Carlos Barria/Reuters

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen shakes hands with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng during a bilateral meeting ahead of a U.S.-hosted Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, Nov. 9, 2023.

When Chinese leader Xi Jinping meets U.S. President Joe Biden in San Francisco on Wednesday, it will be first and foremost an opportunity for the two heads of state to show the world – and their own people – that they can responsibly manage relations between the two superpowers.

Asian countries’ leaders, especially, will be eager for signs that China and the United States are making progress in stabilizing relations at the Biden-Xi meeting, to be held on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. A regional forum with 21 members mainly in Asia and the Americas, APEC accounts for nearly half the world’s trade and about 62% of its gross domestic product.

Messrs. Xi and Biden no doubt have much to discuss, from regional tensions – in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and Korean Peninsula – to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and existential issues such as global warming. The two leaders last met face-to-face a year ago in Bali, Indonesia.

While no major breakthroughs are expected, experts say the meeting is likely to result in modest progress on issues ranging from military-to-military communications to counternarcotics and climate. 

To be sure, the Biden-Xi meeting – a product of months of intensive diplomacy by both sides – itself marks headway in steadying ties between Washington and Beijing, which frayed due to tensions over trade, technology, Taiwan, human rights, and other issues.

“Both sides are trying to present to the rest of the world that they have things under control,” says Oriana Skylar Mastro, author of the forthcoming book “Upstart: How China Became a Great Power.” That, she says, requires “predictable, high-level engagement.”

Spiraling U.S.-China ties

In the six years since Mr. Xi last visited the United States in 2017, Sino-U.S. relations have spiraled downward, reaching a low point unprecedented in the more than 40 years since the two countries normalized relations in 1979.

Washington’s concerns with Beijing’s rollback of reforms, heightened domestic repression, military buildup, and assertiveness overseas since Mr. Xi took power in 2012 have united key American constituencies in a rare bipartisan consensus to get tough on China. Beijing, meanwhile, views the U.S. as a waning power bent on containing China’s rise, and bridles at growing U.S. unofficial cooperation with Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory. Antagonism has grown, exacerbated by increasingly hard-line rhetoric in both capitals.

Since 2020, the pandemic and vulnerabilities exposed in supply chains brought an intensified focus on national security and self-sufficiency. This is the case especially in China but also in the U.S., where the Biden administration has taken targeted measures to curb the transfer of technology to China that could aid China’s military and surveillance capabilities.

SOURCE:

Open Doors, World Bank, U.S. Census Bureau, Pew Research Center

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Jacob Turcotte

Many regular exchanges – both official meetings and the unofficial flow of students, tourists, and family members – were disrupted or halted during the pandemic. Direct flights between the U.S. and China dwindled to a handful of round trips per week, compared with more than 300 a week in 2019. U.S. public attitudes on China grew more negative, mirroring a trend in Chinese opinion.

China’s strict “zero-COVID” policies and a regulatory crackdown by Mr. Xi also dampened economic growth and pushed youth unemployment to record highs, hurting the confidence of Chinese consumers, private firms, and foreign investors. 

“We have seen really large outflows” of foreign capital from China, with new foreign direct investment hitting a 25-year low this year, says Joyce Chang, chair of global research at J.P. Morgan.

Recent Chinese police raids and arrests at foreign firms – and China’s use of exit bans to prevent foreigners from leaving – have spooked the international business community and other travelers. 

“China is not a transparent system ... [and] companies are understanding the opaqueness of that structure puts their interests at risk,” says Kimberly Glas, member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “American companies are looking at other markets.”

Breaking off contact

In the past 18 months, two major incidents led Beijing and Washington to suspend many governmental contacts. The visit to Taiwan in August 2022 by former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – the first House speaker to visit the island in 25 years – led China to cancel military-to-military exchanges and many other contacts. Beijing also launched massive military exercises around Taiwan. Then in January, the flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon over the U.S. led Washington to postpone a planned February visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Beijing.

Chiang Ying-ying/AP/File

People walk past a billboard welcoming U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in Taipei, Taiwan, Aug. 3, 2022. The trip marked the first time a House speaker visited the island in 25 years, leading China to cancel military-to-military exchanges and many other contacts.

The upshot was a several-month delay in the implementation of agreements by Messrs. Biden and Xi at Bali to resume high-level dialogues and put a floor under relations.

Since June, however, Washington and Beijing have achieved fresh momentum, with visits to China by Mr. Blinken, several other Cabinet-level U.S. officials, senior American lawmakers, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. This was followed by trips to Washington by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other senior Chinese officials.

“Beijing and Washington ... [have] a shared desire to make sure that where this competition is occurring, it’s happening deliberately, it’s not happening unintentionally,” said Rick Waters, managing director for China at the Eurasia Group and a former State Department official. 

“You need to have channels at a senior level that are empowered so you can at least understand the other sides’ intentions,” he said during a Thursday panel hosted by Foreign Policy.

China’s main Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, said on Sunday that the U.S. and China have arrested the decline in relations, and share a “special responsibility” to tackle global challenges. “To be responsible to the world means to ... lead global cooperation,” it said in a commentary.

