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The First Large-Scale Cyberattack by AI - WSJ

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  • Chinese Threat Group: GTG-1002, likely backed by Beijing, manipulated Anthropic's Claude AI for espionage.
  • AI Autonomy: AI conducted 80-90% of tactical operations independently, from reconnaissance to data extraction.
  • Targets Hit: Campaign targeted about 30 entities in U.S. and allied nations, with successful intrusions into tech firms and government agencies.
  • Bypass Method: Attackers used social engineering, posing as cybersecurity professionals to trick AI into executing tasks.
  • AI Limitations: Claude overstated findings and hallucinated results, fabricating credentials and discoveries.
  • Tools Employed: Relied on open-source penetration-testing frameworks via Model Context Protocol servers, no advanced malware needed.
  • Strategic Insight: China spies with and on U.S. AI models, turning queries into training data for its systems.
  • U.S. Responses Needed: AI defenses, mandatory disclosures, secure-by-design, international norms, real-time intelligence sharing.


By

Nury Turkel

7


image

Getty Images

A state-backed threat group, likely Chinese, crossed a threshold in September that cybersecurity experts have warned about for years. According to a report by Anthropic, attackers manipulated its AI system, Claude Code, to conduct what appears to be the first large-scale espionage operation executed primarily by artificial intelligence. The report states “with high confidence” that China was behind the attack.

AI carried out 80% to 90% of the tactical operations independently, from reconnaissance to data extraction. This espionage campaign targeted roughly 30 entities across the U.S. and allied nations, with Anthropic validating “a handful of successful intrusions” into “major technology corporations and government agencies.”

GTG-1002—Anthropic’s designation for this threat group—indicates that Beijing is unleashing AI for intelligence collection. Unless the U.S. responds quickly, this will be the first in a long series of increasingly automated intrusions. For the first time at this scale, AI didn’t merely assist in a cyberattack but conducted it.

Traditional cyber-espionage requires large teams working through reconnaissance, system mapping, vulnerability identification and lateral movement. A sophisticated intrusion can take days or weeks. China compressed that timeline dramatically through AI automation. The attackers manipulated Claude into functioning as an autonomous cyber agent, with the AI mapping internal systems, identifying high-value assets, pulling data and summarizing intelligence before human operators made decisions.

The attackers bypassed Claude’s safety systems through social engineering, convincing the AI they were legitimate cybersecurity professionals conducting authorized testing. By presenting malicious tasks as routine security work, they manipulated Claude into executing attack components without recognizing the broader hostile context.

An important limitation emerged: Claude frequently overstated findings and fabricated results, claiming credentials that didn’t validate or presenting publicly available information as critical discoveries. This AI hallucination problem remains a significant obstacle to fully autonomous cyberattacks—at least for now.

Most striking is what China didn’t need. GTG-1002 didn’t rely on cutting-edge malware or expensive proprietary tools. It used common open-source penetration-testing frameworks orchestrated through Model Context Protocol servers. Beijing hasn’t only upgraded its toolkit; it has replaced the craftsman with the assembly line. Capabilities once reserved for well-resourced intelligence agencies can now be replicated by smaller actors using widely available technology.

It also reveals a deeper strategic dynamic. China is spying with AI and spying on American AI. Beijing is studying how U.S. models behave, where they fail, and how they can be manipulated. Every malicious query becomes training data for China’s systems.

Anthropic deserves credit for disclosing the incident publicly and working with U.S. authorities. That transparency should set an industry standard. But the disclosure underscores a larger problem: Current safeguards aren’t designed for adversarial actors that move at machine speed.

The response must be urgent and clear. AI misuse can’t be treated as a narrow cyber issue; it is now central to the broader technology competition with China. Five responses are necessary:

First, AI-assisted defense must become standard across federal agencies, critical infrastructure and major corporations. AI can detect anomalies in real time and accelerate incident response from hours to minutes. China is using AI to accelerate attacks. The U.S. must use AI to accelerate defense.

Second, companies must disclose incidents of AI misuse within 72 hours. When AI systems are manipulated into performing malicious actions, critical details must be shared: attack vectors, guardrail failures, and forensic signatures that might help others detect similar intrusions. Without mandatory disclosure backed by safe-harbor provisions, businesses will keep quiet to avoid reputational damage. Policymakers can’t craft effective rules if the private sector conceals the incidents that illuminate emerging risk.

Third, AI companies must embrace secure-by-design principles. As Anthropic’s report warns, the techniques used by GTG-1002 will proliferate. The next generation of AI models must incorporate robust identity verification, real-time monitoring for malicious behavior, and guardrails resilient to social-engineering prompts.

Fourth, the U.S. and its allies need international norms governing AI-enabled cyber operations. Existing frameworks were created before autonomous systems existed. If Washington doesn’t shape these norms and lead, Beijing will.

Fifth, the U.S. must modernize how it shares threat intelligence. AI-accelerated attacks unfold too quickly for traditional bureaucratic information-sharing mechanisms. We need automated real-time systems capable of disseminating alerts across sectors in hours, not weeks.

The first AI-driven cyberattack is the opening act of a new era. GTG-1002 should be remembered the way we recall the first internet worm or the first ransomware wave: as an inflection point.

The cyber cold war just went kinetic. The weapons fire themselves now.

The question isn’t whether adversaries will continue exploiting AI for offensive operations. They will. The question is whether the U.S. will act quickly enough to defend itself.

China has signaled its ambitions. GTG-1002 shows it is already acting on them. The U.S. must stop debating the future of AI-enabled aggression and begin preparing for the conflict that has already arrived.

Mr. Turkel is a lawyer specializing in global trade compliance, export controls, sanctions and anticorruption compliance. He is author of “No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs.”

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8


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bogorad
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Chris Pope: Republicans Don’t Have a Health Care Trilemma

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  • ACA Subsidies Expiration: Biden-era enhanced federal subsidies for Obamacare expire at end of 2025, causing premium increases.
  • Republican Opportunity: Expiring subsidies provide Republicans leverage to demand reforms unlike failed 2017 repeal attempt.
  • Barro's Trilemma: Josh Barro states Republicans cannot achieve no insurance mandate, low taxpayer subsidies, and pre-existing condition protections simultaneously.
  • Existing Protections: Pre-existing condition coverage persists without mandate due to federal subsidies, maintainable at lower cost.
  • Subsidy Expansion: Subsidies grew from $49 billion in 2019 to $110 billion in 2024, covering 22 million versus 3-6 million with pre-existing conditions in 2014.
  • Targeted Extension: Extend subsidies for some older higher-income enrollees facing premium surges, avoid full renewal exceeding employer benefits.
  • Reform Proposal: Allow unsubsidized risk-based insurance before illness, reducing premiums and taxpayer costs, supported by Cannon, Blase, Pauly, Vance, RSC.
  • Bipartisan Deal: Exchange deregulation for Obamacare funding extension, leveraging Republican congressional majority.

