Joshua Roberts/Reuters

In a bipartisan moment following the June 14 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R) and several others, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R) of Wisconsin, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D) of New York, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky, and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D) of California speak before the annual Congressional Baseball game at Nationals Park in Washington on June 15, 2017.

This story has been updated.

Last week, when Republican senators unveiled their revised health-care plan, reporters swamped Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, a crucial swing vote, pinning her against a wall just steps from the Capitol’s magnificent rotunda.

The moderate Mainer explained her objection to the new version’s deep cuts to Medicaid, and to the closed, partisan process in which the bill was crafted. Inching her way forward, reporters flowing along like flotsam and jetsam, she urged starting anew with a bipartisan, open approach – the way significant bills of the past were forged in Congress.

Asked why she thought that could work, given the poisonous partisanship of today and the midterm elections of 2018, Senator Collins answered: “Because I believe that the Democrats are going to be forced to come to the table … and because I have had numerous Democrats say to me that they want to work on a bill.”

Indeed, on Tuesday morning, the Senate Democratic leader, Charles Schumer of New York, took to the Senate floor to say that “the door is open right now, Republican leadership only needs to walk through it.” This, after Republican support for the GOP health-care plan collapsed on Monday evening, prompting majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky to announce a last-ditch effort at delayed repeal – an idea that also looked to be going nowhere.

The unraveling of the Republicans' go-it-alone approach to the Affordable Care Act could well end up involving Democrats in the search for a solution. But finding common ground between the parties could be just as difficult, if not more so.

On Tuesday, President Trump said he wanted Republicans to let Obamacare “fail,” so that Democrats would come to them. “We’re not going to own it,” he said. Democrats called that sabotage against Americans.

“I think bipartisanship is still possible, but it’s a harder goal than it’s been in a long time,” says Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections, which provides nonpartisan campaign analysis. A polarizing president, an unpopular GOP plan, and Democrats thinking Republicans will suffer in the next elections – those factors help explain why coming together could be very tough, he says.

How bipartisanship worked in the past

As lawmakers and historians point out, the way that Congress has passed big controversial policy in the past has been by coming together through the often slow and grinding legislative process known as “regular order” – committee hearings, debate, and amendments. That has produced bipartisan landmark legislation on everything from the civil rights laws of the 1960s to welfare reform under former President Bill Clinton and education reform under former President George W. Bush.

That’s the way the Founding Fathers designed it. Collins argues that the troubles of Obamacare, pushed through Congress without a single Republican vote, prove her point that it takes both parties to tackle big controversial issues.

But there has been tremendous turnover in Congress in recent years, with many new lawmakers inexperienced in this legislative history. They emerge from a polarized nation, which is reflected in a polarized Congress. 

And compromise has come to be viewed as a sign of weakness in the base of both parties, most acutely in the Republican tea party movement. Last month, Senator McConnell tried to rally his troops with the bludgeon of bipartisanship, threatening that if they did not unite over the health care, Republicans would have to work with Democrats to fix Obamacare’s collapsing individual insurance exchanges.

“I’m not sure that voters want bipartisanship,” Mr. Gonzales adds. “When voters say, ‘just work together and get something done,’ what they mean is, ‘Do what I want you to do and then have other people agree with my stance and we’ll call it bipartisanship,’ ” he said, adding that sometimes the media glorifies the idea when “that’s sometimes not the political realities of the constituencies that a lot of these members represent.”

Move to repeal also lacks support

As the day wore on Tuesday, Republicans seemed resigned that they do not have the support for even the fallback plan to revive the Obamacare repeal effort of 2015, which passed both Republican-controlled chambers but was vetoed by President Obama. That bill delayed repeal by two years so that lawmakers would have time to work out a replacement.

But the uncertainty of coming to an agreement on a replacement, or what an eventual replacement might look like, concerned several Republicans.

“As I have said before, I did not come to Washington to hurt people,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R) of West Virginia said in a statement Tuesday. "I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians.”

Senators Capito and Collins, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) of Alaska, said on Tuesday they opposed the effort at straight repeal with a delay – enough to kill Senator McConnell’s Plan B.

The majority leader told reporters he still plans to go ahead with the vote, which he now plans for next week. When asked about what happens when it fails, he said committee chairs and ranking minority members would likely hold hearings on the crisis to look for a way forward.

