Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaks to reporters about the Niger operation during a briefing at the Pentagon, Monday, Oct. 23, 2017.

The tragic deaths of four US service members in an ambush in Niger have awoken Washington and US voters to the larger issue of American military deployments in Africa and the continued global nature of the nation’s struggle with Islamic extremist terrorism.

Even senior lawmakers seemed surprised by the size of the US presence in the region as outlined by the Pentagon in the incident’s wake. “I didn’t know there was a thousand troops in Niger,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee, in a Sunday broadcast interview.

Yet in the months to come that deployment may expand, or at least become more active. Pentagon officials say US counterterrorism efforts are likely to focus more on Africa now that the so-called Islamic State has been ousted from its de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. The strategy is to press Islamic extremist groups simultaneously, wherever they are, said Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Pentagon briefing Monday.

In Niger and surrounding areas, US Green Berets typically focus on providing training and security assistance for local forces. That includes intelligence and reconnaissance help. Was the Niger ambush related in any way to “mission creep,” with training aid morphing slowly into more concrete combat support for Nigerien troops? So far that’s not entirely clear.

“One positive thing that may come out of this tragedy is, at least temporarily, a little more congressional oversight, looking into what these missions are trying to accomplish and whether they are operating in terms of the US national interest,” says Laura Seay, an assistant professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, whose research centers on conflict and US foreign policy in central Africa.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Graham wasn’t the only top member taken aback by the fact that 800 US troops, according to the military, are in Niger, a landlocked nation surrounded by unstable neighbors with a military generally rated as “poor.” Surprise was bipartisan. Asked if he knew about the US presence there, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York on Sunday said, “No, I did not.”

But the deployment is far from secret. It is likely that Sens. Graham and Schumer were reacting to the scale of the troops, not their location. As General Dunford noted in his Monday appearance, the US has had troops in Niger, on and off, for 20 years.

The Pentagon today has about 6,000 troops scattered in 53 African nations, the Joint Chiefs chairman said. While that might seem large, given the scale of the mission and the size of the continent, it really isn’t, according to the Department of Defense. The 800 US troops in Niger work with 4,000 military personnel from France, the former colonial power in the region, and 35,000 local partners.

These forces face daunting challenges from Islamic extremists, human traffickers and other smugglers, and antigovernment militias from all sides, according to the most recent Worldwide Threat Assessment from the US Director of National Intelligence. US intelligence judges that the Sahel region – particularly Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger – was itself deeply affected by spillover instability from the fall of Libya in 2011, and a violent uprising in northern Mali in 2012.

In 2017 “[Al Qaeda] in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al-Murabitun, Ansar al-Din, and other violent extremist groups will continue attacking Western and local interests in the region,” Dan Coats, director of National Intelligence, told Congress last May.

AQIM has taken advantage of poverty and weak central governments to win local support in the Sahel region. The area’s vast plains and porous borders complicate counter-terrorism operations, writes Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck, a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Lebanon, in an analysis of Jihadism in the Sahel.

Kinship links further cement this relationship. Top AQIM leaders have spent a decade forming relationships and even intermarrying with locals.

“Today AQIM is rooted in the social and economic fabric of many Sahelian communities and tribes,” writes Dr. Ghanem-Yazbeck.

The Pentagon also believes that this is an area where ISIS has an aspiration to increase its presence in Africa. Dunford said that is something the US is watching carefully. It is premature to speak about increased troop levels or other expanded resources in the region, he added Monday.

“We are dealing with a global challenge,” said the nation’s top military commander.

That said, it wouldn’t be a matter of routine that the US suffers casualties in these operations, according to the Pentagon. It remains unclear exactly what happened Oct. 4 near the village of Tongo Tongo in western Niger, near the border with Mali.

Officials aren’t sure if the mission changed during the group’s visit to the village to meet local leaders, or if intelligence was faulty, or why one of the Green Berets, Sgt. La David Johnson, became separated from the main group.

As the ambush shows, the danger from these extremist groups is real, says Dr. Seay of Colby College.

“People in the area suffer greatly under these extremist groups,” she says.

But it is unclear if the presence of Green Berets at this meeting represents a type of mission creep, she says. In general, US operations in the Sahel and Africa generally are taking place under strategies put in place years ago, and directed under the auspices of a congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists passed in 2001.

A US pullout might be devastating to the area, given the relatively weak capabilities of Niger’s forces, Seay says. But is it in the US interest to continue a military presence in a place where unrest is at times driven by local political grievances as much as religious extremism?

