Variants are an unavoidable byproduct of the pandemic’s exponential growth.

Variants are an unavoidable byproduct of the pandemic’s exponential growth. More than half a
million new cases of COVID-19 are reported every day. Each infected person harbors hundreds of
billions of virus particles, all of which are constantly reproducing. Each round of replication of every
viral particle yields an average of 30 mutations. The vast majority of mutations do not make the virus
more transmissible or deadly. But with an astronomical number of mutations happening every day
across the globe, there is an ever-growing risk that some of them will result in more dangerous
viruses, becoming what epidemiologists call “variants of concern.” Hyperintense outbreaks—such as
the ones in New York City in March 2020, Brazil in March 2021, and India in May 2021—only increase
the risk.

A number of variants have already emerged that spread more easily, cause more severe illness, or
reduce the effectiveness of treatments or vaccines, such as the B.1.1.7 variant (first detected in the
United Kingdom), B.1.351 (South Africa), B.1.429 (California), P.1 (Brazil), and B.1.617.2 (India).
Although variants are often labeled with a geographic tag based on where they were first identified,
they should be considered global threats. (In fact, given the uncertainty about where each variant
emerged, as opposed to where it happened to be first reported, the geographic nomenclature would
best be dropped altogether.)

To date, the three vaccines authorized in the United States—the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and
Johnson & Johnson vaccines—are effective against the existing variants. But two variants, B.1.351
and B.1.617.2, have shown signs of impairing the efficacy of other vaccines and of therapeutic
antibodies. Each new, more resistant or more transmissible variant may require additional booster
shots, or perhaps new vaccines altogether, adding to the massive logistical challenge of vaccinating
billions of people in nearly 200 countries. Other variants may even evade current diagnostic tests,
making them more difficult to track and contain. The pandemic, in short, is hardly in its last throes.

AMERICA’S ROLE

As a wealthy, powerful, and scientifically advanced country, the United States is optimally positioned
to help lead the long fight against COVID-19. To do so, the country must recover its reputation for
global public health leadership. At a time of resurgent nationalism at home and abroad, it will need
to rise above the forces of division and rally the rest of the world to join it in undertaking what may
be the biggest experiment in global health cooperation ever.

To start, the United States must continue its trajectory toward zero COVID-19 cases at home. No
country can help others if it is crippled itself. Extraordinarily effective vaccines, along with equally
impressive vaccination campaigns in most U.S. states, have dramatically decreased the number of
infections. When epidemiologists look at the United States now, they no longer see a blanket of
disease covering the entire country; instead, they see scattered flare-ups. This means they can
discern individual chains of transmission—a game-changer in terms of strategy.
One of the most important missing pieces of the U.S. vaccination program is an appreciation for the
power of speedy, targeted deployment. Vaccines should be redistributed to the parts of the country
with high infection rates to protect those most at risk of contracting the disease and reduce the
potential for transmission. In many ways, this strategy represents a return to the basics of disease
control. To eradicate smallpox in the 1970s, epidemiologists encouraged public health departments
to report potential cases, looked for symptomatic people at large gatherings, maintained a “rumor
register” to pick up new outbreaks, and offered cash rewards to people who found potential cases.
They investigated every case, located the source of infection, and identified contacts who were likely
to get the disease next. Those who were infected with smallpox, as well as the people they had
exposed to the disease, were quickly isolated and vaccinated. By practicing “just in time” vaccination,
epidemiologists were able to prevent new chains of transmission—quickly controlling the disease
and saving as many as three-quarters of the vaccine doses as compared to if they had performed
mass vaccination.

Dining outdoors in New York City, May 2021

Dining outdoors in New York City, May 2021

Caitlin Ochs / Reuters

Of course, it was a different disease, a different vaccine, and a different time. Part of what makes
COVID-19 so difficult to combat is that it is an airborne illness with so much asymptomatic
transmission. Today, however, epidemiologists have the added benefit of powerful new tools for
detecting outbreaks and developing vaccines. They can use these innovations to build a twenty-first-
century version of surveillance and containment for the battle against this pandemic. Adopting a
strategy of “just in time” vaccination, the United States and other countries with moderate infection
rates should prioritize the immunization of people known to have been exposed (for whom
vaccination can still prevent or mitigate symptoms), along with their contacts and communities, using
old-fashioned or modern-day methods.

If the United States solves the puzzle of controlling outbreaks of COVID-19 at home and shields itself
against importations of the virus from abroad, it will have a blueprint that it can share globally. It
should do so, turning outward to help lead what will be the largest and most complicated disease-
control campaign in human history. To that end, it should support expanded manufacturing capacity
for COVID-19 vaccines worldwide and get to work distributing enough of them to reach the last mile
of each country in the world—and do so faster than new supervariants can emerge.

There is other work to be done domestically, as well. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed
by Congress in March, provided $48 billion for diagnostic testing and additional public health
personnel to contain outbreaks. Such efforts have become all the more important as demand for
vaccinations has slowed. As of May, barely half of the country was fully immunized. Even allowing for
those with natural immunity from prior infection, that leaves about 125 million Americans
susceptible to COVID-19. Thus, there is even more reason to build the capacity to protect these
Americans from the inevitable importations of the virus, doubling down on efforts to find, manage,
and contain all outbreaks.
Part of this effort will require building a stronger disease surveillance system in the United States.
Hospitals, testing labs, and local public health agencies already routinely report data about COVID-19
to the CDC. But the CDC must continue adding more innovative ways to detect outbreaks early on.
Already, epidemiologists around the world are experimenting with digital disease detection, combing
through data on pharmacy purchases and scouring social media and online news stories for clues of
new outbreaks. Taking advantage of electronic medical records, they are tracking the symptoms of
emergency room patients in real time. And they have created participatory surveillance systems,
such as the apps Outbreaks Near Me in the United States and DoctorMe in Thailand, which allow
people to voluntarily disclose symptoms online.

The global framework for pandemic response is broken.

Together, these reporting systems could capture a high percentage of symptomatic cases. To find
missed infections, epidemiologists can monitor sewage for virus shed in feces to detect unreported
outbreaks. And to capture asymptomatic cases, an especially important task for interrupting the
transmission of SARS-CoV-2, exposure notification systems will prove key. With these systems, users
are alerted through their cell phones if they have come into close contact with someone infected
with the virus, without that person’s identity being divulged—thus informing people who do not feel
sick that they may in fact be carrying the virus. At the same time as they are notified of possible
infection, users can be advised to get tested, vaccinated, or learn about government support for
isolation. Although such systems are still in their infancy, early reports from Ireland and the United
Kingdom, where they have taken off, are encouraging.

