NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, built to give the world a glimpse of the universe as it existed when the first galaxies formed, was launched by rocket early Saturday from South America’s northeastern coast, opening a new era of astronomy.

The revolutionary $9 billion infrared telescope, hailed by NASA as the premiere space-science observatory of the next decade, was carried aloft inside the cargo bay of an Ariane 5 rocket that blasted off at about 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT) from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) launch base in French Guiana.  

 

The flawless Christmas Day launch, with a countdown conducted in French, was carried live on a joint NASA-ESA Webcast.

 

After a 27-minute ride into space, the 14,000-pound instrument was released from the upper stage of the French-built rocket, and it should gradually unfurl to nearly the size of a tennis court over the next 13 days as it sails onward on its own.

 

Live video captured by a camera mounted on the rocket’s upper stage showed the Webb moving gently away high above the Earth as it was jettisoned. Flight controllers confirmed moments later that Webb’s power supply was operational.

 

Coasting through space for two more weeks, the Webb telescope will reach its destination in solar orbit 1 million miles from Earth – about four times farther away than the moon. And Webb’s special orbital path will keep it in constant alignment with the Earth as the planet and telescope circle the sun in tandem.

 

By comparison, Webb’s 30-year-old predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, orbits the Earth from 340 miles away, passing in and out of the planet’s shadow every 90 minutes.

 

Named after the man who oversaw NASA through most of its formative decade of the 1960s, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than Hubble and is expected to transform scientists’ understanding of the universe and our place in it.

 

Webb mainly will view the cosmos in the infrared spectrum, allowing it to gaze through clouds of gas and dust where stars are being born, while Hubble has operated primarily at optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

 

Cosmological History Lesson

 

The new telescope’s primary mirror – consisting of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-coated beryllium metal – also has a much bigger light-collecting area, enabling it to observe objects at greater distances, thus farther back into time, than Hubble or any other telescope.

 

That, astronomers say, will bring into view a glimpse of the cosmos never previously seen – dating to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, the theoretical flashpoint that set in motion the expansion of the observable universe an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.

 

Hubble’s view reached back to roughly 400 million years following the Big Bang, a period just after the very first galaxies – sprawling clusters of stars, gases and other interstellar matter – are believed to have taken shape.

 

Aside from examining the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies in the universe, astronomers are eager to study super-massive black holes believed to occupy the centers of distant galaxies.

 

Webb’s instruments also make it ideal to search for evidence of potentially life-supporting atmospheres around scores of newly documented exoplanets – celestial bodies orbiting distant stars – and to observe worlds much closer to home, such as Mars and Saturn’s icy moon Titan.

 

The telescope is an international collaboration led by NASA in partnership with the European and Canadian space agencies. Northrop Grumman Corp was the primary contractor. The Arianespace launch vehicle is part of the European contribution.

 

Webb was developed at a cost of $8.8 billion, with operational expenses projected to bring its total price tag to about $9.66 billion, far higher than planned when NASA was previously aiming for a 2011 launch.

 

Astronomical operation of the telescope, to be managed from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, is expected to begin in the summer of 2022, following about six months of alignment and calibration of Webb’s mirrors and instruments.

 

It is then that NASA expects to release the initial batch of images captured by Webb. Webb is designed to last up to 10 years.

 
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President Joe Biden came into office at a time when U.S. standing in the world had reached a record low point. Across 60 countries and areas surveyed by Gallup’s U.S. Leadership Poll during the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, median approval of U.S. leadership stood at 22%.

Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, American global standing had largely rebounded. According to Gallup’s August poll across 46 countries and territories, median approval of U.S. leadership stood at 49%.

Biden entered the presidency with a very low bar, said Thomas Schwartz, a historian of U.S. foreign relations at Vanderbilt University. “Outside of a very few countries, most significantly Israel and Saudi Arabia, Donald Trump was so disliked by most foreign leaders that simply not being Trump was an immediate advantage,” he said.

However, not being Trump could take Biden only so far, said Schwartz. Despite inheriting the deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan from his predecessor, Biden’s disastrous execution of the exit gravely damaged America’s credibility internationally and reputation for competence domestically.

“Terrorism has intensified, and the Taliban takeover has led to sanctions that have put Afghanistan in a position where it has an acute humanitarian crisis that could well lead to mass famine,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center. “And I think that this very precipitate, chaotic U.S. withdrawal is seen as links to those outcomes.”

