NOT A ‘TIGRESS’ GARDEN PLAN NEARING EXTINCTION A GOLF PRODIGY GROWING ROSES THE DECLINE OF AFRICA’S ON WOODS’S PATH THE SMART WAY FOREST ELEPHANTS PAGE 15 | SPORTS PAGE 19 | LIVING PAGE 9 | SCIENCE

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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 2021 Strategizing Suicides in a Second hint at the painful cost of isolation

LONDON

Bret Stephens Issues of mental health may be hard to pin down, but signs of a crisis grow OPINION BY ELIAN PELTIER In the First Cold War, the United States AND ISABELLA KWAI and its allies had a secret weapon against the Soviet Union and its satel- Sunny, driven and with a new engineer- lites. ing master’s degree in hand, Joshua It didn’t come from the C.I.A. Nor Morgan was hopeful that he could find a was it a product of DARPA or the job despite the pandemic, move out of weapons labs at Los Alamos. It was his mother’s house and begin his life. Communism. But as lockdowns in Britain dragged Communism aided the West because on and no job emerged, the young man it saddled an imperialist Russian state grew cynical and self-conscious, his sis- with an unworkable and unpopular ter Yasmin said. Mr. Morgan felt he economic system that could not keep could not get a public-facing job, like up with its free-market competitors. working at a grocery store, because his “They pretend to pay us and we pre- mother, Joanna, had open-heart surgery tend to work” — the quintessential last year and Mr. Morgan was “excep- Russian joke about tionally careful” about her health. President working life in the He and his mother contracted the co- Biden has workers’ paradise — ronavirus in January, forcing them to goes far to explain quarantine in their small London apart- a chance to why a regime with ment for over two weeks. Concerned by turn China’s tens of thousands of things he was saying, friends raised the strengths into nuclear warheads alarm and referred him to mental health weaknesses. simply petered out. services. Now we are enter- But days before the end of his quaran- ing the Second Cold tine last month, Mr. Morgan, 25, took his War, this time with China. That’s the own life. “He just sounded so deflated,” takeaway from this month’s U.S.-China his sister said of their last conversation, summit in Anchorage, in which both adding that he said he felt imprisoned sides made clear that they had not and longed to go outside. only clashing interests but also incom- Suicides are challenging to link to spe- patible values. Secretary of State cific reasons, but Mr. Morgan’s sudden Antony Blinken bluntly accused China death has left his sister with a feeling of threatening “the rules-based order that is hard to shake. “The cost of the that maintains global stability.” Yang pandemic was my brother’s life,” she

