Ahn Young-joon/AP

South Korean protesters pray during a rally to oppose a plan to deploy the advanced US missile defense system called Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, near the US Embassy in Seoul, Thursday, April 27, 2017. South Korea announced Wednesday that key parts of the missile defense system had been installed a day after North Korea showed off its military power.

For years, China has been pegged as the sole country with the heft and influence to dissuade North Korea from its pursuit of nuclear weapons – and of missiles capable of carrying those weapons to targets as far away as the United States.

Yet China is not the only country with a role to play. Indeed, dozens of countries in Asia and beyond have a hand in the lifeline that keeps the regime of Kim Jong-un afloat and perfecting its destabilizing weaponry.

Countries buy North Korean conventional arms, pay American dollars for the North’s raw materials, or allow their banks to keep dollars flowing into Pyongyang. Some even contract North Korean workers for what international rights organizations say amounts to nothing short of slave labor. (The contracts are with the Pyongyang government.)

The result is that it will take the entire village of countries that have trade and financial relations with Pyongyang to convincingly demonstrate to Mr. Kim that his only option for keeping his regime safe is to give up his nuclear weapons.

The key role of this international village may help explain the Trump administration’s focus on the United Nations Security Council this week as it labors to address the intensifying North Korean crisis.

After President Trump opened the week by inviting the 15-member Security Council to the White House Monday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will convene a special North Korea session in New York Friday with the foreign ministers of the five permanent and 10 rotating Security Council members.

The objective may be to put the world on notice, some experts in North Asia diplomacy say.

The message? The United States prefers diplomacy for addressing the growing threats posed by North Korea. But it’s going to take serious effort by all countries – large and small – with ties to Pyongyang if diplomacy is to make military intervention unnecessary.

“Maybe part of the message this administration is trying to send to the UN is that it’s long past time for the full international community to get behind the sanctions they’ve already said were warranted by North Korea’s behavior,” says Victor Cha, a former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council and now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Noting that the Security Council has already passed five resolutions requiring all UN member states to implement sanctions and other restraints on Pyongyang, Dr. Cha says compliance with existing measures could have a significant impact on the Kim regime’s actions.

Military action not ruled out

Another point to the Trump administration’s international focus may be to “pregame the Security Council” to act swiftly and forcefully when – virtually all experts say it is no longer a matter of “if” – North Korea conducts either its sixth nuclear test or another missile launch, Dr. Cha says. “The last resolution [following the North’s fifth nuclear test in September] took over two months to pass,” he says. “The message now will be, ‘No more foot-dragging.’”

Others point to the mixed messaging coming out of the White House – saber-rattling at North Korea one day, underscoring diplomacy the next – to say there can be no ruling out that the Trump administration may be preparing Americans and the world for the military action it may feel it has to take, especially with the display of a perfected North Korean ICBM.

“Sometimes diplomacy is the predecessor to a call to arms – but in this case the administration hasn’t been very clear about its intentions,” says Bruce Bennett, an expert in Northeast Asia military issues at the RAND Corp in Santa Monica, Calif. “At the very least, they’re putting pressure on North Korea by telling the world that the US is preparing to do something if the North doesn’t stop with their very serious provocations.”

Trump’s summoning of the entire US Senate to the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House for a North Korea briefing Wednesday, followed by a similar session for the House, prompted some speculation in Washington that Trump was preparing the ground in the event he feels compelled to order air strikes on the North. Trump critics, especially, say they worry the president was taking steps to “inform” Congress now so that he can claim having consulted Congress in the event of military action.

But military action inside North Korea is probably the least likely step the US would take, many experts say. “I really doubt we’re talking about air strikes,” Dr. Bennett says. Citing the arrival of the USS Carl Vinson naval strike group off the Korean Peninsula, he says he presumes the assignment was “more for defensive capabilities than for offensive capabilities.”

Indeed, Cha of CSIS notes that the US has long reserved the right to act defensively against North Korea’s provocations – for example, to shoot down a missile or explosive headed for sea or land where it could cause catastrophic harm. The Vinson, however, is not equipped to intercept ballistic missiles, although other US vessels stationed in Japan are.

White House briefings send tremors

The flurry of high-level briefings on North Korea has sent tremors through Washington and the UN – at the UN, some diplomats say it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the pre-Iraq-War consultations, while others say it’s simply a global power rightly informing the international community of an unacceptable security threat.

Some Washington experts say the rising sense of foreboding in advance of the administration’s briefings does not track accurately with what they understand will be the administration’s policy goals on North Korea.

“There’s this ‘Oh my God’ feeling building after they had the Security Council to the White House and all 100 senators were invited over, it could all be construed as pre-attack briefings,” says Bruce Klingner, a Northeast Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who frequently consults with members of Congress and White House Asia officials. “But it’s all a bit out of sync with what I’m hearing the policy going forward will be.”