Opportunity for progress

In their meeting this week, Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi are likely to agree to resume military-to-military contacts, which the Biden administration has described as a top priority. The lack of reliable crisis communications between Washington and Beijing has emerged as a glaring gap as the two militaries operate in the Taiwan Strait and East and South China Seas. 

Armed Forces of the Philippines/AP/File

Filipino sailors look after a Chinese coast guard ship bumps their supply boat as they approach Second Thomas Shoal, locally called Ayungin Shoal, at the disputed South China Sea, Oct. 22, 2023. Washington and Beijing lack reliable crisis communications, a critical gap as the two militaries operate in the Taiwan Strait and the East China and South China seas.

The risk of an accidental collision has grown, experts say, as Chinese fighter jets have recently conducted unsafe intercepts of unarmed U.S. reconnaissance planes patrolling in international airspace over the East China and South China seas. One video released by the U.S. Department of Defense showed a Chinese fighter jet within 10 feet of a B-52 on Oct. 24. “You run that experiment of 10 feet … 10 or 20 times – you’re going to get a collision or near miss,” says Jude Blanchette, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Leaders on both sides know just how dangerous the situation is,” says Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities. “These are two nuclear superpowers.”

Experts say other potential agreements could focus on:

• Collaborating on law enforcement actions to stem the flow from China of precursor chemicals used to make the illegal drug fentanyl.
• Increasing direct flights between China and the U.S.
• Expanding people-to-people ties.
• Creating a working group on curbing climate change.
• Banning artificial intelligence in controlling nuclear weapons and drones.

Longer dialogues are needed to tackle major problems, such as how to deescalate tensions over Taiwan, experts say, pointing, for example, to the two-day summit between Mr. Xi and President Barack Obama at the Sunnylands estate in California in 2013. 

Yet they caution that political pressures in both China and the U.S. are constraining progress. In this charged atmosphere, a sudden crisis – such as the balloon incident or an accidental collision of U.S. and Chinese military aircraft – could again derail progress as both sides feel compelled to show strength.

In the best-case scenario, Mr. Blanchette says, the Biden-Xi meeting will “unlock the Chinese system to really push for meaningful discussions ... with the United States on shared challenges and mutual antagonisms.”

Israeli Government Press Office/Haim Zach/Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with officers as he visits the Tze'elim army training base in the northern Negev Desert, Israel, Nov. 7, 2023.

The tight embrace between Israel and the United States in the wake of the brutal Hamas attack on Oct. 7 is starting to loosen.

Just over a month into Israel’s military campaign in Gaza aimed at rooting out the militant Islamist organization Hamas, differences between the two allies are widening on key elements of the war, from humanitarian accommodations in the fighting and protection for hospitals to what Israel’s endgame should look like.

This is not to say that President Joe Biden’s support for Israel is wavering. Rather, the Biden administration’s unease and indeed disapproval of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting the war – and other aspects of Israeli governance of keen interest to the U.S., including the broader Palestinian issue – are growing.

Alarm bells sounded in the Biden White House when Mr. Netanyahu hinted last week that Israel envisions remaining in Gaza for an “indefinite period” after the fighting ends.

On Friday the Israeli leader went further, telling journalists, “We will have total security control, with the ability to enter whenever we want to eliminate any terrorists who reemerge.”

This took everyone from President Biden on down by surprise, as it followed stark warnings from a range of administration officials that any semblance of Israeli reoccupation of the Palestinian territory must be avoided – not least for the impact such a step would have across the Middle East.

It was only a matter of time before the U.S.-Israel embrace started loosening, many analysts say, given that Israel is laser-focused on its goal of “destroying” Hamas, while the U.S. is balancing its commitment to Israel against its broader interests in the region.

Yet while differences between the allies on war strategy were to be expected, some analysts say, more worrisome are the deep divides on core postwar issues – including the prickly question of Palestinian governance.

Moreover, those key issues are unlikely to be addressed to anything near Washington’s satisfaction by the current Israeli government, some Israeli experts say.

Leah Millis/Reuters

People demanding a cease-fire in Gaza demonstrate in solidarity with Palestinians, as a motorcade passes with President Joe Biden, in Rockford, Illinois, Nov. 9, 2023.

The U.S.-Israel relationship “is facing two clusters of differences, the first being inevitable disagreements over how to run the military campaign and everything it entails, including all the aspects of the humanitarian impact and how to address it,” says Nimrod Novik, former senior foreign policy adviser to the late Prime Minister and Labor party leader Shimon Peres.

“But I’m more concerned with the second cluster, which is far from inevitable but which derives from internal Israeli politics and from the prime minister prioritizing personal interests and the survival of his coalition,” adds Mr. Novik, who is the senior Israel fellow with the Israel Policy Forum, a Washington-based think tank. “In this moment of national crisis, this is simply intolerable.”

As an example, he notes that after Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel on Oct. 18, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to heed the president’s admonition to begin envisioning and planning for the endgame by assigning two teams with the task of – in Mr. Novik’s words – “designing the end strategy and morning after” for Gaza.

But he adds that so far Mr. Netanyahu has kept any discussion of the reports out of the Cabinet “because they would not meet with the approval of this governing coalition when it comes to the Palestinian issue writ large.”