[

File:Mike Johnson at 73rd National Prayer Breakfast (2025).jpg

](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0TPQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd78982b-4a5c-4eb0-981e-86c4c9bcfb44_960x640.jpeg)

The Affordable Care Act’s overhaul of health insurance remains unsettled fifteen years after it was enacted. In 2021, President Joe Biden and the newly-elected Democratic Congress stuck a band-aid over Obamacare’s flaws, with an infusion of additional federal subsidies. But those will expire at the end of this year.

The pain of premium increases resulting from the expiry of these subsidies means that, unlike their failed attempt at repeal in 2017, merely falling back on the status quo is not an easy option for either party. Republicans actually have to do something about Obamacare. But they also have real leverage the first time—if they come up with a reasonable proposal that is hard for Democrats to block.

On his Substack,

Josh Barro

suggests that this is impossible because Republicans want a healthcare system that:

  1. Doesn’t force people to buy health insurance if they don’t want to.

  2. Doesn’t spend a lot of taxpayer money subsidizing health insurance.

  3. Doesn’t allow insurers to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.

He argues that “it is only possible to have, at most, two out of those three things.”

But this is not actually true. Protections for beneficiaries with pre-existing conditions currently exist, despite the absence of a mandate for people to buy insurance, thanks to enormous federal subsidies. And that arrangement could be maintained at much lower cost to taxpayers.

Barro’s lament reflects the original theory of how Obamacare was supposed to work. Under that theory, insurers were supposed to finance care for enrollees with pre-existing conditions by greatly overcharging those who signed up before they got sick. In reality, this caused healthy people to drop coverage altogether.

The original theory of Obamacare relied on penalties for those who tried to opt out, but even the Obama administration was unwilling to punish those (mostly low-earners) who failed to enroll. This wasn’t actually a problem, because the ACA’s direct federal subsidies automatically expand as necessary to guarantee affordable coverage.

But ACA subsidies now greatly exceed what is needed to protect the uninsurable. The Obama administration estimated that 3 to 6 million people with pre-existing conditions had enrolled in individual market plans in 2014. Last year, the federal government subsidized the coverage of 22 million people enrolled on the individual market—with federal funds paying 87% of the cost. It is quite possible for Republicans to rein in those subsidies (which have expanded from $49 billion in 2019 to $110 billion in 2024), without defunding coverage for those with uninsurable pre-existing conditions.

That is not to say that the Biden-era expansion of subsidies was entirely unwarranted. A 61-year-old earning $65,000 would see their Obamacare premiums surge from $5,500 to over $16,000 if these are not renewed. Many older enrollees with incomes more than four times the poverty level could see similarly substantial leaps in premiums, but these likely impact fewer than 5 percent of those enrolled in ACA plans.

[

](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BNOy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Feb9dfee9-30ba-4f59-80a8-426f537e9b6a_898x608.png)

Source: Author’s calculations. ACA premium data from KFF; STLDI premiums from MI report.

Congress should extend subsidies to some of these enrollees. But it should stop well short of rubber-stamping the bulk of Biden-era subsidies, which made federally-funded Obamacare benefits far more generous than employer-sponsored benefits for most Americans with similar incomes—and opened the door to widespread benefit fraud.

In return for providing additional aid, Republicans can and should demand reform. Specifically, Congress should allow individuals to obtain lower-cost, unsubsidized insurance, priced in proportion to their medical risks, if they sign up before they get sick. Under current law, insurers are prohibited from offering discounted coverage to any enrollees.

The first Trump administration used a loophole from Obamacare’s regulations for short-term insurance to make such plans available for a limited duration. But Democrats resisted their expansion, under the original theory that the ACA was a method of redistributing from healthy policyholders to ones with pre-existing conditions, rather than the federally-funded entitlement that it actually is.

Allowing individuals to switch to cheaper unsubsidized coverage would not just directly reduce premiums for unsubsidized higher-income enrollees, it would also reduce Obamacare’s costs to taxpayers by encouraging some to switch from subsidized to unsubsidized coverage.

There’s more consensus than people realize around the idea of letting people purchase unsubsidized insurance from a market parallel to federally funded Obamacare plans. It has the support of Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute, Brian Blase of the Paragon Health Institute, and Mark Pauly of the Wharton School of Business. J.D. Vance advocated the approach during the 2024 election campaign, and it was part of the 2025 budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee.

It also offers a basis for a bipartisan deal. If you want a GOP Congress to expand funding for Obamacare, they should get some deregulation in return. And, if the ACA’s entitlement for low-income workers and those with pre-existing conditions is solidly anchored in federal funding, what reason is there to prohibit people from purchasing better value plans elsewhere?

Critics have long accused Republicans of not having a health care plan to replace Obamacare. Barro quotes former speaker John Boehner, who once claimed that “in the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like.”

That is not quite true. House Republicans have voted to repeal and replace the ACA at least 100 times. Some of the plans were good; some less so; but many were real comprehensive reform bills.

The real problem was that Obamacare, with all its flaws, was enacted by a filibuster-proof Democratic Congress. Republicans have always lacked a filibuster-proof majority to thoroughly reform it on a party-line vote.

Now, with the subsidies expiring, Republicans have significant leverage and an opportunity to demand change. They should use it.

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Chris Pope is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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bogorad
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This is how Hamas disabled tanks near Gaza on October 7th | Israel National News

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  • Hamas disabled tanks: Terrorists used secret button on Merkava Mark 4 tanks, known only to crews, as revealed on IDF Radio.
  • Intelligence buildup: Hamas gathered detailed tank knowledge over years through social media footage posted by soldiers.
  • Tunnel discovery: IDF found documents in "Pentagon" tunnel in 2024 explaining Hamas methods.
  • Data collection: Hamas tracked thousands of soldiers, analyzed photos and videos from outposts, bases, and Negev training site.
  • Instructional footage: Included videos of soldiers demonstrating tank procedures, pieced together by Hamas.
  • Training program: Nukhba terrorists trained as tank crewmen using full-size models and advanced simulators.
  • Seizure plan: Aimed to capture tanks in Gaza envelope and drive them into Gaza for combat.
  • Broader knowledge: Included outpost gate codes, tank details, and barrier weak points from social media lapses.

Hamas terrorists managed to disable Merkava Mark 4 tanks in the Gaza border area using a secret button usually known only to armored crews, reporter Doron Kadosh revealed on IDF Radio.

The ability to obtain such sensitive information raised questions immediately after the attack, and the investigation found that it was an intelligence achievement built over years.

According to the report, at the beginning of 2024, during IDF operations in the massive tunnel known as “the Pentagon” in the central camps, documents and findings were discovered that explained how the terror organization obtained detailed knowledge of the tank’s systems. According to the findings, Hamas gathered intelligence on Merkava Mark 4 tanks over a long period, relying on footage posted on social media by soldiers.

The information collection included tracking tens of thousands of soldiers, continuous analysis of photos and videos, as well as materials filmed in outposts, training bases, and at the Shizafon tanks' base in the Negev - including instructional videos of soldiers demonstrating procedures inside the tank. Some of the footage was considered harmless at the time, but Hamas managed to piece it together into a full and accurate intelligence picture of the armored systems.

