Lenora Chu

Vita Berehova and her son Stepan wait at Berlin Central Station for their final connection to a new life in Munich on March 10, 2022. They escaped Kharkiv just as shelling began in that Ukrainian city.

Vita Berehova’s train tickets may permit a 12:05 p.m. departure to Munich. But more importantly, they are passage to a new life.

She and her young son had experienced overstuffed buses, long waits while sleeping in streets, and the random kindness of strangers during their jarring three-day journey out of the besieged city of Kharkiv, Ukraine. But while the trek was filled with uncertainty, Ms. Berehova was always sure of her destination. It would be Germany, even though Poland is closer to home and the Polish language closer to Ukrainian than to German.

“In Germany, the sociopolitical environment for refugees is the best in Europe, and maybe best in the world,” says Ms. Berehova, standing in a cordoned area for Ukrainian refugees at Berlin’s main train station, with local volunteers dishing out bean soup in the background. “The mentality of Germans is to treat other people as people, regardless of origin, nationality, their appearance, or the availability of money. It’s the biggest European country who does that.”

Germany’s warm welcome for Ukrainian refugees has accompanied a wider societal and political about-face – the shedding of a decadeslong pacifist nature in the face of the war in Ukraine. In one monumental policy speech the weekend after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz overturned long-held policies by promising to send weapons to Ukraine, bolster an under-equipped German military, and shift away from cheap Russian energy supplies.

Germany’s newfound moral clarity around Russia, say the experts, has opened the door to societal acceptance of bold actions and sacrifice in the name of defending Ukrainians’ shared values of freedom and democracy. It has also served as a call to action for Europe to stand on the right side of history.

“We are all now talking about Putin’s war – the phrase the German government used from the first day,” says Mirco Liefke, a sociologist at Freie Universität Berlin. “They have used communication strategically to create a very specific understanding of this war – turning a necessity created by this conflict into a virtue – so that it demands a response. Yet their messaging has been so successful in creating an urgency to act that they’re now facing criticism for not moving fast enough.”

“Taking advantage of a moment”

The German foreign policy world has seen Russia as either an ally or a threat to Germany over the centuries. Then came Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stabilized Russia at a time when Russia was “a little incalculable.”

“He did bring in a degree of order to the country,” says Jürgen Hardt, a former German naval officer and member of parliament through 2021. Now, it’s clear that Germans have underestimated Mr. Putin’s “ambitions of becoming a major dictator.”

The sudden shift from decadeslong ambivalence toward Russia, to 2022’s strong policy stance, is actually characteristic of German politics, says Tyson Barker, head of technology and foreign policy for the German Council on Foreign Relations. It falls under the concept of wendepolitik (“change policy”), in which a massive event is catalyst for a major strategic upheaval. In such instances, a strong executive can ram through an abrupt policy change in one moment, explains Mr. Barker.

German reunification, for example, took place 11 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government immediately decided to phase out nuclear power. Ms. Merkel also helmed the seemingly abrupt 2015 decision to take in what would ultimately be 1 million refugees mostly from Syria and Afghanistan.

Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters

Fans pose with Ukrainian flags during a Borussia Dortmund vs. Dynamo Kyiv soccer match in support of an end to war in Ukraine, in Signal Iduna Park in Dortmund, Germany, April 26, 2022.

Mr. Scholz’s decisions around the war in Ukraine are in the same vein, with the government announcing the mothballing of the Russo-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2, a €100 billion infusion into the German military, and the reversal of the long-held policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones.

“It’s a complete turnaround, and because it’s in line with public opinion at the moment, the political establishment just takes it and buys into it,” says Mr. Barker. “It’s not planned. It’s taking advantage of a moment.”

That moment, of course, came with Mr. Putin’s troops rolling into Ukraine. Before that point, says Joanna Bryson, an ethics professor at the Hertie School in Berlin, it was easy to argue either for or against the idea that Mr. Putin may be a reliable partner for the West.

“Everyone could turn their heads both ways,” says Dr. Bryson. “Large numbers of people staked their entire identities and professional histories in saying things like ‘The Cold War was over, and we have these institutions that will secure us.’ Then suddenly Russia proved that one narrative was false and one narrative was true” – shaking Germany’s long-held policy foundation toward Russia to its core.

And because Germany is currently run by a coalition government, Dr. Bryson adds, it has the legitimacy to make bold moves to respond to the new circumstances: Most voters saw their first or second choice of party in power. While each party might have to agree to something it normally would find unacceptable, because all the parties were making such sacrifices, it became palatable.

“So, all three parties [in the coalition government] did 180s. The Greens agreed to consider restarting nuclear power; the Free Democrats said, ‘We’ll take debt’; the Social Democrats said, ‘We’ll spend on weapons,’” says Dr. Bryson. “And they brought their people with them because everyone could see why they were doing this.”

A moral position comes into focus

The clear, newfound morality around Russia has also made it politically acceptable to swiftly support sanctions on Russia, ban the country from the SWIFT banking system, and proclaim that Germany must shift away from Russian energy supplies. That also goes for raising defense spending to the 2%-of-GDP target required of NATO members, which Germany has always managed to sidestep.

“Somehow the government found a fitting narrative to do something that had to be done long ago,” says Dr. Liefke, the sociologist. “Mr. Scholz did not create the necessity, but he understood this is the right moment to make a point at a time there is acceptance.”

Prior to the invasion, government language and media coverage describing Mr. Putin’s troop buildup around Ukraine left it all open to different interpretations. The language allowed for nuance. Instead of “soldiers” it was “pro-Russian separatists,” for example.

“Now we’re falling back to old language that’s much more connected to Cold War times and classical war coverage,” says Dr. Liefke. “It’s Putin’s war. And it’s very clear that the Russian side are the bad guys and Ukrainians are the good guys. That is a big change. It’s an indication to society that it’s actually no longer acceptable to be somehow pro-Putin.”

This morality has brought trouble to public figures such as Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who’s a close friend of Mr. Putin’s. After leaving public office, Mr. Schröder joined the board of Russian energy giant Gazprom with an accompanying hefty salary. Now Mr. Schröder’s political party is being pressured to oust him.

Michele Tantussi/Reuters

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz meets with volunteers of associations and social groups committed to helping refugees, at the chancellery in Berlin, April 25, 2022. More than 300,000 Ukrainian refugees are being hosted in Germany.

Mr. Schröder’s “relationship to Putin was always somehow disputable, but in the OK zone. It no longer is,” says Dr. Liefke.