Two clocks

Still, some Israeli officials and analysts are increasingly cautioning Mr. Netanyahu against testing Washington’s support too much, underscoring Israel’s need of its powerful ally – especially as other major global powers, particularly Russia, line up against it.

Israel does not have unlimited time to carry out its Gaza offensive, some analysts say, with relations with Washington being one factor determining the time frame.

“The Israeli army is proceeding as if time is unlimited, and yet we are operating against several clocks that are ticking increasingly rapidly as the war proceeds,” says Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

One of those “clocks” is in Washington, he says, where Mr. Biden – facing rising opposition over his staunch support of Israel both on the political front at home and among America’s Arab partners – is pressing Israel to move more deliberately, particularly on the humanitarian front.

U.S. officials are said to be telling their Israeli counterparts that the Gaza military operation needs to be carried out over a matter of weeks, while Israeli officials say the time frame will be set by achieving goals – and that is more likely to take months.

“That pressure [from Washington] is not going to ease up,” Ambassador Oren says, “so you have that clock going.”

Then there is growing pressure from the U.S. and Israel’s other Western allies on the humanitarian front – to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, and to alter the military campaign to reduce Palestinian casualties, which according to the Gaza Health Ministry, an agency of the Hamas-run government, have now surpassed 11,000 people killed.

Some analysts say the daily four-hour “pauses” in fighting that Israel has instituted in northern Gaza are recognition that Mr. Biden needs some gestures in exchange for his support.

The pauses, intended to allow safe passage south for trapped civilians and a window for food, water, and other supplies to come in, were announced by the White House Thursday. In reality, the Israeli military had already implemented the pauses beforehand, announcing the periodic cessations of fighting with a leaflet drop over Gaza City on Oct. 21.

Abed Khaled/AP

Palestinians carry a girl rescued from under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Nov. 1, 2023. Israel has implemented four-hour daily pauses in its assault on Hamas to allow civilians to flee the northern Gaza war zone.

The four-hour pauses fall short of the more robust two-to-three-day pause President Biden has been seeking to allow for more substantial humanitarian aid and the release of at least some of the 240 hostages Hamas is holding. But U.S. officials say privately that they see the short daily pauses as something to build upon and not as the end of the matter.

Indeed some U.S. officials point to recent talks in Qatar involving CIA Director William Burns and David Barnea, head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, as a sign that a pause-for-hostages deal could be forthcoming.

Gaza’s future

U.S.-Israel differences over the postwar plan focus in particular on how a Gaza flattened to rubble but still home to 2.3 million Palestinians would be administered.

The White House wasted no time in rejecting Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestion that Israel might remain in Gaza indefinitely, with national security spokesperson John Kirby saying President Biden “maintains his position that reoccupation by Israeli forces is not the right thing to do.”

Friday, on the sidelines of a G7 foreign ministers meeting in Tokyo, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken concurred, and laid out a set of principles, including “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no use of Gaza as a platform for launching terrorism or other attacks against Israel, no diminution in the territory of Gaza, and a commitment to Palestinian-led governance for Gaza and for the West Bank, and in a unified way.”

Yet as numerous Israeli analysts have pointed out since, those “principles” run counter to a number of pronouncements by members of the government putting off the planning for postwar Gaza.

The coming clash over governance, Mr. Novik says, will pit the U.S. and a “consensus” of the international community favoring the Palestinian Authority – which rules the West Bank under Israeli occupation – as the enclave’s eventual administrator, against an Israeli government that disdains the PA and has worked in recent years to weaken it.    

Still, some analysts caution that it won’t be solely international forces that pressure Israel to wind up its miliary campaign faster than the army might like. Inexorable domestic pressures, they add, are also going to place time limits.

“One clock is the steady supply of ammunition,” says Ambassador Oren. “We just aren’t going to be able to shoot indefinitely.” Other domestic “clocks” he lists include the limits on long-term deployment of the army’s 360,000 reservists, and the impact the war is having on the economy.

“So there are many clocks,” he says, “and we have to keep our eye on every one.”

Deon Shekuza is a peripatetic and charming climate influencer – as comfortable proselytizing green energy to youth on the hardscrabble roads and villages of this former German colony as he is in Namibia’s government ministries and the halls of United Nations conferences.

Paid with respect if not a salary, he’s part of a rising breed of young climate activists across the Global South whose work, suggests one climate expert, may well determine the temperature of your world.

Africa, which has contributed least to climate warming, is the continent most threatened by the droughts, floods, and heat intensified by climate change. In that extremity, the relentlessly positive Mr. Shekuza sees great opportunity for progress for Namibia.

In the dusty chaos of an informal settlement on the edge of this capital city one recent morning, he faces his biggest challenge: capturing the imaginations of young teens on a complex topic. The kids have gathered in a bright community center classroom, not for school credit and certainly not for fun on their Saturday off, but to hear Mr. Shekuza teach green hydrogen 101. Namibia has staked its future on this next big solution for a global clean energy transition.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Youth leader Clementine Munejewowo (center) was one of the youth at Mr. Shekuza’s presentation.

