micron surge, saw a major land war in Europe, a Supreme Court decision that reversed 50 years of precedent and more.

Today's guest helps us break down these stories and name our 2022 Story of the Year.

She's Dr. Evelyn Farkas this week on "Story of the Public Square."

(energetic orchestral music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- This week we're joined by the executive director of the McCain Institute, Dr. Evelyn Farkas.

Evelyn, thank you so much for being with us.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

It's always a stimulating conversation.

- Well, we are gonna spend a little time this year talking about 2022.

The good, the bad, and the ugly, as it were.

In 2022 began, it seems like a lifetime ago in a lot of respects, but it began with the Omicron surge in Covid and in the first three months of 2022, 160,000 Americans lost their lives to this pandemic.

Here we are now almost 12 months removed from the start of the year.

Where do you think we are as a society, as a country after three years of pandemic?

- Well, to some extent, of course, we're exhausted.

You and Wayne are sitting in the studio without your masks.

Most people are maskless, although there are some places where people still require masks, and people also take them as a precautionary measure because of course, the pandemic isn't really over.

We also have a raging flu right now, and on the horizon, if you talk to the experts or if you listen to them, they'll tell you that there are more potential pandemics coming down the road.

So, everyone is tired of pandemics, but the pandemics aren't tired of us.

- So the cost of the pandemic can be measured in many, many different ways, including the mental health toll, the loss of lives, the loss of of jobs and so forth.

How do you assess where we are now with the pandemic and in terms of how people are dealing with it?

I mean, the toll on every level has been just tremendous.

- Well, the emotional, mental toll, as you said, we don't even know the full scope of it.

It clearly has affected children, you know, who were supposed to be going to school.

It affected their mental health because of course, you're not just learning subject matter in schools, but you're also socializing and you're also building your confidence, and your sense of yourself as an individual, and of course, your community.

So, there has, for children, it's been difficult, and I think there's still an adjustment for many of them.

And that goes all the way through, all the way up to fully formed adults.

But I hear a lot about people's college age children, so young adults still grappling with the result of Covid for them for mental health reasons.

And then obviously, the employment situation is still unresolved.

I think we're kind of in a middle stage right now where people have a lot of hybrid employment options.

There are still people working from home, the corporations are still holding large office space.

So, it's unclear exactly where things will shake out in terms of the longer term impact of Covid on the workplace.

But you did ask me about mental health.

So, I'll just end by saying, you know, I don't think it's an accident that we have an uptick of violence of all kinds, and even the political rhetoric has become so heated.

It's overlaid and I think exacerbated by this pandemic.

- So, Evelyn, you mentioned the fact, the certainty that there will be another pandemic and that is beyond dispute.

Where does this country and perhaps even the globe stand in terms of preparing for the next one?

I think we could all agree that the history starting in late 2019 shows that the world was not prepared for Covid.

What about going forward for the next one?

Where do we stand and where should we stand, both domestically and abroad?

- Yeah, it's interesting, Wayne, because I was executive director of a commission on the prevention of WMD proliferation and terrorism back in 2008/2009, and we predicted that a bioterror strike or a bio incident, and this is essentially what Covid is, that it would be most likely, and that we were very unprepared.

And indeed, as you pointed out, it turns out we were unprepared.

The reality is we're somewhat better prepared now.

Of course, government has learned a lot about communicating with the public, about how to fight disinformation, albeit, you know, we haven't done a great job at that.

We still have a lot of disinformation that foreign and domestic actors are using, frankly, against our publics.

We learned, the government learned, of course, about the need to have prepared stocks.

That was something they had been warned to have on hand in order to deal with any kind of emergency, anthrax, all the way through, you know, a flu.

And so, we still don't see that level of preparedness.

I would be surprised if we had full stocked, you know, full stocks of PPE ready for another really bad lockdown pandemic.

We now know that we need that and hopefully we're working towards that.

But we are still not fully prepared.

Society, I think, is a little better prepared.

It would be less of a shock, but I do worry because of the impact of disinformation, which was something we didn't have around when we were contemplating this kind of pandemic or other kind of bio emergency in the past.

So, that is gonna complicate efforts going forward.

- Ev, I just wanna clarify one thing.

You're not saying that the Covid pandemic is an example of bioterrorism or a biological weapons attack, are you?

- No, I'm not.

- [Jim] Okay.

- No, I'm simply saying it's an example of a bio incident, if you will.

It's a pandemic.

So, it's something that the government not individual companies and individual families needs to manage.

And in that sense, it's similar to something like a kind of bio attack coming from some sort of terrorist organization.

- I thought that's what you were saying.

- I'm not comparing the two.

I'm sorry.

- Yeah.

I thought that's what you're saying.

I just didn't wanna leave that hanging.