Related articles:

Based on the collected information, Hamas built an extensive training program for Nukhba terrorists. The dedicated force was trained as “tank crewmen,” used full-size models of Merkava tanks, and operated an advanced simulator that replicated the operation of a real tank. According to the investigation’s findings, the plan also included an ambitious goal: seizing tanks in the Gaza envelope and driving them into Gaza for use in combat against IDF forces.

The investigation shows that although the takeover plan was not actually carried out during the attack, the tanks that were disabled through activation of the secret button could not participate in the fighting. Findings recovered from terrorists who were killed or captured, as well as additional material uncovered in Gaza later in the war, highlighted how exposed the forces were: Hamas knew internal gate codes at outposts, critical technical details of the tanks, and weak points in the security barrier. A significant part of this knowledge was obtained due to a lack of proper information security on social media.

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San Francisco’s Revolt of the Center - American Affairs Journal

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  • Phone Theft Surveillance: Cameras capture a woman’s phone snatched by a man on a scooter, handed off to another, then placed in a car trunk, leading to arrests via drone tracking in minutes.
  • RTIC Program: San Francisco Police Department’s Real Time Investigations Center integrates drones, license plate readers, and private cameras for immediate crime tracking and officer alerts.
  • Post-2020 Crime Surge: After George Floyd protests and pandemic lockdowns, calls to defund police and DA Chesa Boudin’s lenient policies contributed to an 11% crime rise in 2021.
  • School Board Mobilization: Prolonged school closures, equity debates, and changes to Lowell High admissions activated Asian parents, resulting in a 2022 recall of three board members.
  • Boudin Recall Campaign: Anti-Asian hate crimes, including Vicha Ratanapakdee’s murder, fueled Asian voter turnout, leading to Boudin’s 2022 recall by 60%, with Brooke Jenkins appointed as replacement.
  • Crime Reduction Efforts: Under Jenkins, prosecutions targeted organized crime rings, reducing car break-ins to 22-year lows and overall crime by 7% in 2023.
  • Persistent Drug Market: Open-air fentanyl and meth dealing in Tenderloin and Mission remains unchecked despite raids, with public opinion polls showing it as the top concern.
  • Nonprofit Influence: City contracts with groups like Urban Alchemy prioritize harm reduction over enforcement, sustaining drug tourism and homelessness, amid calls for more sober housing options.

A camera surveys a street in downtown San Francisco. It captures a woman walking with phone in hand; a man dressed in red and black approaches her on an electric kick scooter. One can almost see the moment he snatches her phone, but it’s blocked from view for a second by a passing bus.

There is another camera about two-and-a-half blocks away. It records the same thief hand off the phone to another man, before walking around the corner. Yet another camera at the same location captures the scene at a different angle; the second man can now be seen down the street as he puts the phone in the trunk of a car.

The next images are taken from the air. Circling over the Tenderloin, a downtown neighborhood known for larceny and open-air drug dealing, a drone is scanning the sidewalks. It quickly zeroes in on the thief, who is now seated on the pavement. It’s been just a few minutes since he snatched the phone. Five police officers swarm him. The drone then follows the other man who took the phone from the thief. He, too, is swarmed by police and arrested.

The footage is sourced from a new program of the San Francisco Police Department called the Real Time Investigations Center (RTIC). RTIC combines drones, license plate readers, and a network of private cameras throughout the city to track down criminals immediately after they’ve committed crimes and relay that information back to officers on the ground.

In recent years, San Francisco has become famous for its pathological tolerance of crime. RTIC is emblematic of a new political attitude about public safety in the city. While the crime rate has fallen nationwide, the decline has been even more pronounced here, thanks to a fundamental shift away from the ideological radicalism ascendant in city politics just a few years ago. The origins of that shift may be traced to the blowback from the feverish policies of the early pandemic era, in terms of both the Covid response and the national “racial reckoning.”

In other words, there has been a revolt of the political center. Its leaders have emerged not from the world of professional activists, but from regular San Franciscans: parents of kids stuck in virtual learning, Asian families afraid for the lives of their elderly relatives, and people sick of walking through gauntlets of meth smokers. Their anger has led to a sea change in how the city practices law enforcement, leading to a historic drop in property crime rates. But it has yet to make an appreciable impact on the biggest problem the city faces: the open-air drug market.

The Roots of Disorder

Following the killing of George Floyd, San Francisco, like many liberal American cities, experienced a season of intense political protest in 2020, often against the very idea of law enforcement. Even the mayor was calling to “defund the police.”1 Months into the lockdown, the outburst was naturally experienced as cathartic by the activists and sympathizers who participated in it. But it heralded an enormous crime wave across the country. In San Francisco, that wave had been even more pronounced than in other cities, rising 11 percent over the year 2021, more than twice the increase in New York City.2 “There was a massive social upheaval,” SFPD Commander Tom McGuire told me. “It led to violence and there were a lot of opportunists out there committing a lot of crimes and robberies and burglaries and auto burglaries.”

One of the factors contributing to the exceptionally large rise in San Francisco was its district attorney at that time, the famously soft-on-crime Chesa Boudin. The new DA, who won his office in 2019 on the third round of ranked choice voting, could hardly be characterized as reflective of mainstream San Francisco voters. “Boudin got in almost by accident,” Frank Noto of the organization StopCrimeSF told me. Nevertheless, he exercised the powers of his office as if he had a sweeping mandate. He assumed a highly adversarial posture toward the San Francisco Police Department, unsuccessfully prosecuting one of its officers with manslaughter over a 2017 shooting, and blaming the department for the city’s rising crime rate.3 And as promised, he aggressively pursued a policy of decarceration, reducing the jail population by sending many more suspects into diversion programs or putting them on ankle monitors.4 “People were essentially entering jail and walking right out of jail,” Commander McGuire said.

With the institution of policing under sustained public attack from politicians, activists, and the media—and with a DA reducing the impact of arrests to near zero while pledging to prosecute cops for any hint of misconduct—San Francisco police officers simply stopped enforcing laws. In the eyes of many officers, there was only a downside to doing their jobs.

It wasn’t long before criminals recognized that, in San Francisco, crime had become a risk-free enterprise. “There were stories of police officers transporting someone to jail, and saying, ‘Hey, I don’t give a shit. I’m calling Chesa,’ with a smile on their face, and laughing about it,” Commander McGuire told me.

For many San Francisco families, however, an even bigger concern than rising crime was the prolonged school closures from Covid. As schools began reopening across the country, including in Democratic cities like Atlanta, San Francisco’s school district stuck stubbornly to online teaching. Parents began to get frustrated, especially in the city’s large ethnic Asian population, where education is a prized virtue. “Your whole mission in life is to make sure your kids have a better life than you,” said Forrest Liu, a Stop Asian Hate activist, of Asian American parents. “Education is what we see as our roadway to get there.”

Asian parents who had rarely participated in local politics began showing up to school board meetings on Zoom to find out when their kids would be able to return to in-person learning. “These are people who, if you think your time is valuable, their time is valuable,” said Liu. “Their time is dedicated to making money, taking care of their family, right? They started showing up to the meetings, and they were probably very innocent, like, hey, I just want to know, when’s the school going to reopen? They get to the meetings, and it was just the wildest, unimaginable stuff they were talking about.”