It’s touch-and-go for Mr. Shekuza – who himself came from a poor village, born in 1990 when climate change was just becoming a global concern. His cool factor – a New York Yankees cap and Nike basketball shoes – isn’t making up for the intricacies of environmental acronyms, policies, and economics. His words fly straight over heads dutifully bowed in note-taking posture.

No one here knows what green hydrogen is, let alone how it might be the route to social justice that Namibia’s leaders proclaim. 

Grasping for something understandable, Mr. Shekuza gestures out the window at the ancient and humble street scene of women laden with bushels of branches gathered from the forest for heating and cooking fuel. “This is exactly what we do not want for our people, right? Some energy sources keep you in the past, and some energy sources move you into the future. This is why we are here talking about green hydrogen.”

After 90 minutes, Mr. Shekuza is satisfied. These kids might not exactly understand Namibia’s renewable energy policy, but they understand green hydrogen potential: jobs for them in a new economy that could turn Africa’s perpetual sunlight into clean fuel for electricity and transportation here and for export.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Women in an informal settlement are laden with gathered branches for heating and cooking fuel.

“As the young future leaders or future businesspersons or innovators,” he says, “you need to think about these things, because there’s often opportunities where there is crisis.” 

Activism is for survival, not a moral obligation  

Climate activism is often seen as a movement of the Western middle class – of young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg scolding older generations. But across the Global South, young people are voicing the same anxieties over climate changes, extreme weather events, and how they affect their future.

For activists across Namibia – like the Inuit in the Arctic, or youth from small island nations – caring and conserving is the easy part. These youth grew up living sustainable lives well before it was trendy. Many were born on the land, in the bush, on the coast, with no playgrounds except the natural environment around them. They conserved not for environmentalism, but for survival.

They are not, like their peers in the industrialized world, driven by a sense of moral obligation. Instead, they’re on the front lines of the crisis already. And their voices in the global fight have made it harder to dismiss youth climate activism, as some do, as a protest of unrealistic, privileged children.

Mr. Shekuza and young African activists like him across the continent who are part of the Climate Generation, as we’re calling it, see a chance – the kind Mr. Shekuza tells the children in the informal settlement to seize, the kind he has seized for himself.

These activists “have massive potential influence because I think everybody recognizes that it’s the youth and particularly the youth in the Global South that are really going to be primarily affected by the climate crisis,” says Myles Allen, director of the University of Oxford Net Zero initiative and an author of the landmark 2018 U.N. scientific report, “Global Warming of 1.5 °C,” documenting immediate impacts of global warming.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A legacy of poverty left by apartheid in this former German colony can be seen in Namibia’s informal settlements, like Otjomuise. Namibia is Africa’s eighth-richest country by per capita gross domestic product – but it is second in economic inequality.

“If we do what we say we’re going to do, then Europe will become a diminishing contributor to the global issue, whereas a country like Nigeria or Namibia, for that matter, may be a rapidly growing one,” he says. “So as these new activists take on roles in government, they’re going to be the ones making the decisions that will determine what temperature we end up at.”

Mr. Shekuza can barely afford to do the work he has cut out for himself.

For all his social confidence, he hesitates at the doorstep of his home before inviting visitors in for the first time ever.

Descending from sunny daylight down a step at the side of a large old house, he enters the tiny basement space he shares with his mother.

With a revealing flourish of humility, he pulls the worn blue curtain separating his mother’s bed from his floor space: “This,” he says, “is climate activism in Africa.”

In his windowless corner lies his bed, a tattered pad on the floor encircled by stacks of climate policy documents and the King James Bible, which he reads each morning and night. On the chipped yellow paint of a cement wall are dozens of badges from U.N. conferences. A single business suit hangs from the curtain rope.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“This is climate activism in Africa,” says Deon Shekuza of the humble basement room that is his home and his NGO headquarters in Windhoek, Namibia.

This is the headquarters of his nongovernmental organization. With just the grants and fees he cobbles together from government and U.N. funding, the 33-year-old college dropout educates himself, hatches ideas for mentoring youth, and speaks via Zoom to august groups, all on the floor here. For an online speech on climate justice for a British Museum conference, he had no option but to give his speech right there, cross-legged on his sleeping pad, dressed in a traditional African tunic, surrounded by clothes, caps, shoes, and all of his policy documents.

He picks up a tattered DVD of a 2003 animated “David and Goliath” that he watches often: “I see myself in little David because I feel like, you know, you have a big heart. ... And Goliath is now climate. It’s a big, big challenge.”  

The environment, he says, was always a part of his interest: Nature was his escape from the noise and dilapidation of poverty in his rural hometown of Grootfontein. His earliest memories are of wandering the countryside, drawn up to the town’s welcome sign on the hills where he could survey the shrubs and grassland growing in the dry season, and dams filling with water in the rainy season. 

“We are people who never look at the environment like something that is separate, because you grew up looking at it as part of you,” he says.

As he entered high school, environmentalism and conservation became part of his lexicon. They were suddenly discussed as one of the world’s pressing issues – and just as suddenly became his career trajectory.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mr. Shekuza keeps the badge from the very first climate conference he attended.

