The firing of “Today Show” anchor Matt Lauer had the feel of a summary execution.

NBC brass received a credible allegation of workplace sexual misconduct against Mr. Lauer on Monday night, and by Wednesday morning, he was gone. In a flash, another famous personality has joined the list of high-profile men from media, entertainment, and business who allegedly abused their power with (in most cases) women – and lost their jobs.

The contrast with the political world could not be more stark, as Republican strategist Ana Navarro captured in a tweet. Members of Congress, a candidate for a critical Senate seat, and the president himself all face ugly sexual allegations, and these men are still in place.

On its face, the disparity in outcomes may seem unjust. Why can’t men in politics who have been accused of abusing their office be dispatched quickly? Or, in the reverse, why shouldn’t Lauer have been allowed to hold onto his position, the way countless allegedly miscreant men in public life have, while the charges are fully investigated and both sides aired? 

The answer is simple: On questions of professional life and death, the political world and private sector are not parallel. And it is a distinction that goes right to the heart of democracy.

“The private sector is worried about bottom-line numbers and shareholders, and about the kind of image a business wants to project,” says Kimberly Wehle, a law professor at the University of Baltimore.

If the management – a boss or a board – of a private organization finds a woman’s allegations credible, Professor Wehle notes, it can move quickly and fire the accused. Any hearing of defense takes place behind closed doors. And there is no legal structure that prevents swift action, though fear of a lawsuit could serve as a check.

With elected officials, there’s a larger authority at play: the Constitution, and the system of self-government it establishes.

“The boss is ‘We the People,’ ” says Wehle, reciting the document’s first three words.

It’s the voters who decide whether an accused politician is reelected or wins office in the first place. In the case of Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican vying for a US Senate seat on Dec. 12, allegations of unwanted sexual behavior while in his 30s toward teenage girls have turned an easy GOP victory into a close race. But the bottom line is that Mr. Moore’s political fate lies with the voters of Alabama, and recent polls have shown Moore’s support ticking back up.

Once in office, elected officials are still ruled by the people, in the form of their elected representatives. The Constitution empowers both the House and Senate to expel a peer with a two-thirds vote – a gantlet Moore could face, if elected. But the bar is high, and expulsion is rare.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said that an investigation by his chamber’s Ethics Committee is “almost certain” if Moore is elected, before any attempt to expel him. But the idea of possibly overturning the will of the people gives at least one fellow GOP senator pause, even though she does not support his candidacy.

“If the voters of a state, fully knowing all of these allegations, nevertheless choose to elect Roy Moore, is it appropriate for the Senate to expel him?” asked Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, at a Monitor breakfast Thursday. “I think that’s a really difficult question. And I don’t know the answer to that yet. I would want to see the Ethics Committee’s deliberations.”

It’s also worth noting, analysts say, that the cumbersome expulsion process serves as a protection to public officials who could otherwise be victims of a smear campaign for political reasons – just as allegations of sexual misconduct, in any context, could be false.

Under pressure to resign

Members facing major ethics charges often resign before they can be expelled. In 1995, Sen. Bob Packwood (R) of Oregon resigned after the Senate Ethics Committee issued a 10-volume indictment chronicling sexual abuse of former aides and lobbyists.

On Thursday, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi called for Rep. John Conyers (D) of Michigan to resign from Congress, in the wake of allegations that he sexually harassed women on his staff. Congressman Conyers, who is currently in the hospital, has acknowledged that one of the women received a settlement, but has denied the allegations.

Also Thursday, Rep. Joe Barton (R) of Texas announced that he would not seek reelection, after sexually explicit images of him from a consensual extramarital relationship were posted on the internet.

The issue of pressure to quit office, or quit a race, over allegations of sexual misconduct opens a Pandora’s box of comparisons.

When Reps. Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, both gay Democrats from Massachusetts, became embroiled in sex scandals in the 1980s, neither resigned or faced pressure from Democratic leaders to resign. Mr. Studds was censured by the House, and Mr. Frank was reprimanded – and yet both were still reelected many times before retiring. But in 2006, when Rep. Mark Foley (R) of Florida, also gay, faced his own scandal involving explicit messages allegedly sent to current and former congressional pages, some underage, he resigned under pressure from the GOP leadership. A subsequent FBI investigation did not result in any criminal charges against Mr. Foley.

The highest-profile cases may be most instructive. In 1991, Clarence Thomas reached the Supreme Court, despite charges of sexual harassment by a former subordinate, Anita Hill, at his confirmation hearing. He denied the allegations.

In 1992, Bill Clinton won the presidency despite allegations of sexual misconduct, and survived impeachment in 1998, after he was caught lying under oath about an affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Both cases may have taught candidate Donald Trump an important lesson when he faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct: True or not, deny the charges – and let the voters decide.

More explosive for President Trump, late in the 2016 campaign, was an old recording by “Access Hollywood” of him boasting about aggressive sexual behavior toward women. Mr. Trump admitted making the comments, and apologized. But today he is casting doubt on the tape’s authenticity, a retreat into the old approach of denial when faced with uncomfortable information.

A tipping point – or not?

If Moore wins in Alabama, the takeaway for some – including the Republican leaders in Washington who called on him to quit the race – may be that denying sexual impropriety still pays off.

A Moore victory could also dampen talk that American society has reached a tipping point on the issue of sexual harassment. If voters are still willing to elect leaders amid numerous such charges, that may indicate a definitive shift in the culture has yet to take place.

“I don’t think we’ll know if we’ve reached a tipping point until we see what happens in the 2018 midterm elections,” says Renee Knake, a law professor at the University of Houston.