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn’t.

“That is a discussion that is not happening,” she says.

A more direct US military role in the region involving use of preemptive force against groups judged to be extremists could be counterproductive, adds Jennifer G. Cooke, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The groups at issue are extremely fluid, she says. They arise out of local conflicts and competition as much as, if not more than, radical impulses and connections.

US bombs might thus make things worse. A recent United Nations study reached that conclusion, says Ms. Cooke.

“Military responses may be one of the key drivers of radicalization in a place that is extremely fragile and there are not a lot of economic opportunities,” she says. “There are a lot of other things the US could be doing.”

Correction: This article was updated to correct the number of local partners working with US and French troops in Niger.

J. Scott Applewhite/Reuters

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R) Tennessee pauses during a hearing on Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Senator Corker is locked in an escalating war of words with President Trump.

Donald Trump made his first visit as president to the Senate on Tuesday, trying to unite his party around tax reform at a lunch with Senate Republicans. Nothing unusual there. Presidents in the past have rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue to rally support for a top priority.

What dropped jaws was what came before and after the lunch – a remarkable public display of criticism and concern about the country under President Trump voiced by senators in his own party: Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee and Jeff Flake (R) of Arizona. The Arizonan announced Tuesday afternoon he will not seek reelection, laying out as a “matter of duty and conscience” his concerns about the president, his party, and the country.

Both men have been targets of searing tweets from Mr. Trump. Indeed the day began with a tweet assault on Senator Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who later attended the lunch. Corker had been on early-morning television, essentially telling Trump to let Congress work its will on taxes and butt out.

That touched off a twitter blast from Trump, taunting Corker that he “couldn't get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.” The senator recently announced he would not run for reelection. When CNN caught up with Corker, he unloaded on the president, accusing Trump of “constant non-truth telling,” saying he would not vote for him now, that he was no role model for children, and that the president would be most remembered for “the debasement of our nation.”

It was not their first duel, and intense feuds between presidents and members of their own party are not unique in history, says political historian Julian Zelizer, of Princeton University. Lyndon Johnson famously hated Robert Kennedy; George H.W. Bush battled with Newt Gingrich. 

The difference, says Professor Zelizer in an email, is the kind of rhetoric the current president uses, the apparently ad-hoc and very public ways in which he voices his scorn, “and the incredibly poor timing of doing this at the exact moment he needs support on the Hill.” 

Unlike other cases, “Trump has almost no legislative victory, incredibly thin support, and so the risks of his doing this are immense,” writes Zelizer.

That is not how many Republicans see it, however. 

Before Senator Flake’s stunning announcement, House and Senate Republican leaders batted away the reignited feud with Corker as a distraction that won’t affect the agenda at hand. Republican senators described Trump’s lunch as upbeat, with the president saying he had their back. He encouraged them on tax reform, deregulation, and said to keep working on health care, senators at the meeting said. Corker told reporters that the grenade tosses of the morning did not come up.

“There is a lot of noise out there,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said in response to a reporter’s question after the luncheon. But what Republicans “are concentrated on is the agenda of the American people.” He described “great cohesion” on getting taxes done before the end of the year.

Indeed, tax reform is the holy grail of the GOP, and its centrifugal forces can be felt in both houses.

'It's all nonsense.'

“Who cares?” asks John Feehery, commenting on the Trump-Corker outburst of the morning. Mr. Feehery, who was the spokesman to former Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois when he was speaker of the House during the presidency of George W. Bush, said it’s now well known that Trump likes to fight back and that tweets are irrelevant to the tax debate.

“The House will pass this thing. I don’t think Bob Corker will vote one way or the other given that the president insulted him. It’s all nonsense.” Indeed, Corker told the Monitor after the meeting that his vote will be independent of what the White House says. He has been a critic of a tax plan that would add to the national debt, which now tops $20 trillion. 

Despite his rocky relations with several GOP senators, the president has better relations with Republicans in the House, particularly with hardliners. In the past, they bucked House leaders, partially shutting down the government in 2013 over the budget and the Affordable Care Act, and then pushing House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio from the speakership – and office.

Last spring, Trump was able to corral the House’s jumping frogs, as Speaker Boehner used to characterize his caucus, to back a GOP health-care plan that didn’t fully repeal Obamacare.

And in a recent conference call with House Republicans, he seemed to convince members – many of them deficit hawks – that they should adopt the Senate’s debt-busting budget, because it was their best chance at tax reform.