A kid who always liked the big questions – and with a sense that he was destined for something bigger than his small life – he signed up for courses on renewable energy. He learned that Namibia, where the Kalahari Desert meets plateaus that descend into the Namib Desert and finally the Atlantic Ocean, has a role to play with its unrivaled wind and solar potential.

In the process, he identified his personal path: “We come from a past that is already disadvantaged. And for me not to continue the social justice fight for a better humanity would ignore those who fought for me to have the rights I have right now. It’s just my struggle is not the same as theirs. It’s not slavery or apartheid today,” says Mr. Shekuza. “In our day, for my generation, the environment has presented itself as the challenge of our era.”

He co-founded the NGO Namibian Youth on Renewable Energy (NAYoRE); gave himself the title “youth advocate for sustainable development”; worked with other organizations and networks on biodiversity, farming, and climate change; and started crisscrossing the globe on invitations to attend and address government, U.N., and private conferences. 

He never finished his environment and geography studies at the University of Namibia because he was too busy with social activism. He often mentions his conflicting feelings about this – maybe he shouldn’t be where he is as such a powerful influencer, yet, “with a degree, I’d be working 9-to-5 for an institution.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Behind the barbed wire that rings many Namibian residences, Mr. Shekuza emerges from his room.

He explains, sitting on his sleeping mat: “This is how I know that what I’m saying is correct, because they may see me with a fancy English up here, but my lifestyle is no different from that kid in the shack. So when I speak for the youth, I’m coming from experience and I’m speaking something solid.”

He pulls out a binder on agriculture in Namibia and how to use regenerative practices in one of the most water-stressed nations on the planet. It’s the latest document he’s read, and he’s read all of it: “I have dedicated hours and hours and hours ..., like trying to upgrade and upskill myself. And I did that in and out of school, but I found the most benefit came out of it.”

Though climate change activism has given him purpose, it’s almost a detriment to himself – and his mother.

Renneth Shekuza is a deeply religious woman who works long hours for her Pentecostal church running a food bank, cleaning toilets, and doing anything else that’s needed. Her son is solicitous of her, letting the fan they share blow in her direction in their sweltering room and taking it hard that he has no money to replace her broken TV.

She tears up outside their home in Hochland Park – an area Black residents were forced from under apartheid – and says she thanks God for the work her son does: “I know that one day God is going to lift him up.”

With an arm around her, Mr. Shekuza reassures her: “One day the dots will connect.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mr. Shekuza lives in a small space with his devout mother, Renneth Shekuza.

He says he’s spiritual but no longer religious, and adds that even as God guided David’s aim of the sling, “God guides my tongue whenever I speak.”

Clean energy is this generation’s “moonshot” 

Indeed, Mr. Shekuza’s charming gift of gab animates his activism.

On a late Friday afternoon, Mr. Shekuza meets at a cafe with Micky Kaapama, whom he has been tutoring to be a climate activist, or, as they put it, a “biodiversity enthusiast.” The glamorous fashion model studied biology and, crucially, has 12,000 Instagram followers.

Thinking big, as he does, Mr. Shekuza openly shares a vision of the intersection of gender dynamics and climate. “Imagine she writes [on her social media], ‘I like a man who understands the value of biodiversity.’ ... Then the guy will have to start reading,” he says, quickly dropping his formal manner for the lingo of youth: “If you are going to mack on her, you have to know your basics.”

As if trying to convince her of what she has to gain, he pulls out his phone to show an invitation from the Namibian president’s office that he’s just received. Addressed to Deon Shekuza, “Youth Advocate for Sustainable Development,” it’s for a luncheon with Hyphen, a German- and British-financed Namibian company that signed a deal last May with Namibia to build the largest green hydrogen project in the country. It’s an $11 billion agreement – almost the size of Namibia’s annual gross domestic product.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“[Deon] wants to introduce me [to activism] so that I can create a space for myself." – Micky Kaapama, a fashion model with an Instagram following of 12,000, on being mentored as a climate activist by Deon Shekuza

His tutee is suitably impressed: “He wants to introduce me to the people that are in charge of this type of event so that I can create a space also for myself,” says Ms. Kaapama.

But there’s a hitch in the impressive invite. He has no idea how he can even afford to get to the event five hours away in Keetmanshoop.

He may be recognized by the president as a player, but he earns little working to support Namibia’s 2021 declaration of itself as a climate leader. The country pledged to cut its emissions by a startling 91% by 2030 – and green hydrogen is one part of the plan.  

It’s a bold experiment for an extraction economy. With its vast deposits of diamonds, uranium, copper, lead, tin, lithium, and zinc, it is Africa’s eighth-richest country by per capita GDP. But it ranks second in economic inequality, a legacy of apartheid and a resource economy that has made some Namibians very rich while many remain poor.

So when green hydrogen emerged in the past five years as a solution in a sustainable energy transition and net-zero emission economies, Namibia joined that movement. The U.S. Department of Energy has likened the race to clean energy solutions as this generation’s “moonshot.” And Namibia has the resources for it: 300 days a year of full sunshine and an abundance of wind, coast, and sparsely populated land. That’s all it needs to produce green hydrogen, or energy generated by renewables. (The process, simply put, would use solar or wind power to extract hydrogen molecules from desalinated seawater, producing green ammonium that would be used for regional and global fuel markets to power transportation and electricity production.)