Assessing public attitudes toward sexual harassment in the political sphere is complicated. Some Alabama voters say they resent GOP leaders in Washington telling them or Moore what to do. And some argue that even if the allegations are true, he’d still be better than the Democrat, former US Attorney Doug Jones.

That is the argument some Republicans offered when they voted for Trump: They disliked his treatment of women, but said he’d still be better than Hillary Clinton. When President Bill Clinton got caught with an intern – a power disparity that could hardly be wider – plenty of feminists looked the other way and still supported him.

Those days may be over. Or they may not. Congress sets its own rules, but those rules reflect the cultural norms of the time. The revelation that Congress’s Office of Compliance has paid settlements totaling $17 million in taxpayer money over the past 20 years – although most of them not over sexual harassment – has sparked outrage. Whether such taxpayer-funded settlements will remain in place, including the confidentiality agreements that come with them, is a matter of debate.

On Wednesday, the House passed legislation requiring sexual harassment training for lawmakers and their staff, but members of Congress say it’s only the first step.

Accusations against Trump

The story also hasn’t ended for Trump. He faces a defamation lawsuit by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his old show “The Apprentice” who accused him of unwanted sexual advances. The New York State Supreme Court is weighing whether to allow the case to proceed. If it does, Trump’s other accusers could be deposed.

The case is important because it may establish whether US presidents can be subject to civil suits in state court over their private conduct. Whatever the outcome, the subject of Trump and sexual harassment will return to the headlines, as will discussion of how a president’s private actions should be treated in court. Lawyers note that in 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing Paula Jones to sue Mr. Clinton for sexual harassment in federal court while he was in the White House.

Kyle Grillot/Reuters

Supporters of net neutrality, like these protesters gathered in Los Angeles on Nov. 28, fear that a relaxation of FCC regulations will grant telecoms sweeping powers to control the flow of information in inequitable ways.

When Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai was discussing the impact of social media on American values at a luncheon in the nation’s capital on Wednesday afternoon, he only briefly alluded to his own negative experiences online over the past week.

Last Tuesday, Chairman Pai unveiled a plan that would virtually dismantle the FCC’s long-standing principles of internet governance known as net neutrality. In various forms for more than a decade, these principles, also referred to as the “open internet,” have put a regulatory check on the way high-speed internet providers could control the flow of information through their networks.

His announcement last week, however, unleashed the kind of vitriol that has become a recurring feature of American political discourse – especially since the innovations of the digital age. “Harassment. Threats. Unfiltered rage. The past few days, I’ve seen a lot of that – much more than I or my family would like,” Pai told a gathering sponsored by The Media Institute, a nonprofit communications research foundation in Washington, D.C.

The FCC chairman, a President Trump appointee and the first Indian-American to hold the office, was inundated with death threats and racist taunts, even as the names of his children were posted online.

“And this vitriol seems to reflect the growing feeling that America today is a meaner, coarser place than it used to be, especially when it comes to politics,” continued Pai, who also extolled the positive social effects of social media, such as the recent #MeToo groundswell that has begun to alter the nation’s workplaces. “This unprecedented medium for collaboration and connecting people feels like it’s dividing us and driving us apart.”

It’s an irony that has in many ways tempered the promises of the information revolution. And as industry experts and others note, it has also tended to frame the net neutrality debate into stark and simplistic Manichean terms – terms that often obscure both the deeper values that may underlie both points of views, as well as the potential to find points of agreement.

A 'crudely abstract' debate

Despite the various self-interests and ideological differences that often underlie the opposing sides of the net neutrality debate, many business scholars note there is an essential symbiosis that locks the telecommunications giants to the end users and content providers who use it to deliver their services.

Those who own and maintain the architecture of the internet are necessarily integrated into a relationship with those who use it to communicate and exchange information. Experts sometimes call this a “two-sided marketplace” unique to networks: each side can only grow, make money, and innovate along with the other.

“On one level, this debate has become most crudely abstract – which is, in turn, driving part of the political divide, making it less informed and more political,” says Doug Brake, senior analyst for telecom policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

One such abstraction is rooted in fears about the potential power various players might be able to wield on what now could be considered the most integral civic architecture the county has ever known. Like the advent of electricity in the early 20th century, experts say, high-speed internet has become central to nearly all aspects of the US economy, as well as education, healthcare, and the daily if not hourly rhythms of most Americans’ lives.

“There is substantial confusion in public debates about this issue,” says Brett Frischmann, professor of law, business, and economics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “One side frames net neutrality as heavy government regulation that inevitably involves government micro-management of internet activities.”

“Another side frames it as minimal government regulation aimed primarily at leveling the playing field for edge providers to deliver services to consumers,” Professor Frischmann continues. “Both sides are partially correct but incomplete, and the part that's missing undermines the positions taken.”

Choosing ideological teams

In general, Republicans like Pai have lined up with the nation’s telecommunications giants, including Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast. They not only oppose the net neutrality principles that requires them to treat all data flowing over their networks equally, they are particularly galled by the Obama administration’s reclassification of high-speed internet as a so-called Title II public utility according to federal law. As such, this gives the government broad authority – a “blank check,” opponents say – to go so far as to regulate the services and prices internet providers can charge.

“Title II is potentially heavy government regulation,” Frischmann says. “The Open Internet Order aimed to lessen the weight, to be ‘light-touch’ because the FCC exercised substantial forbearance. It does not involve government micromanagement, and it does not inevitably lead to government micromanagement. But the possibility of regulatory creep lurks.”

Democrats have in many ways lined up with big tech companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and other content providers, on the other hand. They have generally supported net neutrality principles in the Open Internet Order, which prevent internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against lawful content. Most significantly, perhaps, they also forbade internet gatekeepers from offering any paid prioritization to the more wealthy content providers.

