Obamacare is not the only one of his predecessor’s policies that President Trump is seeking to undo.

Consider the Asia “pivot.”

Mr. Trump has taken a number of steps that gut the core of former President Barack Obama’s strategy for adding economic and security muscle to America’s role in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade pact led by the United States that was the economic backbone of the “pivot?” Out.

Security partnerships have been rattled, with allies like South Korea and Japan being told they need to pay more for the security blanket that the US has been providing in the era of a rising China.

Moreover, the attempt to tether Asia more closely to the US-led international system of rules-based agreements and institutions has been undercut by the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord – an agreement with particularly strong relevance for developing Asian economies – ironically ceding US leadership to China.

“On Asia policy, Obama had his pivot – and Trump has his retreat,” says Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of State for South Asian affairs in the Clinton administration. “It’s a retreat from economic and regional leadership that has not gone unanswered, but which has already benefited the Chinese.”

This week, with bookend visits to the White House by two key Asian leaders – India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was there Monday, while South Korea’s newly elected President Moon Jae-in is scheduled there Thursday evening and Friday – the question arises: What replaces the Asia pivot?

Incomplete Asia teams in both the White House and State Department would make it difficult to formulate a comprehensive strategy even if the president had one in mind, many analysts point out. Yet the answer remains: The Trump administration has articulated no Asia strategy.

Analysts say the Trump policy is likely to be based more on bilateral relationships, an approach the president prefers over multilateral engagement. The Modi and Moon White House visits are just the most recent in a string of one-on-one meetings with Asian leaders, they point out.

Beyond that, Asia experts say there is rising evidence that the chief beneficiary of the current policy muddle is China – whose growing economic heft and regional aggressiveness the Asia pivot was designed in part to restrain.

And as China wins more broadly across Asia, these experts say, the loser will likely be not just American economic and security interests, but the values of democratic governance, human rights, and the rules-based international order the US has long sought to spread and deepen across Asia.

For allies, unanswered questions

“The Trump team does not yet have an Asia strategy. They’ve done a lot of piecemeal deconstruction, but have not yet come up with anything to replace the template handed off to them by the Obama administration,” says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who served on the National Security Council in the Obama White House.

That combination of “deconstructing” one Asia policy before formulating a new one has confused US allies in the region and left many unanswered questions – even as it has paved the way for China’s regional and indeed global ambitions, some say.

The Modi and Moon visits this week highlight the unsettling impact Trump’s lack of an Asia policy is having across the region.

Mr. Modi came looking for signs the US will continue to fortify its strategic relationship with India in the face of what some see as an increasingly hegemonic China. And indeed, some Trump aides were happy to let it filter out that the president intended Modi’s White House visit in part to send a message to China.

That was especially true, they added, after the president’s “disappointment” that China had not delivered on cutting the financial flows propping up the regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea and funding the North’s nuclear weapons program.

The two leaders discussed trade, but one of the more high-profile moments of Modi’s US visit was his meeting with the chief executives of more than 20 top technology and social media companies. Essentially Modi offered a sales pitch to invest and create jobs in India to the same companies Trump is pressing to get with the “America First” program and return jobs to the US.

Susan Walsh/AP

President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hug after making joint statements in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Monday.

Another hug for Trump?

For some, the awkwardness of trying to advance relations with a US administration that is dominated more by presidential personality than by presidential policy was captured in a hug the Indian prime minister attempted to give Trump.

“That attempt at a hug said so much, it demonstrated how these leaders are trying everything they can to figure out how to deal with Trump and get on his good side,” says Inderfurth, who is now an adjunct professor in South Asian affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

“I don’t think President Moon will attempt a hug, but we know the Koreans have been studying what works with this president,” he says.

South Korean officials say Mr. Moon and his aides have paid close attention to Trump’s meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, two foreign leaders’ encounters with the new American president widely considered to have been successes.

