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Plenty of new things, in addition to the troop deployment, came out of Thursday’s meetings and in advance of them. Biden announced $1 billion in new humanitarian aid to those affected by the new refugee crisis in Europe, and a week earlier, the US had announced $1 billion more in military and security aid to Ukraine. Together with European countries, the White House and State Department announced even more sanctions on Russian politicians, military leaders, and elites, and measures to stop sanctions-evaders. Biden also said he would support throwing Russia out of the G20 club of countries with major economies.

The trip isn’t just about NATO. Biden is meeting with leaders of the European Union and the G7 countries. He will also travel to Poland, which, bordering on Ukraine, has received more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees as of this week. And Biden announced that the US will welcome 100,000 refugees from the ongoing war.

“NATO was first sort of given a new mission, or a new lease on life, by the events of 2014,” the last time Putin invaded Ukraine, said Samuel Charap, a Russia expert at the RAND Corporation. “There’s a unity of purpose now that there wasn’t before.”

How NATO is meeting the moment

The alliance of 30 countries in Europe and North America had been intended to contain the Soviet Union’s advances in the world. Yet as recently as three years ago, critics — including some world leaders — wondered if it wasn’t well suited for the geopolitics of the 21st century.

Some preeminent US foreign policy leaders argued in the 1990s that NATO wasn’t the right way for the US to engage Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union, but then as now, NATO skeptics didn’t have much sway in Washington.

Enter US President Donald Trump. Preaching a so-called America-first foreign policy, Trump often bashed NATO; he wanted allies to spend more on their militaries, and reportedly for the US to withdraw from the alliance. That stance rankled members of the Washington security establishment, but he wasn’t the only one who emphasized the alliance’s shortcomings. “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” Macron said in 2019.

The comment came after Trump pulled US troops out of Syria to avoid clashing with NATO ally Turkey. He withdrew those forces, however, without consulting with other NATO allies, calling into question the dependability of the Trump White House — and by extension, of the United States. US power is one of the biggest guarantors of the alliance, and Trump had battered that image.

“You have partners together in the same part of the world, and you have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None,” added Macron. He later stood by that harsh assessment.

Those criticisms, and other concerns throughout the late 2010s, led even former diplomats and scholars who were staunch supporters of the trans-Atlantic alliance to say that NATO was in crisis.

Derek Chollet and Amanda Sloat, two policy experts who are now senior Biden administration officials, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in 2018 that NATO summits were “just not worth it” and simply too risky when Trump was in office, as he denigrated the alliance on the world stage.

Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor who is now serving as Biden’s ambassador to China, co-wrote a paper three years ago that argued that Trump’s NATO bashing, increasingly undemocratic leaders under the NATO umbrella (among them Turkey and Hungary), and NATO’s failure to confront Putin “have hurtled the Alliance into its most worrisome crisis in memory.”

Now, NATO is a key pillar of the Biden administration’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Putin has reinvigorated NATO in a fundamental way,” said Ivo Daalder, who served as Obama’s ambassador to NATO and now directs the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “What Biden has done is he has reminded Americans and our allies how important NATO is.”

To deter Russia, NATO has doubled the active forces under its direct command in eastern Europe; there are now about 40,000 on the continent, in addition to the 100,000 US troops stationed there. A NATO spokesperson tweeted a graphic showing that 130 aircraft and 140 naval vessels are “on high alert.”

UPDATE

We face a new reality for our security due to #Russia’s illegal invasion of #Ukraine.

In response, #NATO has reinforced its defensive presence in the eastern part of the Alliance with more troops, planes & ships.

Here’s the overview ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/nrAVDOGtJj

— Oana Lungescu (@NATOpress) March 22, 2022

As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at the top of the summit, “NATO is providing unprecedented support to Ukraine, helping them to defend themselves.” He mentioned the “unprecedented sanctions” on Russia and NATO’s increased military presence, especially in Romania.

NATO’s stepping up to be the leader of European security. Should it?

Proponents — and there are many — of the Biden team’s response and NATO’s resurgence say this is exactly what the alliance should be doing.