The logic of net neutrality, too, was rooted in fears about the potential power that big telecoms could potentially wield if they were able to control the flow of information on the internet without constraints.

But just as open internet advocates argue that the FCC would exercise substantial forbearance while wielding Title II power, industry advocates argue that service providers, too, would be constrained by both market pressures, public vigilance, and self-regulating industry standards.

While the Republican-led FCC is planning to scrap net neutrality when it meets next month, Pai said new regulations would simply require internet service providers to be transparent about any actions they take to control the flow of information – or charge additional fees for a prioritized fast lane for those who can afford it.

“Make no doubt, the circulation of this order will bring the ‘sky is falling’ crowd to the fore, and they will foretell a day when websites will be blocked, content censored and internet access controlled by ISP overlords,” said Joan Marsh, executive vice president of regulatory affairs for AT&T, in a statement last week. “All major ISPs have publicly committed to preserving an open internet and the proposed transparency rules will require that all ISPs clearly and publicly articulate their internet practices. Any ISP that is so foolish as to seek to engage in gatekeeping will be quickly and decisively called out.”

But this is not the only concern for those who have long championed net neutrality rules. The companies who run the internet and provide broadband service are also content providers in many cases.  

“The only way for customers to access our service was through either Comcast or Verizon,” says David Friend, chief executive officer and co-founder of Wasabi Technologies, a cloud storage company based in Boston. “If either of those guys had decided to compete with us and were not obligated to treat our traffic the same as theirs, they could have just slowed down our traffic and put us out of business.”

“Nobody would care so much about net neutrality if Comcast, Verizon, and the like, were prohibited from providing backup, or movies, or games, or anything else that runs over the internet,” continues Mr. Friend, who also founded the data protection company Carbonite. “But that is not the case today, and these companies aspire to offer ever broader services in competition with their customers. Investors will pull back from any startups that look like they could get in the sights of Verizon or Comcast, innovation will suffer, and, ultimately, the economy will suffer – with ill effects for all, including, ultimately, Verizon and Comcast.”

The new FCC order, however, would refer such anti-competitive moves to another regulatory agency, the Federal Trade Commission, Pai said last week.

Even so, fears about the economic and cultural power of the internet gatekeepers go beyond such potential anti-competitive behavior, advocates say.

Recognizing common ground

“Net neutrality is essential for free inquiry, democratic debate, and political dissent,” says Kevin Howley, professor of media studies at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. “If advocates of Title II repeal have their way, any semblance of these more egalitarian values will be ruthlessly pushed aside in favor of a top-down model of political communication and cultural production.”

“In an era when much of our political discourse takes place in digital space, we can ill-afford the loss of the horizontal communication made possible by an open internet,” continues Professor Howley. “Likewise, local, grassroots cultural expression, which in recent years has enjoyed something of a renaissance, will once again be stifled by dominant cultural institutions.”

“Reconciliation is possible – both sides value innovation,” says Howley. “This bit of common ground might provide the basis for resolving the debate.”

Pai was almost wistful as he lamented the deteriorating values of civility on Wednesday, citing the depersonalized and virtually anonymous social space enabled by the internet – a space whose well-ordered flourishing he is charged with protecting.

“But while we’re becoming connected digitally, we can’t allow our nation of 326 million to become disconnected from each other,” Pai closed his speech on Wednesday. “We need to see our fellow citizens as real people with real strengths and frailties, not as abstract online avatars. We need to speak with each other eye-to-eye in order to understand each other’s values, not snipe at each other remotely in order to demean. And when we disagree, we need to do so civilly – to see each other as people aspiring for a better country but envisioning different paths for getting there.”

Stav Shaffir slides into a high-backed black leather chair at the Knesset Transparency Committee, a parliamentary panel she created and helms, and convenes a session on public housing – or rather Israel’s chronic shortage of it.

Every seat in the wood-paneled room is taken, so attendees, many of them housing activists, crowd together in the back. But Hagai Reznik, the director of the Housing Ministry, is running late.

Ms. Shaffir, Israel’s youngest-ever woman lawmaker when she was elected in 2013 at the age of 27, looks out at the room, her trademark shock of red hair spilling over a black blazer, and announces that there is too much ground to cover to wait for the director. She begins questioning Mr. Reznik’s deputies and taking testimony from people who have waited years for public housing.

When Reznik finally does arrive, the room has become thick with tension. He raises his voice when fielding questions, including from a woman who holds up a baby girl whose head is bald from chemotherapy treatments. The mother is among those who has been asking for public housing.

“You don’t have to shout,” Shaffir admonishes the ministry director, noting that his office does not respond to 80 percent of requests for public housing. “But I am asking: What part of your budget is designated for [staff] to respond to people’s requests?”

It’s with this in-your-face, in-the-weeds approach to governing, and a commitment to transparency and tackling corruption, that Shaffir, a member of the center-left Labor party, has planted her flag, challenging a political system accustomed to backroom deals and minimal oversight.

It is a position her supporters hail as principled and critical in Israeli politics today, its urgency underlined as the country watches the government of Benjamin Netanyahu lurch between corruption scandals and attempts even to change laws to protect the prime minister himself from prosecution.

This week she has been one of the leading voices in the Knesset calling on people to act against the controversial bill. A mass anti-corruption rally is scheduled for Saturday night in Tel Aviv.

Heidi Levine/Sipa Press/Newscom

Stav Shaffir, at the time No. 4 on the Zionist Union's election list, during a campaign visit in Ashdod, Israel, on March 13, 2015. Her experience as a social reform protest leader led her to politics.