Pay attention to Trump’s call to his Security Council visitors to impose tougher sanctions on North Korea, Dr. Klingner says. Moreover, note that administration officials continue even to leave the door open for a return to “diplomat–to-diplomat negotiations” with the North – once Pyongyang is ready to abide by international demands for denuclearization, he says.

But in order for diplomacy to work, the world will have to get serious about measures that threaten the one thing more important to Kim than his nukes, Klingner says, and that’s his regime.

That has to start with much more serious action by China, which is the source of up to 85 percent of trade with the North. But Klingner says it will require participation from all of North Korea’s partners – that village of enablers – if anything is to convince Kim.

'More shaming' of trade partners

Klingner notes that some countries have recently broken ties with Pyongyang – some out of fear of being barred from the US financial market, but others as a result of international pressures on moral grounds. Last year Angola cut all commercial ties with North Korea, for example.

“I think there has to be more shaming” of the countries that have considered their trade with the North to be legitimate, Klingner says. Noting that Kim reaps as much as $2 billion annually just from outsourcing “slave” laborers, according to a 2012 human rights report, he says countries including Poland, Qatar, Malaysia, and others that import the cheap labor should be put on notice.

“There needs to be more in the way of publicly calling out these countries,” he says, “We need to say, ‘Do you really want to associate your country with a regime that starves its own people, that commits crimes against humanity.… Is that who you want to be publicly linked to?”

Yet while drawing attention to Kim’s despotism may energize some in the international community to get tough on the North, some experts say what’s really likely to work is amplifying the grave and growing threats North Korea poses to international security.

That above all is what they see the Trump administration doing with its high-profile public steps this week on North Korea.

“I think a big part of this frankly is to send a message to the American public about the new dangers posed by North Korea’s ICBM project,” Cha says.

“When [Americans] do think of North Korea they tend to think it’s about some crazy guy with bad hair halfway across the world. So these really pretty extraordinary meetings,” he adds, “are partly aimed at saying, ‘This is serious.’”   

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (L) and others applaud as U.S. President Donald Trump presents the signed Memorandum on Aluminum Imports and Threats to National Security at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 27, 2017.

President Trump has learned plenty in his first 100 days in office. He has told us so.

Mr. Trump has learned that health-care reform and North Korea are complicated, that NATO and the Export-Import Bank are worth preserving after all, and that China, in fact, is not manipulating its currency. He’s also learned the enormous unilateral power American presidents enjoy as commander in chief – though he hasn't fully tested the limits of that power, or experienced the consequences of doing so.

But the education of Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, is about so much more than learning the vast array of issues that cross his desk in the Oval Office – and rethinking some positions along the way. It’s about discovering that running a business and being president of the United States are dramatically different enterprises. And that campaigning isn’t the same as governing, even as he does both simultaneously.

Still, if there’s one point about Trump that both supporters and critics agree on, it’s that he’s a listener. He’s not a reader or a details guy. “I’m an intuitive person,” he has said. As president, that intuition is informed by exposing himself to differing views, both among his famously clashing advisers, in his cable-news viewing, and in his dealings with Congress.

“I’ve had long discussions with the president in the Oval Office,” says Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, who, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is a central player in enacting Trump’s agenda. “He listens.”

Trump is clearly learning something, says Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

“The question is whether he’s learning enough things quickly enough,” says Mr. Schnur, who served as communications director for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.

Beyond the froth of headlines, deeper truths

The firing of Michael Flynn as national security adviser and his replacement with H.R. McMaster represents progress in the latter’s “more conventional and less disruptive approach to security issues,” Schnur says. “The influence of people like [economic adviser] Gary Cohn demonstrates the same type of realization, that you can change Washington in some ways, but not in every way all at once.”

Indeed, some Trump skeptics on the Republican side have expressed relief that, over time, the president has amassed a team that includes respected figures from the world of national security and finance, and has declined to name some of the campaign gadflies (think Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich) to formal positions in the administration.

For anti-Trump forces, the president’s loose, unorthodox style has made him hard to counter, especially amid the daily barrage of tweets and pivots. One day he’s ready to terminate NAFTA – the agreement that governs the $3.5 billion in daily trade among the US, Mexico, and Canada – and the next, he’s dialing back to a less-disruptive “renegotiation.”

But beneath the froth of daily news coverage, there are deeper truths that have dominated Trump’s first 100 days in office: Foremost is the grand political science experiment of having a political novice in the Oval Office, surrounded by an inner circle of advisers who are also new to governing. It has been a bungee jump for everyone – Congress, the political parties, world leaders, and the American people.

Also central is Trump’s decision to start campaigning for reelection essentially from Day One of his presidency. Trump filed for the 2020 election on Inauguration Day of 2017, a move he says was not a “formal announcement of candidacy,” but he has in fact been holding campaign events. His rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Saturday night – counter-programming to the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner – is being organized by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc, not the White House.

