Tyrone Siu/Reuters/File

Taiwanese artillery unit soldiers take part in an annual military exercise that simulates the People's Liberation Army invading the self-governing island, in Pingtung, Taiwan, May 30, 2019. On Wednesday, China's People's Liberation Army announced large-scale air and naval combat drills in the region.

While the world watches Ukraine, the Taiwan Strait may be heating up. More than 70 Chinese military aircraft have encroached on Taiwan’s air defense zone this month, including fighter jets and bombers. On Wednesday, China’s military announced a large-scale air and naval combat exercise around the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its territory. 

The announcement came just two days after President Joe Biden pledged that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense militarily if China attacks. The drills are a “stern warning” against U.S. military “collusion” with armed forces on Taiwan, according to an online statement by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The rising tensions reflect in part how lessons from the Ukraine war are propelling new strategic calculations by China, the U.S., and Taiwan as they seek to prevent – or, if not, prevail in – a conflict across the Taiwan Strait. Ukraine offers a reality check as they consider a future war with higher stakes for each on core issues: for Beijing, sovereignty; for Washington, a “free and open” Indo-Pacific; and for Taiwan, self-determination.

If China were to take Taiwan “by force,” Mr. Biden said in response to a reporter’s question in Tokyo on Monday, “it would dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine. And so it’s a burden that is even stronger.”

Joint Staff of the Japanese Self-Defense Force/AP

F-15 warplanes of the Japanese Self-Defense Force and F-16 fighters of the U.S. Armed Forces fly over the Sea of Japan on May 25, 2022. Japan’s Defense Ministry said the joint flight was staged to confirm their militaries' combined capabilities, and followed a Russia-China bomber flight while U.S. President Joe Biden was in Tokyo.

View from Beijing

From Beijing’s perspective, the Ukraine war has not changed China’s long-term imperative to gain control over Taiwan – by force if necessary. Beijing has considered Taiwan a renegade province since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government moved to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war on the mainland to Mao Zedong’s communist revolutionaries.

“No force in the world, including the United States, can stop the Chinese people from achieving complete national reunification,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a press conference on Tuesday, when asked about Mr. Biden’s China policy.

But Beijing is nevertheless scrutinizing Russia’s military miscalculations, the stiff Ukrainian resistance, and the united response of the West, to see how it might avoid similar problems in retaking Taiwan, analysts say.

China’s PLA has traditionally looked up to the Russian military as a model and “big brother,” says Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Now, China’s “political leadership has some reason to second-guess what the PLA might tell them about their ability to invade Taiwan in a matter of hours or days and actually accomplish the task,” says Dr. Templeman, manager of Hoover’s project on Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region.

Beijing, for instance, will seek to ensure the smooth functioning of the PLA’s joint command-and-control and logistics systems – both problematic areas for Russia’s military, says Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford and the American Enterprise Institute.

Another lesson for Beijing is the strength and endurance of Ukraine’s military and civilian resistance against a superior foe. “It should give them some concern that the Taiwanese might perform much better than they are expecting,” says Dr. Templeman. 

The war in Ukraine has also showcased the ability of the United States and Europe to act with a high degree of unity in providing significant economic and military support – backup that would be even greater for Taiwan, which is more central to U.S. interests, he says. “What the U.S. is doing in Ukraine will be probably the floor, the bare minimum the U.S. would do to support Taiwan in a conflict with the PRC [People’s Republic of China].” 

Given all these factors, Beijing may take more time to shore up its military, refine its strategy, and insulate itself from potential sanctions before deciding to attempt a military campaign to capture Taiwan, says Dr. Mastro. 

China also seeks to avoid the appearance that it is coordinating military actions with Russia as part of an autocratic block, she says. “Then it no longer becomes a war about Taiwan; it becomes a conflict about these big autocratic superpowers trying to impose their will on the rest of the world,” she says. “European countries and Asian countries are much more likely to fight with the United States if they view the war as an existential conflict for their survival.”

Washington digs in

Viewed from Washington, Russia’s war in Ukraine is clarifying and strengthening U.S. policy on Taiwan to match a tougher strategy toward China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade an independent country that he considers intrinsically connected to Russia has underscored the need for Washington to send stronger signals to Beijing over Taiwan, departing somewhat from its decades-old approach of “strategic ambiguity.”