At the time, the school board was consumed by a fiery controversy over a set of murals at a San Francisco high school that depicted black slaves and a dead American Indian, which some believed caused psychological harm to students of color. Then, the board latched onto another social justice crusade, one aimed at renaming dozens of schools named after newly disfavored historical figures, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. “You could see the parents like, ‘what the fuck?’” said Liu, who attended some of the meetings. They seemed to be talking about everything but reopening schools.

“It really showed how misguided the school board was,” Nancy Tung, the chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told me. “It just made everyone take a look at what was happening, and thinking, ‘What is wrong with my government?’ Parent advocacy organizations were cropping up. Teachers wanted to teach outdoors, but the school board prevented it from happening. So, families started to focus on what the government was delivering for them.”

Word spread, and more Asian parents started showing up to school board meetings. Conducting the meetings on Zoom “increased access to things,” said Tung, as did the idle time forced by the lockdowns. “Since nobody is doing anything else, it allowed people to participate on [a] level we had not had in years past.” And as their numbers grew, the school board moved onto the next item on its equity agenda: changing the admissions criteria for Lowell High School.

Lowell is San Francisco’s elite public high school, where students are selectively admitted based on grades and test scores. Its student body fluctuates around 50 percent Asian. In 2020, the school board declared that the admissions process “perpetuates the culture of white supremacy and racial abuse towards Black and Latinx students,” and voted to replace it with a lottery-based system. Later, old tweets were surfaced of one of the school board members accusing Asian Americans of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

To Asian families in San Francisco, the message was clear: there are too many of your kids at the best school in the city, and we’re going to replace them. This, more than anything else the school board had done, galvanized Asian voters. When a petition circulated to recall three of the board members, it caught fire in the city’s Asian neighborhoods. In 2022, voters approved the recall in a landslide.

The Tide Begins to Turn

The next politician to find himself in the crosshairs of the newly activated Asian electorate was Boudin. During the pandemic, a rash of anti-Asian hate crimes swept San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.5 The most famous of them was the senseless, vicious murder of an eighty‑four-year-old Thai man named Vicha Ratanapakdee by a young black man named Antoine Brown. After fatally body slamming Ratan­apakdee against the sidewalk, Brown went to his parked car, got his phone, walked back to Ratanapakdee’s lifeless body and took pictures of it.

In a New York Times article about the killing, Boudin said there was no evidence that the attack had any racial motivation.6 “It appears that the defendant was in some sort of a temper tantrum,” he said. It was a phrasing that struck many San Franciscans as dismissive. Boudin had already gained a reputation for being unduly sympathetic toward the perpetrators of crimes and indifferent to their victims. “He had no empathy,” Dion Lim, a local TV journalist who was the first to report on Ratanapakdee’s murder, told me. The “temper tantrum” remark infuriated Ratanapakdee’s family and ignited an embarrassing news cycle for the DA.7

As more attacks on Bay Area Asian elders went viral, the callousness Boudin showed toward the Ratanapakdees appeared to become a pattern.8 Asian voters in San Francisco, already attuned to what appeared to be anti-Asian bias from the school board, saw more of the same in Boudin’s lackluster response to the attacks on their community.9 “People who had loved ones who were victims of crime would message me on social media, worrying that there wouldn’t be any justice,” Lim said. “It was coming at an incredibly fast pace. ‘I’m not hearing anything from the DA. Are we ever going to get some answers, some kind of closure?’”

Soon, a petition was circulating for Boudin’s recall. The recall campaign, which was chaired by an Asian American veteran Democratic Party activist, targeted Asian voters and enlisted Asian volunteers. “Voting was not something that we participated in as a family,” Lim recalled about her cultural upbringing in an Asian household. “I have many relatives who aren’t even registered. It’s keep your head down, try to make a living, care for your family.” But between the prolonged school closures and the surge in crimes against Asians, “that reticence was out the window,” Lim said.

Asians started engaging in the local political process like never before. “At a certain point, it was like Lord of the Rings, where we were just like, digging them out the mud, slap the white hand of Sauron on them, and send them off, right?” recalled Liu. One of Boudin’s assistant district attorneys, Brooke Jenkins, had quit the DA’s office in protest over his lenient policies and joined the recall movement. “I was organizing in the recall,” Liu said. “I’d be around with Brooke, and she would see all these Asian people just coming out the woodwork.”

The campaign was wildly successful. In 2022, when the recall election took place, it passed by 60 percent. Two-thirds of ethnically Asian voters supported it.10 But Asians weren’t the only ones: in Bayview–Hunter’s Point, home to the highest concentration of black people in San Francisco, 60 percent of voters supported it.

Jenkins went on to be appointed Boudin’s replacement and then won at the ballot box that November in an election that also brought in a moderate majority to the Board of Supervisors. The biggest upset in that election was in a majority-Asian west side district that for two decades had been represented by supervisors of Asian descent. There, Joel Engardio, a moderate white man with little name recognition who had supported Boudin’s recall, defeated the incumbent, Gordon Mar, a veteran Asian American progressive politician who had opposed it.

Jenkins, who remains the DA today, pledged to stop the attacks on Asians, and the attacks on Asians have, indeed, stopped. This is, in part, because Asian voters have shifted the politics in San Francisco such that city leaders cannot afford to have any tolerance for these crimes. “The Asian American community, and young Asian Americans in particular, have become so strong and focused on organizing around these issues, that there is a sentiment in the city that if an Asian attack did happen, you would have like a thousand young Asian activists down your throat,” Jay Cheng, a political strategist with Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, told me.

But the new DA’s impact on crime went well beyond attacks on Asians. Jenkins’s approach to prosecutions is that of a traditional district attorney: collaborating with police, building cases, seeking convictions. Cheng described it as “building larger cases, organized cases, and going farther with them.” She approached the explosion in property crimes in San Francisco, like smash-and-grab burglaries and car break-ins, not as a sociological phenomenon, as Boudin did, but as the consequences of an organized enterprise. Jenkins worked with the police to use bait cars to ensnare professional car burglars and then used those arrests to break up crime rings. The strategy has helped push car break-ins to at least a twenty-two year low.11 “Bipping is down,” said Cheng, using the local vernacular for car burglaries. “You can just count that by the amount of glass on the street.” Those crime rings have since moved out of San Francisco to other cities in the Bay Area. “Since she’s taken prosecution up to an organized level,” Cheng said, “well now the higher-ranked people are now in danger of being prosecuted. That’s not acceptable to them.”

In her first full year in office, 2023, crime dropped by 7 percent, according to the SFPD’s CompStat numbers.12 By comparison, in Boudin’s only full year in office during which the city was not in Covid lockdown, crime rose by nearly 14 percent. “We had a pendulum swing,” said Commander McGuire. “Brooke Jenkins came into office and she had a different approach. It’s essentially putting people in jail who need to be, that are not responding to the programs we have in place, which is diversion programs, getting people ways to work their way out of the criminal justice system. Some people don’t respond well to that. And I think those people have been identified.”