All presidential actions have a political dimension, but Trump’s manifestation of that is unique.

“He is the first president in our history who did not believe that it was necessary to expand his base of support in order to succeed,” says Schnur. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he’d rather be more popular than he is, but I suspect Trump believes he probably couldn’t unify the country even if he wanted to.”

Consider the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. Trump is the least popular president in modern history at this stage in office, at 42 percent job approval, and yet 96 percent of those who say they voted for him last November say they’d vote for him again today. The poll also indicates the possibility that Trump could win the popular vote – which he did not get last November – if a rerun of the 2016 election were held today. For those tired of the intense polarization gripping Washington, these results do not bode well.

Why it's hard for CEOs to run democracies

Another unique dimension of the Trump presidency is his background in business. There’s a longstanding trope that a businessman could do better in governing the country than a career politician, and Trump, in theory, provides an opportunity to test that proposition.

The test has only begun, but Gautam Mukunda, a professor at Harvard Business School, offers some early caveats.

“No doubt there is some overlap in the skills required to be president and the skills it takes to be a really good CEO,” Mr. Mukunda says. “Large organizations, even businesses and government ones, do have some commonalities.”

But there’s a fundamental difference between a business and a government. “From the very simplest thing, most corporate CEOs have a power and control over their organization that’s a lot more akin to an absolute dictator than it is to the president of the United States,” he says.  

The goal of a business is to make a profit, whereas the goals of government are much more contentious, he adds. “Should the United States government guarantee health insurance to all American citizens or not? That is a matter of great debate. The question of how we should do that is secondary to the question of if we should do that.”

Then there’s Trump himself – and his particular way of doing business. Trump is known for being litigious, and for constantly trying to get a better deal, even after a deal has been signed. When a deal falls apart, he can move on to another deal, with another set of people.

“His entire career he has played in a series of one-shot games,” says Mukunda. As president, “he’s still handling every interaction like they’re one-shot interactions. So he can get into a fight with the prime minister of Australia… but he can’t go elsewhere for a better deal. Australia’s not going away.”

Ever the performer

Author Gwenda Blair has interviewed and interacted with Trump many times in her work on a biography of the businessman and reality TV performer, long before he announced for president.

Today, nothing about Trump’s presidency surprises her.

“It really is the same MO that we saw in his career up until the campaign, then throughout the whole campaign,” says Ms. Blair. “He’s a performer: Always keep people distracted, keep changing the subject. Really, he has spent 40 years honing his ability to keep all the attention on him, and it still works.”

Blair calls him the framer-in-chief. “He keeps framing what success means,” she says. “He ran on the idea that he would have the most successful first 100 days ever.”

Every new president makes mistakes, and goes through a learning curve.  Trump’s first 100 days have been tougher than the norm, however. Trump failed on his first pass at health-care reform, and executive orders targeting illegal immigrants are stuck in court. But in his press releases and public statements, he’s projecting an image of success.

“Undergirding everything, really, is the ongoing delegitimization of traditional news, of the primacy of facts, the importance of accuracy in replacing that with a kind of ever-shifting narrative that accepts contradictions, zig-zags, 180-degree pivots,” Blair says. “And on all of those things, there is no fixed point except him.”

The experiment has only just begun.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed reporting.

DADO RUVIC/REUTERS/FILE

Bida Smajlovic prays near the plaque that displays the names of those killed in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

Zeljko Tomasevic, a local farmer, stands in the early morning sunshine beside a cascading woodland stream as a simple water-driven grindstone transforms his wheat into flour.

“There is far too much politics in these parts,” he snorts. “That’s why I don’t care to follow them too closely. All that matters to me is being able to make a living.”

In this bucolic corner of northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mr. Tomasevic can still afford to be indifferent to international affairs. But perhaps not for much longer. Almost two decades after the guns of war fell silent in the Balkans, marking the end of Yugoslavia’s breakup, renewed tensions are bubbling up, threatening a carefully calibrated order that has yielded an increasingly brittle stability.

“The Balkans are boiling again,” as Muslim, Croatian, and Serbian nationalist politicians stir a bitter soup of ethnic resentment and social grievances, warns Srecko Latal, founder of Social Overview Service (SOS), a think tank based in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. 

The region’s future, he adds, hangs in the balance. Will Europe and the United States notice in time?

The Trump administration has not yet shown any particular interest in the region where US-led diplomacy ended the war in Bosnia and US-led airstrikes won the war in Kosovo at the end of the 20th century. But after several years of neglecting the region, the European Union now seems ready to try harder to bring countries like Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro into its relatively prosperous and peaceful bosom.

Not least because while Europe’s back was turned, outside powers such as Russia and Turkey began making political and business inroads, playing on their respective cultural and historical ties with Orthodox Slavs and Muslims.