“He was very constructive in trying to get this budget done,” says Feehery, adding that the president should be credited for squashing a recently floated idea to change the way people contribute to their 401(k) retirement plans. “It was a stupid idea, alienating his whole political base.”

Learning curve on the Senate

But the Senate is another matter. The 100 individuals there wield more power, represent far more diverse constituencies, and work under rules that aim to forge consensus – or end in gridlock. The president has criticized majority leader McConnell for not being able to deliver on health care, even while the leader enjoys support from his caucus. They know how tough it is to deliver on anything when Republicans hold the majority by a margin of only 2 seats.

“Trump hasn’t really come to understand the Senate as an institution, the rules, the procedures, the history, and what can be successful there,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant in Texas and a former senior Senate aide. “McConnell does understand that.”

That’s why the Republican Senate leadership is concerned about efforts by Trump’s former strategic adviser, Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, to challenge incumbent GOP senators up for reelection – Flake among them.

Before this afternoon, that is.

In announcing that he will not run, Flake said it is clear that a “traditional Republican” has a “narrower and narrower path to nomination.” The party, he said, had given up on its core principles in favor of a “more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment.”

Those feelings are justified, “given the royal mess that we’ve created,” he admitted. However, he concluded, “anger and resentment are not [a] governing philosophy.”

David Sloan contributed to this report from Washington.

Alban Wyters/Sipa USA/Newscom

Ksenia Sobchak arrives at the Versace Spring-Summer 2015 Haute Couture collection show at the Salons De La Chambre De Commerce Et d'Industrie in Paris in January 2015. The Russian journalist, former reality show host, and socialite announced Wednesday that she intends to stand for president in 2018 as an opposition candidate.

Vladimir Putin has been Russia's undisputed leader for so long that people sometimes forget that, according to the country's constitution, he needs to be periodically re-elected.

That moment is fast approaching.

As usual, Mr. Putin himself is being coy about whether he will even stand in the presidential polls slated for next March. Russia's established non-Kremlin political actors like Communist Gennady Zyuganov, noisy ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and liberal Grigory Yavlinsky, whose limitations are clearly defined by numerous past attempts, are girding themselves for one more performance as designated also-rans.

But, until recently, there had been something missing from that well-rehearsed formula: the “wild card” candidate. That is, someone whose role is to inject a bit of public excitement, suspense, and a semblance of real competition into what has become a tired, familiar, and utterly predictable old horse race.

Enter Ksenia Sobchak, a well-known media personality and a sometime liberal political activist, who aims to fill that bill. She knows what she's doing. There is no chance of defeating Putin, even in a completely fair and open contest, if only because his commanding popularity among most Russians remains unshakeable. But there are large pockets of opposition, concentrated among the educated, professional, and small business classes in large cities, who might get behind someone who addresses their frustrations in a recognizably modern, liberal, pro-European political language.

“Sobchak is a person of that milieu, upper-middle class, rich, talented and educated,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center. “In the last election, it was Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire business tycoon, who created this idea of a new type of candidate to give hope to that class of Russians. And he did, even if he was ultimately under control of the Kremlin. [Mr. Prokhorov finished third in the 2012 presidential elections, with 8 percent of the votes.] I don't think Sobchak is as substantial has he was, but she will do for the role.”

An 'against all' candidate

Ms. Sobchak says she will step aside if the obvious candidate to fill the opposition slot this time around, anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny, is allowed by the Kremlin to run against Putin. But Mr. Navalny remains under house arrest, and barred by law from running in elections until 2026. Until then, she is inviting Russians who are impatient with the state capitalism, ritual patriotism, and managed democracy of the Putin-era to regard her as the “against all” candidate – in reference to an option that used to be on Russian ballots before authorities realized how dangerous it was and removed it. Experts say that shows considerable political savvy on her part.

Evgeny Feldman/Navalny Campaign/AP

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (c.) speaks to his colleagues at his office on Oct. 22 after he was released from a jail in Moscow. Mr. Navalny was released from jail where he spent 20 days for "organizing unsanctioned protests." Since he was sentenced, Ksenia Sobchak has declared her candidacy in upcoming presidential elections, a move that is likely to threaten Navalny's own position.

“I think the idea for Sobchak to run was her own initiative. However, even if Ksenia denies it, there is no doubt that her candidacy is approved by the Kremlin,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, who worked in the Kremlin as Putin's chief image-maker during his first two terms, 2000-08, but has since become a critic of the system. “The Kremlin has been interfering in presidential elections for a long time, first within legal limits, then beyond the framework of law, to the point where it now tries to control the entire process from top to bottom. But it's becoming isolated from the people. It's not a system that can last.”