Look.

- Yeah, yeah.

- One of the maybe underreported.

- Although I will say Jim, of course, there are those who think that, you know, conspiracy theorists who think that the Chinese government invented this to attack all of us.

- Yeah.

- Now it may have come indeed out of a Chinese lab.

I don't know if we'll ever know that, but I would be surprised if it was intentional.

- Great, great point.

Look, one of the maybe most underreported stories in the United States anyways, in the last year, was the uprising of Iranian women.

This was triggered by the death of a young Iranian woman in police custody.

It has led to weeks and now months of protests in Iran where people with great courage are standing up to a regime that really tries to keep women down, among others.

What do you think the state of that fight for freedom in Iran is?

And is there any hope that we might actually see progress in one of the world's most closed and repressive societies?

- Yeah, it's interesting, Jim, I was at the Halifax Security Forum in Canada this past weekend, and there were female leader activists from Iran or those living in the United States, rather, who were talking, Iranian Americans, Iranian Canadian leaders, who were talking about the fact that this should be referred to as a revolution.

That this current protest was not simply a protest, that it was the beginning of a revolution.

These women were adamant that they can bring down this regime, that they can bring down the current Iranian regime.

So, that I found to be very interesting, and they felt that it was going to endure, and that they wouldn't be cowed by the regime's threats, which, as you know, extend all the way to summary execution of anyone who is caught protesting, and certainly the leaders.

So, I do think it's a space to watch, certainly if they're saying that it's different.

And the other interesting point that they made was that in the past, when the Green Revolution occurred and President Obama was in the White House, he was sort of, I guess, convinced not to speak out very much or not to do much to assist that protest movement.

And since then, apparently he's on the record saying he regrets that decision.

So, it's interesting to see now what the protest movement, what the demonstrators, the revolutionaries are going to request of outside powers.

They've already said they want us to remove, to kick out essentially all Iranian government officials from embassies worldwide.

So, that is one step that they're urging right now, and has not yet been taken by our government or any other governments to my knowledge.

- So, Evelyn, tragically, gun violence and mass shootings continued as a development in this country over the past year.

We had very recently, just this week, in fact, the shootings in Colorado Springs, we had Uvalde, we had the mass shooting in Buffalo, and there were many other incidences as well.

In the wake of Uvalde, however, there was some reform, bipartisan reform addressing gun violence.

Talk about that and how that was possible and could further steps be possible with a bipartisan effort?

- Yeah, that was really interesting, Wayne, because we saw, all of a sudden, I mean, unsurprisingly of course, Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, who has long been very vocal on the need for gun safety legislation, gun reform legislation, he came out in the forefront of an effort to try to get some bipartisan legislation, whatever they could do to essentially protect the American people, even if it was minimal protection.

And he managed to get Senator John Cornyn from Texas, you know, kind of an unlikely ally to join him.

And then of course, other senators voted for the resulting legislation, which, you know, did make some progress.

It wasn't as, of course, it wasn't what Democrats wanted, it wasn't as broad reaching, but nonetheless, they found some allies.

And I think it was because the, you know, again, it was another shooting.

Perhaps because it was in Texas, in a red state involving children.

And you saw, you had weapons on scene.

The weapons were not used by the adults to rescue the children.

So the old argument about you have to have armed school police.

Well, the armed school police were there and they weren't able to protect those children.

So, I think we had a rare moment, but I actually hope that it was a turning point.

And when we later saw legislation that was passed in a bipartisan fashion with some Republican support, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act, and I believe there may have been something else that I'm forgetting right now.

It did give me some hope that, you know, there are pragmatists and they're listening to the American people.

And then I think, and I know you guys wanna touch briefly on the midterm elections, but I think that was what we learned from the midterm elections, that there's a pretty healthy segment of independents and Republicans who were tired of the anger and the finger pointing and the rhetoric.

They want change and they want Congress to act.

And one more thing tying Congress and the gun legislation together, or elections and the gun legislation together, it appears that nobody was punished for voting in favor of that gun legislation, which, you know, of course, the pro-gun lobbies are always saying, oh, you know, you're gonna pay at the ballot box if you vote with those gun control folks.

So, that was also an interesting data point, I think, for people who are watching the political winds.

- I think you were thinking of the infrastructure bill was the other bipartisan piece of legislation.

- That's right, that's right.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Ev, you mentioned the election.

One of the stories that, and one of the narratives that emerged over the course of the summer was this expectation of a red wave in the midterm elections.

And it never materialized.

Democrats as of this taping have a majority, and they may have even picked up a seat if Senator Warnock's able to hold onto his seat in Georgia.

They lost the house, but not as badly as a lot of the prognosticators expected late summer and early fall.

