THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALTUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 0 N + ALONDON — Britain on Monday
joined an American-led mission to
protect ships traveling through
the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian
threats, signaling a greater open-
ness to working with the United
States to shore up maritime secu-
rity in the region and acknowledg-
ing that its efforts to create a Eu-
ropean-led task force have proved
difficult.
Tensions between Britain and
Iran have been rising since Iran
seized a tanker flying the British
flag in July. That followed Britain’s
decision to impound an Iranian
tanker near Gibraltar on suspi-
cion that it violated a European
Union embargo on the sale of oil to
Syria.
But Britain at the time resisted
the idea of joining its maritime
forces with the United States, and
instead described plans for a Eu-
ropean-led mission in the area.
Britain’s decision to join the
American-led security effort
came after Prime Minister Boris
Johnson took office at the end of
last month. Mr. Johnson has made
strengthening ties with the United
States a priority, in part because a
free-trade agreement with Wash-
ington is a centerpiece of his plans
for Brexit.
American officials have blamed
Iran for apparent attacks on
tankers in May and June, which
came after new sanctions that
aimed to cut off its ability to sell
oil, a pillar of its economy. Iran has
denied involvement. Last month,
the American military downed an
Iranian drone in the Strait of Hor-
muz in what President Trump
called an act of self-defense.
Since Mr. Trump abandoned a
2015 deal intended to prevent Iran
from obtaining a nuclear weapon,
Britain has occupied a pivotal
place in a bloc of European states
trying to broker a resolution be-
tween Tehran and Washington.
Tensions between Iran and
Washington bubbled up again
Monday when Iran’s foreign min-
ister, Mohammad Javad Zarif,
said at a news conference in
Tehran that he had been warned
by American officials in July that
he would be personally sanc-
tioned if he did not accept an invi-
tation to visit the Oval Office. The
administration ultimately took
the unusual step of sanctioning
him last Wednesday.
“On my trip to New York, I was
told that I would be sanctioned
within two weeks unless I ac-
cepted this proposal,” Mr. Zarif
said. During a visit to the United
Nations in July, Mr. Zarif met with
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of
Kentucky, as part of an overture
by the Trump administration to
explore talks.
“I did not accept, thank God,
and I was sanctioned,” Mr. Zarif
said.
A senior administration official
said that it was untrue that Mr.
Zarif had been threatened with
sanctions unless he traveled to
Washington to meet with Mr.
Trump.
Britain’s decision to join the
American-led effort was an ac-
knowledgment that it had not
been able to create a European
maritime security coalition; no
other European countries have
committed warships to protect
merchant shipping in the region.
Instead, Britain said it would
commit the same two warships it
had previously assigned to escort
British-flagged ships through the
strait to the American-led mis-
sion. Britain and the United States
are the only two countries contrib-
uting to the effort.
Ben Wallace, the British de-
fense secretary, said Britain was
“determined to ensure shipping is
protected from unlawful threats.”
But the British government
said its broader policy of saving
the 2015 nuclear deal had not
changed. That deal has been un-
der threat since the United States
imposed crippling economic sanc-
tions in May and Iran began tak-
ing steps to restart its nuclear pro-
gram.
“Our approach to Iran hasn’t
changed,” Dominic Raab, Britain’s
foreign secretary, said. “We re-
main committed to working with
Iran and our international part-
ners to de-escalate the situation
and maintain the nuclear deal.”
Shipping through the Strait of
Hormuz has become fraught since
Iran began building its military
presence in the Gulf and threat-
ened to block exports through the
strait in response to the American
sanctions.
Iran has suggested that it might
release the British-flagged tanker
it captured in exchange for the re-
turn of the Iranian ship seized by
the British military off Gibraltar.
But Britain has ruled out a swap.
Responding to word of a naval
alliance safeguarding oil tankers,
Mr. Zarif said that since the “U.S.
is responsible for setting the
Persian Gulf on flame, it can’t also
be the firefighter.”Britain Joins
U.S. to Help
Ships Elude
Iran’s Grasp
By BENJAMIN MUELLERFarnaz Fassihi contributed report-
ing from New York, and Michael
Crowley from Washington.With temperatures soaring in
Europe and Alaska, ice melting in
Greenland and forests burning
across Siberia, last month seemed
like a blistering one worldwide.
It was.
European climate researchers
said Monday that last month was
the hottest July — and thus the
hottest month — ever recorded,
slightly eclipsing the previous
record-holder, July 2016. “While
July is usually the warmest month
of the year for the globe, according
to our data it also was the warm-
est month recorded globally, by a
very small margin,” Jean-Noël
Thépaut, head of the Copernicus
Climate Change Service, said in a
statement.
The service, part of an intergov-
ernmental organization sup-
ported by European countries,
said the global average tempera-
ture last month was about 0.07 de-
gree Fahrenheit (0.04 Celsius)
hotter than July 2016.