Adding newer forms of disease detection to conventional reporting systems would give public health
officials the kind of situational awareness that battlefield commanders and CEOs have long been
accustomed to. That, in turn, would allow them to act much more quickly to contain outbreaks. So
would faster and cheaper viral sequencing, which would enable scientists to rapidly identify
infections and variants. They could use that information to update diagnostic tests to ensure
accurate surveillance and modify vaccines to maintain their efficacy. If a particular variant was found
to be vulnerable to one vaccine and not others, the vaccine that worked best could be rushed to the
areas where the variant was prevalent. Such a custom-tailored approach will become yet more
important as new vaccines are created for new variants; those vaccines will inevitably be in short
supply.

Everyone should be grateful for the remarkable vaccines that won the race to be first. But the United
States and other wealthy countries must nonetheless invest in the next generation of COVID-19
vaccines, ones that are less expensive to manufacture, require no refrigeration, and can be given in a
single dose by untrained personnel. This is no pipe dream: researchers are already developing
vaccines that can survive heat, take effect more quickly, and can be administered through a nasal
spray, oral drops, or a transdermal patch. Thanks to these innovations, the world could soon have
vaccines that are as practical to distribute in rural India or Zimbabwe as they are in London or Tokyo.
SYSTEM REBOOT

Even though the United States must play a leading role in getting this pandemic under control, that
will not be enough without efforts to reform the global framework for pandemic response. The
current system is broken. For all the debates about who should have made what decisions
differently, a simple fact remains: what began as an outbreak of a novel coronavirus could have been
contained, even when it was a moderately sized epidemic. In a report released in May, an
independent panel chaired by two former heads of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Helen
Clark of New Zealand, did not assign blame for that failure. But the panel did offer suggestions for
how to prevent the same mistake from happening again.

Its headline recommendation was to elevate pandemic preparedness and response to the highest
levels of the UN through the creation of a “global health threats council.” This council would be
separate from the WHO, led by heads of state, and charged with holding countries accountable for
containing epidemics. In order to rebuild public trust in global health institutions, it would have to be
immune from political interference. The report envisioned the council as supporting and overseeing a
WHO that had more resources, autonomy, and authority. One vital contribution it could make would
be to identify those diagnostic tests, drugs, and vaccines for COVID-19 that merit investment most
and allocate resources accordingly, so that they can be rapidly developed and efficiently distributed.
Although many details remain to be worked out, the recommendation of such a council represents a
brave attempt in the middle of a pandemic to reform how pandemics are managed—akin to
rebuilding a plane while flying it.

The most urgent need for global public health is speed. With a viral epidemic, timing is nearly
everything. The faster an outbreak is discovered, the better chance it can be stopped. In the case of
COVID-19, early and rapid detection would let decision-makers around the world know where to
surge appropriate vaccines, what variants are circulating, and how to triage resources based on risk.
Fortunately, when the next novel pathogen emerges—and it is a question of when, not if—scientific
advances will allow global public health institutions to move faster than ever before. Scientists at the
CDC and at the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, or GOARN, have made huge
strides in compiling a range of data streams to quickly learn of new outbreaks. Twenty years ago, it
took six months to detect a new virus with pandemic potential; today, it can be done in a matter of
weeks.

COVID-19 is not yet the worst pandemic in history. But we should not tempt fate.

But the global system for disease surveillance has ample room for improvement. The latest
surveillance technologies—digital disease detection, participatory surveillance systems, and exposure
notification systems—should be available everywhere, not just in the richest countries. So should
viral-sequencing technologies. It is time to move beyond the old model of global health, in which
samples of pathogens were sent from poor countries to rich ones to be sequenced, with the
countries that sent the samples rarely sharing in the test kits, vaccines, and therapeutics that were
developed as a result. This is a matter not only of fairness but also of epidemiological necessity, since
the closer to its origin a new epidemic can be detected, the faster the world can respond.
Even if a novel pathogen escapes national borders, there is still time to contain it regionally.
Governments should encourage the sharing of data about emerging diseases among neighboring
countries. To that end, they should back Connecting Organizations for Regional Disease Surveillance,
or CORDS, a group that brings together three dozen countries, several UN agencies (including the
WHO), and a number of foundations, all in an effort to share early warning signals of infectious
diseases and coordinate responses to them. In the same spirit, the WHO should work with
governments and nongovernmental organizations to put anonymized case-level demographic,
epidemiological, and sequencing data all in a single database. The end goal is a global health
intelligence network that would bring together scientists who can collect, analyze, and share the data
needed to inform the development of diagnostic tests, drugs, and vaccines, as well as make decisions
about where to surge vaccines to control outbreaks.

FINISHING THE JOB

COVID-19 is not yet the worst pandemic in history. But we should not tempt fate. The past year and a
half revealed how globalization, air travel, and the growing proximity between people and animals—
in a word, modernity—have made humanity more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Sustaining our
way of life thus requires deep changes in the way we interact with the natural world, the way we
think about prevention, and the way we respond to global health emergencies. It also requires even
populist leaders to think globally. Self-interest and nationalism don’t work when it comes to a lethal
infectious disease that moves across the globe at the speed of a jet plane and spreads at an
exponential pace. In a pandemic, domestic and foreign priorities converge.

Most of the planet is still mourning for what has been lost since this pandemic began. At least three
and a half million people have died. Many more are suffering from lingering effects of the disease.
The financial toll of the pandemic has been estimated at some $20 trillion. Virtually no one has been
spared from some grieving or some loss. People are ready for the long nightmare to be over. But in
most places, it is not. Huge disparities have led to a Dickensian tale of two worlds, in which some
countries are experiencing a respite from the disease while others are still on fire.

The psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously and controversially outlined the stages of grief that
people go through as they learn to live with what has been lost: denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance. Almost everyone has experienced at least one of these stages during
the pandemic, although in many ways, the world is still stuck in the first stage, denial, refusing to
accept that the pandemic is far from over. To these five stages, the bioethicist David Kessler has
added one more that is crucial: finding meaning. From the devastation of COVID-19, the world must
work together to build an enduring system for mitigating this pandemic and preventing the next one.
Figuring out how to do that might be the most meaningful challenge of our lifetime.
11111

S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who are scheduled to meet in Geneva
on June 16, may know each other too well. They first met in 2011, when Biden, then U.S. vice
president, by his own account told Putin, then Russian prime minister, “I don’t think you have a
soul.” They clashed again after 2014, when Biden was tasked with bolstering Ukraine in the wake of
its protests and pressuring Russia to scale back its military interference in eastern Ukraine.