The tumultuous withdrawal betrayed Western and other allies, including the increasingly educated women of Afghanistan who will suffer the most under the Taliban, said Kenneth Weinstein, Walter P. Stern distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. It will make it harder for American presidents to ask our allies to sacrifice for common goals in the future, he added.

Weinstein pointed to the administration’s handling of the southern border as another failure. As the crisis grew, Weinstein said, the U.S. has returned to “watered-down versions of Trump administration policies that the Biden-Harris campaign denounced as inhumane in 2020.”

Is America back?

Following years of “America First” under Trump, Biden delivered a diametrically opposed message that America was back, returning to multilateralism and diplomacy as the main instruments of foreign policy, rejoining multilateral organizations, returning to withdrawn agreements and bringing more engagement on global issues including pandemic recovery and climate change.

“If the measure of success is global engagement and the baseline is 2020, then President Biden’s first year in office has been nothing short of restorative,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of U.S. and the Americas Program at Chatham House.

Responding to a question from VOA, White House press secretary Jen Psaki listed several achievements, saying the U.S. has reclaimed leadership on some of the biggest global challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, while restoring alliances, resolving trade disputes with European countries, and elevating partnerships in the Indo-Pacific through the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) involving the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan, and AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership that includes the U.S., Australia and U.K.

AUKUS will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and promote cutting-edge three-nation collaboration on cyber, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. “The deal could change the security dynamic of the Indo-Pacific if we can actually deliver the subs before their due date of 2042,” said the Hudson Institute’s Weinstein.

However, AUKUS’s launching blindsided France, a close ally, and scuttled the $66 billion conventional submarine deal Paris had underway with Australia. It was widely seen as another foreign policy blunder and an example of a disconnect between the administration’s messaging and policies.

The administration has shown very little regard for traditional allies and does not back its rhetoric with action that would be discernibly different or better than some of the isolationism seen under Trump, said Dalibor Rohac, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Rohac pointed also to the continuation of the European Union travel ban and tariffs months into the administration as other illustrations of the disconnect.

“Whether the president can bridge the gap between rhetoric and action is the most important question facing him today,” Rohac said.

China and Russia

Managing strategic competition with Beijing, a key doctrine of the Trump administration, remains the defining framework of the U.S.-China relationship under the current administration.

Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping virtually in November to discuss “ongoing effort to responsibly manage” a relationship that threatens to spiral out of control between two rivals competing in areas of trade, geopolitical influence and, more recently, military might.

The biggest thorn in this troubled U.S.-China relationship is the issue of Taiwan, a democratic self-governing island that Beijing considers a breakaway province.

“The United States is asking China not to escalate pressure on Taiwan. China is asking the United States not to fiddle around with and test the limits of the One China policy,” said Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, describing a key point in the Biden-Xi meeting. “Both countries are guilty as charged, and neither is in a position where it’s going to reconsider its policies.”

Meanwhile, Russia is not staying on the sidelines. In recent weeks President Vladimir Putin has mobilized tens of thousands of troops along the Ukrainian border. He says he wants to prevent NATO’s eastward expansion — the main focus of the Biden-Putin virtual summit in December.

“What we’re seeing here is some behavior from the Russian Federation to remind the United States that it’s still there, it still has interests that it wants to pursue and that those interests can’t be ignored,” said Andrew Lohsen, fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Moscow recently outlined demands for a sweeping new security arrangement with the West, including a guarantee that NATO will not only cease expanding farther east but also will roll back all military activity in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. It also included a ban on sending U.S. and Russian warships and aircraft to areas within striking distance of each other’s territory.

Russia wants Washington and Moscow “to sit down and draw up the world like it’s 1921 instead of like it’s 2021,” said Max Bergmann, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The tough demands appear certain to be rejected by the U.S. and its allies, who insist that Moscow does not dictate NATO’s expansion.

The administration says it will continue to hold high-level talks with both Moscow and Beijing, not only to avoid conflict but also to collaborate on areas of common interest, such as the pandemic, climate change and regional issues like Iran.

So far, Biden’s two-track strategy of deterrence and diplomatic engagement has not led to grave setbacks or negative consequences, said Leslie Vinjamuri of Chatham House. “But defending the rules-based order in the context of power shifts and technological change — and in a world where the leading powers embrace radically different value systems — is a tall order and the future is uncertain,” she said.

Moreover, Putin’s threats to Ukraine and Xi’s crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, intimidation of Taiwan and allegedly genocidal policies toward the Uyghurs has fed the narrative of an administration too weak to stand up forcefully for American interests and values against aggressive adversaries, said Vanderbilt University’s Thomas Schwartz. “Iran’s continuing defiance and move toward acquiring a nuclear weapon strengthen this portrait,” he said.