That has led South Korean officials to believe Moon can hit it off with Trump despite differences over North Korea and trade policies. And White House officials appear to confirm that hunch.

At a press briefing Wednesday on Moon’s visit, a senior White House official downplayed differences between the two leaders. On North Korea, the official noted that both Trump and Moon have talked about diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang once the North has significantly reduced the threat posed by its missiles and nuclear weapons – but increasing pressure on the North through sanctions and other means until then.

“That’s President Moon’s approach, and that’s President Trump’s approach,” the official said. He also said he anticipated a “friendly, frank discussion” with Moon concerning South Korea’s trade imbalance with the US.

Centrality of trade

For some foreign policy analysts, the trade issue stands at the center of why the Trump administration has yet to develop an Asia policy.

“We have to remember that in the minds of Trump’s electoral base, it’s Asia that represents the real challenge when it comes to jobs and America’s prosperity,” says Dr. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the public imagination, it’s China, India, South Korea, and countries of Southeast Asia that have been responsible for the off-shoring of American jobs.”

Obama’s response to that was to try to “burrow in” to the Asian economies to reap benefits for the American economy, he says. Trump’s very different approach “is to use protectionism to restore American jobs,” Kupchan adds, “but what that means for America’s role in Asia remains very blurry.”

Yet while the impact of a broad retreat from Asia may be unclear, Kupchan says he senses that a significant shift could come in where many Asian countries turn for leadership and guidance.

“Nations realize that we are in the midst of a historic shift in the global balance of power, they are watching to see who has the upper hand in the contest between the US and China,” he says, “and they will adjust their plans and turn their gaze accordingly.”

In such a big-power contest, Kupchan says the “key question” ultimately will be which country or set of countries will prevail and “push out a set of moral norms that guide not just Asia but global affairs.”

The global tide of “illiberal governance” – antidemocratic practices, disregard for political and human rights – is already rising, Kupchan says. Without the US vigorously promoting in Asia the set of values and norms it has built up over decades, “countries will turn to China on a variety of levels, and repressive regimes will get the sense they’re off the hook because nobody is calling them out.”

When 200 British Muslim imams declared earlier this month that they would refuse to say funeral prayers for the perpetrators of the recent terrorist attack near London Bridge, their statement marked a striking and unprecedented rejection of terrorism.

“We don’t take this matter very lightly,” says Qari Asim, an imam in the northern city of Leeds who signed the declaration. “But … we believe that the terrorists should not be accepted in our community, [either] in life or in death. We are trying everything possible to deter people” from violence.

The move signaled a significant change of tack. For many years, the almost universal reaction among European Muslims to the rising tide of jihadi violence has been to disclaim any responsibility on the part of Islam and the Islamic community.

But the attacks in Manchester and London “have shaken the Muslim community [in Britain] very deeply,” says Ziauddin Sardar, a London-based scholar of Islamic history. Now, Muslim leaders are beginning to tentatively acknowledge that their communities cannot shrug off all liability for the recent spate of terrorist attacks across Western Europe.

“Our first task is to own up and acknowledge that these people emerge from the Islamic community,” says Mr. Sardar.

'It is not enough to condemn'

The imams’ decision not to bury the terrorists came after British Prime Minister Theresa May, speaking in the wake of a knife attack near London Bridge that killed eight people, said that there was “far too much tolerance of extremism in our country.”

But European Muslims, divided between many schools of thought and traditions, are unlikely to unite around a single approach to terrorism.

Demanding that Muslims address the scourge in the name of Islam “would imply that Muslims are potentially terrorists and we don’t accept that premise,” says Imran Shah, a board member of the Islamic Society of Denmark. “We will not accept orders from someone pointing his finger at us saying ‘this is your fault.’”

But British Communities Minister Sajid Javid, himself a Muslim, argued in a recent op-ed article in The Times that British Muslims bear a “unique burden” to tackle extremism. “It is not enough to condemn. Muslims must challenge, too,” he wrote. “We can no longer shy away from those difficult conversations.”