Jiechi, his Chinese counterpart, replied PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON said. “It’s not just people dying in a hos- that the U.S. had to “stop advancing its Clockwise from top left: Bounta, Khao, Yenly, Choi, Nan and Bouam. They suffer from congenital defects linked to that were sprayed in during the War. pital — it’s people dying inside.” own democracy in the rest of the More than 2.7 million people have world.” died from the coronavirus — nearly A few days later, China and Iran 127,000 in Britain alone. Those numbers signed a 25-year, $400 billion strategic are a tangible count of the pandemic’s pact, including provisions for joint cost. But as more people are vaccinated weapons development and intelligence and communities open up, there is a sharing. As challenges to the U.S.-led Hidden victims of a U.S. war tally that experts say is harder to track: “rules-based order” go, it’s hard to get the psychological toll of months of isola- more frontal than that. FROM THE MAGAZINE North Vietnamese Army to infiltrate called the War Legacies Project. Ham- mains one of the last untold stories of the tion and global suffering, which for Maybe things will get better. But it troops into the South. mond, whose father was a military offi- American war in Southeast Asia. some has proved fatal. would be foolish to count on it, much In one of the -and-thatch stilt cer in the war in Vietnam, founded the When the Air Force in 1982 released There are some signs indicating a less suppose that conciliatory behavior houses, the ladder to the living quarters group in 2008. Chagnon was one of the its official history of the defoliation cam- widespread mental health crisis. Japan by the Biden administration will do The toll of Agent was made from metal tubes that for- first foreigners allowed to work in Laos paign, , the three recorded a spike in suicide among wom- anything other than embolden Beijing. merly held American cluster bombs. after the conflict, with the American pages on Laos attracted almost no at- en last year, and in Europe, mental Say what you will about either the in Laos is an untold story The family had a 4-year-old boy Friends Service Committee. Sengthong, tention, other than a statement from health experts have reported a rise in Trump or the Obama administrations, of the Vietnam conflict named Suk, who had difficulty sitting, a retired schoolteacher, is responsible Gen. William Westmoreland, a former the number of young people expressing but they did not provoke China to standing and walking — one of three for the record-keeping and local coordi- U.S. commander, that he knew nothing suicidal thoughts. In the United States, crush democracy in Hong Kong, or BY GEORGE BLACK children in the extended family with nation. about it — although it was he who had many emergency rooms have faced brutalize Uyghurs in Xinjiang, or vio- birth defects. A cousin was born mute The focus of the War Legacies Project ordered it. surges in admissions of young children late in the South It was a blazing-hot morning in October and did not learn to walk until he was 7. is to document the long-term effects of In the last two decades the United and teenagers with mental health is- China Sea, or help North Korea sub- 2019 on the old , an in- A third child, a girl, died at the age of 2. the known as Agent Orange. States has finally taken responsibility sues. vert international sanctions, or use tricate web of truck roads and secret “That one could not sit up,” their Named for the colored stripe painted on for the legacy of Agent Orange in Viet- Mental health experts say prolonged military force to bully its neighbors, or paths that wove its way across the great-uncle said. “The whole body was its barrels, Agent Orange — known for nam. But Laos has remained a forgotten symptoms of depression and anxiety undertake campaigns of cyberwarfare densely forested and mountainous bor- soft, as if there were no bones.” its use by the U.S. military to clear vege- footnote to a lost war. may prompt risky behaviors that lead to and industrial espionage against der between Vietnam and Laos. The women added Suk to the list of tation during the — is no- While records of spraying operations self-harm, accidents, or even death, es- STEPHENS, PAGE 13 Susan Hammond, Jacquelyn people with disabilities they have com- torious for being laced with 2,3,7,8-Tet- inside Laos exist, the extent to which the SUICIDES, PAGE 4 Chagnon and Niphaphone Sengthong piled on their intermittent treks through rachlorodibenzo-P-dioxin, or TCDD, re- U.S. military broke international agree- The New York Times publishes opinion forded a rocky stream along the trail and Laos’s sparsely populated border dis- garded as one of the most toxic sub- ments has never been fully docu- A TERRIFYING SIDE EFFECT from a wide range of perspectives in came to a village of about 400 people tricts. stances ever created. mented, until now. Doctors report paranoia and other hopes of promoting constructive debate called Labeng-Khok, once the site of a Hammond, Chagnon and Sengthong The use of the in the neutral An in-depth review of Air Force psychotic symptoms in patients who about consequential questions. logistics base inside Laos used by the make up the core of an organization nation of Laos by the United States re- LAOS, PAGE 6 have recovered from Covid-19. PAGE 9

An American, an empress and a trove of art

on Indian Red Ground,” a 6-foot-by-8- Just before its revolution, foot canvas that was created with rusty reds and layered swirls of thick, dripped The weekend paper that Iran built an impressive paint and is considered one of his best museum. It’s still there. works from his most important period. gets to the point. Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, BY ELAINE SCIOLINO Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Cha- Award-winning news, opinion, lifestyle, gall, Klee, Whistler, Rodin, van Gogh, Pi- On the edge of a vast park in Tehran sits casso, Braque, Kandinsky, Magritte, culture and more. In one concise paper. a Neo-Brutalist structure the color of Dalí, Miró, Johns, Warhol, Hockney, Pick up the Weekend Edition. sand. Inside is one of the finest col- Lichtenstein, Bacon, Duchamp, Rothko, lections of modern Western art in the Man Ray — they are all here. world. The museum was conceived by the You enter the Tehran Museum of Con- Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, wife of temporary Art through an atrium that Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and spirals downward like an inverted ver- opened to international acclaim in 1977. sion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggen- Just 15 months later, in the face of a heim Museum in New York. Photos of widespread popular uprising, the couple Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fa- left the country on what was officially ther of Iran’s 1979 revolution, and Aya- called a “vacation.” The revolution re- tollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded placed the monarchy with an Islamic him as the Islamic Republic’s supreme Republic weeks later. leader, glare down at you. The new regime could have sold or de- A series of underground galleries stroyed the Western art masterpieces. awaits. There is nothing quite like the Instead, the museum was closed, its feeling of coming face-to-face for the JILA DEJAM treasures hidden in a concrete base- first time with its most sensational mas- Farah Diba Pahlavi, left, the empress of Iran, and Donna Stein, a curator, in 1977. Stein ment, and the shah’s palaces were pre- terpiece: Jackson Pollock’s 1950 “Mural feels robbed of the credit she said she deserves for her work at a modern art museum. TEHRAN, PAGE 2

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