Sobchak, a former reality TV star, is often dubbed a Russian version of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. But that's not really fair. Her father was the reformist mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, and political mentor of none other than Vladimir Putin. Indeed, Putin is Sobchak's godfather. She has worked as an actress, journalist, and TV presenter, and currently hosts a fairly high-brow political talk show on the opposition Dozhd TV channel. Talking to journalists last week, she admitted her function was to spice up the electoral spectacle, not to win.

“You can laugh at me, but I understand show business,” she said. “My job is to rewrite the rules of the show – to bring a new face to the show.”

Asked about her relations with Putin, she was cautious: “Of course for some Putin is a tyrant and dictator. Others consider him Russia's savior. But I'm in a difficult position, Putin helped my dad, and practically saved his life. But I am against the fact that any person, including Putin, should be in power for 18 years.”

Can she measure up?

It's too early to speak about detailed political programs. Those will be unveiled when the campaign starts in earnest in January.

But in a letter to the Moscow business newspaper Vedomosti, Sobchak said that her candidacy could be a step toward the transformation of Russia by voicing opposition to corruption, authoritarian governance, and untrammeled bureaucracy. “We should not ignore elections as an institution, as the main instrument of public representation and the foundation of true democracy, even though, in fact, in recent decades it has never been applied as it should,” she said.

Sputnik/AP/File

Russian President Vladimir Putin (l.) speaks with Lyudmila Narusova, (r.), widow of Anatoly Sobchak, former St. Petersburg mayor, and Sobchak's daughter Ksenia (c.), as he visited the grave of Mr. Sobchak at a cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2003.

She went on to say that she would use the electoral podium to promote “European values,” support small business, human rights, media freedoms, and the advocate the privatization of big state corporations.

Among those who would support a serious alternative to Putin, opinion divides on whether Sobchak can measure up.

“If we had normal elections in this country, she could be a real candidate,” says Nikolai Svanidze, a famous Russian TV personality. “Sobchak is a talented person who has been a success in business, in media, and even took a successful turn as a political activist during the protests in 2011-12. Then she got bored and decided to try her hand in presidential elections.”

Others see her as a Kremlin stooge.

“This is a system where Putin decides who will run,” says Sergei Davidis, a human rights lawyer. “Sobchak's image as an opposition figure has been created by the mass media, with her interesting biography and her rushing from one political side to another. It leads people to think that she is the only candidate the opposition can put forward. So, it's her or Putin then. Well, people will conclude, certainly not her!”

Sitting in the corner of a café in this compact Mediterranean port that is home to both Jews and Arabs, Ghadir Hani describes her frustration with the inertia of Israeli and Palestinian political leaders that led her to become a peace activist.

Nearby, against a backdrop of minarets and stone walls, fishing boats bob in Akko’s ancient harbor, which has borne witness to wars and battles from the time of the Romans, Crusaders, and Napoleon, and up to the 1948 Middle East conflict around the founding of the modern Jewish state of Israel.

“I was born in Akko, a mixed city, and I grew up on the values of accepting others,” she says. “We are all human beings. We cry when someone is killed on the ‘other’ side, but for so long have felt like there is nothing we can do.

“But we want, in our own way, to make peace,” she continues. “As a part of Arab society, I have a feeling we can be a bridge between Palestinians and Jews since we are also Palestinians, but also citizens of this country.”

Ms. Hani, 40, who wears a snugly wrapped black headscarf, describes herself as an Arab-Palestinian-Israeli citizen and a feminist. In Akko to visit family, she has been a community organizer for years in the Bedouin town of Khoura in the Negev, where she moved almost 20 years ago, and where she recently joined a growing Arab and Jewish peace movement called Women Wage Peace.

Courtesy of Ghadir Hani

Ghadir Hani (r.), a resident of a Bedouin town in the Negev, with Alisa Eshen Mozes, from the Jewish town of Even Yehuda, at a conference in Italy where they represented Women Wage Peace.

There are now hundreds of Arab female citizens of Israel who are active in the group, according to a spokesperson, a steady climb in membership since the group began during the most recent war between Israel and Hamas, in the summer of 2014 in Gaza.

“We tell each other shalom (peace), on the streets in greeting and in the prayers we recite, but we don’t feel any sense of shalom. We speak of peace, but we want to feel peace,” says Hani.

