.

It was in part Watergate that drew me toward journalism, and in 35 years reporting for The New York Times, I’ve known and covered many American presidents and foreign leaders. The American leaders sometimes tried to bamboozle or spin us reporters, but they were tethered to truth and to American values and were fundamentally different from some banana republic leaders who were simply gangsters.

I hope Democrats aren’t gleeful. This is a sad moment in American history, for Nixon walks again. Squared.

And I hope the Republicans listened when Cohen told one of his GOP interrogators: “I did the same thing you are doing now for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years.” He added: “People who follow Mr. Trump blindly will suffer the same consequences I’m suffering.”

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a8eca527-20a7-4d3f-9c20-03444c65c4c5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/opinion/michael-cohen-testimony.html">The New York Times</a>.

'He is a racist, he is a con man, and he is a cheat'

Now, watching Michael Cohen testify before Congress, I sense a similar historic temblor, only this time it may be the No. 1-most-corrupt administration that is beginning to teeter.

<h1>When a journalist for the Illinois Baptist newspaper reported in 2002 on a Baptist pastor who had sexually assaulted two teenage girls in his church, one apparently just 13 years old, he received a furious reprimand.</h1>

Glenn L. Akins, then running the Illinois Baptist State Association, offered a bizarre objection: that writing about one pastor who committed sex crimes was unfair because that “ignores many others who have done the same thing.” Akins cited “several other prominent churches where the same sort of sexual misconduct has occurred recently in our state.”

In the end, the Baptists ousted the journalist, Michael W. Leathers, while the pastor who had committed the crimes, Leslie Mason, received a seven-year prison sentence and then, as a registered sex offender, returned to the pulpit at a series of Baptist churches nearby. So Leathers is no longer a journalist, and Mason remained a pastor.

That saga was cited in a searing investigation by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News that found that the Southern Baptist Convention repeatedly tolerated sexual assaults by clergymen and church volunteers. The Chronicle found 380 credible cases of church leaders and volunteers engaging in sexual misconduct, with the victims sometimes shunned by churches, urged to forgive abusers or advised to get abortions.

“Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms,” the Chronicle reported.

Leathers told me he is glad he wrote the 2002 article, even if it cost him his career. He expressed frustration at Southern Baptist priorities: The church leadership would expel a church that appointed a woman as senior pastor, even as it accepted sexual predators.

The indifference to criminal behavior is an echo of what has been unearthed in the Roman Catholic Church over the decades. The latest sickening revelations are of priests getting away with raping nuns and with assaulting deaf students.

These new scandals provoke fresh nausea at the hypocrisy of religious blowhards like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who thundered at the immorality of gay people even as their own Southern Baptist network tolerated child rape.

I suspect it’s no accident that these crimes emerged in denominations that do not ordain women and that relegate them to second-class status.

“If God is male,” Mary Daly, the feminist theologian, wrote, “then the male is God.”

The result may be threefold: an entitled male clergy, women and girls taught to be submissive in church, and a lack of accountability and oversight. It’s complicated, of course, for many of the Catholic victims were boys, but there does seem to have been an element of elevating male clergy members on a pedestal in a way that made them omnipotent and unaccountable.

“Underneath it all is this patriarchy that goes back millennia,” Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, told me, noting the commonality of the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches: “They both have very masculine understandings of God and have a structure where men are considered the closest representatives of God.”

The paradox is that Jesus and the early Christian church seem to have been very open to women. The only person in the New Testament who wins an argument with Jesus is an unnamed woman who begs him to heal her daughter (Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28).

The Gospel of Mary, a Gnostic text from the early second century, suggests that Jesus entrusted Mary Magdalene to provide religious instruction to his disciples.

But then conventional hierarchies asserted themselves, and women were mostly barred from religious leadership.

After the Chronicle’s investigation, the Southern Baptists have promised greater training and more background checks, but what’s needed above all is accountability and equality.

“Prohibiting women from the highest ranks of formal leadership fosters a fundamentally toxic masculinity,” Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer professor of Christian morals at Harvard, told me.

Baptist women have been ready to be heard for a century. I know because my great-grandfather John Howard Shakespeare was the leader of Baptists in Britain from 1898 to 1924 and practiced his sermons on his wife. When she once insisted that she had something else to do, he locked her in an upstairs room.

My great-grandmother Amy, wearing a long dress, then climbed out an upper window and onto a tree branch, and finally clambered down the tree to the ground.

Perhaps inspired by such a strong woman, Shakespeare favored the ordination of women. “That women are not yet permitted to take their proper share in the life and work of our churches is, to our thinking, a relic of barbarism,” he wrote in 1901.