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Namibia named a green hydrogen commissioner and quickly created what Jabri Ibrahim, a Kenya-based specialist for the U.N. Climate Change High-Level Champions, calls a “wealth creation story” around green hydrogen. The budding sector needs safeguards, but the story “really resonates with a growing number of young Africans,” he says. “Many believe aid is not able to transform a country to prosperity in a way markets do. African youth want innovation and African leadership.” 

The buzz around green hydrogen in Namibia right now has the feel of a startup. The University of Namibia has opened the Namibia Green Hydrogen Research Institute, with dozens of academics studying the challenges and benefits of a green hydrogen market. Vocational schools are trying to introduce new curricula in solar and wind for green hydrogen production. In addition to the Hyphen project, others are taking shape here, from plans to power tugboats with green hydrogen in Walvis Bay, to the construction of the Daures Green Hydrogen Village, a net-zero village powered by green hydrogen.

“It’s exciting,” says Aina Kauluma, an energy analyst for the Daures project who is getting a master’s degree in renewable energy at the University of Namibia. “Africa has the resources and the open land and can actually help mitigate climate change through renewable energy resources.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

“Africa has the resources and the open land and can actually help mitigate climate change through renewable energy resources." – Aina Kauluma, energy analyst for the Daures Green Hydrogen Village, a net-zero village under construction in Namibia

Indeed, the promise of green hydrogen is irresistible to Mr. Shekuza, who has come to see it as a propulsion force out of colonial harm.

So, Mr. Shekuza decides the presidential invitation for the Hyphen project is too good to pass up.  

On the night before the event in late July, he headed to the bus station in central Windhoek. But there was no space on the single bus leaving that night. So, he finally asked a friend for money and called a car service, at midnight, paying about $150.

Hardly anyone at the luncheon would know how stressed he was about how he’d pay back the money. He had his photo taken, in a smart black overcoat, a broad smile spreading across his face.

In black-and-white divide, he chooses to be green

Because he believes in signs and symbols, it’s meaningful to Mr. Shekuza that the year he was born – 1990 – was the year Namibia gained independence, making him a part of the post-apartheid “born frees” generation.

“I come from a place that divided me between black and white, so I choose to be green,” he says, always seeing climate through a lens of justice and equality in this nation where white people dominate business and land ownership despite making up about 6% of the population.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Deon Shekuza poses before giving a presentation on climate change and green hydrogen energy to youth at an informal settlement near Windhoek, Namibia, July 15.

Green hydrogen, however, is divisive – and Mr. Shekuza is able to reconcile his passion for it with a shrewd centrist practicality.

Just a year after the nation’s green hydrogen goals were announced, rich oil and gas discoveries off the Namibian coast fueled skepticism of whether Namibia could or should lead a major green hydrogen export market that doesn’t even exist yet.

Pursuing the “hype” of green hydrogen instead of the reality of oil and gas discoveries, asserts retired banker and miner Steve Galloway, is “dancing to the tune of the Global North.” 

Likewise, there are skeptics in unexpected places.

Green hydrogen is a new form of foreign extraction under a green guise, says Veruschka Dumeni, part of the Windhoek branch of Fridays for Future (FFF), the global climate movement started by Ms. Thunberg. The group found allies in the British royal family and Leonardo DiCaprio while fighting
ReconAfrica, a Canadian company drilling for oil in the Okavango Delta watershed.

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fridaysforfuture.org

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“You see the Global North countries trying to achieve their own climate ambitions by carbon outsourcing, coming to other countries, and then extracting uranium to develop their nuclear power plants so that they can diversify their energy grid, or the green hydrogen to also meet their own climate targets,” says Ms. Dumeni.

Instead, she believes the Global North should be focused on the goals of “loss and damage,” a term used on the U.N. circuit to mean that those least at fault for climate change should be compensated for their suffering as the most affected.

“At a time when we should be getting climate financing as vulnerable communities to reduce our climate vulnerability, we get investment that is in the form of extraction,” she says.

Mr. Shekuza has no patience for this line of argument. He agrees that big questions remain around green hydrogen and need answers. And he believes that FFF activists raise good points. But the country can’t wait, he argues. “We have to leapfrog, or we will be left behind.”

So he prefers to focus on positive solutions, he says, from the center. He often criticizes the government as “those guys,” even if FFF activists suggest he’s “with” the government. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

In a presentation to teens in an informal settlement on the edge of the Namibian capital, Windhoek, Deon Shekuza uses graphics on his laptop to explain the complex COP climate summit structure.

“What I like about Deon is that he’s not affiliated,” says Panduleni Haindongo, a sustainable development educator in the Atlantic coast city of Swakopmund, where many green hydrogen pilot projects are slated.

Dr. Allen, the Oxford climate expert, agrees with Mr. Shekuza that Namibia can walk both roads – pursuing green energy as well as fossil fuel production. 