“The U.S. is clear now that because Putin invaded Ukraine, when [Chinese leader] Xi [Jinping] talks about invading Taiwan, it’s not idle chatter,” says Daniel Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “With that clarity has come a new strategy aimed at deterring a similar war by China against Taiwan.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech Thursday that while U.S. policy on Taiwan has remained consistent “across decades and administrations ... what has changed is Beijing’s growing coercion” of Taiwan. He explained that the U.S. would continue to help Taiwan “maintain a sufficient self-defense capability” while opposing “any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side.”

Gemunu Amarasingh/AP

U.S. President Joe Biden gestures as he boards Air Force One for a trip to South Korea and Japan, May 19, 2022, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. China held military exercises in the disputed South China Sea during Mr. Biden's Asia trip, which was largely focused on countering the perceived threat from China.

In Tokyo, Mr. Biden said the U.S. was not only committed to coming to Taiwan’s defense, but that it would move even faster and more forcefully than it has in helping Ukraine to defeat Russia’s invasion. Since the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. has committed to providing Taiwan with the defense weaponry to resist a Chinese military attack, but nothing in the act requires the U.S. to enter a war to defend Taiwan.

“He’s basically saying Taiwan is more strategically important to us [than Ukraine], and we’re going to act accordingly,” says David M. Lampton, senior scholar in China studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. 

Lessons for Taiwan

On Taiwan, Ukraine’s battlefield successes against Russia have provided inspiration for those who argue Taiwan’s forces and population have a crucial role to play should China invade.

Political groups on the island have raised the idea of expanding Taiwan’s reserve forces and conscription, Dr. Templeman says.

Mr. Blumenthal of AEI expects there will be greater pressure on the U.S. Congress to increase U.S.-Taiwan military cooperation and defense spending for Taiwan. But that assistance will likely be conditional, he says. For example, lawmakers may require that Taiwan develop a force similar to Ukraine’s territorial defense guards, boosting civilian involvement in national defense.

A key point to bear in mind, some analysts stress, is that the Biden administration must not only deter China on Taiwan, but also reassure it – by reiterating that Washington neither supports Taiwan independence nor opposes a unification that is peaceful and mutually agreed upon by both sides. 

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a fait accompli, a military campaign by China against Taiwan is still not inevitable, they say.

“All along, strategic ambiguity has aimed not just to deter China but equally to deter Taiwan from making provocative statements,” says Dr. Lampton.

While Clemencia Carabali was watching TV coverage of the funerals of five Afro-Colombian teens who had been tortured and killed back in 2020, she did not expect anything could shake her from her anger and grief.

Then, fellow human rights activist Francia Márquez turned to address the cameras to announce a run for Colombia’s top office.

“What a daring thing to do,” Ms. Carabali remembers thinking, after she almost fell from her seat. “In a racist, sexist, classist” country like Colombia, Black women from poor families like Ms. Márquez don’t successfully cross the barriers into national politics, she says.

But that could be about to change.

Ms. Márquez has experienced a meteoric rise over the past several months, from an environmental activist with little national name recognition to a political candidate with a growing, rock-star following. She’s now the vice presidential candidate on the leftist Historic Pact party ticket of Gustavo Petro at presidential elections this weekend, and her presence has inspired the nation’s “nobodies,” as she refers to Colombia’s long-overlooked poor citizens.

Colombia has never had a leftist president, let alone an Afro-Colombian vice president, and the pair are promising progressive changes such as greater access to land for poor people and widespread health services. Mr. Petro, who is making his third presidential bid and previously served as mayor of Bogotá, the capital, is polling well in the lead, but is not likely to win the 50% of votes needed to stave off a second round.

But it is Ms. Márquez’s atypical profile that is igniting new levels of hope for her supporters at this election. She is a Black woman and was a teenage mother who cleaned houses in a nation where femicides are an enduring scourge and Afro-Colombians are twice as likely to suffer infant mortality and hunger as the average citizen.

She has dedicated her career to environmental activism in a country deemed the deadliest place in the world for that type of work. Her family was forced off its land because of her activism, the sort of thing that can often get you labeled a guerrilla sympathizer in a country that only recently declared an end to its nearly six-decade-long civil war.

Fernando Vergara/AP

A large image of Francia Márquez is projected behind Gustavo Petro, presidential candidate with the Historic Pact party (right), during an event presenting Ms. Márquez, standing next to him, as his running mate, in Bogotá, Colombia, March 23, 2022.