Germany’s welcome to thousands of Ukrainian refugees also has a strong moral foundation, as society has opened its arms with donations of food and shelter, while the government proclaims there is no upper limit on the numbers of Ukrainians who can pass into the country. Analysts say the Ukraine war hits the right combination of factors: namely, flight from war or persecution by a population that’s geographically close and similar in culture and religion. (More than 70% of Ukrainians are Christian, as are the majority of Germans.)

Hence what ensued was a mass outpouring of empathy.

“It’s very clear and prominent in news media and political speeches that Ukrainians really are fleeing a war,” says Christian Czymara, a sociologist at Goethe University Frankfurt. “It also feels very drastic and close, which boosts acceptance among Germans and Europe in general.”

Germany’s warm reception resonates with Yuliya Kosyakova, who migrated from Ukraine to Germany 20 years ago. Now a migration researcher at Germany’s Institute for Employment Research, she is “touched to tears” when observing Germans welcoming Ukrainians into their homes.

The majority of Ukrainian refugees will go elsewhere – likely to Hungary, the Czech Republic, Moldova, or Poland, which has already taken in more than 2.5 million Ukrainians – with 300,000-plus settling in Germany. Even so, most Ukrainians will want to return home eventually, says Dr. Kosyakova.

What’s unclear is how Germany’s welcome will evolve over time. One prominent image around the 2015-16 migration of Syrian refugees into Germany was that of teddy bears greeting new arrivals at the Munich train station. Yet the public grew weary as the months wore on, and the far-right political party Alternative for Germany eventually gained influence in parliament in part by stoking anti-Muslim sentiment.

“Public opinion shifted a bit as the inflow went on,” says Dr. Czymara, “and I’m not sure whether that will be similar this time.”

A slip backward?

In the weeks following the start of the invasion, Germany’s zeitenwende – as Mr. Scholz dubbed this “historical turning point” – has come to seem shaky at times.

A German political establishment so resolutely supportive of Ukraine in the beginning became quickly beset by internal bickering. Some coalition members felt Germany should be moving faster on promises to supply weapons. Then Kyiv disinvited the German president from a visit, in part to protest his business ties to Russia and what Ukrainian leaders perceived as Germany’s dragging its feet on supplying heavy weapons.

Where morality is quite clear, it’s become befuddled by the reality of politics and a German culture that tends to be “plodding and iterative” rather than sweeping and grandly decisive, as is the French policymaking way, Mr. Barker wrote in a New Statesman essay. “Deferred action has long been the default political setting for Germany.”

Yet none of the political back-and-forth could shake the gratitude of Ms. Berehova, the Ukrainian single mother who arrived in Munich from Kharkiv via the Berlin train station. She reports that her young son is enrolled in a German public school, a local German family hosted them until they found housing, and the government is supporting them with housing payments and stipends. Her new adopted country is moving away from Russian energy, which will ultimately “help rid the world of the dictatorship of a degrading country,” she says.

This week, Germany finally committed to sending dozens of anti-aircraft weapons and tanks, days after other allies had committed heavy weapons. And it has decided to end fossil fuel purchases from Russia. Poland and Bulgaria – which Russia has cut off from energy shipments – didn’t have any choice in the matter, but Germany, should it fulfill its timeline to stop buying Russian oil by year’s end and Russian gas by 2024, could lead the way for the rest of Europe to do the same, no matter the economic pain.

As Ms. Berehova puts it, Germany’s actions “broadcast stability and tranquility. Germany gives guarantees and is responsible for its words.”

Editor's note: This story has been edited to correct the spelling of Dr. Czymara's name.

Amid the bewildering array of brutality on and off the battlefields of Ukraine, military ethicists have been keeping a close eye on whether the war could also become a proving ground for drones that use artificial intelligence to decide whom to hurt. 

Early in the war, Moscow was rumored to be employing “kamikaze” drones as “hunter-killer robots.” Though the Russian company that created the weapon boasted of its AI skills – the kind that could potentially enable a machine rather than a human to choose its targets – the consensus among defense analysts has been that these claims were more marketing hype than credible capability.

Yet there’s no doubt that the demand for AI in drones has been voracious and growing. The drones on display in Ukraine all have a human pulling the trigger, so to speak – for now. “I don’t think we see any significant evidence that AI or machine learning is being employed in Ukraine in any significant way for the time being,” says Paul Scharre, who previously worked on autonomous systems policy at the Pentagon. 

“But I don’t think that will last over time,” he adds.

That’s because before the war, drones were seen as a useful counterterrorism tool against adversaries without air power, but not as particularly effective against big state actors who could easily shoot them down. The current conflict is proving otherwise. 

Wars have a way, too, of driving technological leaps. This one could teach combatants – and interested observers – lessons that bring the world closer to AI making “kill” decisions on the battlefield, analysts say. “I think of the Ukrainian war as almost a gateway drug to that,” says Joshua Schwartz, a Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow at Harvard University.

“Scary” – but so is all war

In March 2021, a great fear among AI ethicists was realized: A United Nations panel of experts warned that Turkey had deployed a weapon to Libya – the Kargu-2 quadcopter drone – that could hunt down retreating troops and kill them without “data connectivity” between the human operator and the weapon. 

Along with the flood of commentary decrying the use of so-called terminator weapons, a report from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was more circumspect. It argued that ethical debate surrounding the Kargu-2 should concentrate not on whether it had killed autonomously, but whether in doing so it had complied with laws of armed conflict. 

“The focus of humanitarian concerns should be the drone’s ability to distinguish legitimate military targets from protected civilians and to direct its attacks against the former in a discriminate manner,” wrote the paper’s author, Hitoshi Nasu, a professor of law at West Point. 

Unlike the first iteration of autonomous weapons – land mines, for example – today’s AI systems are typically designed to avoid civilian casualties. For this reason, people should be more inclined to “embrace them,” Mr. Nasu posited in an interview with the Monitor.

But many critics can’t shake sci-fi-fueled biases, he adds.

“I remember someone writing on this topic, ‘It must be very scary for someone to be targeted by an autonomous system,’” Mr. Nasu says. “Well, warfighting is very scary – whether it’s done by autonomous systems or human beings.”  

Critics point out, however, that such a scenario might be especially alarming for soldiers trying in vain to, say, surrender to a machine. This requires “granting quarter” – showing mercy to an enemy laying down arms – and it’s unclear whether the Kargu-2, in the face of “technical challenges,” is capable of it, Mr. Nasu wrote in his paper. 