NATO was the United States’ first transcontinental peacetime alliance, and maintaining it in peacetime is important, says John Manza, a former senior NATO official who is now a professor at the National Defense University. “It’s like a fire truck that’s sitting in the local fire station. You can complain and say, ‘Oh, it’s not doing anything, it’s just costing us money’ — until there’s a fire and you need it,” he told me.

NATO is learning from its last major test, in 2014, when Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and later invaded the country’s eastern provinces. In response, NATO expanded its cohort of rapid response troops.

The alliance in 2018 developed a readiness plan with major land, sea, and air capabilities able to mobilize in 30 days. This month, NATO announced that it is significantly growing its forward presence to plan for potential contingencies. “Now we have enough combat power to really defend conventionally alliance territory against a near-peer competitor, like Russia,” Manza said.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

NATO family photo: Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, US President Joe Biden, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other leaders pose for a group photograph at NATO Headquarters in Brussels on March 24, 2022.

The alliance, at its core, is about preventing interstate war on the European continent. “It’s absolutely what you could call NATO’s sweet spot,” said Bruce Jentleson, a Duke political scientist and fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington. “When you have sort of a superseding shared security threat, that’s when countries work together.”

That’s not to say NATO has it all figured out. “The real conundrum for NATO is the nuclear, biological, and chemical one,” said Evelyn Farkas, a senior Pentagon official for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia during the Obama administration. “How would they respond if there was a nuclear detonation or a nuclear weapon used by Russia? And same for chemical and biological.”

The emerging consensus among the Washington foreign policy establishment, both right and left, is that the Biden administration deserves praise for how it has handled this crisis and shepherded NATO quickly to respond to Russian aggression. NATO has been unified with providing Ukraine with weapons, sanctioning Russia, and beginning to address the new influx of refugees.

But, critics say, there are potential downsides to NATO being the only institution for European security.

Ukraine’s precarious position — with a door open to join NATO at some point in the distant future, but at the moment nowhere near meeting the conditions for the alliance’s unanimous welcome — illustrates one of the complications.

By saying, as President George W. Bush did overtly at a NATO summit in 2008, that Ukraine could and would join NATO, but not providing Ukraine with a membership action plan and a timetable to join the alliance, Ukraine has been left unprotected. It lacks the ironclad protections of the treaty’s Article 5, in which all 30 countries consider an attack on one country an attack on all of them. But at the same time, Russia internalized threats of Ukraine’s closeness to NATO.

None of this is to validate the pretexts that Putin has used to launch this war, but if NATO actually wanted Ukraine to join the alliance, maybe it should have made that happen a little more quickly. Or perhaps it should have never made the offer explicit in the first place.

Given these circumstances, critics of NATO wonder whether NATO is the best forum for ensuring European security. “The time has come for Europe to take primary responsibility for its own defense,” said Rajan Menon of the research group Defense Priorities. “It just beggars belief to me that Germany, the wealthiest country in the EU, has an army that suffers from spare parts shortages and insufficient enlisted men and women and officers.” Germany, pacifist after the Second World War, announced it would invest in its military after Putin invaded Ukraine.

It may be in Europe’s best interest to prepare its own deterrent force separately from NATO. Menon notes that, given increasing American attention toward potential conflict in Asia, Europeans should realize that the United States won’t always have the capacity to have Europe’s back. He explains that while “one can dress it up in all kinds of multilateral clothing,” NATO has always been an overwhelmingly American operation.

Beyond Europe, the United Nations could be playing a bigger role. “NATO is filling a void that the UN has created,” as Farkas put it.

What this summit means for NATO’s future

NATO has come to the fore on the issue of Ukraine. But what’s equally clear is that the transatlantic alliance is not going to be the answer to every problem of this century.

The larger question emerging from this new war in Europe is whether the US will similarly be able to mobilize global allies more broadly in the face of more existential crises of the next period. There remains a bigger global agenda that the US must take on — countering climate change, preparing for future pandemics, and strengthening the internal dynamics of democracies that are backsliding — that can’t be totally put aside by the current war.