“We think Namibia is in a really interesting position on this because it’s a country with strong climate ambitions,” says Dr. Allen, who is showcasing the potential of carbon dioxide disposal technologies for future fossil fuel producers at a sideline event starting at the end of this month at the annual global climate summit, COP28. “They are at a crossroads. And,” he adds, echoing the notion that activists like Mr. Shekuza across the developing world will ultimately determine the temperature of Earth, “in a sense, what Namibia decides to do almost sums up the entire global decision.”

When Mr. Shekuza went to his first COP in Morocco in 2016, he slept on a bench at the airport because he didn’t know how to maneuver the per diems he was entitled to as a youth delegate.

“I didn’t know these things,” he says. “All I thought was, ‘I’m going to the climate conference. Please, please, I want to go.’ ... I’m doing something great for the environment.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A scrappy activist at home in Namibia, Deon Shekuza fits right in on the world stage at a Bonn, Germany, climate conference last June.

It was only when the Namibian environmental minister saw him stuck at the airport that he was able to find his way to a hotel. 

“Sometimes I feel I was born on the wrong side of the world,” he says. Being an African climate activist is harder than being a European one, like Ms. Thunberg, who can afford to skip school, he adds. “I would like to think if I were anywhere else, I would be 20 times bigger than this. I would like to say this is where they need me most ... but this is not where I will win most.”

Still, the climate crisis is a platform for African progress in ways the fight against apartheid and efforts to limit the ravages of resource extraction weren’t. That, he says, is because everyone in the world has a stake in global warming – a shift in perception that climate activists like Mr. Shekuza have helped spur.

He heads to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for COP28 this month – an official youth representative and junior negotiator in the Namibian delegation.

He’ll be wearing that suit that hangs on the curtain rope, carrying his Bible, sleeping comfortably in a hotel room – and he’ll have so much to say.

Carys Musto has been a Taylor Swift fan since before she was born. 

“In the womb I was listening to ‘Our Song,’” the 11-year-old says, clutching a Swift collector’s cup after a matinee at the Boston Common theater with her two best friends, Keira Carucci and Aubrey Schley. All three sixth-graders have friendship bracelets stacked proudly on their wrists. 

After bonding at Glover Elementary in Milton, Massachusetts, the three girls started at different middle schools this fall. But the documentary “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” renewed their ties – and those of thousands of others. It has earned more than $200 million globally to become the highest-grossing concert film of all time.

Girlhood is having a moment. From the sold-out stadiums of Ms. Swift’s Eras and Beyoncé’s Renaissance tours to the success of Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which has grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide, the world is thinking pink, and sparkly. Girlhood is no longer a transient phase of childhood to be outgrown, but rather a state of mind bringing community to anyone who wants to participate. And no one is capturing and capitalizing on the spirit of the times more than Ms. Swift. On Friday, she received six more Grammy nominations to add to her 12 previous wins. She is now the most nominated artist of all time in the top songwriting category.

Ms. Swift is the perfect example of girlhood’s resurgence in a cultural landscape growing beyond male-dominated narratives, says Brian Donovan, a sociology professor at the University of Kansas. In tandem with “Barbie,” “it is like girlhood having its moment and being taken seriously in a way that it hasn’t previously been,” he says.

While there have always been megastars like Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Madonna, Ms. Swift connects to her audiences through the premise of being every girl’s best friend. She has created communities for people to revel in girlhood alongside her. “She represents a kind of nostalgia for girlhood, and her songs represent a kind of time portal where people can relive both the joyous moments of girlhood, but also the traumas and the alienating moments of girlhood,” says Dr. Donovan.

Isa Meyers/The Christian Science Monitor

Middle schoolers Carys Musto (from left), Keira Carucci, and Aubrey Schley pose outside the AMC theater on the Boston Common after viewing "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour," Nov. 5, 2023.

And that’s translated into serious economic clout. The Eras Tour is expected to be the first tour in history to gross over $1 billion. The recent rerelease of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” became her 13th No. 1 album on the Billboard 200. In 2010, she became the then-youngest person to receive the album of the year Grammy for “Fearless.” On top of this, her net worth is now over $1 billion. While Ms. Swift may sing about love, and her relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce is boosting the Kansas City Chiefs ratings this fall, at concerts and online, the emphasis is on celebrating friendship. Not since the Spice Girls has pop culture seen such an emphasis on the importance of friendship in women’s lives. In a recent survey, 55% of Generation Zers and millennials said friendship is more important than romance.

For Kaity Lunde, a nurse practitioner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, being a “Swiftie” is simultaneously celebratory of being a girl and of growing up. “And it’s like she’s a friend, she’s a sister, she’s a daughter, she is a businesswoman, she is a performer, she’s an artist,” says the 40-year-old mother. “She’s so many things. And I feel like that’s every woman – every woman has all of these roles to fill.” 

Ms. Lunde describes her experience at the Eras Tour in Kansas City, Missouri, this summer with her 15-year-old son, Carter, as one centered around community. Despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of strangers, the stadium transformed into an intimate setting. “I didn’t know the people standing in line in front of me,” she says, “but we became friends in that moment.”