“Abandoning a weapon can be a machine-detectable surrender event,” but precisely what happens when combatants who “express an intention to surrender” are, due to injury, “unable to jettison their weapons,” he acknowledges, is unclear. 

AP

Fragments of an explosive device are displayed in Zagreb, Croatia, April 13, 2022. A military drone that apparently flew all the way from the Ukrainian war zone over three European NATO-member states before crashing in an urban zone of the Croatian capital was armed with an explosive device, Croatia's crash investigators said.

A fast-advancing technology

The AI that gives these drones the ability to hunt human targets involves “machine learning” technology that has advanced considerably in the past decade. 

It relies on an enormous digital library of pictures on which the machine can draw. “If you have images of enemy tanks, but only in certain lighting conditions, or only when they’re not partially obscured by vegetation, or without people crawling on them, then the machine learning the lessons might not recognize the target and make mistakes,” says Mr. Scharre, now vice president of the Center for a New American Security.

Drones with the AI to effectively employ such machine learning, however, are still “5 to 10 years” away, he says. After that, “we’ll see machine learning embedded for target recognition that could open doors to AI making its own targeting decisions.”  

The fact that the technology is for now unreliable is not the only reason it is generally unattractive to military professionals. 

Good commanders tend to seek the ability to “carefully calibrate the tempo and severity of a conflict,” says Zachary Kallenborn, research affiliate with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. 

This in turn allows them “to achieve an objective and then stand down – like punishing an adversary for taking an action you don’t like but not creating a global war.” 

Military leaders are also wary of widespread use of AI in drones because of their potential to change what’s known in Pentagon parlance as “targeting incentives” on the battlefield. 

This involves scaring or cowing an enemy enough to get them to do things like surrender – or at least run away. 

Instead of pitting robots against other robots, strategists might decide to destroy an area where the humans waging war will actually suffer harm. This includes “cities, or anywhere they can really do damage,” Mr. Kallenborn adds. “I can see warfare escalating very quickly there.”

Officials in China, America’s greatest AI competitor, have expressed anxiety about precisely this, Gregory Allen, former director of strategy and policy at the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, wrote in a paper on the topic. “One official told me he was concerned that AI will lower the threshold of military action, because states may be more willing to attack each other with AI military systems due to the lack of casualty risk.” 

Influential Chinese think tanks have echoed these warnings but, as in the U.S., it has not stopped governments who don’t want to be left behind in an AI arms race from pursuing the technology. 

Risk for civilians: New face of old problem

Still, one of the takeaways in the ongoing tragedy of Ukraine is “how much it’s been a 20th-century war, primarily dominated by mud and steel rather than whiz-bang new technology,” Mr. Scharre says, raising the possibility, he argues, that “this fixation on fancy weapons as the ethical problem is mistaken.”

Mr. Allen, now director of the Project on AI Governance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, concurs. “For a long time the autonomous weapons debate has been heavily focused on whether or not it increases the risk of technical accidents,” including killing civilians, he says in an interview. “But the war in Ukraine is a great reminder that while unintentional harm to civilians is a real tragedy, there is also the unsolved problem of intentional harm to civilians.” 

That’s a challenge that spans from old technology to new.

The conflict has made it increasingly clear that the question of whether a weapon is ethical is answered in large part, Mr. Allen adds, on whether it’s in the hands of a military – or a country – “that has any intention of behaving ethically.” 

The sun has already set outside the white-walled church as Michael Flynn walks onstage. The crowd inside the 1,100-capacity auditorium has thinned some after 10 hours of speeches and prayers and performances, but the closing speaker seems raring to go. 

Lieutenant General Flynn, a former Army intelligence officer who served, briefly, as President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, wears a blue palm-tree print blazer over a gray camouflage T-shirt with an eagle across the chest. Once described by Gen. Stanley McChrystal as “spring-loaded,” he radiates latent energy as he paces the stage in his brown boots.

It’s Mr. Flynn’s second speaking slot of the day at Reawaken America, the Christian-themed, MAGA-infused roadshow that he headlines. Since his morning pep talk, the audience has heard from anti-vaccine activists, election-fraud proponents, a gold-bar salesman, various GOP candidates, an assortment of pastors, and Eric Trump.

Now it’s evening in Southern California. Mr. Flynn tells the crowd of mostly white, middle-aged men and women that they’re living “in an incredible moment in U.S. history.” But not in a positive sense: America, he says, is under threat from within.

“The people that are in charge of our government right now, they are intentionally trying to destroy our country,” he rasps into a microphone decorated in the colors of the flag. “These people, they’re not incompetent. They’re not stupid. They’re evil!”

For most senior military officers, retirement from active duty tees up a comfortable life of after-dinner speeches, seminars at military academies, and consulting gigs. Mr. Flynn is on a different circuit – one that taps into the combative politics of the president he served and is now a brand-building, cash-generating tour that’s taken on a life of its own.

Nearly six decades ago, historian Richard Hofstader published his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In it, he described the extreme right of the Republican Party as driven by a sense that America had been “largely taken away from them and their kind.” That paranoid wing gained unusual strength in the 1950s and ’60s with McCarthyism and the John Birch Society, which held that communist conspirators had permeated the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Evan Vucci/AP/File

Then-candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he appears with Lieutenant General Flynn during a town hall, Sept. 6, 2016, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. At the end of his presidency, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians, calling it a “Great Honor.”

But while Republican leaders back then took decisive steps to quash the Birchers, today the balance of power in the party seems to have shifted. Former President Trump and his allies have fostered and benefitted from a widespread suspicion of “corrupt” institutions and entrenched elites, which has flourished in a hyper-online, polarized and atomized America.

And as Mr. Trump positions himself for a possible second run at the White House, his former national security adviser – a man who once held the nation’s top security clearance and was privy to its most closely-guarded secrets – is helping to lay the groundwork as a prominent voice for that anti-establishment, conspiracy-minded wing.

To his supporters, Mr. Flynn’s long military service, his loyalty to Mr. Trump, and above all his prosecution for lying to the FBI – a felony that was later wiped clean by a presidential pardon – make him both sympathetic and a symbol of everything that’s gone wrong in this country.

“He’s an American hero,” says Chad Vivas, an artist who presented the retired three-star general with a portrait of him in dress uniform with a bald eagle against a stormy sky. “And they framed him.” 

Like many here, Mr. Vivas is happy to expound on a vast web of conspiracy theories involving global business elites, election fraud, vaccine mandates, and more. One of his paintings shows the Trump family beside a smoke-ringed Q, a nod to QAnon, the byzantine fantasy involving the former president and a secret war against deep-state pedophiles.