Other unsolved problems include North Korea, where the administration appears in no hurry to push for a deal unless Kim Jong Un commits to winding down his nuclear weapons program, and simmering tensions between Israel and Hamas. More than one year following the Abraham Accords that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and two of its Arab neighbors, the administration has reestablished ties with Palestinians severed under Trump but has made little progress in advancing the broader Middle East peace process.

Democracies vs autocracies

The administration frames relations with rivals in the context of a global struggle, drawing a fault line between democracies and autocracies.

“We’ll stand up for our allies and our friends and oppose attempts by stronger countries that dominate weaker ones, whether through changes to territory by force, economic coercion, technical exploitation or disinformation,” Biden said in remarks at the U.N. General Assembly in September. “But we’re not seeking — say it again, we are not seeking — a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”

A “Cold War mentality” is exactly what China and Russia accuse Washington of fostering. Their leaders were excluded from the Summit for Democracy where Biden hosted more than 100 countries on December 9-10. Xi and Putin held their own virtual meeting a week after the democracy summit.

While activists applaud the summit’s goals of “strengthening democracy and defending against authoritarianism,” combating corruption and promoting human rights, some analysts warn of overreach.

If Biden pushes his democracy-vs.-autocracy framing too far, there’s a danger of losing collaborative ground on global issues such as climate change with China and arms control with Russia, said Stacie Goddard, Mildred Lane Kemper professor of political science at Wellesley College. “Those are the types of global issues where you really do need that type of cross-ideological cooperation,” she said.
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A New York state judge on Friday ordered The New York Times to return internal documents to the conservative activist group Project Veritas, something the newspaper said violates decades of First Amendment protections.

In an unusual written ruling, Justice Charles Wood of the Westchester County Supreme Court directed The New York Times to return to Project Veritas any physical copies of legal memos prepared by one of the group’s lawyers, and to destroy electronic versions.

Wood had entered a temporary order against the Times last month, drawing criticism from press freedom advocates.

Project Veritas, led by James O’Keefe, has used what critics view as misleading tactics like secret audio recording to expose what it describes as liberal media bias. The group is the subject of a Justice Department probe into its possible role in the theft of a diary from President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, pages of which were published on a right-wing website.

Project Veritas objected to a Nov. 11 Times article that drew from the legal memos and purported to reveal how the group worked with its lawyers to “gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.”

Wood said in Friday’s ruling that the Project Veritas legal memos were not a matter of public concern and that the group has a right to keep them private that outweighs concerns about freedom of the press.

“Steadfast fidelity to, and vigilance in protecting First Amendment freedoms cannot be permitted to abrogate the fundamental protections of attorney-client privilege or the basic right to privacy,” Wood wrote.

A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, said the newspaper would appeal the ruling.

Sulzberger said the decision barred the Times from publishing newsworthy information that was obtained legally in the ordinary course of reporting.

“In addition to imposing this unconstitutional prior restraint, the judge has gone even further (and) ordered that we return this material, a ruling with no apparent precedent and one that could present obvious risks to exposing sources should it be allowed to stand,” Sulzberger said.

Libby Locke, a lawyer for Project Veritas, said in a statement that The New York Times’ behavior was irregular and that the ruling affirms that view.

“The New York Times has long forgotten the meaning of the journalism it claims to espouse, and has instead become a vehicle for the prosecution of a partisan political agenda,” Locke said.

Project Veritas has been engaged in defamation litigation against the Times since last year, when the newspaper published a piece calling the group’s work “deceptive.”

The Times had not faced any prior restraint since 1971, when the Nixon administration unsuccessfully sought to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers detailing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.
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U.S. efforts to counter what it sees as an erosion of democratic principles around the world are facing a new challenge from China, which is seeking to redefine the very word democracy and use it to describe its own one-party model of governance.

In a white paper issued days before U.S. President Joe Biden’s December 9-10 Summit for Democracy, Beijing’s State Council Information Office argues that its system — in which all power is firmly entrenched in the Chinese Communist Party — constitutes “a true democracy that works.”

U.S. analysts and political leaders are dismissing the claim, seeing it as a bid to make China’s diplomatic and economic outreach around the world more palatable to some of the countries where it seeks to invest and gain influence.