Their numbers are growing, say Arab women in interviews, because they are fed up with a situation that only seems to deteriorate. Within Israel, they say, they face racism and suspicion from individual Jews who view them as potentially dangerous and disloyal, and at the political level they are stuck with leaders on both side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide who, they say, have not worked aggressively toward trying to find a peace deal.

In speaking out and becoming active in an organization like Women Wage Peace, the Arab women within it, and its Palestinian women supporters in the occupied West Bank, are rejecting the notion of “anti-normalization” promoted by Palestinian activists in recent years.

It’s a concept that maintains that Palestinians should not engage in any kind of people-to-people activities with Jewish Israelis as long as the occupation continues, arguing that such projects give the impression that the sides are meeting on a level playing field when it is Israel that is still very much in charge.

10,000 women march

“I won’t say it does not stress me out, but I thought to myself that I will not let it influence what I am working for,” Amira Zedan, a member of Women Wage Peace, says of the anti-normalization pressure.

She and other Arab women say not working with their Jewish counterparts for the common cause of peace is not an option. The way they see it, it’s the only way any fundamental change can ever happen. 

Women Wage Peace casts itself as a big-tent type of movement. It’s not affiliated with any political party, and instead urges women of all backgrounds and political leanings to come together and demand that Israeli and Palestinian leaders return to the negotiating table after years of stalemate.

They are not endorsing any specific peace plan, and they discourage using potentially politically divisive language like “occupation” to refer to Israel’s control of Palestinian areas.

The women held their biggest event this month, a two-week march throughout the country that included stops in Arab cities and in a section of the West Bank near the Dead Sea that is under combined Israeli and Palestinian control. The march drew 10,000 women, including 2,000 Palestinian women from the West Bank.

Among the marchers was Ms. Zedan, 42, who during the summer of 2014 felt her frustration with yet another war (the Gaza war was the third fought between Israel and Hamas in six years) boil over into a desire to take some kind of action for peace.

One woman's protest, joined

In a telephone interview, Zedan describes taking a piece of pink poster board she found in her home and writing in black magic marker the words, “Arabs and Jews Refuse to be Enemies.” She then set out for a nearby major junction in the mostly Arab Wadi Ara region toward the north of Israel, and held her sign for motorists to see as they drove by.

“My husband said, ‘You are crazy. Who will listen to you?’ But I said, ‘I cannot stand by and do nothing, I have to work for a better future.’ And two Fridays in a row I was alone there at that junction, and then on the third Friday I see three women on the other side of the road, and they belonged to Women Wage Peace.”

She’s been active in the organization ever since.

“Enough already with only more hatred, more wars. Let’s figure out a way out of this already,” says Zedan, who points to a lack of connection between people as part of the problem.

She says a dearth of places to come together and work in common cause perpetuates the sense of fear and mistrust.

“When you don’t sit together, you get Jewish Israeli women who think that all Palestinian mothers raise their sons to be martyrs, and Palestinian women who think Israeli mothers are raising children to become soldiers,” she says. “But enough already, we need a better future for our kids.”

The Arab women interviewed spoke of the humiliation and pain of an unresolved conflict that leads, they say, to discrimination, being regarded with fear and hostility, and being singled out for extensive searches by security personnel, whether on the train home after work or at the airport flying abroad.

'We will not rest'

But coming from a mostly more conservative society, Arab-Israeli women have not typically been at the forefront of public activism.

Those involved and active say they need the support of their husbands and relatives in order to come out to marches and meetings.

Naheda Okbi, 61, was born in the Gaza Strip but has lived in southern Israel since an arranged marriage when she was 19. During the 2009 Gaza war, she says, she was not allowed to cross the border into Gaza for her mother’s funeral.

“I could not say goodbye to my mother and this was devastating for me,” she says. “When I heard about this movement I thought, ‘Maybe this will help bring peace.’ ”

She has been open about her activism in Women Wage Peace on Facebook, and her relatives in Gaza have responded enthusiastically.

In one post she wrote, “We will not rest until a peace deal is signed.”

To which her relatives in Gaza wrote back: “Amen.”

Around the world, millions more children are being allowed to be children.

The number engaged in exploitative and often life-threatening work worldwide plummeted over the past 16 years, according to the International Labor Organization’s most recent progress report on child labor. In 2016, there were 98 million fewer boys and girls forced to work than in 2000.

Broadly, that number translates to millions more children in school and fewer exposed to things like dangerous pesticides and machinery, or trapped in human or sex trafficking.