In his new role, Mr. Flynn can be seen “as a phenomenon of an age in which the right in America has bought into immense fantasy elements,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of its Center for Right-Wing Studies.

It all seems a long way from the grinding post-9/11 wars that Mr. Flynn fought as an intelligence officer, building a reputation as a talented analyst and tactician. Still, a contrarian streak early on in his career signaled some of the troubles to come: He became a national-security insider, before a forced early retirement led him to Mr. Trump, the ultimate political outsider. His dizzying rise and fall in Washington – in the shadow of a Russian influence campaign and a flawed FBI investigation that continues to stoke controversy – left him with both significant legal fees and few career options. 

Now he’s fully embracing outsider status, while building a platform that could elevate both his own profile and that of the former president, whether in pursuit of redemption, revenge, or both. At the same time, he’s feeding an outlook on the right that is increasingly alienated from mainstream institutions and convinced of their inherent rot – a worldview that will leave its stamp on American politics long after Mr. Trump and his allies have left the public stage.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP/File

General Flynn signs a MAGA hat as he greets attendees at the end of a campaign event where he endorsed New York City mayoral candidate Fernando Mateo on June 3, 2021, in Staten Island, New York.

Mr. Flynn ardently maintains that the 2020 election was “stolen,” calling it “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced,” despite more than 60 court rulings upholding Joe Biden’s victory. 

And Mr. Flynn believes he himself was unfairly targeted by Mr. Trump’s political enemies. As he told the crowd, he’s seeking “accountability of the people that persecuted me.”

His long, strange journey isn’t over.   

Democratic roots

Michael Thomas Flynn grew up in Middletown, Rhode Island, the sixth of nine children. His father served in the Army in World War II, fighting on the beaches of Normandy, and his grandfather fought in World War I. But he calls his mother, Helen, “the most courageous person I have ever known” for keeping order in a rowdy household while working and studying part-time for a law degree.

Helen was active in Democratic politics, raising money and even running for office. Mr. Flynn describes his family as “proud Democrats who loved America and all it stood for.”

He joined the Army in 1981 and rose through the ranks in the 82^nd Airborne Division, where he met General McChrystal, who would become a key mentor. In 2004, then-Colonel Flynn was put in charge of intelligence analysis at the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite unit in Iraq that was hunting Al Qaeda.

“The only way to defeat [the enemy] was to get to know them better than they knew themselves,” he wrote in his memoir “The Field of Flight.”

Two years later, his unit tracked and killed Musab al-Zarqawi, the elusive leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq; he and General McChrystal inspected the corpse together.

Fresh from success in Iraq, he then served in Afghanistan as director of intelligence for U.S. forces. In January of 2010, Mr. Flynn coauthored a stinging report, published by a Washington think tank, on intelligence failures by the stalled U.S. mission. Among its recommendations was to make greater use of open-source information to fight insurgencies.

The report’s publication raised a stink at home. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates praised its candor, validating the general’s decision to go public and elevating his profile as a maverick thinker and rising star.  

In an NPR interview that year, he said he was tapping the expertise of scholars in archeology, anthropology, and other disciplines to help understand Afghans better. “By bringing those subject-matter experts in, we see the battlefield in a much different light,” he said.

But Mr. Flynn’s own battles were just beginning.

Lauren Victoria Burke/AP/File

Then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Flynn is shown testifying on Capitol Hill in Washington Feb. 11, 2014. After a brief and rocky tenure, he was forced to retire by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who later said he believed the termination "ate at him."

A forced retirement

In 2012, he was nominated by President Barack Obama for a big promotion: director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which analyzes foreign military capabilities. 

Almost immediately, his efforts to overhaul the 17,000-employee bureaucracy went poorly. Morale sank at the agency. Obama administration officials began to question his leadership and judgment amid reports that he played loose with the facts to support his theories, particularly on Iran and militant Islam. 

Two years later, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper showed him the door. He later said Mr. Flynn was angry at being forced to retire. “I think the termination ate at him,” he told NBC News in 2018.

In his memoir, the general claims he was fired for being too honest – for telling Congress that “we were not as safe as we had been a few years back.” He also blamed Mr. Obama personally for his removal. (In reality, experts say Mr. Obama likely had little direct contact with Mr. Flynn.) 

His military career over, Mr. Flynn started a consulting company and began taking on foreign clients. In December 2015, he attended a gala dinner in Moscow for RT, the Kremlin-run media organization. He was paid $45,000 for his appearance and was seated at a table with President Vladimir Putin.

That wasn’t his first trip to Russia: As director of the DIA, he had met two years earlier with Russian intelligence officers in Moscow, ignoring the advice of the CIA’s station chief. When he tried to invite a Russian group to Washington in 2014, not long after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Clapper reportedly had to warn him off. 

During this time, Mr. Flynn also grew increasingly critical of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. He joined Mr. Trump’s team as an adviser, bringing military and national security credentials to the campaign at a time when few others were willing to do so. Soon, he became a popular surrogate on the campaign trail, offering fiery criticism of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He also began sharing far-right conspiracies and memes on social media – falsely linking Secretary Clinton and her staff to child trafficking, for example, and alleging without grounds that Mr. Obama had laundered money for terrorists.

That rang alarm bells in Washington. Retired generals jawboning on TV about military or diplomatic strategy was one thing. But Mr. Flynn’s activities cut sharply against the “norm of nonpartisanship” that has traditionally guided former officers, says Heidi Urben, a retired Army colonel who teaches at Georgetown University. That norm has been stretched in recent years, she admits, but Mr. Flynn’s behavior “far exceeded” its boundaries. 

Gaelen Morse/Reuters

A person with a tattoo quoting the United States Constitution leans on a railing while General Flynn and Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel speak to the media before a campaign event in Cortland, Ohio, April 21, 2022.

In July 2016, he addressed the Republican National Convention, at a time when the FBI was investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal server to send classified emails. As he spoke, the crowd began chanting “Lock Her Up!” He nodded. “Damn right, you’re exactly right.” He clapped along to the chant, mouthing the words.

“If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today,” he said.

Six months later, Donald Trump was sworn in as president and Michael Flynn became his national security adviser. 

The new boss

For the first week, staff at the National Security Council, which Mr. Flynn now headed, heard nothing from their new boss. Still, most knew him by reputation.

Some had read his memoir, which he co-wrote with Michael Ledeen, a hawkish foreign policy analyst. The book, which contains factual errors and no footnotes, warns of myriad enemies lurking at home and abroad. A former NSC staffer familiar with Mr. Flynn’s intelligence career was struck by its tone.

