United States of America eSeries: It’s not exactly a plague of locusts, but ...

It’s not exactly a plague of locusts, but ...

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May 19, 2021

Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

'Jerusalem has become the table'

It's not exactly a plague of locusts following pestilence, but it looks a bit like it.

Around Washington and other parts of the East Coast, sidewalks and backyards are crawling with cicadas -- part of an eerie life cycle that sends a brood of the insects to the surface from underground nests every 17 years. They're a little late this year because of unseasonably cool weather, but billions are on their way. Their offspring will burrow back into the earth until 2038.

Politically savvy members of Brood X might notice that much has changed inside the Beltway while they were underground. At the time of the last cicada invasion in 2004, then-President George W. Bush was just setting off on his reelection race, before the Iraq War went really bad and Hurricane Katrina crippled his second term. Barack Obama was still an obscure state lawmaker from Illinois — who had yet to give that speech at the Democratic National Convention that helped make him the first Black President. Hillary Clinton was pondering whether she could break that highest, hardest glass ceiling in US politics before two unsuccessful White House runs. And Donald Trump had just started telling people they were fired on "The Apprentice."

Same-sex marriage was still unthinkable, even for most liberal political leaders. Twitter was what birds did. And the US was years away from the financial crisis that would create economic conditions for Trump's rise. China was only dreaming of its current superpower status. And world leaders obsessed over post-9/11 terrorism, rather than the current fixation on great power geopolitical competition.

Some things haven't changed though. The Afghan War was raging. (President Joe Biden, who in 2004 was a wisecracking card on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will try to end US involvement this year.) Then as now, President Vladimir Putin was trying to rebuild Russian greatness.

The return of the cicadas is a strange milestone, but it captures most of the turbulent 21st century so far. What might this year's cicada larvae miss as they sleep underground over the next 17 years? Will America still be as bitterly divided? Will anyone have set foot on Mars? Will Putin still be in the Kremlin at 85? And will Americans have finally uttered the words "Madam President"?

The empty shell of a cicada clings to a tree at the US Capitol in Washington on Monday -- a remnant of one of the billions of Brood X bugs emerging.

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Thousands of migrants swam from Morocco to the Spanish enclave Ceuta.

The deadly Tropical Cyclone Tauktae has turned highways into rivers in India.

And the Galapagos Islands' famous Darwin's Arch has collapsed.

Meanwhile, most Americans polled say they want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade.

The governor of Texas banned state agencies from mandating masks.

And a bank is offering investment accounts for teenage traders.

Waves lashed a shoreline in Mumbai on Monday as Cyclone Tauktae bore down on India.

'Jerusalem has become the table'

Wait … didn't Trump bring peace to the Middle East?

One of the political consequences of the ongoing violence between Israel and Hamas has been to expose the former US administration's glib claims for its diplomatic legacy.

The Trump administration played a key role in facilitating normalization deals between Israel and several Arab states that shared common concerns about Iranian power, and they may well have enhanced American national interests -- as the current administration has said. But the pacts, now under pressure as Gaza reels from Israeli airstrikes, were never the epochal breakthrough that a President desperate for success once claimed.

"We have taken Jerusalem, the toughest part of the negotiation, off the table," the then-US President said in 2018 after moving the US Embassy in Israel to the holy city -- where the current unrest originated. An expansive proclamation by Trump's son-in-law and top Middle East negotiator, Jared Kushner, was similarly debunked by recent events: "The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel's relations with the broader Arab world," Kushner wrote in the Wall Street Journal in March.

Trump partisans who hyped his peace moves are blaming his successor, Joe Biden, for inflaming the conflict — even though the current President has deferred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's strategic goals in the fighting. You could make an opposing case that Trump's indulgence of the Prime Minister over issues like building settlements actually fueled the tensions that have now exploded.

The idea the Trump administration could simply declare moot age-old territorial disputes and Palestinian dreams of sovereignty -- and a prospective state with part of Jerusalem as its capital -- was never realistic. The whole "real-estate" narrative advanced by the two New York property titans was frankly offensive.

"Mr. Trump thought he was taking Jerusalem off the table. Well, guess what? Jerusalem has become the table," former US Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller said on CNN.

'Morally wrong'

It is "morally wrong" for children in wealthier countries to be offered Covid-19 vaccinations before high-risk groups in poorer countries, Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told UK MPs on Tuesday. Pollard, who heads the group that helped develop the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, said the first aim of the global vaccination program must be to "stop people dying" -- which means prioritizing people over 50, those with health conditions and health care workers. "There are many unvaccinated people in the world, whilst people whose risk is extremely low of disease are being vaccinated, including children, who have near-to-zero the risk of severe disease or death," Pollard told the All Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus.

Thanks for reading.

On Wednesday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in travels to the United States for his first face-to-face summit with Biden. The Arctic Council Ministerial meeting will be held in person in Reykjavik, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attending along with Indigenous leaders and other ministers. The European Commission and European Council debate a proposal to waive intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines. The President of Kazakhstan visits Tajikistan.