“In order to gain popularity and welcome, ultimately influence, in the international community, they decided to call themselves a democracy instead of changing practices to become one,” said Hu Ping, a onetime district councilor in Beijing who later edited China Spring and Beijing Spring, both U.S.-based journals focused on Chinese politics.

The release of the December 4 white paper, which was published in the China Daily, appears to have been timed to counter the Biden-hosted summit, which the U.S. State Department said was aimed principally at defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.

The white paper offers a very different notion of what democracy is. “Whole-process people’s democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state,” it says.

In a tacit acknowledgment that Beijing’s notion of democracy differs from what is more widely understood by the term, it said democracy “is a concrete phenomenon that is constantly evolving. Rooted in history, culture and tradition, it takes diverse forms and develops along the paths chosen by different peoples based on their exploration and innovation.”

Some elements of the treatise appear at odds with current practices in China, where President Xi Jinping is widely regarded as having set the stage this fall to remain in power indefinitely.

‘Orderly,’ lawful succession

“The best way to evaluate whether a country’s political system is democratic and efficient is to observe whether the succession of its leaders is orderly and in line with the law,” the white paper said.

And at the very time that Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai had disappeared from public view after leveling a charge of sexual abuse against a former party leader, it listed another benchmark for measuring democracy as “whether the public can express their requirements without hindrance.” Peng has since denied making the accusation under what many suspect to be political pressure.

Other benchmarks for measuring democracy in the document appear to contrast with the ruling party’s growing efforts to control most aspects of daily life, ranging from popular entertainment to private tutoring. These include “whether the exercise of power can be kept under effective restraint and supervision” and “whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public scrutiny and checks.”

U.S. Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat who chairs the powerful House Rules Committee and co-chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, told VOA the version of democracy described in the white paper is very different from what is understood in most of the world.

“Democracy is a form of government in which the people have the ability to change their government through free and fair elections, a freedom that the citizens of the People’s Republic of China are denied,” McGovern said in a written statement to VOA.

“Genuine democracy requires respect for all human rights, including freedom of assembly, association and speech, as well as freedom from unwarranted governmental deprivation of the right to life and liberty, consent of the governed, and equal treatment before the law. None of these exist in China,” he said.

Attempt to shift focus

Jessica Ludwig, a China analyst at the National Endowment for Democracy, sees the white paper as an effort to decouple the meaning of democracy from the principles described by McGovern.

“A closer look at the language Beijing uses to describe the concept of democracy — emphasizing democracy as ‘whole-process’ and arguing that different systems should be able to co-exist — reflect an effort to redefine democracy as a weaker, more malleable concept,” she said in written replies to questions from VOA.

Beijing, she said, is trying to “shift the focus of how democracy is defined into narrower terms of what a government delivers and how efficient its processes are rather than by the values it protects and the accountability of its institutions.”

Senator Marco Rubio, a member of the Republican Party and a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said China’s claim to be a democracy is contradicted by its treatment of its own people, including its crackdown on free speech in Hong Kong and its oppression of Tibetans and its Uyghur minority.

Known as one of the fiercest critics of Beijing, Rubio added that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “doesn’t have a shred of democratic legitimacy, no matter what they say.”

Shanghai-born historian Song Yongyi said in a phone interview that the CCP has claimed to be a champion of democracy since the 1940s, when the Mao Zedong-led party portrayed itself “as the true democratic force in China in order to get American support in the civil war” that ended with a communist victory in 1949.

Mao declared at that time that the political system run by the CCP was one of “people’s democratic dictatorship,” following the Leninist model, Song recalled.

Both Song and Hu believe the CCP knows as well as anyone what democracy means, then and now.

‘Worse than Mao’

The fact that “they know they’re not a democracy, and they know we know they’re not a democracy, and they still insist on calling themselves a democracy,” is consistent with increased confidence, or belligerence, on the part of the latest CCP leadership, Hu said.

“Back in the Mao era, Chinese leadership was very clear: we operate under a different model, and we’re in a battle against you,” Song said. He views the latest polemic as a bid to stress the democracy element while downplaying the dictatorship element of its governing model in order to better sell its policies to audiences at home and abroad and to undermine the Western concept of democracy.

“What they’re doing is worse than Mao,” he said, in that Mao was more honest about the true nature of the regime.
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This year, Republicans and Democrats have made a point of publicly embracing Taiwan with a flurry of congressional visits and an invitation to the Democracy Summit hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden. State Department Bureau Chief Nike Ching reports on how officials are promoting closer U.S.-Taiwan ties without fundamentally changing Washington’s overall “One China” policy.
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