A recalcitrant Russia and a reinvigorated NATO has major implications for the future of European security. But Jentleson, the former State Department adviser to the Obama administration, cautioned that it doesn’t change everything we think and know about the world. “Our whole foreign policy is not going to revolve around a new Cold War,” he said. “I don’t see it as defining the next era comprehensively the way that the Cold War defined the era from the late ’40s on.”

What is much more likely to define the coming decades is China as a world power, and that’s why everyone is monitoring how China navigates Russia’s war. This has practical implications. Biden administration officials have leaked that Russia has sought Chinese weapons. In Thursday’s statements from NATO heads of state, the 30 countries called on China “to abstain from supporting Russia’s war effort in any way, and to refrain from any action that helps Russia circumvent sanctions.”

The statement represented a larger acknowledgement of China as a competitor that is watching how the West responds to Russia.

In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that the “East is rising” and the West is declining, and Putin has said that liberalism is “obsolete.” War in Europe’s east may have altered that equation and reinforced the notion that a military alliance alone is insufficient to address 21st-century problems. But some see NATO’s response — and that of non-NATO European countries alongside it — as a sign that concerted action is possible.

“The last four weeks have demonstrated that liberalism is strong and capable of standing up, and the West, if anything, is rising, not declining, if it works together,” Daalder said.

In a split-second decision, Loretta steals Fairfax’s ancient parchment for herself, stuffs it in the cleavage of her fuschia jumpsuit, and then spends the rest of the movie piecing together where it leads. She’s resourceful, turning the aforementioned jumpsuit into a henchmen-killing booby trap. She uses her experience in the field as an adventurer and archaeologist to navigate the jungles and caves. At one point, she and Alan could seemingly go home (and ostensibly end the movie) but Loretta’s ambition leads them back into the wilderness and into danger. She doesn’t exactly ask Alan his opinion on what to do next.

Meanwhile, Alan’s sole focus is on Loretta. He wants to protect her but isn’t quite good at it. He doesn’t tell her when she makes him feel small. He affirms her intelligence, with no expectation of it in return. At one point in the movie, Alan tells Loretta that he understands why she feels the corny romance novels she writes are beneath her. He, too, cringed at being on their covers — until he met her fans. Anything that can bring that kind of joy is nothing to be embarrassed about, he tells her.

Other action hero girlfriend qualities: Alan is much younger than Loretta, Alan is bad at driving, Alan is equally bad at swimming, Alan is allergic to water, Alan is an optimist. Alan is not good at punching and can only slap, and Alan also has the movie’s only nude-ish scene.

Tatum has the muscular, chiseled, rugged (but soft in the lips and eyes) look phenotypical for a Marvel superhero, but it’s impossible to say he’s playing against type. Tatum has played this self-aware, soft himbo role before in movies (and mostly sequels) like 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street, and given us flashes in Magic Mike, Magic Mike XXL, and Kingsman: a Golden Circle. There is no man in Hollywood as good-looking as Tatum who’s better at playing a sensitive himbo, and in this case the romantic accessory to Bullock’s Loretta Sage.

Pairing Tatum alongside Bullock, who played Annie Porter in Speed, one of the most famed action hero girlfriends in the action hero girlfriend pantheon, is a meta role reversal that the movie loves and leans into. The conceit operates on knowing who these actors are and who they’ve played, and picking up on winks to their previous work, as well as tropes of action-adventure movies of the past.

The dynamic and nostalgia are effective, but I do wish The Lost City would give us a bit more to think about.

Channing Tatum is so good at swerving away from being the sexy, dashing Channing Tatum that he’s supposed to be, that the jolt of surprise isn’t there. Sweet, kinda wimpy Channing Tatum has become the silver screen’s go-to Channing Tatum. Similarly, Bullock, a human charm offensive if there was ever one, is giving us a variant of her past performances as gruff agent Gracie Hart from Miss Congeniality and rigid agent Sarah Ashburn from The Heat. Like Tatum, the character is right in Bullock’s wheelhouse, but the material here isn’t really pushing her or her co-star to any fresh places.