“His ideas went from thoughtful and careful to just all over the place,” says the staffer. “This is not the guy who was a two-star [general] briefing four-stars on intelligence in Afghanistan – and impressing everyone.”

When the new national security adviser finally called an all-staff meeting in January 2017, it raised new worries. Mr. Flynn spoke for around 30 minutes, mostly about President Trump’s campaign, and barely mentioned foreign policy. “It was all grievances on the home front,” says another former staffer. “He seemed unhinged.”

“Everybody was more alarmed after that meeting, not less,” says the first staffer.

But it was another meeting, held just days earlier in the same building, that was to prove most consequential.

Two FBI agents met with Mr. Flynn to ask him about his phone calls in late December with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. At that time, the Obama administration had expelled 35 Russian diplomats and imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 election – including hacking and releasing emails from Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Russia had unexpectedly taken no retaliatory measures. The agents wanted to know if Mr. Flynn, as the incoming national security adviser, had asked the ambassador not to escalate.

He told them no, they hadn’t discussed the sanctions. Asked if there had been a follow-up call with Ambassador Kislyak, he said he didn’t recall one. Pressed to clarify, he stuck to his account.

Both claims were false – as the FBI, which had transcripts of the calls, knew. It set off a storm that led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation less than a month into his tenure, after President Trump concluded he had lied not only to the FBI but also to Vice President Mike Pence, who had publicly repeated the denials.

Mr. Flynn eventually struck a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating Russian links to the Trump campaign. The deal would mean no prison time and would end a separate prosecution for illegal lobbying for Turkey.

In December 2017, he told a federal court in Washington that he took full responsibility.

“I recognize that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong, and, through my faith in God, I am working to set things right,” he said in a statement, calling his guilty plea “in the best interests of my family and of our country.” 

Gaelen Morse/Reuters

General Flynn speaks at a campaign event in Cortland, Ohio, April 21, 2022. He continues to insist that the 2020 election was "stolen," despite a lack of evidence, and has urged like-minded activists to run for local office.

“America’s general”

At home in Charlottesville, Virginia, Pasquale Scopelliti suspected a set-up.

A self-employed executive coach, he had gotten to know Mr. Flynn during the 2016 campaign, when he started emailing him unsolicited polling analysis and the general responded positively. To Mr. Scopelliti, the Russian investigation was a smokescreen, an effort to kneecap the new Trump administration. And the more he looked into Mr. Flynn’s case, the less it added up. “He was 100% innocent,” he says.

Central to this counter-narrative is the charge that it was the Clinton campaign that got the FBI to launch the Trump-Russia probe by funding the now-infamous dossier of “dirt” on Mr. Trump – much of which turned out to be false. When Mr. Flynn spoke to the FBI, his defenders say, he was walking into a trap. Moreover, his communications with the Russian ambassador weren’t inappropriate for an incoming national security adviser.   

This view of Mr. Flynn as a martyr who took one for team Trump in the battle against a corrupt establishment makes him an unimpeachable star at events like Reawaken America, where he’s known to supporters as “America’s General.”

“He’s a hero. What he’s been through!” exclaims Anthony Lorenzo, as he stood in front of the eagle-themed painting. “He’s a true patriot.” 

Mr. Lorenzo and his wife had driven from central California, where he installs electrical systems, for the two-day festival. The paintings were sandwiched between stalls touting dietary supplements, anti-vaccine books and videos, patriotic playing cards and T-shirts, scented candles, and, in a nearby room, two nonprofits based in Florida in which Mr. Flynn is involved, one as chairman.

In January 2020, Mr. Flynn formally withdrew his guilty plea before he could be sentenced, arguing that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence. With the support of then-Attorney General William Barr, he sought to dismiss the case. According to Mr. Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, his decision to cooperate had mostly been an effort to protect his son, who had been involved with his father’s foreign lobbying work. 

Mr. Scopelliti, who had started a legal defense fund for him, was delighted. “They made an innocent man make a guilty plea,” he says.

Supporters point to the FBI’s own admission of serial errors in obtaining surveillance warrants for Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide, as evidence of a wider conspiracy. Another was the role of Peter Strzok, one of the agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn, who was fired in 2018 for sending anti-Trump text messages to a colleague with whom he was having an affair.

Yet the problematic warrants didn’t apply to Mr. Flynn, who led investigators directly to him with his calls to Russia’s ambassador. By that time, the FBI was five months into a counterintelligence investigation – and U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia had sought to tip the election to Mr. Trump. To take a call on a cellphone with a senior Russian official and not expect it to be monitored seems naïve, particularly for a former intelligence officer.

John Sipher, a former CIA officer who interacted with Mr. Flynn, thinks he must have known he “screwed up” – and then made it worse by lying. By doing so, he opened himself up to possible blackmail from Russian officials who knew the reality.

Mr. Sipher, who retired around the same time as Mr. Flynn after 28 years in the National Clandestine Service, sees parallels with earlier lapses in the general’s military career, such as when he improperly shared classified intelligence with allies in Afghanistan, or was reprimanded for similar breaches in Pakistan. “That stuff is beaten into us,” says the former CIA officer. But “the military is a whole different thing. They think they can get away with things.” 

Carolyn Kaster/AP/File

A woman holds a sign that reads "GEN FLYNN INNOCENT" outside federal court in Washington, Dec. 18, 2018, before President Donald Trump's former national security adviser arrives. Many of Mr. Flynn's supporters believe he was framed by the FBI.

His next fight

On Nov. 25, 2020, three weeks after President Trump lost the election to Joe Biden, Mr. Flynn’s legal appeal became moot. “The president has pardoned General Flynn because he should never have been prosecuted,” the White House said in a statement.

At that point, the general was already at work on his next fight – to reverse Mr. Trump’s election defeat. Working with a team of lawyers, cyber experts and military veterans, he tried to persuade Mr. Trump to send federal officials to seize voting machines and ballots in contested states.

Had the president green-lit their plan, Mr. Flynn could have been Mr. Trump’s “field marshal,” says Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock, who has spent millions of dollars on “election integrity” efforts in the wake of the 2020 vote. Instead, Mr. Trump rejected the proposal. It’s now a subject of inquiry for the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In San Marcos, Mr. Flynn told the crowd that he had “pled the Fifth” the previous day in his day-long deposition to the committee, which he derided as partisan.

But he left no doubt about his take on the 2020 election: It was stolen. “When somebody goes, ‘Where’s the evidence?’ I want to say… ‘Are you a moron?’” he said, raising a storm of laughter.