The stakes are high for the EU. The western Balkans have become a geopolitical chessboard on which Europe is struggling to firmly establish its democratic political style and substance in the face of autocratic strongman models patterned on Moscow and Ankara, which have found ready adherents in the region.

The EU is increasingly alert to Russia’s moves to expand its sphere of influence. “Geopolitical issues are pulling the Balkans back into Europe’s focus,” says Dimitar Bechev, a Balkans expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The tide is turning and more attention is being paid.”

A quarter century after collapse

It’s about time, too. Trouble is breaking out all over.

A quarter-century ago, Yugoslavia broke apart in a violent spasm of civil wars that claimed about 140,000 lives and stoked ethnic hatreds that Europe thought it had left behind in 1945. Massacres and the threat of massacres sparked waves of ethnic cleansing that chased minorities from their homes.

Western diplomacy and military action put an end to the conflicts, and the EU then pledged to help the new nations born of war become members of the Union. Getting in shape for that status, the thinking went, would deepen democracy, ease ethnic tensions, and boost economic prosperity as governments swung into a Western orbit.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

But it has not worked out like that.

In tiny Montenegro, due to join NATO this year, prosecutors say they have mounting evidence that Russian agents were behind a failed coup attempt last October against the Western-leaning government.

In Macedonia, President Gjorge Ivanov is refusing to let the opposition form a government, though it is the only party with enough parliamentary votes to do so, because it has promised to improve the language rights of the Albanian minority. His refusal is stoking ethnic tensions.

In Kosovo, President Hashim Thaçi is trying an end run around the Constitution in a bid to form a national army dominated by ethnic Albanians, despite opposition from minority Serbs. Kosovo belonged to neighboring Serbia until the 1998-99 war.

In Bosnia, Muslim leaders are trying to get the International Court of Justice to revisit its 2007 ruling that cleared Serbia of genocide during the war. The president of the autonomous Bosnian-Serbian entity, meanwhile, is threatening to hold a referendum on independence, a step toward the breakup of the country created by the 1995 Dayton Agreement.

Tensions are rising as hopes fade that Western incentives, especially from the EU, would induce Balkan leaders to cooperate across ethnic lines, carry out economic reforms, and turn their countries into modern, democratic, functioning states.

The prospective prize for such behavior has always been membership in the EU. But the western Balkan nations’ chances of joining the EU now seem increasingly remote, and the attractions of the crisis-ridden Union less obvious. Its influence and credibility have suffered.

For the past several years, Europe has been distracted by its own internal problems – the euro currency crisis, the flood of refugees and migrants that poured into EU member states, and Britain’s pending departure from the Union.

Brussels has sometimes appeared to neglect its neighbors’ aspirations, and those neighbors are only too aware that public opinion within the EU has turned against the idea of letting new members join.

“Our goal to join the EU is not in question,” says retired Serbian diplomat Zoran Milivojevic, sipping a small cup of black coffee thick enough to stand a spoon in, as it is drunk in Belgrade, Serbia. “It’s the only way we can establish the rule of law and human rights. But it doesn’t depend on Serbia anymore; we’ll have to see how the EU’s enlargement policy develops.”

EU entry terms

Only Serbia and Montenegro have even begun negotiating their EU entry terms, and those talks could well continue for as long as 10 years, European diplomats say privately. Forty-one percent of Serbs don’t believe their country will ever join the Union, according to a recent opinion poll.

Critics claim that the EU sets bureaucratic and technical conditions on candidate countries, but ignores the state of their democracies. “Expectations that stable democracies would emerge from the EU accession process have not panned out,” says Florian Bieber, who teaches politics at the University of Graz in Austria.

That’s because Europe prizes stability above all else, according to the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group, an association of international experts on the region. “The result has been the rise of a regional ‘stabilitocracy,’ weak democracies with autocratically minded leaders, who govern through informal patronage networks,” argues a just-published report by the group. “The status of democracy is weak and declining.”

Though the region’s leaders pay lip service to EU membership as a goal, that is as far as it goes, suggests Predrag Kojovic, head of a reformist multiethnic party in Bosnia and a member of the Sarajevo regional council, a local government body. “If the rule of law applied, these guys would go to jail” for corruption, he says. “The leaders of the big, ethnically based parties have no incentive to get too close to the EU.”

Europe’s focus on stability explains why the West welcomed Aleksandar Vučić’s convincing victory in Serbia’s presidential polls in April without complaining about his role in stifling a free press or hampering civil society.

But the risk is that if any of the region’s autocrats found themselves in danger of losing power, “they would not hesitate to create instability by stoking ethnic tensions,” warns Dejan Anastasijevic, a veteran Serbian political observer.