‘A freighted religious issue’

Republicans complain that Democrats only want to “throw money” at individual insurance marketplaces of Obamacare, which have seen premiums steeply rise and insurers pull out. They also charge that Democrats are not interested in reforming and controlling the cost of Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act and now covers 1 in 5 Americans.

But Democrats are already airing a number of ways to shore up Obamacare that they believe could gain GOP support – from ways to bring down the price of prescription drugs to “reinsurance,” which is reimbursement for insurance companies that have very high-cost participants in the insurance marketplaces.

“There are a number of things that are bipartisan that members have been talking about for years, but we have not had that door open,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) of Minnesota told reporters Tuesday.

“I’m hopeful that this is our moment in time,” says Senator Klobuchar, noting it appears Republicans don't have the votes to pass a delayed-repeal measure. “They get this vote over with.... And then we start.”

In a previously scheduled meeting, the moderate wings of both parties in the House – the New Democrats and the Tuesday Group – met together over lunch today on Capitol Hill.

“Health care is such a freighted religious issue for people that I don’t think a failure on the Senate side leads to next week kumbayas and bipartisan action,” New Democrats Chairman Jim Himes told Roll Call. “I think it’s much more likely on infrastructure, potentially on tax reform. But you got to start somewhere.”

Mikhail Aralov is part of the biggest political surprise of the year in Russia.

The 22-year-old student chef has been arrested twice in the past few months for taking part in unsanctioned protest rallies called by Russian opposition leader and aspiring presidential contender Alexei Navalny. Not only is Mr. Aralov unrepentant, he says he's ready to hit the streets again and again, until the Kremlin agrees to let Mr. Navalny run against Vladimir Putin in elections that are less than a year away.

Aralov was among tens of thousands, the bulk of them very young men and women, in dozens of Russian cities who answered Navalny's call to protest against official corruption on March 26. Hundreds were arrested, including Aralov. Even more came out on June 12, when Navalny controversially switched Moscow venues from a legally permitted downtown rallying point to the central Tverskaya street, where official celebrations of the Constitution Day holiday were taking place. Almost 1,000 of his youthful followers were arrested amid some of the worst police brutality in many years.

But the surprise is a complex and multi-layered one. Most of this new protest generation were kids when the last wave of opposition rallies – against alleged electoral fraud – rocked Moscow and other large cities 5 years ago. While some say they became politically aware around that time, their introduction to street protest is mostly associated with Navalny, who was just one of many opposition leaders back then, but now seems to be the last one standing.

Though Russian media tends to depict them as blind followers of the charismatic, internet-savvy, Pied Piper-like Navalny, a group of them interviewed recently revealed a startling degree of political sophistication, a diversity of views, and some sharp criticism of Navalny himself.

Aralov is broadly critical of the state of modern Russia. “In our country the population is called ‘the people,’ when in fact we are citizens. ‘The people’ need bread and circuses, but citizens need civil institutions,” he says. “We may not have totalitarianism in Russia, but there is still not democracy. It's a hallmark of a democracy that people who pay taxes should have some control over how the money is spent, but we have none at all....”

“There is no equality before the law. If I ever want to start my own business, and I do, it is going to be incredibly difficult,” Aralov adds. “I know perfectly well that if I violate any laws, I will be punished. It's inevitable. Yet people who are higher than me in the social order seem to get away with all sorts of violations.”

Dmitry Zabelin, who is just heading into university to study public-relations management, shares that sort of view. “I am tired of corruption, the state of human rights, and all the hypocrisy that you see every day. I'm very worried about how Putin is trying to restore the Soviet Union; Russia should be trying to become a Western country and part of the world.”

Fred Weir

(l. to r.) Dmitry Zabelin, Artyom Telunts, and Mikhail Aralov

“The main problem in this country isn't that we have falsified elections. If fair elections were held today, Putin would win,” adds Artyom Telunts, who is just graduating from high school this year. “People vote for Putin not because they like him so much but because they see no alternative. We need to show that there are alternatives, and that every person's opinion matters. We need alternatives to Navalny too, many different voices, but real, independent ones.”

New protesters

It's not a new thing in Russia for well-educated young people, just reaching the stage of awareness, to chafe at the authoritarianism, mass conformism, and stifling conservatism they perceive around them. The great writer Ivan Turgenev described a similar phenomenon in his ground-breaking novel “Fathers and Sons” more than a century and a half ago.