Naz Shah, a Labour party member of Parliament from Bradford in northern England, says that her Muslim constituents have overcome their reservations and that “they are having conversations about empowering communities” to face up to extremists. “We are talking about this amongst ourselves,” she adds.

But she rejects the idea that Muslims tolerate terrorism. The Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, had been reported to police by friends and neighbors on three separate occasions, she points out.

In France, too, the tone of the debate is changing, says Rachid Benzine, a member of a government commission studying imams’ education. “In the past people were saying that terrorism either had nothing to do with Islam, or everything to do with Islam,” and nothing to do with adolescent rootlessness, or Western policy in the Middle East, or social discrimination at home, or other contributing factors, he recalls.

Now, he says, “there is a recognition that jihadism is a product of both international problems and of the way Islam has been ideologized.”

The danger of radicalism

Though Muslim public intellectuals may think like that, many preachers in French neighborhood mosques “are hesitant to criticize” extremists “because they are afraid of stigmatizing the whole religion,” explains Mr. Benzine. “But there is no way around this; they have to do it.”

In Britain, Mr. Asim says, Muslim leaders are taking up those cudgels. “We used to ignore those verses” in the Koran that urge Muslims to kill non-Muslims – the ones that Islamic State preachers seize on – he says. “But we need to talk about them and explain to students that they are part of the Koran but that they do not apply today because they refer to a particular historical context that is not the same today.”

But a knowledge of Islam is not enough to combat extremism, suggests Dounia Bouzar, founder of the first counter-radicalization program approved by the French government. Imams are not trained to spot the warning signs, she worries, and they may in fact be the least well placed to help someone in the process of being radicalized.

“The first thing jihadi recruiters do is cut a young man off from his mosque and his community, so that they are his only interlocutors,” Ms. Bouzar says. “It makes him easier to brainwash.”

Bouzar is trying to spur debate among French Muslims about the growing role that quietist, non-violent Salafists play in Muslim society. Though they reject jihad, they way they spurn music, art, sport, and human government, forcing adherents to choose between God and the world, cuts them off from the rest of society, she says.

Across the English Channel, Sara Khan, founder of the anti-extremist Inspire movement, has reached similar conclusions. 
All extremism that promotes hatred of the other, she says, "even non-violent forms, has the potential to create mood music for terrorism."

Muslim and non-Muslim society “has chosen to be tolerant of intolerance,” Ms. Khan argues. “We need a sea change in attitudes,” she says. “We need to be upfront and honest in the Muslim community about violent and nonviolent extremists.”

Recent years have seen a growth in local Muslim groups ready to challenge extremists, she says, “but they are still in the minority, and people involved in counter-radicalization are called government stooges.”

'False news won't be combated with silence'

There is certainly a good deal of resentment among ordinary British Muslims about the government’s anti-terror strategy, known as Prevent, which legally obliges citizens to report any suspicions they may have about their neighbors.

“It turns people against each other,” complains Ms. Shah, “instead of encouraging them to have braver conversations” about how to curb terrorism.

At the Makkah mosque in Leeds, Imam Asim believes “it is absolutely fair to ask people to report” their suspicions. “Nobody wants [extremists] amongst us,” he says. They “are abusing our faith. No one wants to lose a young member of the community, and each attack gives rise to anti-Islamic hatred.”

Islamophobia is a growing problem in Britain. Anti-Muslim attacks have risen nearly fourfold since 2013, and 10 days ago a man drove his van into worshipers emerging from Ramadan prayers at Finsbury Park mosque, killing one of them.

“We must accept that Islamophobia is used by extremists to fan their narrative,” says Ms. Shah. “We can condemn [jihadi attacks] till we are blue in the face, but in the end it’s about … seeing that they are a threat to us.”

In Copenhagen, Mr. Shah agrees. “The false news that is being spread around needs to be combated,” he says. “And it won’t be combated with silence.”