Putin then tasked himself with pushing back against Biden and the strain of U.S. policy he
represented. The Russian president had his intelligence services interfere with the 2016 U.S.
presidential election in the hope that Donald Trump, once elected, might reverse the Obama
administration’s stance on Russia. In the ensuing years, Putin’s minions likely passed along
information or misinformation on Biden’s son Hunter, which Trump’s minions eagerly received and
did their best to deploy in the 2020 campaign. With so much jagged history between them, the latest
meeting between Biden and Putin will be awkward at a personal level.

But the absence of rapport may be overshadowed by the absence of substantive agreement. Biden
did not campaign on a reset of U.S. relations with Russia, and he has not pursued such an approach
as president. Instead, his Russia policy presumes a high degree of friction with Moscow. It recognizes
the many ways in which Russia damages U.S. interests, from meddling in elections to occupying
eastern Ukraine to seeking to diminish U.S. influence worldwide. Biden’s goal is not to transform
relations with Russia but to “restore predictability and stability to the U.S.-Russia relationship,” as Jen
Psaki, the White House press secretary, explained when announcing the summit.

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There is thus a limit to how much the Putin-Biden summit can accomplish. With each leader
mistrusting and surely disliking the other, neither will go out of his way to deliver anything of
significance. Even so, there is real value to the optics of consultation and deliberation. With luck,
such optics can evolve into the reality of consultation and deliberation. These are the underpinnings
of true stability, and they can keep Russia and the West from getting pulled into a direct
confrontation—one that would be as undesirable as it would be undesired.

PUTIN’S CALCULUS

Putin will likely frame the Geneva summit more around his own diplomatic skills than around any
particular deliverables. He knows that Biden will not lift U.S. sanctions anytime soon. The game of
driving wedges between the United States and its European allies, which Putin enjoyed playing in the
Trump era, will pay fewer dividends with Biden, who has shored up the transatlantic alliance; there
are no propaganda points to be scored here. In fact, even the 2018 summit with Trump in Helsinki
did little for Putin. The American president, asked about Russian election meddling, gleefully sided
with Russia’s leader over his own intelligence professionals, marking a nadir for U.S. diplomacy. Yet
this apparent public relations bonanza furnished Russia with no new geopolitical opening, and
Trump’s words in Helsinki, as was so often the case, had little bearing on his administration’s policies.

With Biden, Putin will play the role of a statesman. He will try to get the summit to register as a
meeting of equals. By in no way deferring to Biden, he will strive to demonstrate that Russia is a
great power. Let other world leaders beg for the kind of U.S. attention that Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky has been publicly craving since Biden entered the Oval Office. Let the Europeans
gather with Biden in their byzantine multilateral forums. Let others wait out in the cold, too marginal
or undemocratic or annoying to garner a meeting with the U.S. president. Putin will meet with Biden
one-on-one—as, in his view, is Russia’s right.

Yet beyond international stature, Putin is also seeking the same things Biden wants: predictability
and stability. True, Putin has not shied away from destabilizing Russia’s neighbors or even the United
States. He may or may not have assisted the Belarusian government’s operation to force down a
passenger plane to arrest a journalist flying from Greece to Lithuania, but he certainly condoned the
act afterward. For all the talk of Russia as a “revisionist spoiler,” however, the country revises and
spoils much less than it could. In Ukraine, it has declined to march on Kyiv. In the Middle East, it has
continued to allow Israel access to Syrian airspace. And in the United States, it has held back from
deploying its full arsenal of cyber-capabilities, which could surely wreak havoc on the U.S. economy.

An increasingly out-of-touch autocrat presiding over a worsening economy, Putin cannot afford an
uncontrolled intensification of international conflicts—especially with the United States. Putin needs
levers to manage conflict. A working relationship with Biden would cost him nothing, and it might
well purchase him the geopolitical respite he needs to address the fraying tapestry of domestic
Russian politics.

BIDEN’S GAME

Biden should approach the summit by balancing the long-term with the immediate. A worthwhile
practical gain would be to improve consular services for Russians in the United States and Americans
in Russia. Over the past several years, in retaliation for the election meddling and for the harassment
of U.S. diplomats, the United States expelled Russian diplomats and shuttered the Russian consulate
in Seattle and San Francisco, as well as the Russian trade mission in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile,
Russia expelled scores of U.S. diplomats. The United States, in turn, felt compelled to close
consulates in Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, and St. Petersburg, leaving the embassy in Moscow as its
sole diplomatic mission in Russia—which the Kremlin is currently threatening to deprive of its Russian
staff.

The lack of consulates in both countries makes it extremely difficult for citizens of either country to
visit the other, cutting off the cultural and scientific contact that has historically benefited both. The
people-to-people situation now is worse than it was during most of the Cold War. To correct it, Biden
should offer to relax some of the conditions—enabling the reopening of Russia’s consulates in the
United States or at least an expansion of U.S. consular services in Russia—in hopes of ending the tit-
for-tat reactions of the past several years.

Arms control will also be on the agenda in Geneva. Just a week after Biden took office, he and Putin
agreed to renew the New START treaty, but there is room for improvement. Not only could more
arms control save money but it would also set a good example to other countries. If Russia and the
United States, the world’s preeminent nuclear powers, cannot find an agreement on reducing their
arsenals, then arms control agreements with Iran and North Korea are bound to fail. The area,
fortunately, is ripe for progress. By its nature, arms control requires slow, painstaking work
undertaken by scientists who are less preoccupied with bilateral irritants than are policymakers and
diplomats. As a first step, the two leaders could establish working groups, some of them multilateral,
to conceptualize future arms control challenges.

Biden should approach the summit by balancing the long-term with the immediate.

Biden’s long-term goal should be to normalize U.S.-Russian relations. Simply by taking place, a Putin-
Biden summit would help on this front, by suggesting that it is normal for Russian and American
presidents to meet and meet often. President Barack Obama had a good first meeting with Putin in
Moscow in 2009. That was followed in 2010 by the cheery “hamburger summit” with Dmitry
Medvedev—who replaced Putin as Russian president for four years—during which the two youthful
presidents shared a photo op at a restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. But then things went downhill. In
2013, Obama canceled a planned summit with Putin after Edward Snowden, the former National
Security Agency contractor who released thousands of classified documents, was granted asylum in
Russia. After that, with the exception of tense meetings on the sidelines of bigger international
gatherings, there was only the July 2017 summit between Trump and Putin, which was as
unproductive as it was embarrassing.