But most of today's young rebels have known only the Putin era, a time of relative prosperity, improving standards of education, freedom to travel, and exploding information technologies. Neither they, nor their putative leader Navalny, bear much resemblance to Soviet-era dissidents or even the 1990s liberals who dominated Russia's opposition landscape as recently as five years ago.

“We have been noticing the rise of youth participation in politics for a few years now,” says Alexandra Arkhipova, an expert with the Russian Academy of National Economy and State Service, which works directly for the presidential administration. “Very many of these new protesters say they are not supporters of Navalny; rather they say Navalny supports them. They can be very different kinds of people, but they have similar goals, mainly about simple democratic values and human rights. They are concerned about their future, which they don't feel is secure in this country. They tend to be well-educated, speak languages, have traveled and can compare.”

She points out that Russian schools have greatly increased the time devoted to the study of the country's constitution and legal system over the past five years.

“They read the constitution and see that many articles in it do not correspond with reality. Many of those young people arrested in recent months had copies of the constitution in their hands,” Ms. Arkhipova says. “This is something that has to be noticed.”

'Exciting and new'

Navalny, himself relatively young at 41, has flirted with liberalism, but also expressed nationalist ideas in his search for an opposition niche over the years. He is best known for his crusade against official corruption, which put him on the map and continues to be his staple political issue. His blog is one of the most widely followed in Russia. His electoral program is a very brief one, decried by critics as “populist,” that calls for an end to censorship, stimulation of small business and legal punishment for corrupt officials.

He has been convicted of embezzlement, which could legally block him from taking part in the elections. But Navalny was allowed to run for Moscow mayor in 2013, when a Kremlin stalwart needed a convincing opponent, and he stunned the establishment by taking almost a third of the votes.

For Aralov, who has joined Navalny's “pre-election” campaign which is focused on compelling the Kremlin to allow him a place on the presidential ballot, Navalny is the agent of change that Russia needs.

“Navalny is exciting and new. He's created an alternative program that can unite left and right against Putin,” says Aralov. “Navalny needs us, young people, to be his battering rams. We don't feel the pressure, because we don't have families, careers, all the concerns that make older people conform. The presidential election is everything now.”

Tactical support

Many liberals worry about Navalny's nationalist past and allegedly authoritarian inclinations, as well as a glaring penchant for provocation – on full display in his June 12 decision to send his youthful supporters to disrupt official celebrations on Moscow's Tverskaya Street. Oleg Kashin, a leading light of the liberal old guard, recently warned that Navalny's dominance of Russia's beleaguered opposition forces threatens to create “another Putin” even if he should somehow emerge victorious.

That's a concern shared by even some of the young people who support him.

“I worry about what is not in Navalny's program,” says Mr. Zabelin. “I don't know what is his position on Crimea, the war in Ukraine, or LGBT rights. His program is too short, and he seems to be hiding his views on some things.”

Nevertheless, Zabelin went to the illicit rally on Tverskaya, even though he thought it was a bad idea.

“I even got banned from Navalny's VKontakte community [Russian version of a Facebook group] for opposing the move,” he says. “Still, I went to the rally to show that I care about all these issues. There is no question that Navalny is a person who can organize something big. I respect that, even if I can't support his program.”

Mr. Telunts defends Navalny's refusal to hold the rally on Sakharov Prospekt, as licensed by authorities, and to unleash his young followers onto Tverskaya – where they were sure to get arrested en masse.

“Many people think it's boring to come to a permitted place and stand around,” he says. “The constitution says we have the right to express ourselves anywhere we want. Navalny made the authorities understand that he's not going to play their game.”

Many voices

Experts caution that these youths are not representative of the majority and, like the protest generation that fizzled out five years ago, they might move on to careers and families, and leave their radicalism behind.

“According to our polls, young people support the authorities even more than the population at large,” says Denis Volkov, a researcher at the Levada Center, Russia's only independent polling agency. “But, at the same time, the ratings of all official institutions are declining. Protest moods are growing in many sectors of the population. Navalny's ability to mobilize young people is remarkable, and that's his strong point. On the other hand, older voters think Navalny is too radical and his rallies are too dangerous. Older people not only don't come to his rallies, they don't support him as a politician. And that's his weak point.”

Telunts says supporting Navalny is a tactical choice, but he believes only fundamental political reform can save Russia in the long run.