That said, while The Lost City is by no means perfect, I hope it does well. It’s the right movie for a plane ride, or something I’d put on if I’m not in the mood for Spy, the best action rom-com of all time. But because of the way studios monitor box office hauls, The Lost City and its reported budget of around $70 million represents a trial balloon of sorts. Should it fail to hit numbers executives want, those executives will see it as more confirmation that mid-budget rom-coms and their ilk are not worth investing in the way superhero movies, reboots, and sequels of established hits are.

I hate that!

Pinning all the hopes and dreams of the romantic comedy genre and mid-budget movies generally (even other unsung genres, say, erotic thrillers) onto Tatum’s broad shoulders and Bullock’s sequined jumpsuit is unfair. Tatum’s lats and Bullock’s superpower to defy the rules of human aging should be able to be judged on their own terms. Both go above and beyond what’s necessary. Hopefully The Lost City does well enough to keep the money-driven, movie-making deciders at bay so that we can see more movies like it — or maybe a sequel that’s even better.

Creating rapid-growth chickens took breeding companies decades since they mostly relied on old-fashioned selective breeding. Genetic engineering came next in the 1970s as scientists figured out how to transfer genes from one organism into another, which led to the creation of the fast-growing AquAdvantage salmon in 1989. But newer biotechnology tools, like CRISPR, are faster and more precise because scientists can edit an animals’ genes rather than move a gene from one animal into another.

“The beauty of the newer techniques is the ability to precisely introduce a particular characteristic into already elite germplasm” or heritable genetic material, says Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist at University California Davis.

Juliette Michel/AFP via Getty Images
Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist at the University of California Davis, feeds alfalfa to two hornless offspring of a gene-modified bull and a horned control cow, at the university’s farm in Davis, California in 2019. Eenennaam has been working for several years on the hornless gene.

The promise of the technology is obvious for agribusiness, which naturally wants to use these new tools to boost profits by designing bigger, faster-growing animals with higher fertility rates.

But that’s not the only use of the technology. It could also be deployed to eliminate many sources of animal suffering on today’s factory farms by editing genes in ways that would make painful procedures unnecessary.

Hornless calves are just the start. For instance, male piglets are castrated, usually without pain relief, shortly after birth. If they aren’t, their meat will emit a terrible odor when cooked, leading to what the pork industry calls “boar taint.” So scientists are working on a male pig that never reaches puberty, eliminating the need for castration.

A similar advance could be made with poultry. Each year at America’s egg hatcheries, as many as 300 million male chicks are gruesomely killed — usually by being ground up alive or gassed — since they can’t lay eggs and have been bred to be too small to be worth the effort of raising for meat. Researchers around the world are using transgenic engineering and gene-editing tools in an attempt to solve this chicken and egg dilemma.

Chicks falling off the end of a conveyor belt. Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Each year, approximately 300 million male chicks are ground up alive or gassed in the US egg industry because they can’t lay eggs and have been bred to be too small to be worth the effort of raising for meat. Researchers are using genetic engineering and gene editing to eliminate the need for male chick culling.

A team in Australia is using CRISPR to insert a gene from a sea anemone into a chicken that expresses a particular protein; if it’s a male, the inside of the egg will glow red when a laser is shined on it, enabling egg producers to destroy the eggs before the chcks are hatched. A team in the UK is working to stop the development of male embryos.

Straight out of a Black Mirror episode, the bioethicist Shriver has argued — in a paper that asks if “technology can succeed where morality has stalled” — for creating genetically engineered farmed animals that can’t feel pain. It’s a still- theoretical intervention that shows that the extreme environment of factory farming might demand equally extreme technological solutions.

Using gene-editing to eradicate animal diseases

Breeding disease-resistant animals could also reduce animal suffering in the short term and lead agribusiness to breed fewer animals overall.