“I am a woman who has lived through the hardships of this country, which is what most Colombians have lived through,” Ms. Márquez says in an interview. She connects with her constituents, she says, because they see themselves reflected in her.

“If I can become vice president, I send a message of empowerment,” to the youth, to women, to poor people of Colombia who have long suffered, she says.

“They feel pain but at the same time, they feel hope.”

From “Green Nobel” to presidential ticket

Ms. Márquez became an activist at the age of 13, when the construction of a dam threatened her hometown. The risks it posed to her ancestral territory – drying up wetlands and flooding traditional crops – propelled her into a career in environmental advocacy. In 2014, she organized a 10-day, 350-mile march and three weeks of demonstrations to protest illegal gold mining, which forced the government to dismantle mining machinery in the town of La Toma and create a national task force on illegal mining. She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, or “Green Nobel,” in 2018.

But environmental activism rarely translates to a career in politics – at least in Colombia. The political establishment is made up of familiar profiles: wealthy, white, male. That has created deeply entrenched distrust between the government and people in many rural and poor parts of the country, which are often the regions hardest hit by Colombia’s decadeslong civil conflict. As a result, many who look like Ms. Márquez or come from similarly humble beginnings are disengaged from traditional politics and missing from the national conversation.

Her swift rise has taken many by surprise.

“When she began to gain so much momentum, nobody expected it,” says Aura Hurtado, who teaches history at the Universidad del Valle in Cali. But Dr. Hurtado says the country was primed for a leader like Ms. Márquez.

Colombia is experiencing a period of enormous discontent. Inequality and lack of opportunity heightened during the pandemic, as unemployment rose from 10% to 15% and sparked widespread protests, which were forcefully repressed by the government. Some 40% of the population lives in poverty. 

“The young people who participated in the [protests] recognize her as part of the front line,” Dr. Hurtado says. “They recognize her as a legitimate political leader,” in a way most established politicians are not.

Mr. Petro’s biggest challenger this weekend is Federico Gutiérrez, a former mayor of Medellín who has the support of center-right voters and would be expected to uphold the political status quo if elected.

Ms. Márquez has provided the Historic Pact party with “outsider” bona fides, which she plays up in her public appearances. Her success so far – including placing third in the presidential primary in March – “shows the tremendously adverse sentiment that people have against the political class at this time in Colombia,” says Sandra Borda, an associate professor of political science at the Universidad de Los Andes.

“We will have love”

On a recent Saturday night, the Parque de los Periodistas in downtown Bogotá was packed with people donning T-shirts scrawled with “vivir sabroso,” roughly translating to “live life to the fullest,” and “Vice President Francia” hats. The crowd was speckled with the purple color of Mr. Petro’s Historic Pact party, and a rainbow flag fluttered above the crowd.

Ms. Márquez’s closing campaign event coincided with Afro-Colombian Day, a commemoration of the country’s abolition of slavery, and many rallygoers hailed from Afro-Colombian communities.

When Ms. Márquez finally took the microphone, the crowd erupted, chanting, “We love you, Francia.”

“It’s not easy when you are a girl, and they tell you that your hair is ugly ... that your ancestors are African – and the references are not to the Africa that developed humanity, but to the ... impoverished Africa,” she told the crowd, her voice growing hoarse with emotion.

She went on to call for Afro-Colombian pride, and for the necessity of dreams and role models for citizens of all stripes. Afro-Colombians make up roughly 10% of the population and are underrepresented in business and politics.

Even before polls open this weekend, Ms. Márquez has made a lasting mark on politics here, says David Murillo, a racial justice researcher at Dejusticia, a human rights nongovernmental organization. Soon after she was announced as Mr. Petro’s vice presidential pick, four out of the other six candidates also selected Afro-Colombian running mates.

It’s no coincidence. Her candidacy “is the recognition of a population that has been invisible for many years, decades, even centuries,” Mr. Murillo says.

Ms. Márquez’s rise has sparked challenging conversations around racism, classism, and machismo. She is starting “to generate discomfort in what is known as the establishment,” says Mr. Murillo. “She is touching on issues that were not talked about before.”

Genevieve Glatsky

Nineteen-year-old political science student Joha Ardila (center) says the fact that Francia Márquez "has put herself in a space of power means that all Black women and all Black girls can grow thinking about reaching that space."

Joha Ardila, a political science student attending Ms. Márquez’s closing rally, agrees.