The researchers noted that
their finding was based on analy-
sis of only one of several data sets
compiled by agencies around the
world.
Analyses by other agencies, in-
cluding NASA and the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration in the United States, will
be released over the next several
weeks and could be slightly differ-
ent.
But whatever its ultimate rank-
ing, last month is part of a long-
term trend: As human-related
emissions of greenhouse gases
have continued, the atmosphere
has continued to warm. The past
five years have been the hottest
on record, including the record
single year in 2016. The 10 hottest
years have all occurred in the past
two decades.
This June was the warmest on
record, and the previous five
months were among the four
warmest for their respective
months, the climate researchers
said. That puts this year on track
to be in the top five, or perhaps the
hottest ever.
“With continued greenhouse
gas emissions and the resulting
impact on global temperatures,
records will continue to be broken
in the future,” Mr. Thépaut said.
The climate service noted some
regional temperature differences
in July. Western Europe was
above average, in part because of
a heat wave that occurred during
the last week of the month and set
temperature records in Germany,
the Netherlands and elsewhere. A
rapid analysis released last week
found that climate change made
the heat wave more likely.
The highest above-average con-
ditions were recorded across
Alaska, Greenland and large
swaths of Siberia. Large parts of
Africa and Australia were warmerthan normal, as was much of Cen-
tral Asia. Cooler than average
temperatures prevailed in East-
ern Europe, much of Asia, theNorthern Plains and Pacific
Northwest of the United States
and over large parts of Western
Canada.The year 2016 was a record-set-
ter in part because the world had
just been through a strong El
Niño. During an El Niño there are
changes in sea temperature, at-
mospheric pressure and winds in
the equatorial Pacific that can in-
fluence regional weather patterns
around the world and lead to
short-term variations in tempera-
ture. The world experienced a
weak El Niño this year and fur-
ther weakening has occurred. It is
not clear what, if any, effect this
has had on temperatures.How Hot Was July? Hotter Than Ever, Data Shows
An aerial view of melting ice
during unseasonably warm
weather near Ilulissat, Green-
land. At left, a wildfire raging
on the bank of the Yenisei
River near the Siberian city of
Krasnoyarsk.SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGESILYA NAYMUSHIN/REUTERSGreenland, Siberia
and Alaska had the
highest extremes.
By HENRY FOUNTAINMany scholars of terrorism see
worrying similarities between
the rise of the Islamic State and
that of white nationalist terror-
ism, seen most recently in the
carnage in El
Paso, Tex.
“The paral-
lels are stun-
ning,” said Will
McCants, a
prominent expert in the field.
And they are growing more
notable with each new attack.
Experts say that the similar-
ities are far from a coincidence.
White nationalist terrorism is
following a progression eerily
similar to that of jihadism under
the leadership of the Islamic
State, in ways that do much to
explain why the attacks have
suddenly grown so frequent and
deadly.
In both, there is the apocalyp-
tic ideology that predicts — and
promises to hasten — a civiliza-
tional conflict that will consume
the world. There is theatrical,
indiscriminate violence that will
supposedly bring about this final
battle, but often does little more
than grant the killer a brief flash
of empowerment and win atten-
tion for the cause.
There are self-starter recruits
who, gathering in social media’s
dark corners, drive their own
radicalization. And for these
recruits, the official ideology may
serve simply as an outlet for
existing tendencies toward ha-
tred and violence.
Differences between white
nationalists and the Islamic State
remain vast. While Islamic State
leaders leveraged their followers’
zeal into a short-lived govern-
ment, the new white nationalism
has no formal leadership at all.
“I think a lot of people working
on online extremism saw this
coming,” said J.M. Berger, author
of the book “Extremism,” and a
fellow with VOX-Pol, a group that
studies online extremism, refer-
ring to the similarities between
white nationalism and the Is-
lamic State.
In retrospect, it is not hard to
see why.
The world-shaking infamy of
the Islamic State has made it a
natural model even — perhaps
especially — for extremists who
see Muslims as enemies.
A set of global changes, partic-
ularly the rise of social media,
has made it easy for any decen-
tralized terrorist cause to drift
toward ever-grander, and ever-
more nonsensical, violence.
“Structurally, it didn’t matter
whether those extremists were
jihadists or white nationalists,”
Mr. Berger said.
White nationalism in all forms
has been on the rise for some
years. Its violent fringe was all
but certain to rise as well.
The feedback loop of radical-
ization and violence, once trig-
gered, can take on a terrible
momentum all its own, with each
attack boosting the online radi-
calization and doomsday ideol-
ogy that, in turn, drive more
attacks.
The lessons are concerning. It
is nearly impossible to eradicate
a movement animated by ideas
and decentralized social net-
works. Nor is it easy to prevent
attacks when the perpetrators’
ideology makes nearly any tar-
get as good as the next, and
requires little more training or
guidance than opening a web
forum.