In 2014 and 2015, outbreaks of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) virus across the US resulted in more than 50 million chickens and turkeys killed or culled, using cruel methods like suffocating foam and “ventilation shutdown” — industry jargon for essentially cooking the animals alive.

Seven years later, the disease is wreaking havoc on the US poultry industry yet again; since February of this year, 4 million chickens and turkeys in the US have been destroyed due to a new HPAI outbreak. Epidemiologists worry the growing outbreak increases the chance of the virus mutating and infecting humans. A different strain of the virus, Asian H5N1, has only infected around 700 people since 2003, but it has a disturbingly high mortality rate of 60 percent.

Elizabeth W. Kearley/Moment Editorial via Getty Images
Fake birds in cages at North Carolina’s Cabarrus County Fair in 2015. Real birds were banned due to the bird flu that was ravaging the poultry sector at the time.

The global spread of African swine fever has caused the death or culling of millions of pigs in recent years, while other diseases are routine problems in the industry, such as tuberculosis and mastitis for dairy cows, and PRRS, a respiratory disease that affects pigs. Researchers have created gene-edited animals immune to all of these diseases as pilot projects, but none have been approved to be raised commercially.

“Disease resistance is the big target that everyone’s after because we lose about 20 percent of animal production to disease,” Van Eenennaam told me.

While creating disease-resistant animals would certainly fatten agribusiness’s bottom line, as meat, dairy, and egg producers lose billions of dollars each year to disease, it could also reduce animal suffering in two ways.

The first is obvious: Disease and culling are painful, and eliminating them would be good. The second is that it could result in fewer animals needing to be bred in the first place because when animals die from disease, the industry has to replace them.

But the fact that such innovation could improve animal welfare and the bottom line of agribusiness is one reason why many animal advocates hesitate to buy into it as a viable solution to factory farming.

“Through genetic engineering, the animal agriculture industry can increase efficiency, all the while claiming their motivation is to improve animal welfare,” says Jones of the Animal Welfare Institute. “GE allows the industry to mitigate some of the criticisms of animal farming and keep costs low in the process. Because of this, it absolutely poses a threat to making a transition to alternative protein sources.”

There’s good reason to worry gene editing could result in further harm to animals just as much as it could be used to ease some of the pain that comes from being a cog in the industrial agriculture system. The first genetically engineered animal to be approved by the FDA for human consumption, the AquAdvantage salmon, was created to grow twice as fast as conventional salmon, and animal advocates argue the engineered fish are prone to a number of welfare issues, like jaw deformities, lesions, and higher mortality rates.

Environmentalists worry the engineered salmon could escape into waterways and disrupt wild salmon populations by outcompeting them for resources and pollute wild salmon’s gene pool, affecting their survivability, though an FDA spokesperson told me that the abnormalities “do not differ appreciably from those in comparable farm-raised Atlantic salmon.”

The former CEO of Recombinetics, the company that created the recently approved heat-tolerant cattle and is working on a hornless calf, told the Associated Press in 2018 that the firm was focused on easing animal suffering because “it’s a better story to tell.” But she added that once gene-edited farm animals are more accepted by the public, farmers will be more interested in traits that increase “productivity” — often a euphemism for animals that either grow faster or bigger, produce more milk, or have higher fertility rates.

“I don’t want to assume that I can peer into [Recombinetic’s] mind,” says Shriver. “I definitely am extremely worried about the idea that the initial genetic modifications that are approved are ones that are either welfare neutral or welfare positive, but they’re going to open up the floodgates for a lot of gene interventions that have very negative impacts on animal welfare.”

Recombinetics declined to comment for this story.

Despite Shriver’s fear over how the technology could be used in the future, he notes that public support for the technology is higher when it’s being used to improve animal welfare. But public support isn’t enough. The future of farmed animal gene editing will be largely shaped by the FDA and genetics companies, two bodies that animal welfare advocates have largely neglected to lobby on the matter.