Mr. Trump’s own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, and his cybersecurity chief declared the 2020 election the safest and most secure in history. In all, more than 90 judges, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, ruled against his campaign. 

Recently, some GOP election-fraud activists have criticized Mr. Flynn for seeming more focused on the future – including his own. His main message at Reawaken America was that Trump supporters need to get involved in local politics and get ready for the next election. To keep fighting over the last one, at this point “is looking backwards,” he told the audience. “Now we have to look forwards.”

Mr. Flynn has endorsed challengers in several GOP primary contests and earned fees for political consulting. He’s also advising Mr. Byrne, whose nonprofit The America Project is training poll watchers in battleground states. In February, Mr. Flynn launched a slick new website and a book that bears the hallmarks of a possible political candidate-in-waiting.

Mr. Byrne, who describes Mr. Flynn as his “Yoda” and who moved to Florida to see him regularly, insists that’s the last thing that Mr. Flynn wants to do. He certainly wouldn’t run in 2024 against Mr. Trump. But if Mr. Trump doesn’t run and nobody else seems to be taking on “the swamp,” he could take the plunge, says Mr. Byrne.

“I know he doesn’t want to do that. I know his wife doesn’t want him to do that. But I think that he’s a guy who also does things out of a sense of duty,” he says.

It’s that sense of duty, not a desire for vindication, that counts, says Mr. Byrne. “I think Mike feels zero sense of a need of redemption. I think he’s been redeemed,” he says.

A “safe space”

In the parking lot of Del Rio beach, Mr. Flynn pulls on a wetsuit. It’s not yet 7 a.m., but several surfers are already bobbing in breakers near the shore, and he’s preparing to join them. The previous night, he’d announced on stage that he’d be going surfing the next morning – and anyone was welcome to join.

“General, when was the last time?” asks Scott, a local surfer who heeded the call.   

“Thanksgiving, has to be,” says Mr. Flynn.  

He and his impromptu surf buddies – eight men and his elder sister, Barbara – gather in a circle, boards on the sand, for a short prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” he begins. Afterward, he crouches to wax his borrowed board.  

At 63, Mr. Flynn still has the agility and build of the competitive swimmer and lifeguard that grew up riding the waves off Rhode Island, a passion he’s never forgotten.

Surfing, he told the Reawaken America crowd, is “my safe space. That’s how I get away from all the FBI guys.”

As the morning sun glints off the waves, Mr. Flynn hoists his board and paddles out to sea. Within minutes, he’s past the breakers and lined up with his companions. He kneels on his board and turns his head, waiting for the wave that will bear him forward.

Under the shade of a chinar tree standing next to the famous Zero Bridge in Srinagar, India, Rumi* shares how his music was born out of the death of a stranger.

*The rappers in this story are in hiding due to threats from Kashmir authorities. Because of the danger they face, we have agreed to use pseudonyms in this story.

Nearly a decade ago, while he was walking to work, Rumi says he noticed a group of young boys throwing stones at an army bunker – not an abnormal scene in heavily militarized Kashmir. After a few minutes a soldier fired off a bullet, which hit a passerby. The man died on the spot, Rumi recalls.

“He was just walking, as I was, and died in an instant, killed as collateral damage,” he says, as the Jhelum River quietly flows nearby. The incident triggered something in Rumi, who’s now 30 years old and has several Kashmiri protest anthems to his credit. “As soon as I got back home, I narrated the whole incident in a rap form and recorded it.”

Like many young Kashmiris – particularly men – Rumi turned to rap as a way to process and protest the violence he saw living in one of the most volatile places in the world. But he has found it difficult to make music since 2019, when the Indian government unilaterally revoked Kashmir’s special autonomous status and imposed a six-month media blackout on the region. The subsequent crackdown on free speech has pushed many Kashmiri rappers out of the music industry, but the art form has survived by moving underground. Artists say rapping is worth the risks to ensure Kashmiri experiences aren’t erased. 

Ruth Susan Mathew, who studies the rap music of Kerala in southern India, says hip-hop and rap have always focused on marginalized communities, citing the genre’s roots in Black communities in the United States.

“Rap music in itself is a political art form,” says Ms. Mathew, who is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at Christ University in Bangalore. “That’s why it has a global reach and multiple societies throughout the world use it. Kashmiris, similarly, are using it in a way to voice their concerns [about] what is happening on the streets.”

Rumi’s music explores themes of militarization, political self-determination, and loss of culture in Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region that has also been home to Pandits (Hindu priests and scholars) and Sikh communities throughout history. The rapper, who grew up in a Kashmiri Pandit family, counts Sufism and spiritual poetry as major artistic influences. Nowadays, Rumi keeps most of his music hidden, to protect himself and his work.

“I have a strong feeling that times will change and our raps will be referred to as the history of Kashmir,” he says. “Until then, we have to wait and keep resisting.”

Safina Nabi

A rapper holds up a fist while walking through the old wooden bridge in Srinagar, India. Rap became popular in Kashmir after the region's first hip-hop star, MC Kash, released his hit song "I protest" in 2010.

History of protest

Kashmir came under Indian rule in October 1947, on the condition that the state could retain a degree of autonomy and eventually hold a vote to determine whether it would stay with India, join neighboring Pakistan, or regain its independence. That vote has not happened; instead, the region has faced nearly constant conflict between armed insurgent groups and Indian security forces. Human Rights Watch reports that since 1990, Indian forces “have engaged in massive human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, rape, [and] torture.”

Eventually, rap emerged as a form of peaceful resistance in Kashmir. The trend picked up after Kashmir’s first hip-hop star, Roshan Illahi, aka MC Kash, released his hit song “I protest” in September 2010.

Since then, many young musicians have turned to rap as a way of critiquing the government as well as reclaiming control over their stories, says Mohamad Junaid, assistant professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He grew up in Kashmir and has written extensively on the militarization of the region and its portrayal in the mainstream media.

“No Kashmiri has been shown as a person who has aspirations and is capable of explaining or showing what they are going through,” he says, adding, “The rap music these boys make is a way of venting out their pain.”

Even those who earlier had been devoted to religious songs have found an emotional release in the genre. Ahmed* grew up reciting Naats (praises sung in the honor of the Prophet Mohammad) and verses of the Quran, but found himself drawn to resistance music – specifically, rap – whenever things took a turn for the worse in Kashmir. He wrote his first song in 2014, following a series of devastating floods.