• Courtney Traub in London and Sara Miller Llana in Copenhagen contributed reporting to this article.

Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

Residents wait to fill their containers with water in a field in Latur, India, April 17, 2016.

Sowbhagyamma wears her husband’s checked shirt on top of her sari. Tying a towel to her head so that it fully covers her thick black hair, she plunges into a large swamp of weeds.

“This is dirty work. I want to cover my body as much as possible,” she explains.

Sowbhagyamma is one of dozens of women working under the scorching sun every day to clear weeds, mud, and pebbles from a 6.5-acre plot in the Mandya District of southern Karnataka state, India. 

“Only older people in this village remember that this used to be a lake,” says Shankrappa Gowda, the contractor for project.  

Three thousand women are enrolled in the effort to revive lakes, ponds, and irrigation tanks in 31 villages across the district – crucial work in a region facing drought for the third year in a row, the worst in decades. Today, the lakes are just dry, empty beds. But cleared of the silt that’s accumulated over the years, the lakes will store more rainwater, they hope – when it rains again.

India relies on two monsoons: the southwestern and the northeastern. Neither produced much rain last year, leading to a severe water crisis in India’s southern states – a region home to more than 150 million people. In April, the local government announced that water would be provided only for drinking purposes. Reservoirs in the region’s five states had just 8 percent of their total storage capacity in early June, according to a report from the Central Water Commission. In Karnataka this spring, all irrigation tanks in several districts went completely dry.

Southern India relies heavily on agriculture for employment, and its states are large cultivators of rice, a staple grain. Now, thousands of acres have been left waterless. In just over a year, more than 500 farmers' suicides have been attributed to drought-related woes.

It's a problem that touches almost everyone. But “when the farm community is affected, it is always the women who get their hands dirty to get work done,” says Sowbhagyamma. 

'We have to do something and do it fast'

The women in Mandya decided to revive age-old methods of water storage, like desilting lakes and ponds, to replenish groundwater and ensure water for irrigation. On any given day, about 30 women take to the waterbeds, now dry, using spades and shovels to dig up silt and mud. Shovels full, they trek about 200 feet to deposit it, then return – back and forth under the sun, all day. In about a month, they will have created a depression the size of a soccer field: a new pond in which rainwater can accumulate.

It all started with one woman: Chandramma, of the Kalaburagi district, who purposefully strode into a weed-covered area last October to clean it. “People thought she was mad,” says KS Vimala, secretary of the Janawadi Mahila Sanghatane, an organization working with the women to clean the lakes of Karnataka. But soon, people saw the value of what the 67-year-old woman was doing. The tract of land she cleared now holds enough water to serve the purposes of 120 neighboring households.

But it took a long time for people in other parts of the state to duplicate this experiment. It was only in March that a women’s team in Mandya district began to desilt lakes. Another began to do so in Kolar district, about four hours northeast, only in May.

In the past, the women in Mandya said, they never had to dig borewells or tubewells to obtain water. But in the past five years, almost all the houses in the village have needed to dig one. 

“That is when we realized we have to do something and do it fast,” says Ramgamma Bevanahalli, who is working on lake rejuvenation in Kolar. They drew inspiration from Chandramma. 

Mr. Gowda recruits anywhere between 50 and 200 women per day, who earn a daily wage of about $1.80. A government welfare scheme for manual labor, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREG), is paying for the women to rejuvenate these water bodies. But the women had to fight with the administration to ensure their work was covered under the program.

“They wanted to use the money from MNERGA for other infrastructure projects like road construction,” says Ms. Bevanahalli. “But, we insisted that they should pay for work related to water bodies. This is what we need the most,” she added.

Their next fight was to get the authorities to pay them on time – which some women say continues to be a battle.

On March 23, Irrigation Minister of Karnataka T B Jayachandra announced that 34 of the 176 districts in Karnataka have seen improvement in groundwater levels – thanks, in part, to desilting.