And global changes that
played a role in allowing the rise
of the Islamic State are only
accelerating, Mr. Berger warned
— changes like the proliferation
of social networks.
“When you open up a vast new
arena for communication, it’s a
vector for contagion,” he said.A New Kind of TerrorismThe nihilism that increasingly
defines global terrorism first
emerged in the sectarian caldron
of American-occupied Iraq.
A washed-up criminal from
Jordan, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi,
exploited the chaos brought bythe American-led invasion to
slaughter occupiers and Iraqi
Muslims alike, circulating videos
of his deeds.
Al Qaeda, for all its religious
claims, had, like most terror
groups, killed civilians in pursuit
of worldly goals like an American
withdrawal from the Middle
East.
But Mr. Zarqawi seemed driv-
en by sadism, a thirst for fame
and an apocalyptic ideology that
he is thought to have only
vaguely grasped.
Al Qaeda objected, fearing he
would alienate the Muslim world
and distract from jihadism’s
more concrete goals.
Mr. Zarqawi instead proved so
popular among jihadist recruits
that Al Qaeda let him fight under
its name. After his death, his
group re-emerged as the Islamic
State.
His group’s unlikely rise hinted
at a new approach to terrorism
— and sheds light on why white
nationalist terrorism is converg-
ing on similar beliefs and prac-
tices.
Most terrorists are not born
wishing to kill. They have to be
groomed. Where past terror
groups had appealed to the politi-
cal aspirations and hatreds of its
recruits, Mr. Zarqawi’s found
ways to activate a desire for
bloodshed itself.
The American-led invasion of
Iraq had seemed, for many Mid-
dle Easterners, to turn the world
upside down. Mr. Zarqawi andlater the Islamic State, instead of
promising to turn it right side up,
offered an explanation: The
world was rushing toward an
end-of-days battle between Mus-
lims and infidels.
In that world, Mr. McCants
wrote in 2015, “the apocalyptic
recruiting pitch makes more
sense.”
This gave the group justifica-
tion for attacks that otherwise
made little strategic sense, like
killing dozens of fellow Muslims
out shopping, which it said would
help usher in the apocalypse
foretold in ancient prophesy.
Because the attacks were
easier to carry out, almost any-
one could execute their own and
feel like a true soldier in the
glorious cause.
Jihadism retained its core
political agenda. But the things
that made the Islamic State’s
form of terrorism so infectious
also made it less strategically
rational.
With an ideology that said
anyone could kill for the move-
ment and that killing was its own
reward, much of the violence
took on a momentum of its own.
That, some scholars say, is
what appears to be happening
now with the extreme wings of
the white nationalist movement
rising globally.Seeing a Global Race WarThe ideological tracts, recruit-
ing pitches and radicalizationtales of the Islamic State during
its rise echo, almost word-for-
word, those of the white national-
ist terrorists of today.
For the latter, the world is said
to be careening toward a global
race war between whites and
nonwhites.
“The Camp of the Saints,” a
bizarre 1973 French novel that
has since become an unofficial
book of prophesy for many white
nationalists, describes a con-
certed effort by nonwhite for-
eigners to overwhelm and subju-
gate Europeans, who fight back
in a genocidal race war.
So-called manifestoes left by
the terrorist attackers at Christ-
church, New Zealand, and El
Paso, Tex., have warned of this
coming war too. They also say
their attacks were intended to
provoke more racial violence,
hastening the fight’s arrival.
Radicalization requires little
more than a community with
like-minded beliefs, said Maura
Conway, a terrorism scholar at
Dublin City University. While
white backlash to social and
demographic change is nothing
new, social media has allowed
whites receptive to the most
extreme version to find one
another.
Mr. Berger, in his research,
found that these deadly mes-
sages, which have had mixed
success in traditional propagan-
da channels in all but the most
dire historical moments, can
spread like wildfire on social
media.
He termed the message one of
“temporal acceleration” — the
promise that an adherent could
speed up time toward some
inevitable endpoint by commit-
ting violence. And the “apocalyp-
tic narratives,” he found, exploit
social media’s tendency to ampli-
fy whatever content is most
extreme.
As with the Islamic State’s
calls for mass murder, this world-
view has resonated among
young men, mostly loners, who
might have previously expressed
little ideological fervor or experi-
enced much hardship. It offered
them a way to belong and a
cause to participate in.
And, much like the Islamic
State had found, social media
gave white extremists a venue
on which to post videos of their
exploits, where they would go
viral, setting off the cycle again.
In 2015, Mr. Berger wrote that
the Islamic State had been “the
first group to employ these am-
plifying tactics on social media.”
But, he added, “it will not be the
last.”White Terrorism Shows ‘Stunning’ Parallels to Rise of Islamic State
An area of Raqqa, Syria. White nationalism is following a path similar to jihadism, experts say.IVOR PRICKETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESMAX FISHERTHE
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