With everything that's happened in the last few years, do you think that there's a way forward for real bipartisanship to actually solve things in this country again?

- Yeah, it's kind of exciting, Jim, because first of all, the reason, I mean, the Democrats almost won the House, and one reason they lost it was, or at least one thing that added to the Republican vote tally was these four seats in New York that the Republicans won.

They turned my old district, New York 17th Congressional District, which was a hardy, you know, Democratic district for quite some time under Nita Lowey and then under Mondaire Jones.

It was redistricted.

The head of the DSCC, Sean Patrick Maloney, was defeated.

So, the New York gerrymander was an overreach.

A court went in and fixed it.

And as a result, frankly, the Republicans got more seats.

But I do think the fact that we have narrow, a narrow majority in the house, and of course, in the Senate, means that first of all, the Senate narrow majority is not as narrow as it appears.

We'll find out, of course, also on December 6th, as you mentioned in the Georgia runoff.

It means that the Senate will be able to be a little bit more, it'll have more power to pass legislation, which will put more pressure on the House.

And I think that the House, it'll be interesting to see whether Kevin McCarthy can even keep his majority, because it will be so narrow.

And then, you know, how he goes about using the power that he's gonna have.

Is he gonna listen to the fringe right and essentially, you know, allow gridlock and a lot of investigations of the administration, or is he gonna get pulled over to the pragmatic middle and is he gonna actually, you know, pass some legislation?

I think for the Republicans, if they don't do the latter, the Republicans in the House, then they will lose votes the next election.

- So Evelyn, another one of the major, major stories, of course, was the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

So here we are a few months after that, and it was clearly a factor in the elections.

Have we fully processed what that means for Americans and for American women in particular?

- No, Wayne, and I think the fight is going to the state level.

I mean, as you said, it was clearly an issue.

Gretchen Whitmer, who won another term as governor of Michigan, she made it a central point of her campaign and never wavered from that.

And she will pave the way, you know, in terms of legislation that needs to pass in states to ensure that women have the right to abortion.

And I think we will also see more action at the state level to protect other rights.

Certainly at the federal level, we already see in the Senate, it looks like they're going to be able to pass in the lame duck session, so before the next Congress, they will be able to pass some legislation protecting people's right to marry anyone they would like.

So, LGBTQ rights when it comes to marriage, and that is important.

Marriage equality is important.

It's something that we fought over politically, we agreed on, we thought it was settled, the law.

And then, now with this willingness on the part of the Supreme Court to overturn precedent, people of course have become quite concerned that other rights may be jeopardized.

So, we'll see that one also addressed, and there may be others.

- Ev, this has been a great conversation about some of the stories that have dominated the news in the last 12 months.

But this is the time in the show where we name the 2022 Story of the Year.

So beyond the pandemic, the year began with a buildup of Russian forces around Ukraine.

Then on February 24th, 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine seeking to topple the democratically elected government and annex the sovereign nation.

But the people of Ukraine would not be rolled over.

When an American official reportedly asked Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy if he wanted a flight out of Kyiv, President Zelenskyy reportedly said, and I'm quoting here, "I need ammunition, not a ride."

Before grizzly accounts of Russian war crimes began to emerge from Bucha, before Russian offenses were thwarted and then reversed, even before the war began, Russian president, Vladimir Putin rattled the nuclear saber.

Days after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, at his command, he put Russia's nuclear forces into a higher state of alert.

In April, after Germany provided tanks to Ukraine's war effort, Putin threatened anyone who might intervene in Ukraine with swift and decisive action, including the possible use of Russian nuclear arms.

As Russia's battlefield losses mounted late in the summer and into the autumn, the nuclear rhetoric from Russia escalated again.

And so we named the return of great power conflict and competition under the shadow of nuclear weapons the 2022 Story of the Year.

The narrative most likely to have a lasting impact on public life.

Evelyn, you've spent a lot of your professional life watching Russia and working in national security, and you've spoken publicly urging people not to be panicked by Putin's rhetoric, but can you speak to the norm-shattering behavior that threatening nuclear weapons use is?

- Yeah, I mean, it, Jim and Wayne, it's shocking to hear a head of state consistently, repeatedly threatening to use nuclear weapons.

We have heard some saber-rattling in the past coming out of Putin's administration, coming out of his diplomats.

For example, in the past we had some saber-rattling towards, I think, Denmark and the Netherlands, when the Russians didn't like something going their way, diplomatically.

But the fact that the head of state essentially is trying to put this kind of nuclear blackmail over the heads of the entire international system, you know, starting with the head of the UN, you know, to each individual state that could have a say in whether Ukraine prevails in this war of aggression Russia launched is shocking.

And you know, remember after World War II, we established the entire international order including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in that regime to ensure that we did not see a repeat of a global world war that ended with the use of nuclear weapons.

