Council on Foreign Relations

Abstract When the World Closed Its Doors tells the story of how nearly every country in the world shut its borders to respond to an external threat and explains how this global shock to the system ended up transforming state border policies around the world. It details the consequences of the Covid border restrictions—couples separated for years, children blocked from reuniting with their parents, container ship workers moving essential goods trapped at sea, pregnant citizens barred from returning home—and explains why governments used their harshest containment measures on those coming from outside. The book tells human stories to show the multiple impacts that states’ increasing restrictiveness has had—economic, demographic, social, and political. And the fallout continues: Covid taught governments that borders could be closed or heavily restricted for extended periods with strong public support and minimal disruption to the everyday lives of most of their people. The temptation to do so in future crises—from pandemics to terrorist attacks to flows of desperate asylum seekers—will be irresistible. This book is an effort to ensure that lessons are learned about what worked and what didn’t from this unprecedented closure of borders—and to highlight the enormous costs that were paid by millions of people whose lives straddle those borders.

Abstract The End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East posits that in the post–World War II era, the United States was successful in the Middle East when it pursued policies aimed at preventing harm to its core interests. There were moral and material costs to this success, of course, but oil flowed freely from the region, Israel was secure, and the United States remained predominant. The American failure in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War reflects a shift from preventive policies in favor of an ambitious effort to transform the Middle East through the establishment of a Palestinian state, regime change in Iraq, and the Freedom Agenda. Rather than retrench or withdraw from the Middle East, The End of Ambition advocates that the United States remain active in the region, but that Washington must place a premium on prudence, discretion, efficiency, and balance in its approach.

Purpose:Bioinformatics methods were used to identify the key genes associated with the immune microenvironment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) to construct an immune risk prognostic model (IRPM) and to study the correlation between IRPM’s risk groups and immune characteristics of patients with HCC.Methods:HCC transcriptome sequencing information was searched for immune-related genes (IRGs) that were regularly expressed in cancer tissues. The IRGs, which were strongly linked to overall survival were screened; the prognostic characteristics model was constructed using Cox regression analysis. IRPM’s independent prognostic value was explored; Kaplan–Meier survival and receiver-operating characteristic curves were used to determine the model prediction ability in the led-to queue.Results:Patients in the high-risk group (HRG) showed significantly poor outcomes. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis revealed factors involved in both the HRG and low risk group. Immune-related hub genes (IRHGs) and drug sensitivity expression levels revealed that all IRHGs were correlated with drug sensitivity for certain chemotherapy drugs.Conclusion:The study results may serve as a reference for improving prognosis, early screening, and immunotherapy in patients with HCC.

Speeding up development of new vaccines won’t help much in the next pandemic, unless world leaders work faster to roll out vaccination globally. Speeding up development of new vaccines won’t help much in the next pandemic, unless world leaders work faster to roll out vaccination globally.

This Viewpoint proposes a multistep plan that US can implement to achieve a “new normal” of living, in which the combined risk of all viral respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19, does not exceed the risk during prepandemic years.