“As a Black woman, that Francia Márquez has put herself in a space of power means that all Black women and all Black girls can grow thinking about reaching that space,” she says, adding that – at last – she feels seen in her own country.

Ms. Márquez finished her speech from behind police shields after bodyguards spotted a green laser pointed at her chest. Even before she exploded onto the national political scene, Ms. Márquez survived assassination attempts and death threats for her activism. As her security team ushered her offstage, she struggled to deliver her final message, fireworks erupting behind her.

“After hope, we will have love,” she called out. “We will have joy.”

Dominique Soguel

Alisa Skoropadyk planned to become a pastry chef before she saw Russian soldiers kill a man in her hometown of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Now she wants to join the police force and help expel Russia from Ukraine.

Alisa Skoropadyk was doing the dishes when the Russian soldiers killed the man driving his car outside her home. She could see from the kitchen window where she was cleaning with her mother. The man was driving up to the Russian checkpoint, and they shot him, dragged his body out of the vehicle, and dumped it on the street of her once idyllic suburb on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.

That is just one moment the teenager cites when explaining why she scrapped plans to become a pastry chef and decided to join the police academy.

“After what I saw in Bucha, I just want to fight these orcs and liberate Ukraine,” says Alisa, using the evil, subhuman creatures of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to describe Russian soldiers.

“My dad understands it; Mom is against,” she explains while lingering with her friends outside a newly reopened supermarket in Bucha where they stocked up on chips. Her revised career choice is modeled on the path of her father, a police officer who is now serving in the army. “When I said I planned to enlist, they wanted to keep me home in handcuffs.”

Direct and indirect exposure to the horrors of war has reshaped the choices of Ukrainian students across the country. Standing at the crossroads of childhood and adulthood are about 230,000 teens who were due to finish school this year. Those still in Ukraine saw their daily routines upended and responsibilities mushroom.

Some dove deeper into their studies to cope. Others struggle to concentrate. At a time when in normal circumstances, they would be faced with decisions about what to do with their lives, now those questions are overshadowed by a more existential one: Will we survive?

“The last opportunity to be in school”

Wedged in the west of Ukraine and once part of Poland, Lviv has been a relative safe haven, a steppingstone for those on their way to Europe and a shelter for the shellshocked residents of front-line areas.

Still, war dominates daily life even as cafes burst with chatter and cherry trees blossom. Missiles rain in daily across the country, triggering an alarm system reinforced by phone apps that pushes people to shelter in bathtubs and basements. At School 8, which Russian troops used as barracks between 1915 and 1918, teachers today give classes online and spend their breaks making camouflage nets to conceal Ukrainian army tanks.

“We won’t be able to hold an official graduation this year, but we hope that there will be a victory celebration on the last day of school,” says Sofia Yasinka, the arts and crafts teacher.

Irina Hudyma was considering studying in Germany even before Russia invaded her country. She would like to specialize in biomedicine, but that program is not available in Ukraine; the closest she could achieve is a degree in biology. The invasion increased her inclination to leave the country, even though as an only child, she has greater anxiety about the prospect of leaving her parents alone in a war zone.

“I am not 100% sure I am going to apply to Ukrainian universities,” says Irina, who writes scholarly papers for fun and reads fiction to relax. But “the situation in our country is not stable. I do not know what will happen tomorrow. If I start learning at a Ukrainian university, I am not sure I will be able to finish my education here.”

This was not the end of year she and her classmates had envisioned. The pandemic already forced them to moderate their expectations. But still, they had hoped it would be a time of freedom, full of laughter together before life took them separate ways. Instead, social interactions have been limited to rare walks in the city center, kept short by air sirens, a national curfew, and parental concern.

“We were planning to eat out in restaurants, celebrate,” she says. “Not anymore. War changed everything. I am sad and upset just like my classmates are. This was the last opportunity to be in school, to enjoy childhood, to not have adult responsibilities.”

Dominique Soguel

From left, Severyn Titko, Solomiya Lutsiv, and Sviatoslav Stehnii exchange stories while sitting on the terrace of a cafe in Lviv, Ukraine, on May 6, 2022. All hope to go on to university after finishing their studies online this semester despite the disruptions of war.

In a normal year, graduating students at School 8 would take a class trip abroad. Now they study online, something teachers say is challenging for students who have ended up in different countries. Not everybody shows up in the virtual world. Those who stayed in Lviv split their time between volunteer activities and family duties.