“The last month breaks all the records of shame. Instead of legislating for the benefit of the middle class and for the elderly and disabled, the government legislates against the law enforcement authorities,” Shaffir posted on Facebook. “Those who prefer to take care of their friends instead of being concerned for our citizens should not be allowed to rule here for even one day longer. We have to stop them.”

Shaffir’s supporters see her mission as one they hope will catapult her to high places, noting her youthful following and record of being able to get people to mobilize.

Not everyone likes it, especially not her right-wing colleagues across the aisle. They have dismissed her as a “little girl” when she challenges them in powerful forums like the Knesset Finance Committee, and have bristled when she has taken to the Knesset floor, as she did in an impromptu speech in 2015 over payouts to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, admonishing them that they don’t have a monopoly on Zionism.

“Don’t preach to us about Zionism, because real Zionism means dividing the budget equally among all the citizens of the country,” she said in the speech, which went viral on Israeli social media. “Real Zionism is taking care of the weak. Real Zionism is solidarity, not only in battle but in everyday life.”

Shaffir rose to national prominence six years ago as an organizer and spokesperson of social justice protests that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis to the streets to publicly demand what they had agonized about in private for so long – the crushingly high cost of living.

Today, four years after entering Israel’s parliament, she is driven to find out where the money in Israel’s budget is actually spent. She is credited with helping pull back the veil on government corruption and keeping social justice issues – specifically the widening gap between Israel’s haves and have-nots – on the national agenda.

'A real authentic voice'

In doing so she remains the most high-profile voice of young left-leaning Israelis who are struggling to afford a middle-class existence and are hungry for a peaceful way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they were born into.

Shaffir acknowledges that Israel faces “major” security challenges, but invokes what she says is the Zionist movement’s “courage to make the impossible happen.”

“Having security means building more trust with our neighbors, and defining our borders,” she says in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor. “But the current message from our government is that nothing will change.”

Her left-leaning constituents are young people who are tired of being called traitors by the ruling right-wing establishment, who are fed up with what they see as endemic government corruption, and who see in Shaffir someone who was bold enough to enter the political fray to fight back, says Liat Schlesinger, executive director of the Israeli think tank Molad.

“She is a real authentic voice [that] brings with it energy, which is something that is very important in politics. I think people see – through Stav – an approach that says we need to be inside the political system, which means going out on that playing field every day,” Ms. Schlesinger says.

Shaffir spends long and densely packed days on that playing field. On days that parliament is in session, she rises at dawn in the apartment she rents in Tel Aviv and drives up the steep traffic-clogged highway to Jerusalem for hearings, meetings with her Zionist Union faction, and plenary sessions that often run past midnight. Several nights a week she crisscrosses the country to speak to small groups at people’s homes. She talks to them about hope, about reclaiming the country, about joining her in politics.

“We don’t use our power enough. We barely use it at all,” she tells a rooftop crammed with people at the home of a supporter in Tel Aviv at a recent such parlor meeting. “We fought so hard for this country. How did we let things get to the point where we have such vast gaps? I want to fix that.”

An aversion to politics

Shaffir, who grew up wanting to be either an astronaut, a musician, or a pilot (she was accepted into the Air Force’s prestigious pilot training course), worked for social causes and in journalism and had no intention of ever entering politics.

“I thought politics was too corrupt, and I did not trust politicians,” she tells the Monitor. “I had a very hard time even voting. I voted, but I did not perceive my vote as something meaningful.”

But her leadership in the social protest movement changed her life course.

She realized that if she wanted to effect change it would need to be from the inside. She told those gathered on the Tel Aviv rooftop: “I wanted to know where all the money goes when they [the government] say there is no money.”

She explained to them how she exposed how tax money was surreptitiously used for Jewish settlements in the West Bank by channeling millions of shekels through a system called budgetary transfers.

Granted, it’s not a sexy topic, but she helped make it one. She took to Facebook, as she often does to get the word out, to recruit volunteers to investigate where the money was going and then report back to the public on what they found out. She even took the Finance Committee to the Supreme Court, which ruled it had to find a new more transparent way to operate.

Her two-room Knesset office is crammed with young volunteer interns, most of them law students or social work students. They pore over files, putting together spreadsheets and data of government ministries.

Link to peace process

Shaffir says she sees the fight for social justice and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as linked. For her own undergraduate degree, Shaffir studied through a special program at City University of London that brought together Israeli and Palestinian students to study and dialogue together.

Among her take-aways, she says, was this: “Regardless of who is on the other side, it is not for us to rate them as a nice enemy or a bad enemy;” you have to find a way to build trust and work together.

Two states for two peoples is the only way forward for both sides, she says.

“We need to collaborate and get the message across: the role of leadership is to lead people forward to give people hope, and encourage them that this can work,” Shaffir says.

Denis Abramov/Sputnik/AP

The Russian corvette Grad Sviyazhsk shoots a Kalibr cruise missile during the final stage of Russian summer exercises of the Caspian Flotilla's battle groups this year.

The ongoing, acrimonious collapse of US-Russia relations has been mostly sound and fury, so far. But it may be about to start having a real, detrimental effect on the sense of safety that people, especially in Europe, have taken for granted over the past quarter century.

That safety has been provided by the landmark Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 – known as the deal that ended the cold war. But accusations from both Washington and Moscow that the other is violating it appear to be reaching a breaking point.

If they do, the treaty itself could quickly unravel, leaving Europe once again vulnerable to the short-fused nuclear missile threats that prompted negotiators to ban that entire class of medium-range weapons three decades ago.