During the Cold War, even as the two sides’ proxies battled each other across the globe, the United
States and the Soviet Union held regular diplomatic summits, which signified that the conflict was not
itself a conventional war. Its end state was not unconditional surrender but a wary and imperfect
coexistence. By contrast, the post–Cold War summits between U.S. and Russian leaders were
supposed to express partnership. They came to a halt during the second half of the Obama
administration, when the pretense of partnership could no longer be sustained. So twisted and
uncertain has the relationship become now that it must be shown that Russia and the United States
are not at war. Even a summit composed entirely of preset talking points would help do this.

For the Biden administration, the Geneva summit does not just concern diplomacy. Under Trump,
policy toward Russia and Ukraine got tangled up in U.S. politics. Trump had any number of strange
connections to the Russian government, although evidence that he was a Russian asset never
surfaced and accusations that he colluded with Russia were often driven by partisan motivations.
Objectively, however, Trump allowed Russian misinformation or intelligence about Biden’s son
Hunter to inform his reelection campaign. These were the dirty dealings for which Trump was
impeached in 2019. By starting to normalize U.S.-Russian relations, Biden can restore Russia to its
rightful place within the United States: as a matter of foreign policy, not domestic politics.

WHAT’S AT STAKE

Expectations for the Putin-Biden summit are rightly low. The stakes, however, are high. Russia and
the West are currently sleepwalking toward the abyss. Neither side feels any pressure to
compromise. Domestic politics in both countries rewards toughness. Each side is convinced that the
other is in decline, making compromise that much less desirable, since one side’s collapse—and, by
extension, the other’s victory—is only a matter of time.

Little will get resolved in Geneva. Some six years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Crimea remains
annexed, and eastern Ukraine has become yet another of the region’s frozen conflicts. The
diplomatic agreements forged by Germany, France, Russia, and Ukraine to end the conflict are an
irrelevant footnote to the situation on the ground. Meanwhile, Belarus is under the leadership of a
mad dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who will either achieve North Korea–style isolation for his
country or fall trying. The United States and its European allies want Belarus to be democratized,
while Russia, which has a substantial military presence within the country, insists that it remain tied
to Moscow. In and around Syria, the U.S. and Russian militaries are in close proximity but have
entirely distinct objectives.

All these incompatibilities will persist for decades. They admit no clear solution and may never get
solved. But they cannot be allowed to metastasize. That is Biden’s mandate in Geneva: to begin the
arduous journey toward predictability and stability.
11111

he United States has spent $19 trillion on its military since the end of the Cold War. That is $16
trillion more than China spent and nearly as much as the rest of the world combined spent during the
same period. Yet many experts think that the United States is about to lose a devastating war. In
March, Admiral Philip Davidson, then the commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, warned that
within the next six years, China’s military will “overmatch” that of the United States and will “forcibly
change the status quo” in East Asia. Back in 2019, a former Pentagon official claimed that the U.S.
military routinely “gets its ass handed to it” in war games simulating combat with China. Meanwhile,
many analysts and researchers have concluded that if China chose to conquer Taiwan, the Chinese
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could cripple whatever U.S. forces tried to stand in its way.

It has become conventional wisdom that this gathering storm represents the inevitable result of
Beijing’s rise and Washington’s decline. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. The United States has vast
resources and a viable strategy to counter China’s military expansion. Yet the U.S. defense
establishment has been slow to adopt this strategy and instead wastes resources on obsolete forces
and nonvital missions. Washington’s current defense posture doesn’t make military sense, but it
does make political sense—and it could very well endure. Historically, the United States has
revamped its military only after enemies have exposed its weaknesses on the battlefield. The country
may once again be headed for such a disaster.

To change course, the Biden administration must explicitly and repeatedly order the military to focus
on deterring China and downsize its other missions. These orders need to be fleshed out and codified
in the administration’s defense budget requests and in its National Defense Strategy. In addition, the
administration should support the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a program that would plug holes in
the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia. If the United States does not seize this chance to secure its
military advantage over China, it may not get another.

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THINK SMALL

Contrary to popular belief, the United States has the means to check China’s naval expansion. China’s
defense expenditures have risen for decades, but the United States still spends almost as much on its
navy and Marine Corps alone as China does on its entire military, excluding its internal security
forces. American combat units bear many burdens besides preparing for a U.S.-Chinese war—but so
do China’s. China shares sea or land borders with 19 countries, ten of which have ongoing territorial
disputes with Beijing. Patrolling these borders bogs down hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops
and drains at least a quarter of China’s military budget. Although China would have home-field
advantage in a war in East Asia, it would also face a more daunting set of tasks. Consider a conflict
over Taiwan in which China would need to seize and control territory in order to win, whereas the
United States would just need to deny China that control—a far easier mission.

Given these enduring U.S. advantages, a consensus has emerged among defense experts about how
to deter China. Instead of waiting for a war to begin and then surging vulnerable aircraft carriers into
East Asia, the United States could install a high-tech “minefield” in the area by prepositioning missile
launchers, armed drones, and sensors at sea and on allied territory near China’s coastline. These
diffuse networks of munitions would be tough for China to neutralize and would not require large
bases or fancy platforms. Instead, they could be installed on almost anything that floats or flies,
including converted merchant ships, barges, and aircraft.

The United States has vast resources and a viable strategy to counter China’s military expansion.

Defense analysts have touted this approach for more than a decade. Yet the U.S. military still relies
overwhelmingly on small numbers of large warships and short-range fighter aircraft operating from
exposed bases—exactly the kinds of forces that China could destroy in a preemptive air and missile
attack. To make matters worse, Washington has been exporting this flawed system to its allies.
Taiwan’s purchases of U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets and Abrams tanks, for example, have depleted
funds from the island’s army and ground-based missile forces, its primary defense against a Chinese
amphibious assault.

In the opinion of many military experts, U.S. leaders face what should be an easy choice. They can
rapidly shore up the military balance in East Asia by flooding the region with low-cost shooters and
sensors, or they can continue to fritter away resources on extraneous missions and expensive
weapons systems that are sitting ducks for China’s missiles. The question is: Why doesn’t the U.S.
defense establishment see things the same way?

MISSION CREEP

The problem starts at the very top and flows down through the ranks. Since the end of the Cold War,
U.S. presidents have allowed (and often encouraged) the Department of Defense to morph into the
Department of Everything. The U.S. military now performs dozens of missions besides preparing for
great-power war, including development assistance, disaster relief, counternarcotics operations,
diplomatic outreach, environmental conservation, and election security. American military personnel
operate in nearly every country on earth and perform almost every conceivable job.

This broad mandate has turned U.S. combatant commanders into what The Washington Post
reporter Dana Priest has described as “the modern-day equivalent of the Roman Empire’s proconsuls
—well-funded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of U.S. foreign policy.”