“I was really scared in the beginning,” says Sviatoslav Stehnii, another student in the final year. “The most difficult thing is to understand that our citizens are dying just because a guy in the Kremlin wants this.”

School 8 is known as the “German school” because fluency in German is a condition of graduation. That means students have a realistic pathway to German universities, provided their parents can afford it or they can secure scholarships. “Many of my classmates want to go study in Germany, Austria, and Poland,” says Sviatoslav. “I just want to stay here and help develop my country.”

Others are hedging their bets. “You don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” says Severyn Titko, who volunteers at a charity near the train station. He worries that Ukrainian universities in Lviv will be overwhelmed by applications from displaced students. But he is committed to carrying on with his education wherever that is.

“Learning will help me build a better future,” Severyn says. “I understand that we will win this war. We now say not ‘after the end of the war’ but ‘after winning the war,’ we will study, we will travel, and our mood will be much better.”

Solomiya Lutsiv, who plans to study psychology in Ukraine or Canada, longs for a normal graduation. “I imagined a big party and beautiful outfits,” she says, sparking laughter from the boys. “I wanted to dance to Ukrainian music until the morning with my friends, go see the sun rise together.”

“When there are bombs, I cannot sleep”

The future of the class of 2022 has been a major concern for the Ukrainian Ministry of Education. Oleh Sharov, general director of the directorate of higher education, outlines three key hurdles in this year’s university enrollment effort: the risk of military strikes across the country, the massive displacement of the population within and beyond Ukraine, and the widespread destruction of educational property.

“We get daily reports of new kindergartens, schools, and universities being damaged,” he says. “From 250 universities in Ukraine, four of them are completely destroyed and 36 are damaged.”

Those figures reflect the barrage that hit cities like Kharkiv. Ukraine’s second-largest city, near the border with Belarus and Russia, is an important hub for university studies.

Among the roughly 200 people living and sheltering in its Heroes of Labor metro station is student Evgeny Schevchenko. “This war has taken a toll on children and the mental health of youth,” he says. “When there are bombs, I cannot sleep. I start hallucinating and talking to myself.”

He has been at the station since the early days of the war because his home was hit by Russian shelling. The memory of a Russian tank rolling down his street and taking aim toward the basement door where he stood haunts him. Nights at the metro station have been difficult, with bombings jolting people awake and triggering downward stampedes in the pursuit of greater structural safety.

Access to an electric kettle allows him to boil water and wash once a week. He helps his mother care for his grandparents, whose highest comfort are two floor mattresses. The family frets over an older brother now fighting and unreachable. Despite these misfortunes, Evgeny has high hopes for his future.

“I’d like to open a restaurant,” he says, lining up for soup doled out by volunteers. “I want to become a chef and feed people. Sometimes there was not enough food for everyone here. I am not complaining, but I can always tell when food is overcooked or undercooked.”

“Our parents don’t let us wander far”

The boom of outgoing artillery and the hiss of incoming missiles also punctuate the days of Igor Klymenko, a 16-year-old living in Merlo, a village of about 500 people northwest of Kharkiv.

Dominique Soguel

Igor Klymenko sits on the only playground of the village of Merlo, near Kharkiv, Ukraine. Igor says at the start of the war, he felt so sick to his stomach from stress that he could not get out of bed or do chores, which include feeding the pigs.

“Our bags are packed in case of a Russian advance here, but that never happened,” he says, sitting on an empty playground as a horse eats grass nearby. Igor is a bit less anxious now because the Ukrainian army has beefed up its air defense system.

But that, too, carries risks. Four people in a nearby village were wounded by the shrapnel of an intercepted incoming rocket. Igor fears his family could suffer a similar fate.

“The explosions have become louder lately, so our parents don’t let us wander far,” he says. “Before the war we would go to the forest, do picnics, or fish by the pond.”

Lately, he has been using the family computer to prepare for the simplified multisubject national test. Usually, Ukrainian students sit three or four exams in their best subjects. But due to the risks associated with carrying out multiple exams at multiple locations, students will take a single, simplified test covering math along with Ukrainian language and history.

Everyone can prepare for these topics online. But the lessons most present on Igor’s mind, however, are how to react to a chemical attack or avoid stepping on a mine.

“If it was up to me,” he says, “I would be in school even now.”