So much has changed for women since then, yet even today a majority of religious women still belong to denominations that do not ordain women. And as long as inequality is baked into faith, as long as “men of God” are unaccountable, then sexual assaults will continue.

The problem is not just wayward pastors and priests. Rather it is structural, an inequality and masculine conception of God that empowers rapists.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a5aa33d5-80a8-4725-aa50-e65ebb0a8cb1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/opinion/clergy-sexual-abuse-southern-baptist.html">The New York Times</a>.

Rapists presented by their church as men of God

Glenn L. Akins, then running the Illinois Baptist State Association, offered a bizarre objection: that writing about one pastor who committed sex crimes was unfair because that “ignores many others who have done the same thing.”

<h1>After the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, tweeted concern about Saudi Arabia’s imprisoning of a women’s rights activist, the crown prince there seemed to go nuts.</h1>

Saudi Arabia announced that it was expelling Canada’s ambassador, halting flights to Canada, ending purchases of Canadian wheat, recalling students from Canada and selling off Canadian assets. Did the United States or other Western countries stand up for an old friend and ally, Canada?

“The United States doesn’t have to get involved,” Heather Nauert, then the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters.

Yet Canada stuck to its principles. When a young Saudi woman, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, fled to Bangkok last month and warned that she would be killed by her family if she was forced home, it was Canada that again braved Saudi fury by accepting her.

Freeland was at the airport to welcome Alqunun as a “very brave new Canadian.” And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t mince words, saying, “We’ll stand up for human rights and women’s rights around the world.”

Canada may be one of the world’s more boring countries, as yawn-inspiring as sensible shoes — wake up, reader, I know you’re snoozing! — but it’s also emerging as a moral leader of the free world.

There’s no one else. The United States under President Donald Trump is on a nationalist tear. Britain’s leaders seem determined to drag their people over a Brexit precipice. France is distracted by protests. Germany is preparing for succession.

During the worst of the Syrian refugee crisis, President Barack Obama admitted just 12,000 Syrians and provoked a furious backlash, including Trump’s Muslim ban. Canada accepted 40,000 Syrians, with Trudeau appearing at the airport to hand out winter coats to these new Canadians.

All around the world, doors to refugees were clanging shut. But Canadians were so eager to sponsor Syrians that organizations were clamoring for more of them. Canadian politicians are mostly rewarded for showing compassion.

Trump gets headlines with his periodic threats to invade Venezuela to topple President Nicolás Maduro, but Canada has been quietly working since 2017 to help organize the Lima Group of 14 nations pushing for democracy in Venezuela. When Canada recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president, he won credibility because nobody sees Ottawa as an imperialist conspirator.

Canada has spoken up about the mass detention of about 1 million Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China even as Muslim countries have mostly kept mum, and it detained a Chinese executive at the request of the American government. China retaliated by arresting Canadians and sentencing one to death, but Canada is sticking to its guns — even as Trump undercut Canada by suggesting that the case against the executive might be dropped for political reasons.

For aid programs in the developing world, countries usually try to finance big, glamorous projects that will get lots of attention. Instead, Canada champions programs that are extremely cost-effective but so deathly boring that they will never be discussed on TV — initiatives like iodizing salt to prevent mental impairment.

Still, Canadians can be devious. A couple of years ago I sought an interview with Trudeau for a piece about Canada’s successes — and he kept stalling. Aides explained that praise from an American might damage his relations with Trump. That may have been the first time I’ve had a leader resist laudatory coverage.

Whenever I say something nice about Canada, I get indignant emails from Canadian friends pointing out the country’s shortcomings (which are real). Fortunately, Canadians don’t seem capable of mean emails. Not even of mean tweets. One study found that Americans’ tweets are loaded with curses and words like “hate”: Canadians’ tweets are larded with “awesome,” “amazing” and “great.”

(Note: Ignore all the bits about Canadians being nice when playing hockey with them. In the rink, they’re brutes.)

Off the ice, Canadians pursue policies that are preternaturally sensible. Canadians regulate guns, oversee the banking sector so as to avoid financial crashes, and nurture entrepreneurship and economic growth without enormous inequality.

Typically, more Canadians use mass transit, and the country has better traffic safety laws, so that the vehicle fatality rate there is half that of the United States’. If the United States had Canada’s traffic death rate, we would save more than 20,000 American lives a year.

Today there’s a vacuum of constructive global leadership. Canada may be incapable of a mean tweet, but it’s tough when necessary — and it may be the leader the world needs.

Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6e1ab465-f5cd-40c5-aba5-4aa1ec8e6b67" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/canada-trudeau-saudi-arabia.html">The New York Times</a>.

“The United States doesn’t have to get involved,” Heather Nauert, then the State Department spokeswoman, told reporters.

Thank God for Canada!

<h1>HAVANA — It has been 60 years since Fidel Castro marched into Havana, so it’s time for both Cuba and the United States to grow up. Let’s let Cuba be a normal country again.</h1>

Cuba is neither the demonic tyranny conjured by some conservatives nor the heroic worker paradise romanticized by some on the left. It’s simply a tired little country, no threat to anyone, with impressive health care and education but a repressive police state and a dysfunctional economy.

Driving in from the airport, I saw billboards denouncing the American economic embargo as the “longest genocide in history.” That’s ridiculous. But the embargo itself is also absurd and counterproductive, accomplishing nothing but hurting the Cuban people — whom we supposedly aim to help.

After six decades, can’t we move on? Let’s drop the embargo but continue to push Havana on improving human rights, and on dropping support for other oppressive regimes, like those in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Let’s make room for nuance: Cuba impoverishes its citizens and denies them political rights, but it does a good job providing basic education and keeping people healthy. Cuba’s official infant mortality rate is lower than America’s (its real rate may or may not be).

I’m not a Cuba expert, and I don’t know how this country will evolve. But Cuba has a new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who is associated with experiments in opening up the economy. Fidel is gone and his brother Raúl is fading from the scene.

In the 1960s, we were scared of Cuba. We feared that neighboring countries would tumble like dominoes into the Communist bloc, and the Soviet Union attempted to place on Cuba nuclear missiles that could have threatened America. But today even as those fears have dissipated, our policy has ossified.

President Barack Obama took the necessary step of re-establishing diplomatic relations and easing the embargo, but President Donald Trump reversed course and tightened things up again out of knee-jerk hostility to anything Cuban and anything Obaman.

Cuba is changing, albeit too slowly. About one-third of its labor force is now in the private sector, and this is just about the only part of the economy that is thriving. I stayed in one of the growing number of Airbnbs in Havana, and people were friendly, even if governments are not: When I said I was from the United States, I inevitably got a big grin and a reference to a cousin in Miami or New York or Cleveland.

Plus, extra credit goes to a country that so lovingly preserves old American cars. I rode in from the airport in a pink 1954 Cadillac.

In another sign of flexibility, Cuba recently hammered out a deal with Major League Baseball that will allow Cuban players to travel legally to the U.S. and play on American teams.

Yet, sadly, the Trump administration is threatening the deal.

Consider the persistence of North Korea and Cuba, and there’s an argument that sanctions and isolation preserve regimes rather than topple them. China teaches us not to be naïve about economic engagement toppling dictators, but on balance tourists and investors would be more of a force for change than a seventh decade of embargo.

Moreover, trade, tourism, travel and investment empower a business community and an independent middle class. These are tools to destabilize a police state and help ordinary Cubans, but we curtail them. America blames the Castros for impoverishing the Cuban people, but we’ve participated in that impoverishment as well.

Cuba’s government is not benign. It’s a dictatorship whose economic mismanagement has hurt its people, and Human Rights Watch says it “routinely relies on arbitrary detention to harass and intimidate critics.” But it doesn’t normally execute them (or dismember them in consulates abroad like our pal Saudi Arabia), and it tolerates some criticism from brave bloggers like Yoani Sánchez.

It is revising its constitution, and my hope is that over time — despite ideologues in both Havana and the United States — relations will continue to develop. Some American seniors who now winter in Florida could become snowbirds in Cuba instead, relying on its health care, low prices, great beaches and cheap labor. You can hire a home health care aide for a month in Havana for the cost of one for a day in Florida.

China’s economic boom began in the early 1980s partly with factories financed by Chinese overseas, and after the American embargo ends, Cuba will have similar opportunities to forge mutually beneficial business partnerships with Cubans overseas.

That would benefit both sides. For 60 years we’ve been feuding, like the Hatfields and the McCoys, in a conflict whose origins most Americans don’t even remember clearly.

So come on. We should all be bored by a lifetime of mutual recriminations and antagonisms. Let’s put aside the ideology, end the embargo, tone down the propaganda and raise a mojito together.

I propose a toast to a new beginning.

This article originally appeared in <a id="683d6348-6a82-47b3-90fd-5007ab74cb9b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/opinion/cuba-embargo.html">The New York Times</a>.