They oversee sprawling mini-Pentagons, travel the world like heads of state, and handle a wide array
of issues. Instead of advocating the relatively cheap and easy deployment of cruise missiles that
would be crucial in a war with China, they instead push for big military units and massive military
platforms (such as aircraft carriers and destroyers) that can handle a variety of peacetime missions.

As the defense expert Mackenzie Eaglen has shown, combatant commanders constantly request the
use of such platforms, and the services run their forces ragged trying to meet those demands. As a
result, the U.S. military has maintained a wartime tempo of operations throughout the past two
decades, even after drawing down from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with some units currently
being sent on deployments at nearly three times the Pentagon-recommended rate. Not surprisingly,
accidents and mechanical failures have surged. From 2006 to early 2021, the number of U.S. service
members killed in accidents—5,913—was more than double the number killed in combat. In 1986,
operations and maintenance costs consumed 28 percent of the Pentagon’s budget; they now drain a
whopping 41 percent, which is more than twice the budget share available to buy new weapons
systems. These trends have set off a vicious cycle in which the Pentagon spends more and more to
maintain fewer, older, and increasingly obsolete forces.

A BETTER APPROACH

The problem starts at the top and, therefore, so must the solution. President Joe Biden and Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin must order the Pentagon to focus on high-intensity combat with China,
especially in the Taiwan Strait, where the threat of war is greatest, and to downsize or eliminate
other missions. Those directives should be laid down in the Biden administration’s defense budget
proposals and in a revised National Defense Strategy. The 2018 National Defense Strategy usefully
prioritized great-power competition but did not significantly change U.S. force structure in Asia
because it piled on new missions without shedding less vital ones. The Biden administration now
needs to do the dirty work of identifying and axing nonessential tasks to free up military resources
and focus attention on deterring China.

The first step in that process would involve reducing the number and scope of “presence missions,”
which currently keep hundreds of thousands of military personnel navigating, flying, training, and
exercising around the world each day. The torrid pace of these activities ties up and wears down the
military’s combat units and incentivizes the procurement of large platforms unsuited for a war with
China. Reassuring allies and “showing the flag” are important missions, but they could be handled by
lighter units, such as Security Force Assistance Brigades, or by the State Department rather than by
carrier battle groups.

The Biden administration must explicitly order the military to focus on deterring China.

Second, the Biden team should redeploy as many air and naval forces as possible to Asia. The United
States announced a “pivot” to the region nearly a decade ago, but many of its big guns remain
elsewhere. In the Middle East, for example, the United States routinely uses advanced fighters to
attack lightly armed terrorists and deploys aircraft carriers and heavy bombers to send coercive
signals to Iran. Such overkill saps military readiness and deprives the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command of
the forces it needs to compete with China. A more sustainable approach would handle smaller
threats with smaller forces, hunting terrorists with drones and special operations units, providing
close-air support with light-attack aircraft, and hedging against Iranian aggression by maintaining a
skeletal base structure in the region ready to support a surge of forces if a major conflict broke out.

Finally, the Biden administration should transfer nonmilitary missions to civilian agencies. For
example, drug interdiction should be handled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, border
security by Customs and Border Protection, election security by the Department of Homeland
Security, development assistance by the U.S. Agency for International Development, and so on.
Reassigning such missions and beefing up civilian agencies to handle them would boost American
military might while simultaneously demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy.

WOLF AT THE DOOR

Reforming the country’s biggest bureaucracy will be hard, but not impossible. The military is a
hierarchical organization with clear lines of formal authority. The president and the secretary of
defense can issue orders to combatant commanders and enforce them through their control over the
budget and personnel. Combatant commanders and service chiefs, in turn, have substantial influence
over procurement. They are on the frontlines, so when they make an equipment request, members
of Congress can only do so much to resist—defense contractors usually have to fall in line, too. The
president and the secretary of defense can also use their bully pulpits to shift the political incentives
facing the most important players. For example, if the president and the secretary of defense clearly
prioritized China, it would provide members of Congress with political cover to support the
cancellation or downsizing of other missions.

Reform is possible in theory, but putting it into practice will require clear and sustained top-level
leadership. Biden and Austin have said that deterring China is their top military priority, but Biden
also wants the Pentagon to handle a range of unconventional security threats, and Austin hardly
seems likely to be an “Asia First” advocate given that he is the former commander of U.S. Central
Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East.

Reforming the country’s biggest bureaucracy will be hard, but not impossible.

However, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for reform. One is that a
growing number of powerful political players support a renewed focus on China. Last year, Congress
passed the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. If fully funded, this program would allocate $27 billion over
five years to disperse and harden the U.S. base structure in Asia and equip the Indo-Pacific Command
with plenty of long-range munitions and sensors. In April, lawmakers on the House Armed Services
Committee wrote a letter to the Pentagon calling for a reduction in nonessential peacetime
operations to free up resources to prepare for great-power war. The Marine Corps and the army, the
two branches of the military most inclined to resist a focus on naval warfare in Asia, have drafted
plans to pivot from fighting insurgents in the Middle East to sinking ships in the western Pacific. And
defense experts across the political spectrum now broadly agree on how the United States should go
about deterring Chinese naval expansion.
Meanwhile, anti-China sentiment, both within the United States and around the world, has surged to
its highest level since the Chinese government carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Getting tough with China is one of the few bipartisan initiatives in the United States, and China seems
to be doing everything it can to fan these flames with “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy.

There now exists bipartisan political support in Washington for a true rebalance to Asia and a
strategic consensus among defense planners about how to proceed. The main ingredient that is
lacking is concerted top-level leadership to harness that support and put those strategies into action.
11111

Since the Iranian presidential election of 1997, when the reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami
won a surprise victory, elections in the Islamic Republic have remained relatively competitive. That
seems set to change, however. In the upcoming presidential election, slated for June 18, Iran’s
current chief justice, Ebrahim Raisi, is all but certain to cruise to victory and become Iran’s eighth
president. His win will largely result from preelection engineering on the part of the Guardian
Council, a 12-member body of jurists and clerics that is closely aligned with Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei and that vets candidates for office. Of the 592 candidates who threw their hats, turbans,
and headscarfs into this month’s race, the Guardian Council approved only seven men, of whom Raisi
is the most prominent.