The Persistence of the D****rug Problem

A poll over the summer by the moderate advocacy group GrowSF showed a striking change in public opinion.13 The number of San Franciscans listing violent crime as an extremely serious or very serious problem dropped by 21 points in the last two years. Just over half of the city’s residents now believe that San Francisco is moving in the right direction; two years ago, nearly 70 percent of San Franciscans thought the city was on the wrong track.

But the same poll reveals something else: concerns over open-air drug use and fentanyl dealing have barely changed at all. That is a significant exception to the rule of falling crime rates. More than violent attacks, bipping, auto theft, or any other crime, public drug use and drug dealing have always topped the list of San Franciscans’ law-and-order priorities. But they barely even register as “crimes” anymore in San Francisco. In fact, drug dealing and drug use are not even tabulated into the city’s crime statistics. The crime rate in general may be down in San Francisco, but people are committing these particular crimes day and night all over the city in full view of everyone, including kids.

Last November, San Francisco elected a new mayor: Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Lurie rode into office on a tide of disapproval of the previous mayor and incumbent candidate, London Breed, who had failed to stem San Francisco’s addiction crisis or shut down the open air drug market. Breed’s boldest effort to disrupt the status quo was to establish a supervised drug consumption site—a fenced-in zone where users could smoke and shoot up with Narcan-equipped observers overseeing them—which closed in less than a year in a storm of controversy.14 Lurie, by contrast, committed himself to an agenda that prioritized drug and alcohol treatment for addicts over the laissez-faire “harm reduction” approach the city had been emphasizing for years.15 He won as an outsider running in a change election.

Under Jenkins and the new mayor, things have begun to change, but only incrementally. Speaking of the Boudin years, Commander McGuire said, “In San Francisco, it was pretty much legalized to the point where a drug dealer would laugh in your face if you arrested him. Put him in jail, and then he’s dealing before your shift ends.” Under Jenkins and Lurie, by contrast, there have been large-scale, high-profile drug raids, a novelty for San Francisco.16 The city has also been more aggressive in stopping people from camping on the street. A recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the city to start clearing sidewalks of homeless encampments for the first time in years. But the day-to-day reality of the city’s open-air drug market is not dramatically different from a few years ago. “Depending on where you are in the city the street conditions have improved,” Steve Basio of GrowSF told me. “Where I am near 16th and Mission, it’s way worse.”

In the Tenderloin, during the day, some streets look pristine compared to the cesspools they were just a year ago. “Others are as bad as ever,” Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told me. But at night, when there’s a lighter police footprint, the drug market comes alive again. The sidewalks are crammed full of dealers and staggering, hunched-over drug addicts. “Only the tents are gone,” said Gina McDonald, a former addict whose daughter was once on San Francisco’s streets. “Now it’s just bodies lying everywhere.”

Meanwhile, the open-air drug market has expanded deeper into SoMa and into the Mission. On Mission between 15th and 16th, dealers openly sell meth and fentanyl across the street from the SFPD mobile command center, Basio told me. All of the attendant petty crimes that come with a population of drug addicts, like curbside markets of random items shoplifted from stores, have exploded in the vicinity.17

“It creates a market for stolen goods,” Commander McGuire said of the open-air drug trade. “It creates retail theft everywhere, you know, every Walgreens and every CVS and every Safeway and Lucky’s and whatnot, and even mom-and-pop stores were just getting picked clean.” Basio’s wife’s bike was recently stolen, and he found a listing of it for sale on Facebook Marketplace just two blocks away.

The blight, crime, and disorder stemming from the open-air drug market has sustained the shift in voter sentiment against the decarceral policies of the last DA. It is also what led to the legislation that created the Real Time Investigations Center.

Treating the Symptoms

With its bright white walls and glassed-in conference rooms, RTIC looks like the headquarters of a tech start-up, because that’s what it used to be. Last summer, the cryptocurrency firm Ripple donated its office space to the SFPD. Chris Larsen, Ripple’s cofounder, has long pushed for the police to adopt surveillance technology. About five years ago, he began paying for private cameras to be installed in public spaces all over the city. Now, Larsen is paying for RTIC.18

Larsen’s partnership with the police has been unpopular with the city’s significant civil libertarian activist base. Brian Hofer, director of the anti-mass surveillance group Secure Justice, told me he has no problem with RTIC using camera footage to investigate crimes. But, he warns, the police share the data they collect freely with other law enforcement agencies, including those that are currently suppressing political protest on behalf of the White House.

“What about when the National Guard is sent to San Francisco?” he asked. “They’re just going to walk into RTIC and say, ‘This is ours.’ San Franciscans aren’t asking themselves, ‘How can these tools be used against me?’”

In 2019, the Board of Supervisors passed a law that prohibited the city from using facial recognition technology, though Hofer warns that the private cameras in RTIC’s network are all “pre-loaded with analytics.” That was before the crime wave that was induced by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Five years later, voters passed Proposition E, which, among other things, simplified the process by which the police could deploy surveillance technologies, making RTIC possible.

For professional crime rings, RTIC has changed the calculus for targeting San Francisco. The day I visited RTIC, the officers there were passing around an episode of a Bay Area hip-hop podcast in which the guest testified to the new reality with license plate readers, cameras, and drones:

Look, soon as you slide past that motherfucker with some stolen plates, they’re going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, right? And they’re going to start dispatching to that area. . . . And then they’re going to put the drone on you. They’re not going to follow you with no PD car from hella far. They don’t got to do that. No unmarked vehicles. They’re going to set a drone on you. Listen, they’re going to set a drone on you. That’s about a few thousand feet up. And it’s just going to trail you the whole time. And then when you hit a corner or something, they’re going to box your ass in.19

“Just crime in San Francisco, period,” the guest said, a bit earlier in the episode. “That shit over with, brother.”

But RTIC is a less powerful tool when it comes to stopping drug deals. Being monitored has never been a disincentive for San Francisco drug dealers, who peddle narcotics on the streets, in plain view, night and day. The open-air drug market thrives in San Francisco in part because the city’s police, prosecutors, and judges, who are often at war with each other, have failed for years to deter it. But that failure merely exacerbates the more fundamental problem of San Francisco’s bizarre tolerance of public drug use.

The Mission has become a magnet for drug dealers and drug addicts for the same reason the Tenderloin did: because of the high concentration of social services for homeless people there. “The unlawfulness is integral by design,” a neighbor, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by activists, told me. The area, the neighbor said, is a containment zone for crime and disorder. With careful collaboration between the community and the government, the worst of the fallout can be managed. But it’s always just a band-aid.

Up the street from the anonymous neighbor’s home is the now empty site of Mission Cabins, a tiny home community for homeless people to live in. It’s right next to an elementary school. When the facility was first proposed a few years ago, many of the neighbors opposed it. They thought it would generate more drug activity on a street that already had its fill of it. A committee of neighborhood volunteers spent endless hours negotiating a very specific Memorandum of Understanding with the city. It took five months. Every two weeks they met with the city on Zoom. Twenty faces would appear on screen, from multiple government agencies. The neighbor I spoke to described it as a second job.

But what emerged from it was worth the trouble. Mission Cabins was like a halfway home, the neighbor told me. There were rules, and the residents were, for the most part, sober. Most importantly, Five Keys, the nonprofit that ran the facility, agreed to deploy foot patrols around the neighborhood. Whenever a neighbor saw someone smoking meth, or defecating, or sleeping on the sidewalk, they could text one of the workers on patrol and get a response within minutes. The neighborhood is cleaner now than it was before the facility was erected.