In October 2019, an environmental researcher named Jenny Rowland-Shea co-wrote a report for the left-leaning Center for American Progress about the rapid loss of American wildlife and natural areas. In it, she included a statistic that the United States was losing a football-field-sized swath of nature every 30 seconds.

Soon, she recalls, she started seeing that fact, and her report, cited in a variety of blog posts and opinion articles. But these pieces of writing took a very different tone. 

“They were always twisting the statistic to support some rhetoric that we certainly were not aiming to support [such as] criticizing immigrants and people of color and saying they were responsible” for environmental damage, says Ms. Rowland-Shea, now the deputy director for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress. 

When she and her colleagues started researching the posts, they found a landscape of environmental rhetoric and organizations with nativist, and even fascist-leaning, underpinnings. Although they were taken aback at first, Ms. Rowland-Shea recalls, they learned from colleagues that what they were seeing was far from unique.

Over the past few years, mainstream environmentalists and climate activists have watched with alarm as a new brand of right-wing eco-consciousness has started to gain traction in the United States and western Europe. On its extreme edge, proponents have explicitly embraced the label of “eco-fascism.” The alleged perpetrator of this month’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, claimed this identity, as did those in the 2019 El Paso, Texas, and Christchurch, New Zealand, massacres. Each blamed migrants, and people of color in general, for denigrating nature, and claimed that killing to lower population numbers was helpful for the environment – a clear throwback, scholars say, to Nazi rhetoric. 

But as disturbing as those cases are, some climate advocates say that even more worrisome is the way eco-fascism’s underlying concept – the violent defense of a romantic, and racially white, image of “nature” – is seeping into the mainstream. This is particularly true, they say, as fewer people argue over whether climate change exists, and more debate whether humans can do anything about it. And it has caused soul searching for many environmental activists who have long worked to convey the seriousness of the climate crisis, and who now find themselves needing to advocate against despair. 

Wilfredo Lee/AP/File

Ed Prichard (left), site manager for the Miami EcoAdventures unit at Crandon Park, and Charlotte Gonzalez pick up trash and microplastics during a beach cleanup, April 22, 2021, at Crandon Park in Key Biscayne, Florida. In an effort to counter despair about climate change, environmentalists are emphasizing the difference individuals can make.

“Many have used doomsday narratives thinking that they were useful to scare people into action,” says Betsy Hartmann, professor emerita of development studies at Hampshire College and author of “The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness.” “I don’t want to diminish the urgency of these environmental issues. But to put it in this apocalyptical mode encourages people to suspend their basic ethical frameworks. If it’s an apocalypse coming, anything is possible, and it’s easier for all kinds of racialized stereotypes to come up.”

That is particularly true, she says, in conversations about “climate refugees.” For many on the progressive left, the idea of people needing to leave their homes because of climate change sparks sympathetic action. For those on the right, though, it can create fear and prompt talk about solidifying national borders. In fact, she says research shows that much climate migration will happen within a country – people deciding to move from wildfire-prone California or drought-starved New Mexico to another part of the U.S., for instance.  

“There may be climate factors involved in people’s decisions to migrate. But usually decisions to migrate are much more complex,” Dr. Hartmann says. “I think we have to be wary about the way climate and migration have been linked in national security circles, and even in progressive environmental circles. It often serves as yet another reason to beef up our borders.”  

Climate “doomerism” as license to exclude 

Meg Ruttan Walker, a climate activist based near Toronto, saw a similar kind of extreme despair as she worked to help local municipalities embrace climate action plans and lower emissions. She says that in public meetings and rallies, she would regularly encounter opposition – not from climate change deniers, but from those who said that the world was simply doomed. The best approach to global warming, these opponents argued, was to tighten borders, reject immigrants, and prepare individually for civilization’s collapse. 

“Climate change scares me,” says Ms. Ruttan Walker. “But this – this is terrifying. It’s what happens when people in the developed world say it’s too late to do anything. Doomerism gives people the permission to do anything they want to survive.”  

Indeed, despair is a key link between a growing global ultra-right movement and a fringe eco-fascist environmentalism, says Jeff Sparrow, an Australian writer who published the book “Fascists Among Us,” about the Christchurch massacre. 

“Fascism is a movement of despair,” he says. “It’s ‘The world is falling apart, we don’t feel we can make it better in any way – so let’s unleash violence and find redemption.’ … Nothing good comes out of despair.”