That is just what is happening in Macedonia, where the constitutional crisis has an extra edge to it because Russia and the West have taken opposite sides. That sort of geopolitical standoff is complicating the region’s domestic politics more and more as Moscow seeks to stall Balkan countries’ tentative moves toward Western institutions such as the EU and NATO.

Russia is building its most visible ties with Serbia, playing up their cultural and religious affinities, giving Belgrade MIG fighter jets and tanks, and buying control of Serbia’s energy monopoly through Gazprom. The Russian oil and gas giant is active on the soft power front, too, sponsoring soccer team Red Star, for example, and paying for the religious mosaics that will decorate the dome of Belgrade’s long-unfinished Orthodox cathedral.

So warm is Russia’s embrace that 25 percent of Serbs believe Moscow is their country’s biggest aid donor, according to a recent poll, though in fact the EU’s donations of €2.7 billion ($2.86 million) over the past 15 years dwarf Russian gifts. But the EU enjoys little public popularity, and only 21 percent of respondents were aware of its generosity.

Balancing act

Mr. Vučić of Serbia, following in the footsteps of former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, is playing a delicate balancing act between East and West. Serbia refused to join Western sanctions against Moscow over its annexation of Crimea, but its Army last year conducted more than 10 times as many training maneuvers with Western forces as with Russian troops, according to the Defense Ministry.

Vučić told cheering supporters on election night that his election success “demonstrated that a large majority of Serbian citizens favors the continuation of the European path while maintaining close ties with China and Russia.”

Russia is also giving very public support to Milorad Dodik, president of Republika Srpska, the autonomous Serbian entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed him to Moscow shortly before the US put him on a sanctions blacklist for posing a threat to the Dayton Agreement and to the existence of the country.

Mr. Dodik has threatened to hold a referendum on independence for his Serb-dominated territory – a breakaway that observers say would almost inevitably lead to war. Whether he means it, though, is uncertain. He and Mr. Putin can throw a wrench in Bosnia’s complicated political works and render the state ineffectual more easily from inside Bosnia than from outside.

The limits of an ethnic lens

Edib introduces himself simply to a visitor to his small cheese shop in the mountains of central Bosnia – with just his first name and a beefy handshake.

Edib is a Bosnian Muslim who spent his working life as a mechanic, with a sideline in repairing the clocks on Croatian Roman Catholic church towers. Retired now, he has bought a flock of sheep that in summer graze on the Alpine pastures outside his window. In winter, when snow covers the grass, he trucks his animals to low-lying land in Republika Srpska, where he entrusts them to an Orthodox Serbian herder.

If Bosnia’s political leaders were as broad-minded, ethnically tolerant, and ecumenical as Edib, the country would be in a great deal better shape.

But they are not. Viewing every issue through an ethnic lens and seeking ethnic advantage from every decision, the Muslim, Croatian, and Serbian nationalist parties that share power in Bosnia have led the country into almost permanent deadlock.

Parliament passed only a handful of laws last year; the tripartite presidency has not met for two months; the nation has no national anthem because nobody can agree on the words. The three communities cannot agree, either, on how many people live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, so they could not validate a census. And the government cannot agree to enact economic reforms on which the International Monetary Fund is insisting in return for loans.

For the past 10 years, “there has been no progress, no new institutions, and some rollback,” laments Valentin Inzko, the high representative for Bosnia, whose job it is to oversee implementation of the Dayton Agreement. “Local leaders have failed,” he sighs, looking out over the steep and narrow valley in which Sarajevo sits.

Some contend that the Dayton framework, which froze but did not resolve ethnic disputes and used ethnic identity as an organizing principle, was bound to lead to this. “It would have taken political leaders with the qualities of Gandhi and Mandela to make it work,” says Valery Perry, an analyst with the Democratization Policy Council, an international group promoting liberal democracy.

In any event, says Mr. Latal of SOS, “nobody speaks on behalf of the nation. We see an increasing focus on Bosniak [Muslim], Croat, and Serb national interests.”

Similar trends are clear beyond Bosnia’s borders, says Milos Popovic, a researcher for the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy. “Nationalism and ethnic scapegoating is a cheap way to maintain your popularity,” he says. “And memories of war are very fresh.”

Only firm action can halt the slide, argues Mr. Inzko. “The international community should be more prescriptive and more robust,” he says.

Latal agrees, calling for a “stronger outside political presence and stronger diplomacy. The EU could change its policies relatively quickly,” he says. “I just hope they do not wait for fighting to break out to do so.”

A different time

But this is not 1914, or even 1991, the year that civil war tore Yugoslavia apart.

True, Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, warned in a recent interview with the Financial Times, “If we leave them alone ... all those countries, we will have war again.”

And the commissioner in charge of enlarging the Union, Johannes Hahn, told western Balkan leaders in March that “either the region as a whole picks up momentum and we generate a genuinely positive narrative, or we end up ... with a stream of bad news slamming the window [to EU membership] firmly shut.”