“We don't need another strong leader,” he says. “This is a big, diverse country and one person can't speak for 140 million people. We need a strong parliament, one with many voices, many Navalny types, to make democracy secure.”

From the imposing ramparts of a newly constructed military base, fortified by rock-filled blast barriers and an armor-plated watchtower, Lebanese soldiers keep a careful eye on the adjacent border area with Syria, which until not long ago was home to Syrian rebel groups and extremist militants.

International attention on the effort to defeat the so-called Islamic State has focused on the set-piece battles in Mosul in northern Iraq, and now Raqqa, in eastern Syria, the capital of the brutal jihadist group’s self-declared “caliphate.”

But in a remote corner of northeastern Lebanon near the town of Arsal, an estimated 500 ISIS militants are bottled up in rugged barren mountains that straddle the Lebanon-Syria border, surrounded by Lebanese Army troops and fighters from the Shiite Hezbollah organization.

The army closely monitors ISIS movements with newly acquired aircraft, drones, and watchtowers, and barely a day passes without artillery bombardments of the group’s positions in these remote mountains. The daily attrition underlines that, in its small way, Lebanon, the world’s fifth largest per capita recipient of US military funding, is a fully committed member of the global anti-ISIS campaign.

For the army, that’s a long way to come from its status during Lebanon’s civil war and afterward, when it broke apart twice and was just one of several military and paramilitary forces in the country.

Much of its ability today to confront ISIS is owed to the backing of foreign countries, including Britain and especially the United States. Since 2005, the US has plowed more than $1.4 billion into the Lebanese Army, providing weapons, equipment, and training – and helping to significantly boost its capabilities.

But that assistance could soon dry up, as the State Department is proposing drastic funding cuts to Lebanon in its 2018 foreign aid budget, including a complete cessation of the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. In 2016, the FMF to Lebanon amounted to $85.9 million. The move portends a potentially tougher stance by the administration of President Trump against Lebanon in the months ahead and has sent alarm bells ringing in Beirut and among the Army’s supporters in Washington.

Counterbalance to Hezbollah

Initially, it was hoped that a stronger national army would act as a counterweight against Iran-backed Hezbollah. Officials in the Bush administration saw an opportunity to contain Iran by potentially weakening its Lebanese ally, while Lebanese political opponents of Hezbollah hoped a stronger army would shift the domestic power balance.

Nevertheless, despite the improvements to the Army in the past few years, the well-financed and battle-tested Hezbollah is the true military power in Lebanon. Yet if the initial ambition faltered, the conflict in neighboring Syria and the emergence of extremist groups like ISIS and Jabhat Fatah ash-Sham, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, has helped maintain the momentum in Washington for building a stronger Lebanese Army.

“The United States started heavily investing in the [Lebanese Army] after 2006 with the theory that if you built up Lebanon's national institutions, that would reduce the relative power – and the perceived need for – Hezbollah among Lebanon’s population,” says Andrew Exum, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense in the Obama administration.

While that theory did not pan out, Mr. Exum adds, “it doesn't mean it was a bad investment.”

“An unexpected benefit of the increased capacity of Lebanon's Army has been that the United States has had a valuable ally in the fight against groups like the Islamic State and Nusra. That’s why cutting support to the [Lebanese Army] is so strategically stupid,” he says.

The total US aid budget to Lebanon for 2018 has been slashed by more than 50 percent under the proposed cuts, and Washington’s contribution to the United Nations peacekeeping force operating in south Lebanon has been cut by some $70 million.

“This is a new approach by the administration. It’s all change for Lebanon. There’s a perfect storm brewing against us,” says a Lebanese lawmaker.

Cuts across the board

Yet Lebanon is not alone. Washington analysts say significantly reducing the State Department budget is the overwhelming reason for the proposed cuts.

The Lebanese Army “is not the only foreign military seeing cuts in proposed US assistance, it’s across the board,” says David Schenker, director of the program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Noting that the administration slated Jordan for a 20 percent cut in its assistance, Mr. Schenker says the difference is that Jordan has strong support in Congress.

“Lebanon just doesn’t have that same kind of constituency,” he says.

Still, analysts and diplomats caution that the State Department’s draft budget is unlikely to be adopted by Congress as it stands, and that pushback from some quarters could see substantial changes to the final paper. The Pentagon backs the military support program to Lebanon, and members of Congress who have visited here recently have come away impressed with the Lebanese Army’s performance, diplomats and analysts say.