But Mission Cabins recently closed, to be relocated to another part of the district, to make way for the construction of low-income housing. The anonymous neighbor described the moment as an “inflection point.”

The Nonprofit Industrial Complex

To live in the Mission, especially if you have young kids, entails constantly checking which streets the drug activity is concentrated on every time you leave the house and plotting out your walking routes to avoid them. The city has been more aggressive under Mayor Lurie at clearing hot spots of drug users. But whenever one block or alley is cleared, the addicts just gather at another, just as the users in front of Mission Cabins were pushed onto somebody else’s sidewalk. It’s like a never-ending traveling circus of chaos and despair. “They’re addressing the mosquitoes but the swamp is still there,” the neighbor told me.

That “swamp” is the plethora of free services available to homeless addicts, including housing and health care, and the city’s hospitality toward those who choose to live on the streets, which includes passing out free pipes, foils, and straws to smoke fentanyl with.20 “While we make more arrests, City Hall policies still encourage drug tourists to come to San Francisco,” said Shaw.

There are other obstacles to shutting down the open-air drug market, such as gross police understaffing and judges who are ideologically opposed to incarceration, even of professional drug dealers. But the underlying issue is one of incentives. San Francisco has a reputation across the country of being a place where anyone can fully indulge in their drug addiction.

An addict can live on the street or in a rent-free room. He or she can get meals for free, buy drugs on demand at any time of the day or night, can consume them openly on the sidewalk without fear of arrest. One doesn’t even have to learn any criminal skills to get the money to buy drugs, for merchandise can be taken easily from any store and sold to a fence two blocks away. The storekeepers won’t stop the crime and the police will likely not arrest the perpetrator, if they’re even called in the first place. Clean new drug paraphernalia are also handed out free of charge, delivered to addicts on the curb they are loitering on. If they overdose, they can be revived with Narcan by another user or by a paramedic, and they will go right back to using again.

As long as such conditions remain, the open-air drug market will have oxygen to breathe. But voters may not tolerate it for much longer. The Mission is full of progressive-minded people, even by San Francisco standards. But they’re fed up, the neighbor told me. It’s not so much a political issue anymore as a matter of just living a normal life. The committee that negotiated the MOU over Mission Cabins included many far-left people, including an anarchist. But a change in voter sentiment alone isn’t enough. For public opinion to matter, government institutions need to be responsive to it. And right now, in San Francisco, they’re beholden not to constituents, but to their own contractors.

At first glance, one might assume that the nonprofit groups that San Francisco hires to provide the city’s homeless services are subordinate to the politicians and agency heads who issue those city contracts. But that network of groups has become so vast and so insinuated into the apparatus of government that it’s often the other way around. In San Francisco, working for a progressive nonprofit doing public service work for the city is a steppingstone into politics. It’s like a farm team system. “You can see that in the bios of basically every progressive who’s been elected, they come either from legislative staff or from the nonprofit world,” said Tung.

Out of the incestuous relationship between elected officials, agency heads, and nonprofit contractors has emerged a political machine that is far more responsive to the needs of the nonprofit industry than to regular voters. To take just one example, the city pays Urban Alchemy, a group that does homeless outreach and civilianized police work in neighborhoods consumed by the open-air drug market, tens of millions of dollars a year in contracts. Last year, the nonprofit knowingly overspent its budget by $800,000, according to a financial analyst for the Board of Supervisors, who characterized the conduct as “extreme.”21 But that hasn’t stopped the city’s homelessness department from asking the Board of Supervisors to extend Urban Alchemy’s contract and increase its budget.

The organized political influence of these nonprofit contractors often exceeds the diffuse power of San Francisco voters. The Coalition on Homelessness, which acts as the industry’s grassroots activism and lobbying firm, successfully sued San Francisco to prevent it from clearing homeless encampments, despite a majority of San Franciscans supporting homeless sweeps.22

Nonprofit leaders have even questioned the public’s right to know how they’re spending their money at all. When the San Francisco Examiner reported on her $220,000 yearly salary in 2022, Urban Alchemy’s CEO wrote to the paper: “How is it helping society or the story to tell the whole world what I make? What is the purpose, so everyone can decide if it’s enough or too much? It’s just messy.”

Marc Solomon compared San Francisco’s government to a colonial empire, in which the neighborhoods of the Tenderloin, SoMa, the Mission, and Bayview-Hunter’s Point are the colonies, and the rest of the city is the metropole. “The nonprofits are the colonial administrators,” he said.

Strides have nevertheless been made toward aligning the city’s policies with the interests of voters rather than with those of nonprofit contractors. Last year, the United States Supreme Court overturned the appellate court ruling upon which the injunction banning sweeps of homeless encampments in San Francisco depended. The Tenderloin’s sidewalks are now more or less tent-free.

But there have also been steps backward. In October, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed state legislation drafted by a San Francisco assembly member that would have funded more sober housing for recovering addicts. (That bill was also opposed by the Coalition on Homelessness.) In response to the veto, some of San Francisco’s supervisors are now pushing for a local law to prohibit new funding for supportive housing that permits drug use.

“What we want is a balanced system,” UC San Diego Sociology Professor Neil Gong, who wrote a book on the subject,23 told me. “There should be housing for people not ready for sobriety, as well as orderly, sober housing for the many who want it.”

With Mission Cabins and its foot patrols gone, there is no such balance left in the neighborhood that had surrounded it. Recently, residents on the block heard gunshots outside. A car was driving the wrong way down the one-way street, shooting at someone who ran into the elementary school while kids were arriving, one neighbor said.

Emily Gasner, who has a ten-year-old at the school, told me she has to routinely walk her son past clouds of meth or fentanyl smoke at drop‑off. In between ushering kids across the intersections, she said, crossing guards clear the sidewalks of drug addicts, and regularly call the city to have human feces removed. Once, a gunfight broke out a block away from the bus stop where Gasner and her son were waiting after pickup. Another time, someone jumped out of an alley and threatened to kill her while she was with her son. Her son has nightmares about being attacked by addicts with knives.

Gasner loves the school and feels safe almost anywhere else in San Francisco. But the area around where her son spends the majority of his waking hours has been effectively made into a sacrifice zone. Now, the city is building affordable housing on a lot next to the school, which will include permanent supportive housing, likely for drug addicts. Neighbors only expect the problems to get worse.

With conditions like these as the daily reality for people who live in San Francisco’s sacrifice zones, progressive ideology starts to fade into the background as a north star for people’s political choices. The vast majority of San Francisco’s voters lie somewhere between hard left-wing and moderately liberal. There is zero chance, especially with Trump as president, that the city will shift to anything resembling, by national standards, “the Right.”

But not wanting your kid to inhale meth smoke on his way to school, or fearing that your Asian grandmother might be randomly assaulted while taking a walk, aren’t really ideological issues. They’re just a matter of living in a sane world. What should count as insane, however, has become normal in pockets of the city. The more progressives in San Francisco line up to support or defend those conditions, the further voters are pushed toward what, by the city’s standards, constitutes “the center.” And that center is in revolt.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 4 (Winter 2025): 211–25.