“Politics are driving this deterioration. People concerned with strategic stability know the value of this treaty, and the folly of wrecking it,” says Alexander Konovalov, one of the Soviet arms control experts who helped design the INF Treaty in the 1980s and president of the independent Institute of Strategic Assessments in Moscow today. “These mutual allegations are mostly about technical issues that could be solved if specialists were able to sit down and talk in a constructive atmosphere. Perhaps the treaty could be updated, but it's still absolutely necessary.”

Negotiations and violations

Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the INF Treaty almost exactly 30 years ago, committing themselves to destroying hundreds of Soviet SS-20 and US Pershing II ballistic missiles. In effect, the deal banned all land-based missiles with ranges between 300 and 3,400 miles. The two classes of missiles had, between them, threatened to strike anywhere in Europe within 12 minutes – dramatically slashing previous nuclear war warning times of half an hour or more.

Their elimination was greeted in Europe with an enormous sigh of relief. The political momentum it generated contributed greatly to the rapid unwinding of the cold war, and further strategic arms control agreements that followed. The general feeling continues to this day that the shadow of nuclear war in our time has been lifted through peaceful negotiations.

Some hardliners in the Russian military have never liked the INF Treaty, complaining that Mr. Gorbachev gave away too much to the United States in his eagerness to reap the political and economic benefits of effective arms control. For one thing, the Soviet side permitted the US to carve out a huge exception for sea-and-air-launched cruise missiles, which the US already had – and would use repeatedly in subsequent wars – in the form of the Tomahawk cruise missile, while the USSR possessed no such capability.

“Gorbachev committed treason when he signed this treaty, he betrayed the interests of our state,” says Viktor Baranets, a former spokesman for the Russian defense ministry, now military correspondent for the Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. “The general point of view of Russian military people today is that we don't need to surrender anything more to the Americans. This treaty requires major repairs.”

The US has been alleging Russian violations of the treaty for some time, though it has never before filed a formal complaint. But the Trump administration recently accused the Russians of actually deploying a ground-based cruise missile of intermediate range – a charge which the Russians strenuously deny but would indeed destroy the treaty if true. In early November the US Congress voted $58 million to start development of a medium-range US missile, which would also wreck the deal if the weapon reached testing stage.

“The idea here is we need to send a message to the Russians that they will pay a military price for violation of this treaty,” an unidentified US official is quoted as telling The Wall Street Journal. “We are posturing ourselves to live in a post-INF world ... if that is the world the Russians want.”

The Russians have long accused the US of already maintaining a medium-range weapon of the forbidden type: the Hera, a ballistic missile that is used as a target in testing anti-missile systems.

Confusion over Kalibr?

One major Russian complaint about the INF Treaty, that the US held an asymmetric advantage with its monopoly on sea-launched cruise missiles, suddenly disappeared last year when the Russians unveiled their own version of such a weapon, the Kalibr, by firing massive volleys of them against ISIS targets in Syria from Russian warships in the Caspian Sea.

Some Russian arms control experts suggest that US allegations that Russia was testing a forbidden ground-launched cruise missile may actually relate to the development of the Kalibr, a permitted sea-launched weapon, which the Russians may have – in a technical violation of the treaty – tested on land.

“When you are developing a new missile, it's much more convenient to test it on land,” says Pavel Zolotaryov, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. “It's just more efficient. You can't recover it if you lose it at sea. The American side got this information and began making these sweeping accusations, but without ever going into details.”

The US still declines to spell out its allegations, or even name the Russian missile system that is said to be violating the treaty. That leaves open the possibility that they are talking about something completely different from the Kalibr cruise missile, possibly a new extended-range version of Russia's permitted short-range ballistic missile, the Iskander-M.

Russian arms control experts say that in the current atmosphere of heated mutual recriminations, and in the absence of concerted diplomatic efforts to save or re-work the INF Treaty, the military hardliners on both sides are likely to get their way.

“The termination of this treaty would drag Russia and the West into a far more severe cold war confrontation that we experienced back in the 1980s,” says Vladimir Dvorkin, an arms control specialist with the official Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. “It would be totally unacceptable, disastrous for everybody. Europeans would have a hard time forgiving the US if the agreement collapsed. So, it really would be expedient to make some serious diplomatic efforts to restore stability before it's too late.”

Doug Struck

Families and friends watch the judging at the Moffat County Fair in Craig, Colo.

La Juanita is packed. Under a mural of a farmer in a sombrero, three Asian teenage girls sit in a booth giggling with their white friend. At the next table, an ethnic pea pod of workers ogle overflowing quesadillas, arguing about sports. Spanish, English, and Hmong words slide within sentences and leap between tables.

And this is Iowa. 

The presidential election a year ago produced a somber map of the United States, colored red and blue. The blue states were mostly clustered on the East and West Coasts, with a broad brush of red between. President Trump’s volcanic presidency has cemented the image of an urban elite and rural heartland frothing at each other over politics, culture, and heritage.

Mr. Trump’s election was delivered by these “flyover states,” cast as places of angry whites, frustrated at being left out of the economic recovery, besieged demographically, ignored politically, and stuck in shrinking small towns with vanishing jobs.

These problems exist. But they are not etched in inevitability. There are exceptions – exceptional people trying to buck the trends, and exceptional places that are succeeding. More than a few small towns are figuring out ways to stop their economic slide and to grow. More and more, white Middle America is being repeopled with newcomers of color, bringing a workforce to agricultural jobs, a vibrancy to decaying towns, and a mix of welcome – and suspicion – from older residents. 

To meander on a 6,712-mile drive across the US on routes mostly painted red is to rediscover a heartland that is often not what the rest of America thinks it is. It is not monolithic. There are places refusing to be an emptying and failing “other” America. They are places of inspiration, optimism, and hope.