Regulating animal welfare into gene-edited meat

One thing to keep an eye on is how the regulatory landscape for gene editing animals shakes out. In 2017, the FDA announced plans to treat gene-edited animals designed with newer technology, like CRISPR, the same way they treat new veterinary drugs, which means the approval process is slow. According to the Animal Health Institute, an organization that represents veterinary drug companies, it takes around 8.5 years for a livestock drug with a new active ingredient to come to market.

Animal geneticists like Van Eenennaam argue that this classification doesn’t make sense. “They’re regulating all alterations in DNA as a drug, and DNA is not a drug,” she says. “If that’s the only way [the FDA] can regulate it, then everything that’s genetically altered is a drug because then” the agency can maintain oversight.

The seemingly quick “safe to eat” determination of the short-haired cattle could portend a faster process moving forward, but it’s “a bit wobbly,” Van Eenennaam says. That’s because the FDA didn’t say all heat-tolerant cattle designed in the way Recombinetics did are safe to eat — just the two cattle and their offspring that Recombinetics brought forward before the agency. If the FDA handles other projects the way it did Recombinetics’ cattle, the process will be “one by one by one. … It’s not sustainable.”

Instead of regulating gene-edited animals as drugs, she says products should be regulated on the basis of safety to animals, consumers, and the environment — not on the type of technology being used. “Regulations should be risk-proportionate. They shouldn’t be triggered by the use of a [specific] technology.”

The slowness cuts both ways. “This protracted process is a good thing if you want to delay or stop potentially harmful uses of GE,” says Jones of the Animal Welfare Institute. “But it also means a very lengthy process for beneficial applications, such as hornless cattle or eliminating males from [egg] layer breeding.”

In the final weeks of the Trump presidency, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue proposed a rule change that would give the agriculture agency primary oversight of gene-edited farmed animals.

That hasn’t happened, but if it does, it would likely speed up the approval process, potentially in ways that bode poorly for animal welfare. The USDA is notoriously industry-friendly, which explains why groups like the National Pork Producers Council ardently support the USDA taking over the regulation of gene-edited animals raised for food, and why groups like the Animal Welfare Institute just as ardently oppose such a move.

Van Eenennaam is cautiously optimistic that handing over the regulatory job to the USDA would lead to a more streamlined process, mostly because the USDA wouldn’t regulate genetic alterations in farmed animals as drugs. Rather, according to Van Eenennaam, it would look more like its process for approving genetically altered crops: conducting a safety assessment with a focus on whether the genetic alteration could increase the animal’s susceptibility to pests or diseases, and then a pre-slaughter food safety assessment to ensure slaughter and processing doesn’t result in unsafe food products.

But animal welfare advocates worry the treatment of animals isn’t likely to be a top priority in the review process no matter which agency oversees it. “I have little to no confidence that a case-by-case review of the impacts of proposed GE applications on animal health and welfare will occur under either the FDA or the USDA,” says Jones.

When questioned about how the FDA factors animal welfare into its review process for genetic alterations to farmed animals, a spokesperson told me, “Our review includes an evaluation of animal safety in which we take into account physical health and, to the degree that it can be measured in a species, behavioral health. To the extent that animal health encompasses animal welfare, our approval process does include it.”

Shriver hopes that, at the very least, there’s more public discussion about gene editing farmed animals.

“There are a lot of these technological solutions on the horizon: Plant-based alternatives are getting better every year, and cultured meat is something that’s being worked on and gets a lot of discussion in the press. But I feel like gene editing is not debated as much in public, yet it also could have really dramatic implications,” he says. “There needs to be a robust debate about what the future could look like.”

The present is untenable; the global factory farming of tens of billions of animals each year accelerates climate change, endangers public health, and has reduced feeling beings into little more than mere machines.

Despite more awareness than ever of the ills of industrialized farming, and increasingly stronger moral pleas to end it, it pushes forward unabated: US meat consumption is at an all-time high, and the United Nations anticipates the global appetite for meat is expected to rise 73 percent by 2050. Gene editing animals to reduce their suffering may appear to be an extreme response to an extreme situation, but it’s one that should at least be on the metaphorical table — and perhaps, the dinner table too.

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