Women's work?

“It is important that the rejuvenation of water bodies benefit women,” says S. Vishwanath, an expert in water resources management who runs the Rainwater Club, an organization encouraging people to collect rainfall. “Instead of working on water bodies which help in the irrigation of lands, they should first work on those tanks that provide drinking water,” so women do not have to walk as many miles to fetch water, he says.

“The question to be asking is, ‘Where are the men in this?’ ” he adds, suggesting that they have left the collective problem for women to solve on their own.

Politicians and judges, too, have a role: for more than 60 years, Karnataka and the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu have fought legal battles over sharing water from the Kaveri River, the lifeblood of south India – battles that have reached the Supreme Court, and sometimes spark real violence, as protesters take to the streets over rulings to release or withhold more water.

But in Mandya, at least – more than 1,300 miles from the Supreme Court – the women are toiling away, one shovelful at a time. Temperatures reach up to 110 degrees in the summer months of March, April, and May in the Kaveri basin. But they continue dawn to dark, with a break only for lunch.

“We will do anything to save our crops,” said Sowbhagramma. 

Here are 10 new titles that the Monitor's book critics found to be good blends of entertainment and smarts.

1.  "The Essex Serpent," by Sarah Perry

Novelist Sarah Perry has already won raves in her native Britain for this engaging historical novel, set in late 19th-century England. Protagonist Cora, a wealthy young widow, leaves London for the coast and confronts the mystery of the Essex Serpent, a mythical 300-year-old beast now charged with the death of a young man. Cora begins to investigate and must ultimately decide whether science or faith is the driving force behind the creature’s reappearance.

2.  "Sea Power," by Adm. James Stavridis

James Stavridis, a retired US Navy officer and the first Navy officer to serve as Supreme Allied Commander for Global Operations at NATO, combines a lucid consideration of the geopolitics of the oceans with the compelling story of his own career. The result is a highly readable survey of naval power and its significance in the past, present, and future.

3.  "Benjamin Franklin," by Thomas S. Kidd

This new biography of Benjamin Franklin, subtitled “The Religious Life of a Founding Father,” focuses on questions about his religious beliefs. Although Franklin is most often portrayed as a deist, evangelical historian Thomas S. Kidd takes a deep dive into Franklin’s own writings and emerges with a much more nuanced and interesting take on Franklin’s relationship to faith, which, he argues, evolved considerably over time. Kidd’s biography makes a highly readable contribution to our understanding of Franklin and his worldview.

4.  "Adua," by Igiaba Scego
(translated by Jamie Richards)

When Adua – the protagonist of this moving novel by Italian journalist Igiaba Scego – emigrated from Somalia to Rome more than 40 years earlier, she was seeking freedom from both her authoritarian father (once an interpreter for the Mussolini regime) and an oppressive government. But now that her father has died and left her his estate, she must decide: Will she return to her homeland or remain in her adopted country with her young immigrant husband?

5.  "Golden Hill," by Francis Spufford

This debut historical novel set in colonial New York City mixes a bushel of rich historical detail with a peck of old-fashioned fun. The story centers on Richard Smith, a mysterious arrival from London carrying a large bill of credit. Smith rapidly gets himself into all kinds of trouble, but readers must wait as his true purpose for being in New York is slowly revealed. Politics, commerce, romance, and mystery all play a role in a novel that can best be defined as picaresque.

6.  "Toscanini," by Harvey Sachs

This biography, scheduled to coincide with the 150th birthday of Arturo Toscanini, is as energetic and robust as the great Italian conductor himself. Harvey Sachs, a faculty member of the Curtis Institute of Music, draws on the archives of La Scala, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic, as well as Toscanini’s own correspondence to create a thorough and highly engaging portrait of a remarkable musician, courageous anti-Fascist, and complex human being.