Exhibit A might be Storm Lake, Iowa, where half the population is Hispanic, black, or Asian and where schools are stuffed with children speaking 30 languages.

The town of 10,000 (locals say 14,000) is in northwest Iowa – solidly within Trump country. It is the picture of an idyllic Midwest: Dappled trees break the heat in summer and the town hugs a sparkling lake. Avenues are lined by homes with wide porches, and kids wander in blissful confidence about town. Cars stop midstreet as drivers chat with senior citizens in sneakers out on their evening walks.

Midwest towns like Storm Lake are seen as an endangered species. Rural areas cover 72 percent of the nation’s land but host only 14 percent of the population. “Nonmetropolitan” populations began to stagnate in the 1940s and have gradually declined since. Smaller, more rural populations have fallen more precipitously: 1,350 rural counties have lost residents in the past six years, while only 626 showed any gain, according to the research arm of the US Department of Agriculture.

Doug Struck

A tractor-trailer knifes through a pillow of fog in rural Nebraska.

But Storm Lake is different. Across from the town water tower is a Buddhist temple for more than 500 Laotian refugees who came here in the late 1980s. Rust’s Western Shed, the quintessential small-town clothing store, no longer just rents tuxedos for prom night and weddings, but displays quinceañera dresses. The high school valedictorian speech a couple years ago was given by a young woman who had first come from Mexico to Storm Lake speaking no English.

“Just because somebody doesn’t speak English, it doesn’t mean they aren’t bright,” says Carl Turner, superintendent of schools. Eighty percent of his 2,500 students are ethnic minorities, and the first language of 60 percent is not English.

For years, Storm Lake’s workers – almost all white men of European stock – slaughtered pork at the meat plant on the edge of town. It was hard work, but paid $30,000 a year, a solid middle-class income then. In 1981, the plant closed, citing competition, putting 500 people out of work. When it was reopened a year later by Iowa Beef Processors, wages had been slashed to $6 an hour, productivity demands were higher, and fewer than 30 former workers had been rehired, according to Mark Grey, a sociologist at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. Instead, the assembly lines were filled with immigrants who came for the jobs and did not complain about the pay.

The first group were Laotians, brought by a single respected patron from an earlier church-sponsored group of resettled Vietnam War refugees, according to Professor Grey. They were followed by waves of Hispanics, Mennonites from Mexico, Micronesians, Burmese, Africans, and others.

The resentments that followed the job upheavals have softened, and Storm Lake officials have stepped up to try to help the newcomers. The influx is now mostly accepted as the pain of necessary change, those officials say.

“It’s a pretty amazing place, for this to be in northwestern Iowa,” Dr. Turner, the school superintendent, says at his office in the center of town. “I tell new teachers they will never work harder and never learn more than they will here.” 

Bryon Houlgrave/The Des Moines Register/AP

A teacher works with students at a school in Storm Lake, Iowa, an immigrant hub.

The schools weave English as a second language courses throughout each day’s classes and have rigged up a system for high-schoolers to earn a year’s worth of college credits before they officially graduate, in part to help students who lack the legal documents to apply for colleges, loans, or financial aid.

Emilia Marroquin came to Storm Lake 16 years ago. She was born in El Salvador, spent 10 years in Los Angeles, and moved with her husband because they heard there were good jobs in the packing plant, and, she says, “we were looking for a safer place for our kids.”

“It was a shock. I came in November in the middle of a blizzard,” she recalls, now laughing at the memory. “Nobody spoke Spanish, and I didn’t speak English. We were living in a motel and I didn’t know anybody.” She lasted only a couple days on the exhausting, chilled meatpacking line. She quit – her husband stayed at the plant – and she plunged into English classes. She is now finishing a four-year college degree. 

She chats while sitting in a tiny school chair at the town’s new Head Start program building, where she works as a community liaison. She just finished enrolling the child of a Sudanese arrival. “They need a person they can trust,” she says of people like the tall, lanky man who had come to her office, clutching a sheaf of official documents for his daughter.

“Those who stay feel they have job security, their kids’ school is safe, and it’s a safe community,” she says. “It’s a place where they can do things that they never thought of before, like owning a house, having a car, having a job that will give them good wages.”

If the newcomers bring problems, they would wash up at the foot of Mark Prosser, Storm Lake’s burly chief of police. But “in 28 years, I can probably count the hate crimes we’ve had on one hand,” he says.

The force makes an ambitious outreach effort to the communities, with mixed success. Their potluck dinner flopped: “We learned that in other cultures you don’t invite someone to a meal and then ask them to bring the food.” 

And they don’t round up the town’s citizens to check their papers. Mr. Prosser shrugs at the question of how many are here illegally – he’s heard from one-third to one-half. But “we’re not in the immigration business,” he says. “I honestly have not even had that conversation for two or three years. It’s not an issue.”

Prosser, too, is bullish on the town’s diversity. “Sure, there are problems. But let’s be clear: The pros so outweigh the cons – it’s not comparable. Storm Lake is so young, so colorful, so vibrant compared to other Iowa communities. What kind of problems do you want to have – the problems of dying or growing?”

Other rural towns are seeing a similar influx. Hispanics, blacks, and other races made up 82 percent of what growth there was in rural areas between 2000 and 2010, according to an analysis by Daniel Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

But the dagger in the heart of many small towns is the loss of industry. The Department of Agriculture says rural areas lost nearly a quarter of their manufacturing jobs during the 2000s.