It is also true, as Mr. Milivojevic, the former Serbian diplomat, worries, that “ethnic questions are still open, and their mixture with economic and social problems is explosive.” Thirty-eight percent of Serbs fear war will break out in the Balkans in the next five years, according to a February poll.

At the same time, 74 percent of them said Serbia should not go to war to recover Kosovo, however dear to their hearts the province is. And only 6 percent said they would take up arms to defend fellow Serbs if they were suffering from an armed conflict in a neighboring country.

“War is not in the cards,” says Dr. Bechev, in North Carolina. “The status quo is fragile, but likely belligerents do not have the means to wage war, nor the international support, nor the finance, nor the armaments, nor the mental attitude.”

Even from Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska and a hotbed of resentment against Bosnian Muslims, the view is the same. The town is just getting by – a nondescript provincial center whose largest city-center building is the 19th-century headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian imperial governor. But poverty and the lack of prospects are driving thousands of young people abroad every year, and exhaustion and apathy prevail among those who stay, says local teacher Mladen Bubonjic. 

“People are too fed up with everything to want to fight,” he explains. “Maybe they’ll bark. But they won’t bite.” 

Noah Berger/AP

A conference worker passes a demo booth at Facebook's annual F8 developer conference April 18 in San Jose, Calif. )

Like thousands of Bay Area residents, software engineer Risha Mars skipped work on International Women’s Day to rally for women’s issues on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall.

Unlike many of her fellow protesters, Ms. Mars didn’t need to worry about taking off on a Wednesday afternoon; she was on paid leave.

“I didn’t feel pressured or guilty for leaving work,” she recalls. “I felt very lucky to be able to do that.”

About a month before the protest, Mars’s company – a San Francisco startup called Buoyant – joined a handful of others in announcing that it would provide additional paid time off for employees to participate in civic activities. The idea, says Buoyant chief executive William Morgan, is to support democracy by encouraging workers to take the time they need, including office hours, to engage in politics, volunteer work, and civic service.

“It’s a recognition of the fact that civic engagement is something that we should be doing not just as individuals but as a company,” he says. “I wanted to make it more clear that we could not be passive citizens in this world.”

The policy is drawing renewed attention in the wake of Facebook’s announcement that it would give its employees paid time off on May 1 to join nationwide protests against President Trump’s immigration policies. Critics say the policy could be construed as another way for left-leaning Silicon Valley to push an anti-conservative agenda. At a time of heightened political partisanship, they say, such a move could be detrimental to efforts to bridge the yawning gap between the political right and left.

But there’s also a sense among some that in such a polarized environment, any attempt to improve civic participation could strengthen democracy and should be celebrated.

“There’s nothing wrong – from a political, civic, and legal perspective – with facilitating citizens’ pursuit of their civic duty, as long as the company isn’t advocating how employees use that time,” says Justin Gest, assistant professor of public policy at George Mason University in Washington.

“In many places … civic engagement comes from people who have the leisure of time, money, and resources [to participate],” he adds. “To provide dedicated time for civic engagement levels the playing field.”

Newfound activism

Silicon Valley has made no secret of its opposition to parts of Trump’s agenda.

In January, Google executives spoke at a rally against the president’s order that banned people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the US. The company was among more than 120 others – including Facebook and Apple – to oppose the order. In February, Politico reported that a coalition of executives, activists, and engineers from across the Valley had teamed up to provide support to progressive candidates.

The spirit of activism is unusual for an industry that has traditionally held progressive views but avoided engaging in politics, says Alec Levenson, senior research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. This new advocacy, he says, aligns with two things: the coming-of-age of the Millennial generation, a cohort that values meaningful work and social consciousness; and Trump taking office.

“The amount of activism in Silicon Valley is breaking with historical norm,” Professor Levenson says. The civic engagement policy, he and others agree, is a step in the same direction. Where perspectives diverge is on the implications of this emerging activism.

'A chilling effect'

To Matthew Del Carlo, chair of the California Young Republican Federation, businesses have the right to shape their vacation policies however they want – whether that means giving employees time off to pursue their hobbies, take a trip, or rally for a cause.

The trouble, he says, comes when companies begin to suggest the kinds of causes their workers can and should support – something that Facebook appears to be doing by choosing May 1 as the day to support their employees' civic engagement.

“Would this have been permitted if people had wanted to protest against Obamacare?” says Del Carlo. “Will tech companies allow conservative thought and conservative protests to occur? [If not], it could have a really chilling effect on having a diverse environment.”

Others say the civic engagement policy smacks of liberal elitism.

“It suggests that, ‘Well, people have to work so they can’t be active in democracy.’ But the rest of us are working as well, and we don’t get paid to do it,” says Erik Fogg, co-author of “Wedged: How You Became a Tool of the Partisan Political Establishment, and How to Start Thinking for Yourself Again.” He believes either everyone should get paid time off or no one should.

