Carolyn Kaster/AP

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks to media outside the White House in Washington during a government shutdown , Monday, Jan. 22, 2018.

Ironically, President Trump – a dealmaker in his past life – was nowhere to be seen when the deal to reopen the government was struck.

Mr. Trump had spent the weekend holed up in the White House, talking with friends, aides, and key Republican lawmakers, watching his surrogates speak for him on television, and perhaps most important, steering clear of top Democrats. Even his Twitter account stayed on message.

This was all by design, stage-managed by advisers who sought to prevent the chaos of the past few weeks from spilling over into the high-stakes arena of a partial government shutdown.

The gambit worked. Democratic leaders quickly concluded that Trump wasn’t going to address the plight of Dreamers – unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children – as part of a short-term spending bill, and so most Democrats voted to reopen the government. In exchange, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky pledged to take up immigration issues, including Dreamers, by early February.

The president’s defenders say Trump’s hands-off approach was, in fact, in keeping with his past as a businessman. He was doing what CEOs are supposed to do: delegate.

Still, it’s unusual for a president to remain essentially on the sidelines throughout such a big battle in Washington. And Trump’s relative absence from the debate could have ongoing implications, as Congress continues to wrestle with hot-button issues such as immigration.

“It’s the president’s job to be part of the conversation, particularly when there are thorny problems that require negotiation between the parties,” says David Redlawsk, a political scientist at the University of Delaware. “The normal presidential administration has the power to persuade, to bring people together. Lyndon Johnson was especially well known for doing this.”

Of course, Trump is not a “normal” president, elected precisely because enough Americans in enough states wanted someone who would break the mold. And it may be hard for Trump to sit quietly by during the next big showdown with Democrats in Congress. As one who clearly enjoys being the center of attention, Trump was reportedly champing at the bit all weekend.

But for now, the president can learn important lessons from the shutdown showdown.

“There’s no question that Trump is still learning how to govern,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “In this instance he was smart to let his lieutenants – in this case, Senator McConnell and [House Speaker Paul] Ryan – work it out themselves, while saying essentially, I’m not giving in on Dreamers.”

‘He needs to be clearer about what it is he wants’

Illegal immigration was a central issue for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and “Republicans on Capitol Hill are willing to fight for him and do what he wants,” Mr. O’Connell says. “But he needs to be clearer about what it is he wants.”

After the Senate voted to fund the government for three more weeks, a group of six conservative Republican senators met with Trump at the White House to discuss immigration. Trump also met with two Democratic senators from red states, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Doug Jones of Alabama.

The two meetings showed that Trump is keen to hold onto the GOP base, as well as sound out potentially persuadable Democrats, as he moves forward on this divisive issue. The White House has stated that any solution needs to cover four main pillars: the Dreamers – the 700,000 unauthorized immigrants protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which was originally set to expire on March 5 before a federal judge issued a stay; chain migration, in which legal immigrants can sponsor family members for US immigration; the diversity visa lottery; and border security.

But the negotiations have been complicated by the fact that Trump himself has been all over the map on immigration. One day he’s telling lawmakers in an unusual televised meeting at the White House that he wants a “bill of love” to protect Dreamers. Two days later, he’s using vulgar language to complain about immigrants from some of the world’s poorest countries as he rejects a bipartisan plan on immigration that senators have brought him.

On Capitol Hill, both Republicans and Democrats have been left scratching their heads.

“At some point it would be helpful if the president said, ‘This is what I’m for, this is what I will sign,’ ” Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas, the majority whip, told reporters Monday.

To presidential observers, Trump’s vagueness on what exactly he wants from immigration reform isn’t surprising. It points to his newness to politics and government, and his apparent reluctance to dig into the details of policy. But at a time of growing polarization and dysfunction in Congress, it could have a significant impact on the ability of lawmakers to make progress.

“Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, the president has been chief legislator as well as chief executive,” says former Senate historian Don Ritchie. “If the president doesn’t provide leadership, then you have sort of anarchy in Congress on these issues.” 

The resurgence of Congress

Of course, there are Democrats who say that President Barack Obama was aloof from the process, unwilling to roll up his sleeves and forge deals. Each president brings his own skill set to the job.

But with Trump, whose adherence to ideology can seem loose at times, the issue could be more acute.