The Guardian Council’s decision to disqualify many established political heavyweights shocked
Tehran’s political elite. The council rejected the candidacy of Ali Larijani, who served the longest term
of any Speaker of the parliament, currently advises the supreme leader, and led the negotiations that
produced Iran’s recent strategic partnership deal with China. Also barred from running were Vice
President Eshagh Jahangiri, who has been a heartbeat away from the presidency for the past eight
years, and the two-term past president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Criticism of the council’s decision laid bare the Iranian political elite’s hypocrisy. Larijani’s brother,
Sadeq, a member of the Guardian Council, lambasted the “indefensible” disqualifications and
derided the “security apparatus” for meddling in the vetting process. Hassan Khomeini, the grandson
of the Islamic Republic’s founder, condemned the council’s undermining of the system’s republican
institutions as “counterrevolutionary” and advised the approved candidates to drop out of the race.
Ahmadinejad joined millions of Iranians who say they are planning to boycott the elections.

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Khamenei initially defended the Guardian Council’s choices. Although he later claimed that some
injustices were committed during the vetting process, he stopped short of demanding a reversal.
That is likely because the supreme leader may be considering structural changes: namely, converting
the country’s presidential system into a parliamentary one or replacing the role of supreme leader
with a multiperson council. A parliamentary system would limit the conflicts between the offices of
the supreme leader and the president under Iran’s existing system, and abolishing the position of
supreme leader would help his son maintain backroom influence after Khamenei’s death. Having a
pliant president such as Raisi by his side would mean that Khamenei would face little internal
resistance to what would amount to an unprecedented transformation of the Iranian political
system.
AN UNLEVELED PLAYING FIELD

When the council published its final list of approved candidates on May 25, Iranians flooded social
media with clips from The Dictator, a movie in which Sacha Baron Cohen plays a Middle Eastern
tyrant. In one scene, the dictator participates in a race, which he begins by firing his pistol into the air
—and then shooting the other runners. To Iranian observers, it served as an allusion to Raisi, who is
notorious for his involvement as a prosecutor in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in
the late 1980s.

None of Raisi’s vetted rivals pose a serious threat. One, the hard-line former national security adviser
and chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, supported Raisi in the 2017 presidential election. Polls
suggest that the gap between him and Raisi is insurmountable. The same applies to another
perennial contender, Mohsen Rezaei, the former commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps. In his previous three failed bids, Rezaei never gained more than four million votes
(compared with Raisi’s nearly 16 million in 2017, which was in turn dwarfed by the 23.5 million votes
for the winning candidate, Hassan Rouhani). Two other hard-line opponents, Amir-Hossein
Ghazizadeh and Alireza Zakani, are current members of parliament with little national recognition.
But they present no challenge since Zakani withdrew on June 16, and Ghazizadeh is likely to do the
same before voting day. The fig leaf reformist candidate, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, former governor of
the province of Isfahan, was not backed even by reformist coalitions and also dropped out on June
16, further narrowing the field for Raisi.

The only person who could potentially mobilize some popular support is Abdolnaser Hemmati, the
technocratic former head of Iran’s central bank. Many centrists and reformists are starting to
consider him the least bad option owing to his relatively progressive platform and to his wife’s active
participation in his campaign, which signals a relatively progressive approach to gender issues by the
standards of Iran’s highly patriarchal polity. Nevertheless, he is unlikely to dislodge Raisi as the front-
runner.

END OF THE REPUBLIC?

The government of the Islamic Republic has often pointed to high rates of voter turnout to buttress
its claims to legitimacy, even if the electorate always has to choose from a limited spectrum of
preselected candidates. In reality, however, turnout rates have varied widely. And in recent years,
the Guardian Council’s increasingly aggressive disqualification practices and the hard-liners’ dogged
obstruction of meaningful reforms have culminated in widespread political apathy. Recent surveys
anticipate a historically low turnout of around 40 percent. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is likely
to further reduce participation.

This causes very little alarm for Iran’s hard-line faction, which is not primarily concerned with shoring
up the government’s popular legitimacy through competitive elections. Instead, Khamenei has
decided to further shrink the circle of insiders and anoint a subservient ally to the presidency to
complete the hard-liners’ control over all levers of power at a critical moment. Most observers
believe rigging the election in favor of Raisi is a ploy to groom him to become the supreme leader
himself, in the same way that Khamenei succeeded Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, in 1989, after serving as president. According to this view, if Raisi became supreme leader,
his lack of revolutionary and religious credentials would force him to rely on Khamenei’s office—a
shadow government of sorts in which Khamenei’s son Mojtaba is a key player.

Others argue the opposite: that the supreme leader sees Raisi as a threat and that by elevating him
to the presidency, Khamenei is setting him up to fail. After all, the thinking goes, as head of the
judiciary, Raisi faces a narrow set of challenges and is accountable only to Khamenei, but as
president, he would confront numerous socioeconomic crises amid a standoff with the West over
Iran’s nuclear and regional policies. With Raisi’s credibility eroded by the burdens of the presidency,
Khamenei could elevate his preferred heir apparent.

Neither hypothesis is particularly convincing. Once in office as supreme leader, Raisi would not
necessarily remain dependent on Khamenei’s office or family and could sideline them in much the
same way Khamenei himself sidelined the Khomeini and Rafsanjani families that had helped boost
him to the pinnacle of political power. It is hard to believe that Khamenei, his family, and his
supporters would overlook Machiavelli’s warning: “He who is the cause of another becoming
powerful is ruined.”

Khamenei has decided to anoint a subservient ally to complete the hard-liners’ control over all levers
of power.

The second hypothesis is even less likely. There is, after all, a decent chance that the nuclear deal Iran
struck with the United States and other major powers might be restored by the time Raisi comes into
office. In that case, he would begin his presidency by reaping the deal’s economic dividends and
taking credit for the country’s recovery from COVID-19 as well, given the prospects of greater vaccine
availability by then. If Khamenei is trying to set up a rival to fail, he’s picked an odd time to do it.

A more likely explanation for why Khamenei and the Guardian Council put their fingers on the scale
so decisively to assist Raisi is that they have reason to believe he would not oppose major structural
changes that would put the system on a more stable footing while ensuring the survival of
Khamenei’s family and his vision for the revolution. Specifically, the supreme leader may aim to
convert Iran’s presidential system to a parliamentary one or to replace the supreme leader’s role
with a council that would take over once he passes on. He hinted at the former a decade ago, when
he publicly announced that “if one day, possibly in the distant future, it is felt that a parliamentary
system is more suited for electing those responsible for the executive branch, then there would be
no problems in making changes to the system.” A parliamentary system would reduce the friction
between the offices of the supreme leader and the president that currently exists in Iran’s bifurcated
political structure and would make it easier for an amenable parliament to remove and replace the
chief executive. And thus one of the system’s key representative institutions—its executive—could
no longer challenge its theocratic unelected ones, strengthening the control of the supreme leader.
Abolishing a single-man supreme leadership, meanwhile, would diminish the risk that after Khamenei
leaves office, his successor would marginalize his family. The absence of a sole dominant ruler would
also allow Khamenei’s son Mojtaba to retain a great deal of behind-the-scenes influence even after
his father had passed away. Having sidelined Khomeini’s family and imprisoned Rafsanjani’s children
himself, Khamenei is right to fear a similar fate for his son, who could ensure that Khamenei’s legacy
is protected and his strategic agenda outlives him.