In 2016, there were 152 million children worldwide who were child laborers, down from 250 million at the turn of the millennium. Behind the drop, experts say, are efforts to get children into school, the enforcement of established labor laws, and programs that boost incomes for poor families. But serious concerns remain: The rate at which boys and girls are being pulled from dangerous work has slowed in the past four years, and experts say that ambitious global targets to end child labor by 2025 appear out of reach. 

“Over the last couple of decades there’s been some real progress in reducing the number of children involved in child labor worldwide,” says Jo Becker, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch’s Children’s Rights Division. “We called the new report a wake-up call because we feel like it shows that progress is possible, but we really need to pick up the pace.”

Ms. Becker says the slowdown has been driven by a number of factors including the Syrian civil war, which displaced millions of children. And there are concerns that the remaining child workers are proving harder to extract as government crackdowns push them out of regulated industries, such as factories, and into the shadows. 

“We always have a concern that if we succeed in getting children out of one sector, they will be forced into something worse – and sexual trafficking is something worse,” says Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition.

The US Department of Labor (DOL) published a report in September also analyzing child labor around the world in 2016.

One troubling trend: In sub-Saharan Africa, the rate of child labor actually is increasing. For example, in Burkina Faso, South Sudan, Cameroon, and Chad, more than half of all children between the ages of 5 and 14 are involved in child labor. Many children in these countries are involved in what the DOL refers to as “the worst forms of child labor,” such as human trafficking or sexual trafficking. 

But international progress is evident: Of the 135 countries covered in the report, 61 percent achieved “moderate” or “significant” advancement and only 6 percent showed no progress whatsoever. 

Some of the countries that made significant advancement took measures to ensure labor laws were strictly enforced. For example, Albania increased funding for labor inspectors, Ecuador increased its number of inspectors by 67 percent, and Brazil launched 950 investigations into commercial sexual exploitation of children. 

“While passing good laws and ratifying established conventions are rarely easy and always commendable,” says the DOL report, “laws – even the most perfectly crafted statutes – are meaningless if they are not enforced.”

Nicaragua and Egypt made moderate progress through investments in education. Although education is free in Nicaragua, families often struggle to cover associated costs such as school supplies. To combat these barriers, the Ministry of Education invested in its school supply program, which provided 3.9 million textbooks and 700,000 packages of school supplies to children. Egypt created a new program to expand education to 36,000 additional students and supported a feeding program that served 13.3 million students. 

Boosting adult wages can also help more children have a childhood. Companies around the world need to ensure they are paying their low-level employees a respectable salary, says Mr. Maki, meaning they are less likely to send their children to work. 

“[Companies] need to be willing to make a little less money and have a clean supply chain – and customers want that,” says Maki. “If you ask, ‘Are you willing to pay more for something that doesn’t have child labor?’ customers say, ‘Yes.’ ”

Reuters/file

Argentina's President Mauricio Macri (left) dances in a carnival celebration in the Argentine northern town of Purmamarca,

The world’s largest economies are awash in red ink, the International Monetary Fund reported in October. And they are hard-pressed to service their debts, which on average amount to more than twice their domestic output. China accounts for much of this global rise in debt. After a leadership reshuffle this week, Beijing may start to finally tackle the problem. But one country in particular, Argentina, has shown how to change attitudes and turn around an unhealthy dependence on debt-fueled spending.

In 2001, after decades of subsidizing basic services in order to win elections, populist leaders in Argentina decided to stop paying foreign creditors. The debt default was the largest in modern history. The country saw a run on its banks. Inflation ballooned and the economy deflated. The government started to lie about economic statistics. Once one of the world’s wealthiest countries, Argentina dropped to 66th.

In 2015, voters elected a new president, Mauricio Macri, who promised to tackle the debt crisis and make Argentina a “normal” country. The former engineer and Buenos Aires mayor cut energy subsidies, ended currency controls, and started other reforms that have allowed Argentina to win back the favor of international financial markets. The economy is expected to grow 2 to 3 percent this year. Inflation is down by half.

In midterm elections on Oct. 22, voters endorsed Mr. Macri’s reforms, showing an appreciation for the idea that social services should not be paid by excess borrowing. Macri’s Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition picked up seats in the Senate and lower house. It became the first party since 1985 to win in Argentina’s five largest electoral districts.

The electoral boost will allow Macri to pursue further reforms and chip away at Argentina’s debt.

“We have entered into a period of permanent reform,” he said after the election.

Countries in deep debt, from China to the United States, can take a cue from Macri’s progress. Attitudes toward debt can shift. After suffering a historic default, Argentina may end up being a model of financial probity.