Notes

1 Alix Martichoux and Cornell Barnard, “San Francisco Mayor London Breed Announces Cuts to Police in New City Budget,” ABC 7 News, July 31, 2020.

2 Robert Pozarycki, “Crunching the NYPD Numbers: Major Crimes Up over 5% as NYC Entered Final 12 Days of 2021,” AMNY, December 28, 2021.

3 CBS San Francisco, “Embattled DA Chesa Boudin Places Blame for San Francisco Crime on Poor Police Follow Up,” CBS News, May 24, 2021.

4 David Sjostedt, “Explainer: DA Boudin Is Sending More Defendants to Diversion. Here’s What That Means,” San Francisco Standard, March 28, 2022; Mallory Moench, “S.F. Uses Ankle Monitors to Keep Defendants Out of Jail. But Does the System Work?,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2021.

5 Thomas Fuller, “Fear, and Discord, among Asian Americans over Attacks in San Francisco,” New York Times, July 18, 2021.

6 Thomas Fuller, “He Came from Thailand to Care for Family. Then Came a Brutal Attack,” New York Times, February 27, 2021.

7 “Family Outraged over SF DA’s Description of 84-Year-Old Asian Man’s Suspected Killer,” ABC 7 News, March 2, 2021.

8 NBC Bay Area staff and Sergio Quintana, “SF Resident Sues DA’s Office Following Mishandling of AAPI Hate Crime,” NBC Bay Area, January 25, 2022.

9 CBS San Francisco, “Victim in ‘Brutal’ Chinatown Attack Sues San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin amid Shocking Jump in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes,” CBS News, January 25, 2022.

10 Claire Wang, “How San Francisco’s D.A. Recall Election Shows a Rift in the Asian American Community,” June 10, 2022.

11 Danielle Echeverria, “Reports of San Francisco’s Most Notorious Nuisance Crime Are at a 22-Year Low,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2025.

12 “Crime Data,” San Francisco Police Department, accessed October 2025.

13 “Tracking SF’s issues: July 2025 Poll Results,” Grow SF, August 22, 2025.

14 Michael Schellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse, “Exclusive: It Was Supposed to be a Facility to Put Addicts in Touch with Rehab Facilities but We Reveal How Drug-Swamped San Francisco Is in Reality Operating a Secret and Illegal Drug Use Site,” Daily Mail, January 21, 2022.

15 Lyanne Melendez, “San Francisco Faces Obstacles to ‘Recovery First’ Housing,” ABC 7 News, June 18, 2025.

16 Suzanne Phan, “Dozens of Drug Dealers Arrested in Overnight Raid at SF’s Jefferson Square Park, Police Say,” ABC 7 News, February 27, 2025.

17 Leighton Woodhouse, “The Criminal Order Beneath the ‘Chaos’ of San Francisco’s Tenderloin,” RealClear Investigations, June 16, 2022.

18 Nellie Bowles, “Why Is a Tech Executive Installing Security Cameras around San Francisco?,” New York Times, July 10, 2020.

19 Adam 22, host, “Dreamllife Rizzy on EBK Jaaybo Beef, Swamp Storiez, Bay Area Politics & More,” No Jumper, September 2, 2025.

20 Leighton Woodhouse, “‘It’s Neighbourhood Destruction’: San Franciscans Sue City over Drug Zones,” Times, August 29, 2025.

21 Michael Barb, “Urban Alchemy Gave Pay Bumps to Homeless Shelter Staff in Defiance of S.F., Analyst Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2025.

22 Jeff Elder, “Urban Alchemy: A Rapid Rise with Rampant Risks,” April 12, 2022.

23 Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024).

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Most of ERC Barcelona leadership resigns during budget vote

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  • Eight of thirteen members of the permanent leadership of ERC's Barcelona federation have resigned.
  • The resigning members accuse the city's ERC president, Creu Camacho, of pursuing an independent and unapproved strategy and making unilateral decisions.
  • The departures include prominent figures like Secretary General Miquel Colomé and Barcelona City Councilor Rosa Suriñach.
  • The mass resignation triggers an internal party mechanism requiring an extraordinary congress within a month to restructure the local leadership.
  • Critics allege that the federation's decisions are being subordinated to the municipal group's interests within Barcelona's City Council, particularly concerning ERC's role in Mayor Collboni's government.

Barcelona has been shaken in the last few hours by a strong internal crisis in ERC, after eight of the thirteen members of the permanent leadership of the Barcelona federation presented their resignations en bloc. The leaders directly point to the party's city president, Creu Camacho, whom they accuse of promoting her "own, unconsented strategy" and of making decisions "unilaterally," outside the party's bodies and membership.

Among the resignees are figures with significant weight within the organization, such as Miquel Colomé, the federation's general secretary, along with Quim Bosch, Nil Font, Agnès Russiñol, Rosa Suriñach —a councilor in Barcelona City Council—, Sheila Vidal, Max Zañartu, and later, Esther Martín as well. The resignations exceed half of the permanent leadership, which automatically activates the party's internal mechanisms and requires the convening of an extraordinary congress within approximately one month to recompose the local structure.

The outgoing leadership's statement denounces a "drift" that, in their opinion, would be subordinating the federation's decisions to the interests of the municipal group in the City Council. The signatories maintain that the political program and the project for which part of the membership supported Camacho and the outgoing team are being sidelined, and they demand that ERC Barcelona regain a more participatory dynamic less dependent on the institutional context.

The situation erupts just a few months after Creu Camacho was elected president of ERC Barcelona with 49.6% of the votes at the regional congress held last April, in a narrow victory against the rival candidacy. After that triumph, Camacho publicly stated that her goal was to "empower the membership" and strengthen the federation's role. However, internal friction has not subsided, especially around the relationship with Jaume Collboni's PSC and ERC's role in the municipal government.

The coincidental timing of the organic crisis with a key moment in Barcelona City Council adds an inevitable political layer. In parallel to the resignations, the council held the plenary session where municipal budgets were put to a vote. The budget proposal received the support of PSC, Barcelona en Comú, and ERC, but municipal arithmetic has forced Mayor Jaume Collboni to resort to a vote of confidence to guarantee its approval due to the lack of a solid majority. If an alternative government is not formed within the established timeframe, the accounts will be automatically approved.

The internal rift within ERC thus coincides with a moment of maximum visibility for the party. On one hand, the critics might have considered this the moment of greatest impact to demonstrate their rejection of the current leadership. On the other hand, Camacho could interpret the extraordinary congress as an opportunity to reinforce her leadership by seeking the support of the membership.

The conflict did not arise out of nowhere. At the congress that awarded leadership to Camacho, the two candidacies already showed deep differences regarding the relationship with Collboni's government and the role ERC should play in Barcelona: whether as a partner for institutional stability or as a more clearly independent and demanding force. The coming weeks will be decisive in determining whether the party manages to regroup or if this crisis will mark the beginning of a new era for the republican space in the Catalan capital.