The Lebanese Army is set to receive two Super Tucano light attack aircraft in October with another two to follow in 2018 as well as the first batch of 32 M2 Bradley armored fighting vehicles, making Lebanon only the third country alongside the US and Saudi Arabia to field them.

But maintaining the equipment alone costs a substantial annual sum and requires a “steady level of funding” for both the Lebanese Army and supporting industries, notes Aram Nerguizian, senior fellow with the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington who writes frequently on the Lebanese military.

Critics of the Lebanese Army, meanwhile, say it cooperates too closely with Hezbollah and does nothing to impede the smuggling of weapons into the group’s arsenals in Lebanon nor stop Shiite fighters from crossing into Syria to fight rebels opposed to the Damascus regime. In March, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman described the Lebanese Army as a “subsidiary unit of Hezbollah.”

The reality is more complex, analysts say. The Lebanese Army and Hezbollah represent two military forces crammed into a tiny space that have learned to live with each other, not always comfortably.

Display of state authority

Two months ago, Hezbollah handed over a string of military outposts it had built in 2014 along the mountainous eastern border with Syria to protect nearby Shiite-populated villages from attack by Syria-based militants. The army has been improving the fortifications.

At the Nimrod base, named after the remains of a nearby Roman temple, an observation tower protected by layers of ballistic steel, bullet-proof glass, and anti-missile mesh netting allows the soldiers to watch over the nearby valleys, potential infiltration routes. The red, white, and green cedar tree flag of Lebanon is emblazoned on all four sides of the tower, a rare display of state authority over a remote and traditionally neglected stretch of the border.

The army is expected to take over the remaining border outposts manned by Hezbollah in the coming weeks, which will result in the Lebanese military establishing an uninterrupted presence along the entirety of Lebanon’s frontier with Syria for the first time since the country’s independence 73 years ago.

Such a feat would not have been possible without the support of the US, Britain, and other nations, which is why, says Mr. Nerguizian of CSIS, the US should continue backing the Lebanese Army.

“If the US is serious about having any kind of relationship with Lebanon, or any kind of clout,” he says, “it starts and ends with the [Lebanese Army].”

Tony Badran, a research fellow specializing in Lebanon and Syria at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, says that the US nevertheless has good reason to worry about the army’s ties to Hezbollah.

“There are still some people out there who buy the argument of Lebanon as a good partner – especially at [the Pentagon] – and some are still convinced by the obsolete notion of the Lebanese standing up to [Syrian President Bashar] Assad,” he says.

“That has now mostly shifted to, ‘Oh, we can benefit from standing them up against the jihadis,’ ” he adds, “and in the end that might save them from being zeroed out.”

WINEP’s Schenker, who from a post in the Pentagon from 2002-06 saw the first fruits of military assistance to Lebanon, says the Lebanese Army has profited from the US assistance – as has the US.

The army is "one of the few operating national institutions in the country,” he says. “They’ve used this money to improve their capabilities, and in some ways that has suited us.”

Staff writer Howard LaFranchi contributed from New York.

Tim Dominick/The State/MCT/Newscom/File

Benefactors John and Anne Rainey for statues of Camden's native sons, Larry Doby, the first African-American to integrate the American Baseball League, and financier Bernard Baruch, of Jewish ancestry and an adviser to presidents, pose for a photo in Camden, S.C., in 2013. Camden, given its history and the involvement of the late Mr. Rainey, will be among the first South Carolinian communities to participate in a new racial reconciliation program starting in the fall of 2017.

In this rural outpost, a pair of statues collectively called “Reconciliation” celebrate two natives and their heritage, Jewish financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and African-American baseball legend Larry Doby.

The town library features a bronze figurine of an African-American boy reading a Langston Hughes poem. And the police chief tells his officers they should acknowledge, in everyday conversations with black residents, policing’s legacy of racism — and find ways to apologize.

And yet even here in Camden, a town of 7,000 with a history of acceptance and openness, African-American resident Jacqueline Greene-Stuckey recalls a small white child pointing at her in the grocery store and asking, “Mommy, mommy is that the (n-word)?”

The South’s stubborn, persistent history of racial prejudice is usually not so brazenly on display. But the 2015 Charleston shooting, in which a white supremacist killed nine congregants at an African-American church, has created an opening for addressing its racial legacy head-on, says civil rights and political organizer Bud Ferillo.