Such significant changes might not be Ayatollah Khamenei’s ultimate objective. He might just want
his new (and probably last) president to be less troublesome than the previous four, who often
caused him headaches. But if he is seeking transformational change, a compliant president would
certainly help.
11111

June 13, 2021, marked the end of an era in Israel. After 12 years as prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu was voted out of office by the narrowest of margins, 60 to 59. In his place, the parliament
chose a coalition government, to be led by the conservative Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair
Lapid.

Even excluding his first, three-year stint as prime minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu was Israel’s
longest-serving leader, and he so dominated Israeli politics that it was difficult to imagine that
anybody could ever replace him. Indeed, it took four elections over two years and the collaboration
of eight opposition parties to finally remove him from office. The effort required is a testament to his
unmatched survival skills in a political system that requires endless maneuvering just to stay in place.

Netanyahu will be the first to claim that he did more than just survive, and that is true. His
Reaganesque policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts, bureaucratic reductions, and banking
reforms did much to boost economic growth and fund the rise of Israel’s high-tech juggernaut, even
though they increased inequality. During his tenure, a million new jobs were created, GDP grew by
50 percent, and exports doubled. And although he bungled the management of the COVID-19
pandemic early on, he did secure an impressive number of vaccines and distribute them quickly.

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Netanyahu also parlayed Israel’s formidable intelligence capabilities, military prowess, and
reputation as the “startup nation” into a prominent role for his country on the world stage. Relations
with India, China, Russia, Africa, and Latin America burgeoned. So did strategic cooperation with Arab
states, especially as the threat to Israel’s neighbors from Iran and the Islamic State (or ISIS) waxed
and as their faith in the reliability of the United States waned. Although he ruptured relations with
neighboring Jordan, Netanyahu’s crowning achievement was the normalization of relations with the
United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco under the umbrella of the Abraham accords,
signed in 2020.

For all these achievements, as time went on, Netanyahu became more narcissistic, arrogant, and
paranoid. These were the flaws that led to his undoing and that explained his failures in relations
with the United States and the Palestinians, both of which he leaves in poor condition. Now, the new
Bennett-Lapid government, with its razor-thin majority, is tasked with repairing the damage.

BYE-BYE, BIBI
From early on, Netanyahu was convinced that the press was his enemy. He was determined to
manipulate the message by gaining control of media outlets, convincing the American billionaire
Sheldon Adelson to establish a free newspaper to carry his message and using his position as
communications minister to shape television and Internet coverage. This obsession led him to abuse
his power and resulted in his indictment, in 2019, on charges of bribery, corruption, and breach of
trust. In the process, Netanyahu so mistreated his staff and advisers that three of his closest aides are
now testifying against him in that trial.

Similar behavior turned his political partners against him, too. Ironically, although Netanyahu
succeeded in using his populist appeal to drive the Israeli polity to the right, his politics were so
divisive that he managed to split his base. In the end, three right-wing parties joined the effort to
bring him down. In his ever more desperate attempts to secure a majority, he brought new players
into the political mainstream, legitimizing far-right Jewish extremists and Ra’am, an Arab Islamist
party that he had previously marginalized along with the other Arab political parties. In the process,
Netanyahu engineered his own downfall: first, the Jewish extremists vetoed a government with
Arabs in it; then, the newly legitimized Arab Islamists joined the coalition against him. It was a classic
tale of hubris.

Netanyahu engineered his own downfall. It was a classic tale of hubris.

The same self-destructive instincts ruined Netanyahu’s relations with the United States, Israel’s most
important source of support, without whose backing none of his achievements on the world stage
would have been possible. Ensuring bipartisan support had been the carefully cultivated approach of
all previous Israeli prime ministers. But as U.S. politics became more polarized, Netanyahu
deliberately chose to side with Republicans and their evangelical and Orthodox Jewish voters. He
judged liberal Jews, who make up the bulk of the American Jewish community and are a mainstay of
the Democratic Party, as unreliable. So he abandoned them.

Netanyahu pitted Republicans against Democrats in his failed effort to thwart the Iran nuclear deal
and then embraced Donald Trump’s divisive politics, drawing the U.S. president into his increasingly
desperate attempts to get reelected. That secured him the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
and U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, but those interventions were not
sufficient to help him achieve a majority. In May 2021, the chickens came home to roost when the
progressive wing of the Democratic Party harshly criticized Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens
against Hamas’s rocket attacks and called for the conditioning of U.S. military assistance; some of
Israel’s strongest Democratic supporters in Congress spoke out, too. Netanyahu had been warned
repeatedly that it was a mistake to put all Israel’s eggs in the Republican basket, but he thought he
knew American politics better.

THE MISSING PEACE

Nowhere have Netanyahu’s destructive impulses been more damaging to Israel’s future as a Jewish
and democratic state than in his treatment of the Palestinian issue. In 1998, during his first term as
prime minister, he reluctantly went along with the bargain enshrined in the 1993 Oslo accords—
territory for peace—and grudgingly conceded a mere 13 percent of the West Bank to Palestinian
rule. When that led to the collapse of his first government, he vowed never to repeat the exercise.
Upon his return to the prime minister’s office eight years later, he paid lip service to the two-state
solution but was never prepared to risk his base to achieve it. Instead, he pursued a divide-and-rule
policy toward the Palestinians, building up Hamas in Gaza and weakening the Palestinian Authority in
the West Bank. All the while, he ensured that Jewish settlers expanded their footprint in the West
Bank.

Aided by the Palestinians’ resort to violence and incitement, Netanyahu manipulated the Israeli
public into believing that they had no partner on the Palestinian side and therefore needed to make
no concessions to advance peace. In a sign of just how successful this effort was, in the last four
election campaigns, the parties of the left-wing peace camp did not dare mention the Palestinian
issue.

Nowhere have Netanyahu’s destructive impulses been more damaging to Israel’s future as a Jewish
and democratic state than in his treatment of the Palestinian issue.