“There is a school of thought that suggests what we’re watching will be, in a sense, the resurgence of Congress, with a president who abdicates the kinds of things that modern presidents have done,” says Mr. Redlawsk.

Back in the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was the Republican speaker of the House and doing battle with President Bill Clinton, Speaker Gingrich used to argue that Congress was meant to be the primary branch of government. Its duties and powers, after all, are laid out first in the Constitution, before those of the executive branch.

In the modern era, Congress has delegated massive authority to presidents – though some in the Senate are expressing hope that their chamber can help with the heavy lifting on immigration through bipartisan problem-solving.

Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware put it this way Tuesday on MSNBC: “If [Trump] can just let the Senate be the Senate, let us work together for two weeks and find a solution, I think in the end, he might be on the path to signing into law something that gets the border security investment that he wants and he ran on, and a solution to the DACA problem that he says he also wants.”

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed to this report.

Natalie Righton, a political correspondent for the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, says it’s been “strange” to watch American politics from afar since the election of Donald Trump, in particular seeing what she always viewed as a stable country turn “a bit chaotic.”

But when American-inspired chaos crept onto her home turf – after the new US ambassador to the Netherlands, Peter Hoekstra, got caught in a web of untruths regarding Muslim radicalism – she took a stand.

At a press conference called at Mr. Hoekstra’s residence on his first day on the job this month, journalists questioned him about comments he made prior to being nominated ambassador by President Trump, about Muslim “no-go” zones in the Netherlands and about politicians and cars “burned.” Did he say those comments or not?

After several refusals to give a straight answer, Ms. Righton declared in exasperation – in a comment that’s since become famous around the globe – “This is the Netherlands. You have to answer questions!”

She says it was a spontaneous response. But looking back, it can be seen as part of a more proactive defense of values on display across Europe since Mr. Trump has come into office. Among journalists and activists, citizens and heads of state, many of those in Europe who do not support the US administration are not just voicing disapproval, but actively defending their stances and policies on immigration and human rights, climate policy, or truth.

Trump's unpredictability

Protests against American power, foreign policy, and successive presidents are nothing new in Europe. After one year with Trump in office, views of US leadership around the globe at 30 percent are at historic lows, according to a new Gallup survey, and at just 25 percent in Europe. But they aren’t the worst on record. Only 18 percent approved of US leadership in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

What is different now is Trump’s “unpredictability,” says Kathleen Burk, professor of contemporary history at University College London, which she says “has energized other countries to try to do something about it.”

The citizen iteration of this is expected to be on full display at Davos this week as the World Economic Forum gathers in Switzerland.

When Andreas Freimüller, founding member of the Swiss campaigning organization Campax, learned that Trump would be attending the annual summit in the Swiss alps, he immediately started drawing up a petition called “Trump not Welcome.” It drew more than 15,000 signatures in the first three days.

But if the theme of the campaign is “persona non grata,” in reality Mr. Freimüller says he wants the US president’s presence as a rallying point to reinforce values on climate policy, gender equity, and racism. Their petition, which says that Trump shouldn’t be given a podium for his “America First” policies, also underscores their contrasting worldview: “The World first, not America First!”

“We know we are not an amazingly big and important country,” says Freimüller, who has applied to protest in Zurich and Davos this week. “But we are a country and we demand to be taken seriously. So it’s our opportunity to be heard now.”

A chilly reception

Over the weekend, Campax teamed up with Action Together: Zurich, a group of American expats, Swiss, and other nationals, for a “we are sorry” march on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration and the global women’s marches. They handed out fliers of anti-Trump actions people could take, such as supporting nongovernmental organizations or writing letters to newspapers, says volunteer Alexandra Dufresne.

Some of those they engaged supported Trump's leadership, arguing that Hillary Clinton would not have been any better, or that US policy under Trump is just being more honest about American goals than the US usually is. Others recognized similar strains of xenophobia in their own countries, Ms. Dufresne says. But the majority voiced condemnation of Trump's leadership.

That sentiment is widely seen as the motive for Trump canceling a trip to Britain, a stunning turn in relations for America’s closest ally historically. Trump tweeted that he decided not to visit London in protest of a new location for the US Embassy in London. But his visit had been contested from the outset, debated in Parliament and drawing thousands of fans to a Facebook page set up by a group called the “Stop Trump Coalition,” who promised “one of the biggest demonstrations in British history.” The fervor grew after Trump retweeted anti-Muslim videos posted by a British far-right group, leading British Prime Minister Theresa May to publicly call out Trump as “wrong.”