In the wake of the mass shooting, he helped set up the South Carolina Collaborative for Race and Reconciliation at the University of South Carolina (USC), an initiative designed to encourage communities to address racism by building stronger alliances and friendships across racial lines. Camden, given its history, will be among the first communities in South Carolina to participate in the program, which debuts this fall.

“[South Carolina] is the home of American slavery. It was the major port of entry for 40 percent of slaves into the United States, nullification, states’ rights, secession, the act of secession, the start of the Civil War,” Mr. Ferillo says. “Now, in South Carolina, there’s a crack in the door, because of an interest on the part of community leaders to address this racial alienation that has persisted for so long. African Americans have been waiting for 350 years to have this conversation.”

‘The face of Camden’

Alfred Mae Drakeford, who recently became Camden’s first African-American mayor with a 24-vote win in November, recruited the black participants for the initiative; her predecessor, Tony Scully, recruited the white half of the group.

The initiative is focused around “welcome tables” that have even numbers of white and black participants who engage in exercises that build trust and foster deep, substantive dialogue. Camden’s welcome table will have 24 participants, guided by two facilitators.

Mayor Drakeford and two others, Ms. Greene-Stuckey and Connie Rouse, say in an interview in Drakeford’s small City Hall office that they are eager for the conversations to begin. 

There are specific issues they would like to address, such as how black children are treated in schools and ensuring African-Americans have a shot at civic leadership posts. But they also said they believe that a conversation on race is vital on its own.

While many, white and black, remain happily segregated in their view, the three said opportunities to address challenges when they arise as a unified community are sometimes lacking as African Americans are underrepresented on town boards and other leadership positions. Camden is about 35 percent black.

“In Camden, there’s no hatred, there’s not anger, there isn’t protest, but there is clearly two communities,” says Ms. Rouse, a writer and activist.

Drakeford says that as the only black member of the City Council for years, she didn’t want to be seen as the African-American community’s de facto voice. But that is often what happened.

“If I didn’t put it on the table, it wasn’t discussed,” Drakeford says.

Greene-Stuckey chimes in: “A lot of the time we say we’ve done it [transcended racial problems], and that’s the biggest lie I’ve ever heard.”

The three start talking about Drakeford’s historic election. The only black member of the City Council for years, she ran against a fellow councilwoman, and while former Mayor Scully didn’t endorse anyone formally in the election, many knew he had said that when he stepped down he would back the other candidate.

Scully wrote a column in a local publication that said both were good choices and had the character and experience to be mayor. He also wrote: “As I see it, the core question remains, which candidate do you want to serve as the voice and the face of Camden?”

With the race behind her, Drakeford is reluctant to talk about the incident, but gives a knowing smile. Her friend Ms. Greene-Stuckey chimes in, “We know exactly what he was saying,” she said, drawing attention to the “face” comment.

Tellingly, Drakeford has never discussed the issue with Scully, even though she considers him a friend.

Scully, who is in his 70s and had moved to Camden from Los Angeles in 2005, says he has thought deeply about racial issues throughout his career in theater and when he was mayor of Camden. When USC and Ferillo approached him about the race and reconciliation initiative, he made sure that the town embraced the effort.

At first, in response to a reporter’s questions about his letter, he expresses exasperation at the thought that his words could have been called racist. “I don’t have to participate in fighting and I’m just not going to do it if that’s what this [reconciliation initiative] is going to be. I just can’t,” he says. But then he adds, “That’s maybe why we need the welcome table if she perceives that as race.”

A model from Mississippi

This small example of how race is a factor in the eyes of some and not others is common in small communities, says Susan Glisson, who has guided USC’s program and also helped start the Mississippi initiative it is modeled after. That model, developed by the University of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, sprung out of former President Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race talks in the late ’90s. In 2004, the institute’s efforts helped pressure authorities to bring charges and convict Edgar Ray Killen, a notorious Ku Klux Klan murderer.

Since then, some victories have been high-profile, like the University of Mississippi’s public efforts to reconcile its racial history – part of a nationwide trend of universities confronting their past association with slavery. Others have been quiet, such as groups building trust to speak to each other across racial lines.

“You have to change hearts and minds … in small groups. It’s tedious, long term work,” says Ms. Glisson, who now runs a consulting firm called Sustainable Equity that provides the community-based model for racial reconciliation. Glisson uses civil rights-era community organizing principles and methods, among others, to foster substantial dialogue among the groups she works with. She has found over the years that establishing from the very beginning that shame isn’t productive helps lead groups to get to know one another and want to tackle problems.