There are towns trying to overcome that. Peru, Ind., was born almost two centuries ago, first as a trading post with the Miami Indians and then as a way stop on the Wabash and Erie Canal. It became a railroad hub when the canal was filled in, and thrived as the county seat with an Air Force base and several auto parts manufacturing plants. But the base and the plants were mostly closed by the 1990s, the town’s population shrank to 11,000, and longtime businesses gave way to shops selling electronic cigarettes and fireworks – a familiar death spiral for rural towns.

Gabriel Greer is the mayor. He is only 35 years old and owns a small construction business. He’s also a Democrat. “Donald Trump won hands-down here. I won hands-down here. Hard to square,” he acknowledges, sitting in his office in City Hall.

One reason is townsfolk are buying into his refusal to let Peru wither away. He and a small cohort of mostly young businesspeople are trying to save the town. The trick, he believes, is not the traditional one of courting the odd industrial plant to bring new jobs.

“ ‘Jobs first’ is not how it works anymore. What we are fighting now is a battle for people,” he says. “People now decide where they want to live, and start looking for a job from there. The jobs will follow.”

Mr. Greer notes there are five medium-sized or larger cities within about an hour’s drive offering employment. “Then the question is, where do you want to live?” Small towns, with cheaper and bigger homes, low crime, kid-friendly streets, and a strong sense of community may persuade many people to put up with a longer commute, he says.

Or eliminate it altogether. “There’s a lot of people working jobs online, and they can live wherever they want,” says Steve Dobbs. He moved with his wife, a lawyer, back to her hometown of Peru six years ago. They set up offices in the old Montgomery Ward store, and Mr. Dobbs started renovating the boarded-up storefronts to put lipstick on an aging downtown.

He sees signs it is working. The plywood is coming down, windows are being repaired, and a few new businesses have opened. In fact, the US Census Bureau says the rate of new start-ups in rural areas nationwide is nearly double that in metropolitan areas.

“We are definitely coming back,” says Sandra Tossou. She left a fast-paced culinary career in five-star restaurants to return to Peru, where she reopened an old bakery and now has a dozen workers. Facing down a towering cake with an icing bag, she says it was the right choice. “We’re part of the revival. It’s the young entrepreneurs who have to have the drive to make a comeback.”

The country looks different from the heartland. Middle America is a seductively vast tableau where people are shaped by natural elements – soil, water, wind, and space. The people in the heartland are more defined by the boundlessness of those characteristics than laws. Rules from Washington often seem an insolent din from afar, naive to the dictates of the land. Parents here raise their kids with an ethos of endurance, not complaint. They labor to overcome problems, not to circumvent them. They see religion, not government, as the only force equal to the power of the land and the weather and the miseries those sometimes bring. They honor consistency, not discord. 

To the people of the heartland, the coastal denizens who fly over don’t know what’s below and don’t understand it. They pull down the window shades in their airplane to watch a movie.

But the very vastness of Middle America is drawing new industries. In Nebraska, corn is king. The countryside is a mosaic of huge circles of cornfields – grown around the radius of giant pivoting sprinklers – set within the squares of traditional property lines.

Yet from O’Neill, Neb. (pop. 3,700), you can take roads due east for 10 sections (as square miles are measured on farmland) and then due north for nine sections to find the state’s newest bumper crop – wind turbines. 

Doug Struck

Wind turbines sprout on the grasslands of Nebraska, coexisting comfortably with cows.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy planted 200 turbines here at the Grande Prairie Wind Farm, an army of mechanical giants that loom over the landscape like the Martian invaders in H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds.” Shawn O’Connor is the senior manager who oversees the wind farm for Vestas, the Danish turbine manufacturer. He is a US Army-trained engineer whose background is in coal. He has run coal plants and helped build them. He says he realized they were industrial dinosaurs.

“I had a lot of career left. I wanted something that would grow,” he says. He calls the turbines “masterful creatures.”

He is right about the growth. Mr. O’Connor’s 200 wind machines will soon seem modest compared with the 1,000 turbines being erected in the massive Wind XI project in next-door Iowa, part of that state’s plans to abandon fossil fuels entirely.

O’Connor walks into his office with a job seeker who is wearing a hard hat and safety harness. Before a person is hired, the candidate must pass a climb test: Scale a ladder 300 feet to the top of the tower and traverse the “nacelle,” the pod at the hub of three 177-foot blades.

“It’s not for everyone,” O’Connor says. When the wind blows, the turbine sways a bit, which can be unnerving at 30 stories high. O’Connor likes to hire local farmhands for his crew of 20 technicians. They respect safety, understand big machinery, and “show up for work every day,” he says. His technicians start at $17 to $22 an hour, not bad in a rural area where jobs off the farm are hard to get and usually pay meager wages.

Not far away, Jared Sanderson and Tim Peter are working at a grain silo set amid cornfields studded by the turbines. In every direction, giant white towers support blades that cut the air. Neither farmer minds the turbines.

“I’d rather have that than the leak from an oil pipe,” says Mr. Sanderson, referring to the ongoing controversy in the state over the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Do the machines mar the aesthetics? “There’s nothing to look at here anyway,” says Mr. Peter, grinning. The men say farmers get about $10,000 a year to put a wind turbine on their land, and the blades are high enough that they can till the soil under them. The cows seem to approve, too: On hot days, they will line up single-file in the slender shade of a turbine tower.

Other new industries are cropping up in Middle America, not all welcome. Pueblo, Colo., made steel for the country’s westward expansion and was known as “the Pittsburgh of the West” until the price collapse of the 1980s. Its bruised economy is now reviving in part because of marijuana. Twenty-nine states have legalized pot use in some form; Colorado was the first to approve recreational use. Pueblo has one of the largest outdoor fields of marijuana – 21,000 plants and expanding – in the country. 