Take the friendship bracelets, which have become a celebratory symbol of girlhood. Swifties have been trading bracelets as if they’ve been friends their whole lives.

Even more precious for the mom of a teen boy, “[She’s] also created a bond between Carter and I, like as a mother and son,” she adds.

Carter notes that the singer makes people happy. “When I’m having a bad day, I turn on Taylor Swift,” he says.

The price of admission to the girlhood club is pretty steep. The Eras Tour caused a meltdown on Ticketmaster. While face-value tickets were priced between $49 to $449, resale prices could be in the thousands. Many opted to attend the concert film, with adult tickets costing $19.89.

Chris Pizzello/AP

Taylor Swift (center) and tour dancers arrive at the world premiere of the concert film "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour," Oct. 11, 2023, in Los Angeles. The movie has earned more than $200 million globally to become the highest-grossing concert film of all time.

Even though girlhood has always been “ubiquitous” in pop culture, this moment is different, says Hannah Wing, an assistant communications professor at Wichita State University. For one, pop culture depictions of girlhood are attracting fans and audiences beyond young girls. She points to recurring references of summer 2023 as “the summer of the girl.” Alongside Ms. Swift's tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour smashed records. In August alone, the tour grossed $179.3 million, making it the highest one-month gross for tours since Billboard began tracking earnings in 1985. Beyoncé showed her support for the Eras Tour by attending the concert film’s premiere in October alongside Ms. Swift. Her own concert film, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” opens Dec. 1. 

Part of this shift in girlhood is explained through economics. “There is a kind of top-down element where the cultural creators are realizing that the girls of 10 or 20 years ago now have spending power,” Dr. Donovan says. “There is [also] a bottom-up element in that girls and women are growing up with new gender norms and a new sense of agency.”

Girlhood now allows for girls and women to have the freedom to connect with one another. “There’s a lack of apology in current depictions of girlhood that we haven’t seen in the past, where girlhood is not something to be ashamed of or even something necessarily radical, but instead something to be celebrated and to be enjoyed,” Dr. Wing says.

Ms. Spears’ memoir, out in October, is a stark contrast to the Eras Tour celebration. In it, she chronicles how others, including her father, stole her girlhood and capitalized off her talent. Ms. Swift, by contrast, is in the process of rerecording her first six albums so that a producer whom she considered a bully wouldn’t profit off her work. “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first,” she sings in “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.” 

Ms. Swift’s carefully cultivated relationship with her fans leaves them feeling as though they are truly understood. From leaving clues that, once decoded, point to whom a song is written about, to holding the “secret sessions” listening parties, Ms. Swift invites fans to participate in her life and music process. Before the pandemic, she would invite super Swifties into her homes to listen to music before releasing it.

“Her music just ... speaks to me,” says Allison Young, a college freshman in Boston. “I relate to [her lyrics] on such a personal level, and it just makes me feel like seen.”

Ms. Young gestures to the three friends beside her in matching, homemade “Red” shirts they wore to watch the movie. “We’ve all bonded over Taylor Swift,” she says. “She brought us all together.”

Reuters

A Ukrainian government worker uses a remote-controlled de-mining vehicle on a field near Kamianka in the Kharkiv region, Nov. 8.

For “Harry Potter” fans, let it be known that Ukraine has invented an “invisibility cloak.” It will make Ukrainian soldiers much less noticeable to thermal-imaging cameras used by Russian drones and snipers at night. In addition, Ukraine has developed an aerial mine detector that is four times faster than humans, while it also hopes to release a fleet of self-driving vehicles that can evacuate injured soldiers.

These are the latest examples of how Ukrainians have tapped a well of innovation in their society to give their forces an edge over Russia’s far larger military. The country’s wealth of talent in digital capabilities even helped inspire NATO to invest in a new fund for itself called the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic.

“The innovation and resourcefulness the Ukrainians have demonstrated to keep equipment in the fight is nothing short of remarkable,” said Christopher Lowman, U.S. assistant secretary of defense for sustainment.

Even before the Russian invasion early last year, Ukraine was a budding tech giant. Despite the war, its exports of information technologies rose from $5 billion in 2020 to $7.3 billion in 2022. Some experts predict Ukraine will emerge from the war as a global center for creativity in technology.

“The Ukrainian government’s strength has been its ability to mobilize all of Ukrainian society and much of the world, then fight asymmetrically with superior public will, supported by fast-moving private technology companies and open source innovation,” wrote Audrey Kurth Cronin, director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Security and Technology, for the website War on the Rocks.

The necessity to survive as a country may be “the mother of invention” for Ukraine, but the government has learned to nurture openness and flexibility as well as an equality of collaboration. A new chatbot, for example, allows Ukrainians to report the movements of enemy forces, giving real-time information to the country’s military.

“In the seamless integration of public and private digital capabilities across these four dimensions – data collection, integration, analysis, and operational targeting – we’re witnessing the impact of a new kind of societal mobilization that is at the heart of Ukraine’s resilience,” Ms. Cronin stated.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia appears to have stalled as winter sets in. But its generals have called for more innovation in advanced technology. They would not have asked if Ukrainians hadn’t already shown what is possible.