“There’s a sense that it’s a benefit given to people who need it less than everyone else,” he adds.

But Levenson, the USC researcher, notes that governments in other developed nations already have policies that promote civic participation – like making election day a national holiday. It just so happens that Silicon Valley leans left, and so the causes its employees support are likely to be in the same vein, he says.

“Were the energy industry or military industrial complex to provide the same kind of civic leaves, the advocacy would lean elsewhere. And they are not inhibited from doing so,” Levenson says.

“The way democracy is envisioned, civic engagement is not a luxury but a duty,” he adds. “This policy is a privatization of what other countries are doing nationally.”

'Peace of mind'

The firms behind the new policy – which gives employees additional paid leave equal to the amount they already provide for vacation – say it’s not about advocating one agenda over another.

“We’re providing [our employees] a platform and opportunity – without professional consequences – to participate and express themselves in whatever way is going to make the most meaningful impact,” says Amna Pervez, director of recruiting at Fauna, the San Francisco software startup that first came up with the policy.

She distinguishes their approach from one that focuses a particular day to extend paid leave to its employees, as Facebook has done.

“It’s up to employees how” – and when – “they wish to exercise this,” Ms. Pervez says. “We trust them.”

Chris Anderson, who works remotely as Fauna’s director of developer experience, used the time the new policy afforded to complete a project he had spent two years working on: a “play street” for his neighborhood in Portland, Ore.

“Portland has a legacy of a bunch of roads that never got paved and are randomly spattered throughout the city,” he says. Mr. Anderson helped renovate one of those streets into a safe place for both kids and adults in his community. In April, he took several days to supervise the installation and spread the word about the project.

His company’s policy, Anderson says, “gave me peace of mind. I don’t have to second-guess myself. You feel free not to constrain your creativity just because it’s work hours.”

“I had not gone out of work for political reasons before. It felt good,” adds Mars at Buoyant. “[The policy] removes some of the mental barriers to being engaged.”

Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Kendrick Lamar performs at Coachella Music & Arts Festival on April 16 in Indio, Calif.

If you set out to make a playlist to express America’s social and political realities, which tracks would you pick? What Beyoncé song would you select? Would there be Kendrick Lamar or Toby Keith? Or both? Of course, you’d have throw in Lady Gaga and at least one song (or maybe the soundtrack) from “Hamilton,” right?

Every generation has a soundtrack, every movement an anthem. So, what’s the musical score for President Trump’s America, the Women’s March, the national political divide, and pressing questions about race, immigration, gender identity? Which hit songs convey our collective consciousness – and is that even still possible in an age of Spotify?

Few songs earn the status of anthem, capturing the essence of a popular sentiment in a few lyrics or the chorus. “There are these collective moments – maybe they are under four minutes – that a very deep well of feeling is tapped for a large number of people,” says Jeff Chang, a music writer and executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University in California. “People can project their own struggles into that chorus.”

Those moments include both turmoil and triumphs: The civil rights movement (cue Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin), the race to the moon (David Bowie and The Byrds), the Vietnam War (Buffalo Springfield and Edwin Starr), the cold war era (Elton John and Gil Scott-Heron), the collapse of the Berlin Wall (yes, David Hasselhoff), 9/11 (Brooks & Dunn and Billy Joel), hurricane Katrina (Lil Wayne and Rebirth Brass Band), the women’s movement (Lesley Gore and Katy Perry), and the gay rights movement (Gloria Gaynor and Lady Gaga).

“One of the great things about music is that it can tell you how people were feeling about a particular event,” says Jeff Dupre, a partner with the TV production company Show of Force, which coproduced the CNN series “Soundtracks: Songs that Defined History” that airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. EST until June 18. Over eight episodes, the show charts the transformative moments in US history since the 1960s through music, which often became a form of protest itself. “You hear a song and it can take you back to a very specific moment in time.”

'Music was the glue'

The series launched with a look at the role music played during civil rights marches in the 1960s, and how song helped propel the movement forward after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.  “Music was the glue that held everything together,” said Charles Neblett, a member of the Freedom Singers, a group featured in the series that sang many of the songs that reflected the black struggle at the time (songs like “This Little Light” and “Which Side are You On”). The episode also touches on the urban black struggle after desegregation in the 1970s through Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” and in 1980s with songs like Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” It concludes with the Black Lives Matter movement and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” which became an anthem for many protesters in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown. 

“We wanted to address these themes musically,” says Maro Chermayeff, a partner at Show of Force and coproducer of the series. The power of music is also its ability to transport listeners back to specific moment in time, she says. “You love a song because you love the memories that it brings up for you.”