Pueblo’s citizens continue to argue about the crop – Isn’t it a gateway drug? dangerous to your health? – but the city reaped $3.5 million in taxes and fees from the pot businesses last year. A year ago, Beverly Duran, director of the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation, selected 30 high school graduates to each receive a $1,000 college scholarship. This year she gave all 210 students who applied for scholarships $2,000 a year for college, thanks to pot taxes. At the school awards ceremony, “the excitement and the look on the faces of the students was incredible,” she says. “It was the look of hope.”

Other towns in Middle America are hoping a change in Washington will bring new vigor to their main streets and monthly incomes. Across the state from Pueblo, in northwest Colorado, lies Craig (pop. 9,500). This is red country – Trump won the county by 82 percent. Ranchers graze cattle on dry, cinnamon-brown land dotted with sagebrush. Historical photos show gunslingers and huge cattle drives. The local museum keeps Native American displays on one side and cowboy displays on the other.

The scene at Craig’s annual Moffat County Fair seems relaxed. Worn boots and cowboy hats are standard uniform. Men and women deftly navigate around the grounds on horseback, willing their animals with gentle nudges and tugs. People wave hello.

Still, “it was a little scary before the election,” says Katrina Springer, president of the fair board, who grew up on a sheep ranch. Passions run deep here: At the center of town is a store dedicated to survivalists. “Prepare for the worst,” the sign in the window says. “Hope for the best.” Yard signs proclaim “Coal Keeps the Lights On,” in defense of the thick seams of the Yampa coal field underlying Craig.

It is impolite to ask ranchers here how many head of cattle they have – it’s like asking how much money they have in their bank account. Nor does one inquire too pointedly about the size of their ranches. Many ranchers graze their cows and horses on federal land, and their relation to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is a touchy subject. By that calculation, they saw President Barack Obama as against them and see Trump as for them.

Standing by the auction lot fence at the fair, Shandy Deakins, who grew up in Moffat County, says the Trump election has eased anxieties in the area. “I feel that we have a voice now,” she says.

“Absolutely,” agrees Shane Ridnour, who works with show cattle. “We feel way more secure. In the last eight years, they were really going after coal. People back East don’t understand the benefits of coal and ranching. The BLM was trying to take away land that ranchers had used for years.”

“That’s the thing about this president,” says Mr. Ridnour. “He wants us to succeed.” 

A few, quietly, are not so sure. By the craft exhibits, Susan Domer takes a moment from extolling the virtues of knitting – “your kids and husband think you’re busy working, but it’s relaxing” – to contemplate her town. 

“Craig needs another industry,” she says. “When I was 18, I put Craig in my rearview mirror. I was going to take the world by storm.” Now more than five decades later, she is back, not out of defeat, but by choice. “It’s home. People here have common sense. They’re raised that way.” But she sees the challenges of living in rural America. “I have one granddaughter who sees what I see,” she reflects. “But she can’t afford to live here because there’s no job that will pay her [enough].”

Still, Craig is just 42 miles away from Steamboat Springs, a thriving tourist hub. The tools of change are there for rural America – a national infrastructure of good highways, a growing system of internet and virtual work, a variety of new professions that can thrive outside cities. The question for many small towns is whether they can overcome the image of isolation that the residents themselves embrace but outsiders are wary of.

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, knows something about changing perceptions. It was the poster town for neo-Nazis in the 1970s and ’80s. Now it is booming with new residents and a steady tourist trade drawn by a stunning lake and Swiss-mountain scenery. 

Lita Burns came 16 years ago to take a job at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene. It was “incredibly white,” she says, and she and her children – of Hispanic origin – were distinct oddities. A dozen years later, Ms. Burns, now head of the Human Rights Education Institute, was trying to hire Hispanic faculty at her college.

“They wanted to know if it was safe to bring their families here,” Burns recalls. “I said ‘yes, the world is changing.’ ”

Reuters

Abdoulaye Dosso, an Ivorian migrant who voluntarily returned from Libya, talks with friends in Abidjan, Ivory Coast Nov. 25.

Many schoolchildren in Africa have been taught about the history of the slave trade and how it ended with a universal appreciation of human rights. Those lessons must have been very much in thought during a summit of 83 heads of state from Europe and Africa on Nov. 29-30. The gathering was set to focus on youth development in Africa. Instead, it turned into emergency planning to end the open buying and selling of slaves in Libya.

Many African leaders have been in shock in recent days after a CNN video showed a slave auction in Libya run by smugglers taking advantage of migrants trying to reach Europe. The slaves were being sold for as little as $400, either to be exploited as day laborers or used to extract ransom payments from their families back home. “Some Nigerians were being sold like goats,” said Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

At least 400,000 African migrants are living in dozens of repressive camps in Libya hoping to make the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean. But they’ve been blocked by efforts of the European Union and the Libyan Coast Guard to make the crossing. Many EU leaders, worried about the rise of anti-immigration sentiments in their countries, are desperate to cut off the flow of Africans to the Continent.

Thankfully, both the EU and African leaders meeting in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, recognized the need to again assert the basic rights of liberty and initiated plans to end the auctions and return thousands of migrants to their home country. They also agreed on ways to resettle the migrants and break up the criminal networks bringing them to North Africa. The United Nations promised to take the smugglers to the International Court of Justice.

This swift action might help the two continents better deal with the fundamental issues of mass migration. Africa needs more aid to improve living conditions while Europe must come up with better legal ways to admit more Africans. Africa is expected to more than double its population by 2050, creating even more pressure to migrate unless there is rapid development.

Physical slavery in Africa may again be ended after this summit. But the mental chains about economic growth and opportunity need to be broken. Perhaps the next EU-Africa summit can return to the topic of youth development.