So, you know, Vladimir Putin, I don't believe that he will use nuclear weapons, because I think that there, first of all, there are people that would have to be working with him to actually detonate a weapon.

Second of all, I think he understands that, you know, the next day there would be conventional force used against him and his government and the units that had anything to do with a nuclear attack.

And third, he would be labeled an international pariah, including by those fence-sitting nations like India, and Indonesia, and many other countries.

- So Evelyn, I recently, just a few days ago, had lunch with an old friend, he's a journalist, an acclaimed journalist, now retired by the name of Joel Ross, and he was a combat veteran of Vietnam.

And he's a very thoughtful man.

He knows history very well.

And he said to me, "The last thing I ever expected to see in my lifetime was another land war in Europe."

Did this surprise you as much as it has him?

- It didn't surprise me, because Wayne, let's not forget, in 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine.

So, it's not a new war.

And when people say, you know, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2024, no Russia, or in 2022, Russia invaded in 2014, this is a new phase of the war.

It's a much more brutal, bloody phase of the war.

This phase of the war involves not just the nuclear saber-rattling, but horrendous human rights abuses, blatant horrendous human rights abuses by the Russian regime.

I mean, I can't even name them all, but to rattle off a few, you know, rapes in the hundreds of women, children and civilians being deliberately attacked in hospitals, in their homes.

This is of course, you know, the Russian tactics that we've seen, military tactics in Syria and before that, in Chechnya, in their own republic, we have seen hundreds, well, thousands of Ukrainian, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians be deported forcibly into Russia.

We've, of course, seen a refugee flow, but this war involves blatant attacks deliberately on civilians.

In addition to that, of course, the impact on food security, which has also been deliberate on the part of Russia.

You know, we've alleviated it somewhat, the international community has by brokering this grain deal to get the grains out of Ukraine through the Black Sea.

But nevertheless, it's Russian pressure that caused the prices to skyrocket and is causing the problems that we still have getting sufficient food to markets in Africa in particular, where already there were food security issues.

And then of course, you mentioned the nuclear security, and that's not just the saber-rattling, that's the fact that Putin has, you know, twice sent military in, or sent military into at least two nuclear facilities, Chernobyl in the north, where they since left.

Of course, those poor Russian soldiers who were there are probably dying a slow, but not too slow death.

And then of course, Zaporizhzhia, where the Russians have occupied it, they've turned it into a military base.

And it's an incredibly dangerous situation.

They powered it down more or less using Ukrainian hostage engineers, but there's still a huge danger that you could have a nuclear incident in the middle of Europe again because of the Russian action.

So this is a horrendous war on so many levels, Wayne.

- Evelyn, we've got a couple of minutes left here.

I wonder if you could just put into broad terms what's at stake in Ukraine?

- Yeah, I mean, a lot of people say we're helping Ukraine, you know, defeat Russia.

And that is one thing that we're doing there.

But we are helping defeat Vladimir Putin's attack on the international order.

If Vladimir Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will turn, he will attack Moldova and Georgia, either militarily or certainly politically.

He wants these areas.

He's put it on paper, he's stated it verbally.

He wants these countries under the control of the Russian Federation.

He wants to reconstitute kind of a new Russian empire.

It's insane in the 21st century that we're looking at that.

But that's his objective.

And if he gets his way with those countries, he will then turn to NATO.

He will attack NATO probably subtly.

But what he'll try to do is undermine Article 5 where we are all working as a collective alliance, because that's what he doesn't want.

He doesn't want any country that can stand up to his attempt to destroy the international order.

He wants a sphere of influence system where a big country like his can tell smaller countries like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, what they can do internally, which countries, which international organizations they can associate with externally.

And it's a very dangerous world, because we know, before we establish the post World War II order, we had World War I and World War II.

Since we established the post World War II order, we have yet to have a global war, because it puts a brake on large state competition.

It puts a brake on protectionism.

Those things that we know can lead to global war.

- Evelyn, we're almost out of time, but I have a very quick question.

Nobody can predict the future.

Do you have an educated guess on how this ends?

- [Jim] 30 Seconds up.

- Well, sure.

The war in Ukraine will end if we, and I believe we can do this, provide robust weapons to the Ukrainians.

They continue fighting through the winter.

They take advantage of the fact that the Russians are incredibly demoralized and weak militarily.

They push the Russians out of their territory and sue for peace.

That's the best way to win.

Vladimir Putin needs to be defeated militarily in Ukraine.

- Evelyn, we've gotta leave it there.

But thank you so much for being with us and for looking back at 2022.

She's Evelyn Farkas with the McCain Institute at Arizona State University.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on Facebook or visit pellcenter.org were you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(energetic orchestral music) (cheerful guitar music)