“The Jhelum swelled and flooded the whole valley,” he says. “I could not help but think that the Jhelum was swollen with the pain due to all the things it has witnessed.”

August 2019 brought more hardship. Since the media blackout, the Indian government has used broad public safety laws to detain thousands of critics and journalists. New policies grant authorities the freedom to define “anti-national activities” and arrest individuals they deem “likely to commit terror” – rules that effectively criminalize political dissent, say civil rights advocates. But this hasn’t stopped rappers such as Rumi and Ahmed from making music.

Safina Nabi

Ahmed, who grew up singing Quran verses, is now navigating Kashmir's underground rap scene. The artist hopes to preserve Kashmiri experiences and history.

Adaptation

Today, Kashmiri hip-hop artists organize secret cyphers – freestyle rap events – at undisclosed locations. After removing names and other identifying details from the recordings, the rappers then upload their music online. Lyrical themes still include the hope for peace and an end to censorship and militarization, but with the regular detention of local journalists and disappearance of newspaper archives, rappers feel an even greater obligation to document everyday occurrences in Kashmir, including human rights violations. 

Whether or not the artists are consciously trying to create a historical record, Dr. Junaid says that’s what is happening at the underground cyphers and in nondescript studios. “These [songs] are cultural artifacts,” he says. 

Ahmed knew that he had to continue his music as other forms of documenting oppression slowly slipped away. “After 100 years, when people will come back to my songs, they will get to know what happened in Kashmir and may feel what we are feeling right now. This is the only purpose of doing what I do,” he says.

It’s risky work, and the young rapper says he relies on imagery and symbolism to evade censors. “I frame the sentences in a way so that no one is offended, keeping my work and myself safe,” he says. 

Despite his carefully constructed lyrics, Ahmed has been summoned and questioned by police. Fellow rapper Dayaan* felt obliged to remove all traces of his art from the internet after his songs went viral and he got a call from the security forces.

“I became quite popular as the lyrics were written in such a manner that everyone could relate to them. But I had to delete everything from my YouTube channel for my own security,” he says. Eventually, he discovered the underground cyphers, and found a community of other Kashmiri rappers. 

“It makes me happy that I am able to do something for Kashmir,” Dayaan says. “I believe it is better to work for the community and highlight its plight rather than sit idle and wonder about what may happen in the future.”

Courtesy of Center for Environmental Forensic Science

Seized in Singapore in May 2018, some 1,800 elephant tusks were exported from Nigeria en route to Vietnam. The tusks are laid out by size to enable identification of the right and left tusks from the same elephant, only one of which will be genotyped using Sam Wasser's DNA identification process.

When Sam Wasser was a young biologist studying baboons in Tanzania, he never imagined he would one day lead an international force cracking down on the smuggling of illegal goods, from elephant ivory to pangolins and timber.

Yet fighting transnational criminal organizations, or TCOs in law enforcement parlance, is exactly what he’s doing today, all because of his passion for animals.

And because he discovered how to extract DNA from elephant poop.

Today, Dr. Wasser is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. But in 1989 he was observing environmental stresses on baboons when Tanzania launched Operation Uhai (“freedom” in Swahili). That mission involved six months of intelligence-gathering and then a “brutal crackdown” on elephant poaching rings. Tanzania battles a reputation for being among a handful of worst offenders in Asia and Africa that fuel the illegal ivory trade.   

In the 1800s, Dr. Wasser explains, an estimated 5 million elephants roamed Africa. From 1979 until 1989 governments around the world instituted ivory bans, but much of the damage had been done and the population had dropped to just 600,000.

Operation Uhai “literally stopped poaching in the country, where it was the worst in Africa,” he adds. But that victory also had unexpected consequences.

“All of a sudden our baboons started to be killed by leopards at an incredibly high rate,” Dr. Wasser says.

He and his colleagues had been studying three troops of baboons. “Within six months the troop of 20 were all killed, and by about a year and a half later the two troops of 70 were down to about 12 animals each,” he says.

The team realized the leopards had mostly ignored the local baboon fare while feasting on the remains of elephants left by poachers, who took only the tusks.  

The decline in elephant carrion and subsequent decimation of the baboon troops “made me realize how significant poaching really was on all levels,” he says, “and on all the other species that were similarly affected by the ecological cascade of events.”

Elephant families, broken by poaching

A self-described “animal nerd,” Dr. Wasser points out that elephants are “some of the smartest animals around,” he says. “They can recognize themselves in a mirror. You can put a spot on their forehead, and they’ll look in a mirror and they’ll wipe it off. That’s a high cognitive ability.” But “we lost over 100,000 elephants from 2007 to 2015. There are currently an estimated 415,000 elephants remaining in Africa.”

Dr. Wasser explains that poachers often go back and kill members of the same elephant families – so frequently that he believes it creates a form of elephant PTSD.

Elephants also exhibit a strong interest in their dead. “They’ll go and they’ll just explore the carcasses of elephants. They know it’s dead. They know who it is that died,” he says, “and they have tremendous social bonds. Their family members keep getting killed, over and over.

“It’s just too hard to watch, and the fact that we’re developing ways to potentially stop it – it keeps me going.”

For the baboon studies, Dr. Wasser used hormones from animal dung to help understand their reproductive successes or failures. That work led Dr. Wasser to think, “You know, I could apply these tools to elephants. I realized that feces are really easy to collect, especially from an elephant that has a massive poop. You could then go and collect dung samples from elephants across the continent, genotype all the samples, and essentially create a DNA map,” he explains. “And we could then get the DNA from the ivory to match to the map.”

It sounds straightforward today. Yet no one then had yet figured out how to collect DNA from elephant dung or tusks. Nevertheless, by 1997 Dr. Wasser had cracked the code and published one of the first papers on extracting DNA from elephant feces, and “right around the same time we were moving forward to see if we could develop methods to get DNA out of ivory.”

Dr. Wasser’s team got its first break in 2005: Bill Clark, chair of Interpol’s Wildlife Crime Working Group, asked for help analyzing a shipment of ivory intercepted three years earlier in Singapore. It had been the largest seizure of ivory to date, about 6 tons, which included 40,000 carved hankos – also called chops – small pieces of ivory used throughout Asia to ink one’s name or seal on correspondence. Each would fetch about $200 retail, making the hankos alone worth $8 million.

Until Dr. Wasser and his colleagues employed their emerging science to analyze that seizure, the biologist says “everyone” believed these tusks were coming from all across Africa. But, using their dung-to-DNA analyses, “that’s not what we found.”