“We say at the very outset that this not blaming or shaming anybody,” Glisson said. “Nobody alive today invented racism.”

Anna Jean Kaiser

Ghazal Baranbo and her husband Talal Altinawi, Syrian refugees now living in Brazil, pose in front of reviews at their restaurant, Talal Culinária Síria, in São Paulo.

On a Thursday morning in São Paulo, Ghazal Baranbo prepares for the lunch rush at her family’s restaurant. She carries out neatly organized trays of hummus, tabbouleh, falafel, and hindi kabab and arranges them in a buffet-style line. Her husband, Talal Altinawi, is speaking with their lawyer about the business.

At noon sharp, they’re slammed. The couple frenetically rearranges the dining room to accommodate the quick turnaround of lunch-break patrons while they take turns passing their 2-year-old daughter back and forth. They switch between using Arabic with each other and Portuguese with the costumers.

It looks like a well-choreographed dance, but four years ago Ms. Baranbo and Mr. Altinawi, refugees from Syria, could have never imagined they would own a successful Syrian restaurant in São Paulo, South America’s largest city. They used to live comfortably in a suburb of Damascus, where Altinawi was a mechanical engineer and Baranbo stayed at home with their two children. But as the civil war in Syria progressed and the Assad regime cracked down on civilians, it became too dangerous to stay.

Today, the couple is playing a part in the growing landscape of Syrian refugee-run restaurants popping up across São Paulo. Newly-arriving immigrants, who rarely have experience working in the restaurant industry, are turning to home-cooked Syrian food to make a living. It’s a phenomenon seen in this city for decades, with other waves of immigrants like Japanese, Lebanese, Cameroonians, and Armenians making a culinary foot-hold before them. The country’s open-door policy for refugees plays a big role in making this possible. And for Altinawi and Baranbo, it’s laid the groundwork for a city that’s already familiar with Middle Eastern food.

A wave of Middle Eastern immigrants in the 19^th  century helped make Syrian delicacies like esfiha (savory pastries) and quibe (spiced bulgur-wheat meatballs) staples in Brazil, and it’s estimated that 7 to 10 million Brazilians have Lebanese ancestry, or almost 5 percent of the population. Newly arrived Syrian refugees are capitalizing on Brazil’s appetite for their native cuisine, bringing back authenticity and flavor and introducing more unfamiliar dishes, ranging from shawarma to baklava.

“Immigrants influence our cuisine in São Paulo, but sometimes it can get kind of ‘Brazilian-ized,’ ” says Carolina Gushiken, a lunchtime-diner at Talal Culinária Síria. She works nearby and says she’s grateful that more recent immigrants like Altinawi and Baranbo are helping bring back some authenticity to Middle Eastern food.

An unexpected path

Most refugees or immigrants here never planned to open a restaurant.

Dr. Saeed Mourad, an orthopedic surgeon from Damascus, came to Brazil two years ago. Converting his degrees and qualifications to practice medicine in Brazil was nearly impossible, so his family turned to the food industry. At their restaurant, they sell baklava, kanafeh pasteries, and sesame-covered barazek cookies, alongside Syrian-style coffee with cardamom.

“I decided opening a Syrian restaurant would be a good idea because it’s a quick way to get income. And Brazilian people really like Middle Eastern food,” Dr. Mourad says.

Many other recently arrived Syrians have followed suit. There’s Muna Sabores e Memórias Arabes, opened by a Syrian woman who sells sweets and other traditional foods that she makes in her home, and Eyad Abuharb, who’s had great success selling fast food-style shawarma sandwiches at his restaurant, New Shawarma, near São Paulo’s downtown. Adam Hamwia, who opened Adoomy in the city’s trendy Vila Madalena neighborhood, specializes in fried chicken and gyro-style wraps.

For Altinawi and Baranbo, the food solution was not an obvious one. Back in Damascus, Altinawi was arrested in what was described to him as a name mix-up (they had the wrong Talal Altinawi), and spent more than 3 months in prison. Soon after getting out, his family loaded up their car and drove the 75 miles to neighboring Lebanon.

“We spent 10 months going from embassy to embassy in Beirut. Brazil was the only place that opened their doors to us,” Baranbo says. 