Yet for decades, says Dr. Hartmann, environmental rhetoric has leaned toward apocalyptic warnings. These have been about everything from food shortages to water running out to the dire effects of overpopulation, she says.  

That last point has been particularly problematic, she says. In 1968, a bestselling book by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb,” predicted that a growing number of humans would lead to everything from global famine to world war. It helped usher in years of environmental ideology focused on the alleged problem of “too many people.”

Josh Edelson/AP/File

Water drips from a faucet near boat docks at the Browns Ravine Cove area of drought-stricken Folsom Lake, in Folsom, California, on May 22, 2021. “It’s really hard to get people to accept that consumption is the problem, not how many people there are,” says Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine.

But as Dr. Hartmann and other scholars have pointed out, that “too many” was rarely conceptualized as white Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, the whole concept of overpopulation had roots in the early 20th-century eugenics movement, which advocated building a “superior” human race through selective breeding – an approach that was deeply racist. 

In recent years, most mainstream environmental organizations have backed away from, and even apologized for, their focus on overpopulation during the ’60s and ’70s. But the rhetoric still comes up regularly in conversations about climate, says Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. This is despite clear research that shows fossil fuel use in wealthier, whiter countries has had a far greater climate impact than the number of people in any high-birthrate nation.

“It’s really hard to get people to accept that consumption is the problem, not how many people there are,” Dr. Gill says. “And that when we talk about overpopulation, there’s a dog whistle there that a lot of people don’t even realize that they’re blowing.”

Needed: “Radical solidarity”

The counterpoint to all of this, many climate advocates say, is a sort of gritty optimism that requires a shift from the alarm that has often characterized the warnings about global warming. 

“The world is changing so quickly, and the climate is changing so quickly, we’re really behind in how we’re communicating,” says Ms. Ruttan Walker.

She and others say that instead of doom and societal collapse, people need to learn that concerted action can make a difference and that many steps are happening to counteract climate-related damage – and also how they can work with others in what she calls “radical solidarity.” 

It also requires a reorientation on who climate change has hurt most and how to best fix those inequities, says Dr. Gill. After all, she says, the people eco-fascists tend to blame for environmental problems – immigrants, residents of developing countries, people of color – have done the least to create climate change, and are already suffering most from its impacts, she says. 

“The biggest uncertainty about our climate future is not what the planet is going to do, but what we’re going to do,” says Dr. Gill. “This is true from the scientific perspective in terms of emission pathways, policies, and decisions. But it’s also true in terms of rising social movements and other things that are hard to predict.” 

AP

Russian anti-corruption fighter Alexei Navalny appears on a video link from prison at a May 24 court hearing in Moscow.

One plausible reason for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Ukrainian citizens have made progress in creating transparent and accountable government. The Kremlin not only feared it could no longer use corrupt oligarchs to control the country but a less-corrupt Ukraine might inspire the Russian people to demand the same.

This war, said imprisoned Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny on the first day of the invasion, “was unleashed to cover up the theft from Russian citizens.”

The invasion, in other words, is an example of how much corruption across borders now influences global events. Last year, for example, corruption in the Afghanistan military led to the collapse of an elected government, forcing a hasty retreat of U.S. forces as the Taliban took over. Anti-corruption protests in Iran may affect talks to curb its nuclear weapons program. Corruption in a number of countries such as Sri Lanka has made it easier for China to gain access to foreign ports for its navy.

A year ago, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an order that the fight against corruption worldwide is a “core” national security interest. In April, the Netherlands, Canada, and other countries announced a plan to meet in a few months to curb graft that often leads to famine, human rights violations, and even war.

All of this has helped revive a decadelong campaign to set up an international anti-corruption court, one that would act only if a country fails badly in combating graft. On Tuesday, 42 former presidents and prime ministers added their support to the idea, according to two global nonprofits, Integrity Initiatives International and Club de Madrid.

Corruption “has global dimensions and cannot be combated by the affected countries alone,” said Danilo Turk, a former president of Slovenia. In recent years, many other world leaders as well as Nobel laureates have joined the cause.

Creating such a court is an uphill battle. It remains unclear how it would assert any authority or gain enough acceptance among countries to change international norms. It would be modeled after the International Criminal Court, which has a mixed record of success since its founding in 2002.

Still, the Ukraine war – with its probable origins in the country’s progress in good governance – has reenergized anti-corruption efforts in many countries. Ukraine’s efforts have indeed inspired others.