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Critics of Ukraine peace deal must answer: What's the alternative? | Responsible Statecraft

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  • Diplomatic Shifts: Efforts for a Ukraine war solution involved optimism after a Trump-Putin summit, followed by U.S. sanctions and threats due to no ceasefire.
  • New Peace Plan: The U.S. proposed a 28-point plan with security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe for Ukraine, leaked by a Russian negotiator indicating potential acceptance.
  • U.S. Leadership Role: The plan highlights U.S. diplomatic initiative as essential in addressing the U.S.-West vs. Russia security conflict, given Russia's battlefield advantage.
  • Russian Concessions on EU: Russia accepts Ukraine's EU eligibility and market access, resolving a key 2014 trigger while avoiding NATO issues.
  • Ukrainian Military Size: The plan allows Ukraine a 600,000-troop army, exceeding prior negotiation demands and bolstering it beyond most European forces, plus intervention guarantees.
  • Territorial Provisions: Ukraine withdraws from about 1% of territory in Donetsk as a demilitarized zone, retaining 80% of 1991 borders despite Russian annexations, without full reversal of conquests.
  • Additional Agreements: Russia provides $100 billion in frozen assets for Ukraine's rebuild, plus provisions on religious tolerance, minorities, and anti-Nazi standards aligning with EU norms.
  • Broader Stability: The plan includes Russian non-aggression pledges, G-8 re-entry, U.S.-Russia security group, sanction relief, and nuclear non-proliferation extensions for European peace.

Efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine war have followed a dizzying course over the last few months. After an optimistic period around the August Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, the Trump administration, frustrated by the inability to gain an immediate ceasefire, turned back to intensified sanctions and military threats.

Now the U.S. has advanced a new 28-point peace plan and accompanying security guarantees for Ukraine from the U.S. and Europe. Although Russia has not explicitly endorsed the draft, the fact that Russian negotiator Kirill Dimitriev leaked its contents to American media suggests a high degree of Russian acquiescence to the plan. If accepted by Ukraine as well, the plan would pave the way to an immediate ceasefire and long-term settlement of the conflict.

The U.S. move to craft a detailed peace plan recognizes a core reality of the situation, which is the indispensable role of U.S. diplomatic initiative and leadership in ending the war. The Ukraine war represents a multi-domain security conflict between the U.S.-led West and Russia. Thus, many of the security drivers of the conflict cannot be addressed by Ukraine alone. Given that the Russians have the upper hand on the battlefield, they were never likely to agree to a cease-fire without assurances that their core security needs would be addressed along with those of Ukraine.

Not only does this plan do that, it represents the use of U.S. diplomatic leverage to extract major concessions from Russia that support lasting Ukrainian security and independence. Indeed — although it is hardly likely to be described this way in most of the U.S. and European press — it would be fair to describe this plan as a U.S.-mediated victory for Ukraine and for global stability in this long and brutal war. A successful implementation would create a secure and firmly Western-aligned Ukraine on some 80 percent of its 1991 territory.

Russian concessions begin with the core issue that triggered the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2014, namely Ukrainian accession to the European Union. The plan specifies that Ukraine is eligible for EU membership and will receive preferential access to European markets while under consideration. This conclusively signals Ukraine’s political and economic alignment with the West, while still respecting Russian security concerns about NATO. It was precisely the dispute over this issue that triggered the 2014 Maidan uprising, and Russia has now conceded it.

Russian concessions continue in the area of Ukrainian security. During the 2022 Istanbul negotiations in the opening phases of the war, Russia demanded that the Ukrainian military be limited to some 80,000 troops — a number far inadequate to defend against Russian aggression. In those same negotiations Ukraine itself called for a standing army of a quarter of a million troops. Now, the current 28 point plan permits Ukraine a standing army of 600,000 troops, more than twice the level Ukraine itself asked for in the 2022 negotiations and almost eight times the Russian demand.

While this is below the current wartime size of the Ukrainian active duty military, which is over 700,000 troops, that level is almost certainly not sustainable in peacetime. A Ukrainian army of 600,000 troops would be by far the largest military in Europe (outside of Russia). Indeed, it would be larger than the British, French, and German armies combined. Ukraine’s military power would be further bolstered by a separate security guarantee of U.S. and European intervention and support in the event of a Russian attack.

The areas of the agreement most likely to be described as Ukrainian concessions are those that address territory. However, even the territorial provisions contain significant Russian concessions as compared to Russia’s recent demands and certainly compared to Russia’s initial war goal of taking political control of the major areas of Ukraine.

In late 2022, Russia claimed formal annexations of four Ukrainian oblasts in addition to Crimea. In this agreement, it drops demands for Ukrainian withdrawal from unconquered territories in two of these oblasts. Instead, Ukraine would withdraw from so far unconquered territory in only one oblast, Donetsk, territory amounting to about 1% of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. But crucially, in a major concession as compared to Russian positions only a few months ago, Russia will not occupy this region — instead it will be maintained as a demilitarized zone.

Obviously the territorial provisions here would not restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. But this demand has been proven unattainable over four years of bloody war. Leaving territories conquered by the Russians in Russian hands, and the provision for de facto recognition of these territories as Russian, will without question be a bitter pill for Ukraine to swallow. But given that Russia has lost millions of casualties in the war for these territories it was unrealistic to reverse this outcome.

These are far from the only Russian concessions in the document. For example, Russia grants $100 billion in frozen Russian assets to be used toward the rebuilding of Ukraine. Even many provisions that reflect claimed Russian goals, such as religious tolerance (presumably toward the Russian Orthodox Church), tolerance of ethnic minorities, and rejection of Nazi ideology, simply align the values of a Western-aligned Ukraine with broader European Union standards.

The document also creates a road map to a more peaceful and stable Europe, an outcome clearly in U.S. interests. The European security architecture is stabilized through Russian promises of non-aggression, Russian re-entry into the G-8, a U.S.-Russia security working group, and the gradual lifting of economic sanctions on Russia conditional on compliance with core elements of the agreement. A crucial provision states that the U.S. and Russia will “extend treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons.” The details of this conceptual agreement remain to be worked out but it opens the door to broader cooperation on nuclear disarmament.

For all the positive elements of this document, it is unlikely to initially be presented in such a light by many in the mainstream media. With millions of casualties in Europe’s largest war since World War II, a war that began with a Russian invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory, there is tremendous bitterness toward Russia and tremendous and justified sympathy for Ukraine’s suffering. The reality of Russian gains in territory and the agreement that Ukraine will not join NATO may be allowed to obscure the reality of major Russian concessions and the ways in which the agreement would benefit both Ukrainian and U.S. interests. Those who have for years insisted on maximalist demands for complete reconquest of Ukraine’s territory and even a long war for regime change in Russia will find it difficult to support an agreement they regard as imperfect.

But the alternatives are much worse — especially for Ukraine, which is roiled by internal crises, teetering on the brink of economic collapse, and facing a grim battlefield situation in the Donbas and parts of the southeast. A secure and firmly Western-aligned Ukraine on 80% of its pre-war territory is a far better outcome than the terms on which this war will likely end if it grinds into 2026 or beyond.

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bogorad
1 day ago
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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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