The embargo on Cuba failed, let's move on

Cuba is neither the demonic tyranny conjured by some conservatives nor the heroic worker paradise romanticized by some on the left. It’s simply a tired little country.

<h1>Half a world away, crowds of heroic protesters are in the streets. They shout “Peaceful, Peaceful” even as security forces target them with live ammunition.</h1>

They are risking their lives to try to topple a genocidal ruler. But President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other world leaders are largely ignoring these brave protesters, increasing the risk that they will be massacred.

These protests are unfolding in Sudan against the regime of President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. Other presidents have committed genocide over the last century, but Bashir has the distinction of conducting three different genocides by my count: in South Sudan, in the Nuba Mountains and in Darfur. He is not just a serial killer; he is a serial genocidaire.

For almost a month, ordinary Sudanese have poured out of their homes and offices around the country to join this “Sudan uprising.” Perhaps 40 or more have been killed by security forces and hundreds more detained and often beaten. The police reportedly have dragged injured protesters from hospital beds, with lawyers, doctors and journalists particularly targeted.

A large march is planned in Khartoum for Thursday, with simultaneous protests in other cities around the country, and there are growing concerns that Bashir will at some point decide that the only way to stay in power is through a blood bath.

What is the United States doing as these courageous demonstrators risk their lives? Nothing. Trump hasn’t issued a statement. Pompeo has yet to say a peep.

“It is very disappointing,” Omer Ismail, a Sudanese working for the Enough Project, which fights atrocities, told me. “Pompeo and Trump should condemn this in the strongest terms, and they should call on Bashir to reach a peaceful solution in Sudan.”

“We need the voice of America because it is the leader of the free world, like it or not,” Ismail added.

The United States did join in statements with Britain, Norway and Canada calling on Bashir to release detainees and recognize the right of peaceful assembly. But there should be a much sterner warning to all security forces that they will be held personally accountable for atrocities.

I asked Mudawi Ibrahim, an old friend who has led a Sudanese aid group and has himself been imprisoned in the past, what the United States could do, and he said: “Put the government under pressure to stop brutal confrontation against demonstrators, release all detainees, allow the people of Sudan to exercise their constitutional rights.”

I have covered all three genocides by Bashir, which have spanned most of the period since he took power in 1989, and I can never forget what I’ve encountered. A 2-year-old girl named Zahra beaten to death in Darfur. A 27-year-old man named Abdullah whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet. Six children in Nuba burned to death in a pit. A 17-year-old girl named Hawa dragged away by police officers who had barged into a clinic after she sought help from French doctors for a brutal rape.

Bashir and his aides are ruthless. That’s why it is so important for Trump and other leaders to send a clear warning to security forces not to massacre protesters. We can also ramp up intelligence collection in Sudan and send the message that the world is watching.

Demonstrators are angry not only at Bashir’s brutality but also at his incompetence and corruption, which have left the economy in catastrophic shape (partly because Bashir’s policies led to secession by South Sudan). A country that was historically a bread basket of the region now is a net food importer.

The protesters know that Arab Spring protests in countries like Syria and Libya led to disaster, and they worry about a palace coup by a strongman, or about the risk of Sudan becoming a failed state.

Yet Sudan also has great strengths, including a robust, well-educated civil society that is fed up with autocratic ideologues and yearns for freedom. In covering Sudan ever since my first reporting trip as an Arabic student in 1984, I’ve been haunted by the atrocities I’ve seen — but also inspired by the inner strength of so many ordinary people.

I once came across an elderly couple in Darfur who were in a village attacked by Bashir’s Janjaweed militia. The man, Simih Yahya, didn’t run because that would mean leaving behind his disabled wife, Halima. So the militia members threw him down, piled grass on his back and laughingly started a bonfire on top of him. Halima threw herself on the fire to try to extinguish it with her own body. Both were badly burned, but they survived.

Today, courageous Sudanese across the country find themselves in an even bigger bonfire. They are begging us to at least speak up.

Mr. President, Secretary Pompeo, will you do that much?

This article originally appeared in <a id="15962c4d-9ad1-469f-8233-7eb869ba271f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/sudan-protests-bashir.html">The New York Times</a>.

Nicholas Kristof

Articles written by the author

Two women, heroes for our age

The cruelty at the border continues

We will survive ... probably ...

'He is a racist, he is a con man, and he is a cheat'

Rapists presented by their church as men of God

Thank God for Canada!

The embargo on Cuba failed, let's move on

Marching toward a massacre