“When I looked down at my Brazilian visa, I thought to myself, ‘What is Brazil? I don’t know anything about this place,’ ” she says.

They arrived in São Paulo at the end of 2013 – but it was a rough start. Altinawi began working as an engineer but, after 10 months working there, his employer went under amid Brazil’s relentless recession. Baranbo sold baby clothes on the streets.

They threw a joint birthday party for their son and daughter and served homemade Syrian food. An NGO worker who helps refugees in Brazil encouraged them to start selling street food as a side gig.

“I’m an engineer, not a chef,” was Altinawi’s response, which he still stands by, despite the restaurant’s success.

They started at a street market and eventually landed a catering job at a mosque for the entire month of Ramadan. Their friend from the NGO set up a Facebook page for them and an account on a crowdfunding site, with the goal of raising 60,000 Reais ($20,000) to open a restaurant. About 1,000 locals generously donated. 

Then it was time to take on Brazil’s infamous bureaucracy.

“There are so many documents and so many government entities,” Altinawi says. “You need a lot of time and a lot of money for this process.”

But after five months dealing with the red tape, they opened Talal Culinária Síria in April 2016. 

Diverse food history

Brazil is a popular, if lesser-known, destination for refugees. That’s mostly due to its refugee policies, which are more lenient than the vetting processes in most countries in Europe and North America. There are more than 2,300 Syrian refugees here today, and nearly 10,000 refugees from all over the world. Most immigrants find themselves in São Paulo, the country’s largest city and economic hub.

Brazil has a rich tradition of receiving immigrants, from Arab immigrants coming from the then-Ottoman Empire, often fleeing religious persecution, to Japanese and European immigrants who came to work as laborers on coffee plantations in the early 1900s, or later fled from war. São Paulo is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan.

This is reflected in São Paulo’s world-renowned food scene – which trumps other Brazilian cities in its variety. 

“Without a doubt the Syrian refugees in Brazil are benefitting from the long history of Middle Eastern immigrants who’ve come to São Paulo and built up the tradition of Middle Eastern food here,” says Tamyris Roxo, a local São Paulo food blogger who studied gastronomy, history, and culture. Their country’s food provides “a strong link for them in Brazil.”

Middle Eastern food is so ubiquitous here that there’s even a fast-food restaurant called “Habib’s,” which sells esfihas, BBQ kaftas, and baba ghanoush, alongside cheeseburgers and pizza. Its logo is a winking man with a big grin wearing a fez.

“In other parts of Brazil you can’t find such diversity, and the people aren’t used to ‘exotic foods’ because they don’t have the same history as São Paulo, which has always received so many immigrants,” says Ms. Roxo, the food blogger. 

“São Paulo’s food scene has transformed over the years, and now it’s totally eclectic. I think that in a few years we’ll be like New York City, full of influences from all over the world.”

Reuters

Syrian children are seen playing amidst the rubble of damaged buildings in Deraa, Syria, July 15.

After six years of war, nearly 100,000 civilian casualties, and rising foreign intervention, Syria has a toehold on peace. A truce in southwest Syria, brokered on July 7 by Russia and the United States, has so far held up. While the silencing of guns may fail, it at least shows growing war fatigue and provides some hope for a reshaping of Syria by peaceful means.

Much of the fighting in Syria, which began with pro-democracy protests in 2011, is now driven by foreign powers. The US, for example, has tapped local forces to defeat Islamic State in the city of Raqqa. Iran seeks a land corridor to the Mediterranean Sea. Turkey wants to block a Kurdish state. But it is Russia, which has found it difficult to balance its many interests in the Middle East, that is driving this local truce between the forces of the Syrian regime and its opponents. 

Russia has discovered in Syria what the US had to learn in Iraq: Local allies are hardly stable partners if their source of legitimacy is mainly guns and not an inclusive and tolerant government. A solution for Syria’s long war lies ultimately in a reframing of the bonds of community, even if that requires a partition of the country along religious or ethnic lines.

The cease-fire, as well as ongoing talks in Geneva between the regime and the Syrian opposition, allows a small respite for Syrians to consider an alternative to armed conflict. It may also allow for civilians in the area to receive humanitarian aid.

Outside powers, such as Iran and Turkey, must recognize that military means alone cannot be the only way to seek an advantage or to defend one’s positions. Russia may have overplayed its hand in Syria and could be looking to cut a diplomatic deal. The truce might be a cornerstone for peace.