7.  "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness," by Arundhati Roy

In 1997, Arundhati Roy was awarded the Booker Prize for her stunning debut novel, “The God of Small Things.” Now, two decades later, her second novel is finally making its way to readers. The complex and ambitious plot set in Delhi centers on two women. One was born intersex and the other is a freedom fighter, but both are drawn to an abandoned infant. Questions of identity, gender, ethnicity, and religion make this a deep and richly satisfying read.

8.  "Huế 1968," by Mark Bowden

In February 1968, the Vietnam War reached a tragic turning point in the Battle of Hue. Veteran journalist Mark Bowden (author of “The Three Battles of Wanat,” among other titles) tells the story of the pivotal battle in a compelling narrative that draws on primary material from both sides of the conflict and advances contemporary understanding of the Vietnam War.

9.  "Be Free or Die," by Cate Lineberry

Robert Smalls may be the most remarkable American that you never heard about in history class. Journalist Cate Lineberry tells the story of Smalls’s rise from slave to Union Army hero to US congressman in her compelling and carefully researched biography. This is a story demanding a wider audience, and Lineberry, an Edgar and Anthony Awards nominee, is to be congratulated for bringing it to light.

10.  "The Windfall," by Diksha Basu

When Mr. Jha sells his website for millions, he and Mrs. Jha are able to leave their cramped East Delhi apartment for a new home in an upscale neighborhood. But moving up the social ladder does not necessarily create happiness, as the characters in Diksha Basu’s debut comedy-of-manners novel – including competitive neighbors and a son studying in New York – soon discover.

Reuters

Couples take part in a competition during a mass wedding of 64 doctoral student couples at Harbin Institute of Technology, in China June 4.

Good news: If young Americans follow a simple three-step formula they can greatly increase their chances of living the American dream as adults.

Bad news: It isn’t entirely clear whether the formula causes the good results or only reflects other causes. And promoting it won’t be a comfortable task for government when such personal life decisions are involved.

The “success sequence” argues that if youths do three things – graduate from high school, get a job, and wait until after marriage to have children – their chances of financial success will grow by leaps and bounds.

The concept received a boost from a recent study by the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, which concentrated on Step 3 of the formula: a marriage before a baby carriage.

It found that 95 percent of Americans 28 to 34 years old who married before having children were not poor compared with 72 percent who had children before marriage.

The study also found that the better results from the “success sequence” were seen across income and racial lines, though white youths and youths from higher-income households saw the best results. In low-income families, for example, 71 percent who married before having children reached at least the middle class by ages 28 to 34, compared with only 41 percent who had children first.

Among blacks, 76 percent who married before having children avoided poverty, while only 39 percent of those who had children first did so. The statistics for Hispanics showed a similar margin (81 percent if married first, 54 percent if had children born before marriage).

But is the “success sequence” a cause or an effect? For example, many of those who chose to marry first, before having children, may have strong religious beliefs that contribute to their success throughout their lives in a variety of ways.

Waiting to have children until after marriage may suggest a mature and practical approach to life. But where do youths acquire these skills? At home? In school? Through religious affiliations? What appropriate role might government play in promoting them?

The study also found that a majority (55 percent) of those ages 28 to 34 are having children before marriage – and thus losing out on the benefits of the “success sequence.”

The issues of human relationships – love, marriage, and child-bearing – are complex and intensely personal. It would be dangerous to oversimplify by concluding that the “success sequence” alone guarantees financial stability.

And it would be wrong as well to conclude that single or unwed parents aren’t deserving of support or that they are incapable of being wonderful parents.

Low-income and minority youths face higher hurdles than white and affluent youths in achieving the first two steps in the “success sequence” – completing high school and finding jobs. If the “success sequence” is going to work for all youths these problems must be addressed as well.

Yet youths should be made aware of the greater likelihood of success if they follow the "sequence." The old playground rhyme "first comes love / then comes marriage / then comes the baby in the baby carriage"  suggests that the "success sequence" actually has a long history in American life – and contains valuable advice.