Thursday’s episode takes viewers to the songs that followed the 9/11 attacks that emphasized patriotism and American resilience. In the episode, music producer Nile Rodgers talks about bringing together many of the emergency responders and police offers who were at the scene of the World Trade Center attack – along with lots of famous singers – to give new meaning to an old classic, “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge. The episode ends with “Empire State of Mind” by Jay Z and Alicia Keys, a song from 2009 that for many became the prevailing anthem that celebrate the post 9/11 spirit of New York.

From 'We Shall Overcome' to 'We gon' be all right'

While the CNN “Soundtracks” series deftly explores American history through its songbook, it also tells the story of just how dramatically popular music has changed. For instance, the civil rights episode began with song like “We Shall Overcome” and concludes with Mr. Lamar’s “Alright” from his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” While Black Lives Matter protesters chanted the chorus to Lamar’s rap – “We gon' be all right” –  in the streets of Ferguson, and elsewhere around the country, it couldn't be more different from the spirituals heard during the 1960s. Lamar's songs are gritty, forceful, and rife with explicit lyrics and violent references. 

Still, says Mr. Chang, author of "We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation," Lamar’s hip-hop lyrics stand out because they capture the collective feeling for so many young blacks in America. Lamar’s latest release, “DAMN,” is the No. 1 best selling album in the country, further underscoring the rapper’s influence on pop culture even though no track on the album has yet to break into Top 40 radio songs. Nor did tracks from Beyoncé’s video album “Lemonade,” which Chang called “her most incisive statement on politics that she’s ever made … I can’t imagine a better album for right now than ‘Lemonade.’ ”

Indeed, the way people consume music has changed dramatically. People listen differently – on iPhones, via Spotify and YouTube, through headphones – and there’s just so much music out there, too. Gone are the days when DJs establish the soundtrack for any given moment in time. In that way, “Soundtracks” may be as much about the history of America through music as it is a history of the way Americans collectively experienced music. “I am not sure we’ll ever recapture the fervor and the intensity of those songs [from the civil rights era],” says Larry Watson, a professor of ensembles at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. “I don’t think we’ll ever come back to those moments again.”

Songs of the 1960s

The songs of the 1960s contained both the power of cultural expression and offered a vehicle for social change, says Mr. Watson. “This period we are in now is clearly one of social disruption, but there’s no music. With what we’ve been through in the past six months, I think the airwaves would be flooded with songs that remind us of what a democracy is.” The music that dominates popular culture now, he says, “deals only with the waist down,” meaning that sex and violence dominate the lyrics of popular music. “But there’s nothing that deals with the waist up.”

Others say the anthem can live on, even in an era of greater diffusion in the music market.

Even though listening habits have changed and technology has disrupted the mass culture industry – the internet can serve up any kind of music in an instant – there will continue to be those songs that rise above the rest, says Chermayeff from Show of Force. “People really still are very empowered by these joint experiences that they have around music,” she says. “I still think that the communal experience wins out in the end.”

AP Photo

A man shouts at Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as she speaks during a town hall meeting with constituents April 17, 2017, in San Francisco .

In a recent skit on “Saturday Night Live,” two actors in a mock TV ad invite Americans to live in a new planned city called The Bubble. The glass-encased city is designed to be a “like-minded community of free thinkers – and no one else.”

“If you’re an open-minded person,” says the pitchman, “come here and close yourself off.”

A video of this skit might be useful to show before many public events in the United States these days, such as talks by controversial speakers at public universities or at town hall meetings with elected leaders. It points to a need for greater use of an essential quality in a democratic society: the ability to listen to others out of a shared desire to discover truth and to find common solutions.

By and large, civility and free speech remain the norm in academia and politics. But after a few incidents of violence on campuses to prevent a public talk and of politicians being shouted down, the forces of civility need to rise up.

Two recent examples make the case. In mid-April, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California was forced to deal with a heckler at a public forum in San Francisco. And on the conservative side, commentator Ann Coulter had to cancel a planned appearance at the University of California, Berkeley out of a concern over possible violence.

Free speech should not need a police detail.

Such incidents have forced many university presidents to remind students and faculty of the need for a diversity of ideas in learning and for civility during public talks, even on uncomfortable topics. And in March, the student government at Northwestern University became the first to pass a resolution in support of “viewpoint diversity” on campus.

In Congress, meanwhile, about 50 members of the freshman class in the House, both Republican and Democratic, signed a letter in February called “Commitment to Civility.” It aims to restore trust in Congress as well as head off hecklers who would disrupt public forums in which elected leaders take questions from constituents. The new members pledge to “strive at all times to maintain collegiality and the honor of the office.”

Both Congress and colleges are involved with great moral struggles, from racial inequality to national indebtedness. Yet there is a more primary struggle over the moral necessity to hear different views in public forums. In a free society, even free thinkers must grapple with those who oppose freedom of speech. No bubble exists to avoid that struggle.

[Editor's note: An earlier version of this editorial mischaracterized the public forum with Sen. Feinstein.]