Dr. Wasser’s game-changing work helped law enforcement realize the ivory was coming from a small number of specific areas in east and west-central Africa – yet was being shipped out of ports on either side of the continent.

Dean Paton

At Sam Wasser's University of Washington office, maps connect the dots between where ivory poaching occurs and where the contraband is exported. Before Dr. Wasser's work, authorities thought the tusks were harvested across the continent. Dr. Wasser discovered that most ivory comes from east and west-central Africa.

To illustrate, he rises quickly from his desk and points at a map of Africa on his office wall. Different colored dots mark where tusks came from and out of which port each was shipped. His finger moves from dot to dot: “If it’s orange, it means that it was containerized in Kenya. If it’s maroon it means it was containerized in Uganda.”

His finger keeps moving, pointing to the dates of different seizures and blue dots pinpointing the ivory’s origin.

Identifying poaching hot spots

“People don’t understand the intricate structure in wildlife crime,” explains Rod Khattabi, a former homeland security agent who now runs the Justice Initiative for the Grace Farms Foundation, which partners with Dr. Wasser to train law enforcement agencies in Africa. (Mr. Khattabi and Dr. Wasser are set to travel to Africa later in May to train authorities fighting poachers – Mr. Khattabi in ways to go undercover and Dr. Wasser showing them how DNA fits into investigations as well as prosecutions.) Wildlife criminals operate like independent cells, which makes arresting disparate elements of the syndicate tougher.

“That’s why Sam is so critical – because he can connect the dots,” Mr. Khattabi says. “He’ll tell me, ‘Rod, this stuff is coming from Rwanda’ even if it shipped out of Togo. He can almost pinpoint where the elephant got killed.”

Serendipitously Dr. Clark, the now-retired Interpol agent who worked with Dr. Wasser across Africa, had trained as a biologist. In 2005, he “went to Sam because I understood that the techniques he was pioneering offered important tools in helping investigate elephant poaching and ivory trafficking in Africa,” he says. “Sam’s work identified the poaching hot spots.”

Dr. Wasser’s sleuthing has expanded beyond elephants. “The work that we were doing with the illegal ivory trade – we realized it was relevant to all of these other species that are all coming out of Africa,” he says. “Same problem: transnational criminals shipping it on containers – and us needing to really get the transnational criminals.”

In 2021, with funding from the Washington State Legislature, Dr. Wasser and his colleagues formed the Center for Environmental Forensic Science. “There were also other tools that other scientists were using that could complement what we’re doing,” he says. “Now we’ve got over 40 scientists from the University of Washington alone that are part of our center” using an array of synergistic methods including isotopes, chemistry, and handheld DNA detectors to fight a spectrum of crimes.

Counting that initial seizure, Dr. Wasser’s team has analyzed roughly 70 seizures, “about 111 tons of ivory,” which Dr. Clark says “provided a lot of prima facie evidence prosecutors use.”

Almost a billion seagoing containers travel the globe annually, Dr. Wasser says, yet only 1% or 2% get inspected, and corruption in ports and governments further reduces enforcement.

Criminals with systems for smuggling ivory are perfectly positioned to traffic other contraband. Smugglers sometimes hide ivory, narcotics, and pangolins, thought to be the world’s most-poached animal, in shipments of illegally harvested timber.

“It’s all connected,” Dr. Wasser says of the TCOs, insisting that collaboration among those fighting these criminals is vital: “Look, either you collaborate or wave goodbye” to species after species.

Part of why Dr. Wasser developed the Center for Environmental Forensic Science was to coordinate efforts among local as well as national governments, universities, and nongovernmental organizations, marshaling their complementary skills to battle well-organized transnational criminals.

“I’ve long had the opinion that Sam deserves a Nobel Prize, but the Nobel Committee doesn’t give it to his type of work,” says Dr. Clark. “There’s a big void in recognizing people who contribute to the future of planet Earth.”

Dr. Wasser, though, seems more concerned with elephants than awards. “What drives me now is seeing the damage that these criminals are causing to nature,” he says, “and the fact that they’re getting away with this – and wanting to really fix it.”

Reuters

Sri Lanka's national flag is reflected in the sunglasses of a protester in Colombo during an April 28 nationwide strike against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Political protests often shift from what people are against to what they are for. That process may now be underway in Sri Lanka. The island nation off the tip of India has been caught in its deepest economic crisis since independence in 1948. That has sparked a sustained nationwide movement seeking to oust President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his Cabinet, and the entire legislature.

Yet as protesters defy curfews and fend off police cannons, their frustrations over acute shortages of food and fuel have turned toward their deeper aspiration: a society united by democratic values rather than divided by rival identities.

One protest placard put it succinctly to elected leaders: “You divided us to come to power. Now we are uniting to send you home.”

Divisions run deep in Sri Lanka. The country has a long history of ethnic and religious strife. But now as the protests go on, Christians and Muslims, Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil nationalists, students and professionals, farmers and teachers, are finding common cause. In early April, a large group of them held a “people’s parliament.” That was followed by a “people’s university” on social media to encourage “diversity, inclusion, and equality to uphold social justice through knowledge sharing.” One group of protesters set up tent camp near the presidential residence to remind Mr. Rajapaksa daily that they seek a new government. Local bakeries and restaurants responded by bringing them food and water.

“Sri Lanka’s economic collapse, and the anger it generated, has given rise to a protest movement that is so large, so sustained, and so widespread that it can be called a nonviolent people’s uprising,” Alan Keenan, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera. “The country has never seen such a nationwide movement involving all communities.”

There is no single cause for Sri Lanka’s current crisis. The country endured a 26-year civil war between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists. Since 2005 its politics have been dominated by a single family whose rule has been marked by corruption, economic mismanagement, and violence.

It has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 110% and an inflation rate of more than 20%. The government is currently in talks with a range of creditors – including China, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund – to restructure portions of its overall $51 billion in external debt. When the pandemic struck, the public was already at a breaking point.

In what may be the clearest sign yet that the demonstrations are having an effect, Mr. Rajapaksa offered a rare apology last week. “Today people are under immense pressure due to this economic crisis. I deeply regret this situation,” he said during the first meeting of his new Cabinet on April 19. He exhorted his ministers to avoid exploiting their offices for personal gain. “We must always tell the truth to the people. There is no point in hiding the reality from the people.”

In Sri Lanka, presidential contrition is as unprecedented as the country’s current crisis. The people may doubt his sincerity, but it is a confirmation of what they are discovering – that democracy and its institutions derive their strength and authority from the shared purpose of a united citizenry.