When a credulous Trump peace team led by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, came along,
Netanyahu convinced them to cut-and-paste his conception of a two-state solution into what the
president called “the deal of the century” and try to impose it on the Palestinians. The plan involved
what Netanyahu termed a “state-minus” for the Palestinians, with an emphasis on “minus”: the
Palestinians would be denied the territory, sovereignty, contiguity, and capital in East Jerusalem
necessary for an independent and viable state. That humiliation was to be combined with Israeli
annexation of the Jordan Valley and all the West Bank settlements even before negotiations began.

Not surprisingly, the Trump peace plan was dead on arrival. But that nevertheless served
Netanyahu’s purposes. The prime minister had calculated that the threat of annexation would force
the Palestinians to accept Trump’s offer. It didn’t, but someone else knocked on his door: the
Emiratis, who offered full normalization of relations in return for his commitment to drop
annexation. Normalization with three more Arab states followed, enabling Netanyahu to proclaim he
had secured “peace for peace” deals involving no concessions to the Palestinians. He thereby
reinforced the illusion that Israelis could have peace with the Arab world without peace with the
Palestinians—until in May 2021, 3,440 rockets were fired at them from Gaza, and most of the world
condemned Israel’s response as excessive.

A NEW BEGINNING

The Bennett-Lapid government offers a chance for a fresh start. It will be the first-ever coalition
spanning the far left to the far right that includes an Arab Islamist party and excludes the Orthodox
Jewish parties. With women filling nine of the 27 ministerial posts, it also moves Israel closer to
achieving gender parity in the cabinet. According to the deal the coalition struck, Bennett will lead for
the first two years with Lapid as his foreign minister. Then, Lapid will replace Bennett, and Gideon
Saar, the leader of another right-wing party, will replace Lapid as foreign minister. Bennett will
become interior minister.

What can this new government, with its fragile majority, do to repair the damage of the Netanyahu
era? Bennett is a young, fast-moving, hard-driving, ambitious politician who has declared that all the
members of his coalition will have to check their ideological ambitions at the cabinet room door.
Lapid, for his part, has demonstrated an unusual willingness to sublimate his ego to the higher cause
of removing Netanyahu from office and admirable skill in patching together this coalition of
opposites. They trust each other and have worked well together in a previous Netanyahu
government.

The Bennett-Lapid government offers a chance for a fresh start.

Their goal will likely be to calm things down. The two leaders are keen to demonstrate that they can
deliver on the things Israelis care about: economic recovery from the pandemic; improvements in
health care, infrastructure, and education; and a reduction in poverty (more than one in five Israelis
still live below the poverty line). These are bread-and-butter issues that all members of the coalition
can agree on. They also agree on directing significant economic resources to the neglected Arab
sector, which will help cement Arab support for the coalition.

In their efforts to hold their coalition together, Bennett and Lapid will be aided by the fact that
Netanyahu has no intention of going quietly into the night and will be out there every day reminding
their coalition partners why they acted together to get rid of him. His ugly speech in the Knesset
debate prior to the vote on the new government—in which he belittled Bennett, claimed Tehran
would be happy with his appointment, and presented Biden as an adversary—gave them all a
foretaste.

A FRAGILE COALITION

Nevertheless, a government of such disparate constituencies will be challenged from the start. With
such a thin majority, any one of the eight parties in the coalition can bring the government down.
Meanwhile, the prime minister’s power is reduced by the fact that he can fire only members of his
own party from the cabinet and can act only with the agreement of the alternate prime minister.

Bennett is already under siege by right-wing critics who claim he has betrayed the cause by joining
with parties of the left (even though Netanyahu did so several times). Although he is standing firm,
members of his party are beginning to buckle; one voted against the government, another publicly
contemplated doing so. Yet there is little Bennett can do to play to his right-wing base without losing
his left-wing coalition partners. His only course is to try to produce results.
Settlements will provide an early test of this balancing act. In the waning days of the Netanyahu
government, 40 settler families established Evyatar, an illegal outpost on privately owned Palestinian
land in the West Bank. Instead of ordering its removal, Netanyahu let it stand, leaving this land mine
in the path of the new government. If the cabinet does not quickly order its removal, the settlers will
see it as a sign of weakness and build more outposts. But if the outpost is removed, the settlers will
regard it as a further betrayal by Bennett and his party members.

Similarly, if the cabinet allows evictions and demolitions to proceed in Arab East Jerusalem and lets
right-wing demonstrators rampage through the Arab sectors of the Old City—permitting a repeat of
the scenario that set off the explosive escalation in May—it will bring international condemnation
and possible renewal of Hamas’s rocket attacks. But if it blocks these activities, the pressure on the
right-wing parties in the coalition will grow, and Hamas will claim victory.

None of these stresses is likely to cause the coalition to collapse in the short term. Having contested
four elections in the past two and a half years, neither the coalition parties nor the public is
interested in a fifth election anytime soon. But they will ensure that Bennett and Lapid will do
whatever they can to avoid controversial issues for which there is no consensus in the coalition.

In particular, the two prime ministers are unlikely to welcome any initiative to relaunch Israeli-
Palestinian negotiations over a final-status agreement. That is not a problem for the administration
of U.S. President Joe Biden, which places little store in the idea. But Biden will want to see some
meaningful first steps in the direction of a two-state solution, something Bennett staunchly opposes.
In the past, Bennett proposed “autonomy on steroids” as an alternative, in which Israel would
encourage improvements in the Palestinian economy, West Bank infrastructure, and the creation of
industrial zones to boost Palestinian employment. Previous U.S. presidents embraced this idea, only
to be disappointed by the many obstacles to implementation. But Biden’s team will no more want a
return of Netanyahu than Bennett and Lapid do, so both sides will have a strong incentive to test
whether Bennett’s ideas can provide a way forward.

That applies to another contentious issue: Iran. Like Netanyahu, the Bennett-Lapid government
opposes the Biden administration’s plans to return to the nuclear agreement. Bennett called it “a
mistake” in his inaugural speech. But the new government will want to show that it can get along
with the United States and rebuild Washington’s bipartisan consensus in support of Israel. It will no
doubt avoid Netanyahu’s confrontational approach—if for no other reason than that it failed to stop
the original nuclear agreement and cannot succeed in blocking a U.S. return to it. That is perhaps the
ultimate irony of the Netanyahu era. The prime minister who boasted till the very end that only he
could stop Iran’s march to the bomb left office with Iran closer to its nuclear ambitions than ever.

In the end, Netanyahu’s politics became so divisive and his sense of entitlement so great that to have
him replaced by a true unity government of eight diverse parties working together for the common
good will certainly be welcome to many Israelis. Far from merely surviving, it might even thrive.