“Rushing to offer him a state visit in retrospect must appear a mistake,” says Tim Oliver, a transatlantic expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has been even more outspoken in his condemnation of some of Trump’s decisions, above all pulling out of the Paris climate accord. “I do believe that's a big mistake, I told him but there is no new negotiation,” Mr. Macron, expected to give a major speech in favor of free trade this week at Davos, told the BBC over the weekend. “You join or you don't join.”

'Not an alternative fact, but a lie'

It’s not that American allies are easily watching the US diverge from the the expected norm. Ms. May’s condemnation of Trump’s retweet of Britain’s far-right was preceded by a recognition of the deep ties between the two anglophone countries. Dutch politicians have every incentive to get beyond the awkward start of their new American ambassador so as not to strain the bilateral relationship.

But within that reality, says Righton, there is still room for action. The Dutch press received the highest ratings in Europe of 38 countries surveyed around the globe by Pew Research Center on press fairness. That is not something that Dutch journalists would give up easily. In the case of the American ambassador, in fact, accountability won. He finally apologized for his misstatement.

As a political reporter, Righton says she speaks to politicians on a daily basis, and while they might evade questions, embellish facts, or make false campaign promises, outright lies are not the norm. “If you say more people were at your inauguration than your predecessor, if you can see in photos that is not true, for us that is not an alternative fact, but a lie.”

As Righton puts it of her own tiny role: “What is happening in the US, you can’t just transport that to my country.”

Bassam Khabieh/Reuters

Surrounded by war-damaged buildings, girls break their fast in an Iftar organized by the Adaleh Foundation during the holy month of Ramadan, in the rebel-held besieged town of Douma, Syria, June 20, 2017.

The sound of female laughter and the cheerful beat of an Arabic goblet drum pierce the walls of a ground floor apartment in the rebel-held Syrian city of Douma.

Such sounds seem incongruous in the city, where food is scarce and bombing attacks routine, and in a region the United Nations envoy for Syria has described as an “epicenter for human suffering.”

Indeed, how to feed their children is just one of the extreme challenges faced daily by the women who gathered at the apartment recently to support one another and choose to be happy.

To carve out moments of joy for Douma’s women takes a unique brand of courage and creativity. Yet Sabah, a charismatic mother of five who hosted the recent gathering, has it in spades.

“We are the privileged ones,” says Sabah, who like others interviewed for this story spoke under a pseudonym out of concern for the safety of her family. “I am sad for the younger generation who were born during the siege and remember nothing but war. We have memories, and these memories give us strength.”

Sabah left behind a husband and a luxurious life in Abu Dhabi to join the Syrian uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in her native Douma. She recalls a time when seaside trips were snap decisions taken with the morning coffee. Now she can barely find coffee at a premium price, and leaving town is not an option.

Douma, a conservative middle- and working-class city just 10 miles northeast of Damascus, has never been a base of enthusiastic support for Mr. Assad or his father and predecessor, Hafez. In 2011, the primarily Sunni community was at the forefront of weekly demonstrations calling at first for reform and then the ouster of the Assad regime. Forces loyal to Assad have laid siege to the rebel-held town since 2013, limiting the movement of people and the entry of food, fuel, humanitarian aid, and medical supplies.

Bassam Khabieh/Reuters

Relief workers unload humanitarian aid in the rebel-held besieged Syrian town of Douma, in eastern Ghouta, on May 3, 2017.

Today, two Islamist armed groups vie for control of the area while maintaining an open front against the regime. Last summer Russia, Iran, and Turkey brokered a de-escalation deal that included Eastern Ghouta, where Douma is located and where an estimated 400,000 people remain trapped, but residents say that days without heavy artillery and aerial bombardment remain the exception.

Her own home reduced to rubble, Sabah converted her parents’ apartment in Douma into a safe haven for women, a place to gather and forget, even if just for a moment, the suffocating siege and seemingly endless war. She works with a charity supporting widows, divorcees, and single young women.

Women of all ages stream into her cozy living room at the recent gathering. Small coffee tables offer plates of cookies and popcorn. Carpets cover the floor in a bid to trap the heat emitted by a stove burning coal and dry wood.

The older women squeeze together onto wooden-based sofas, while the youngest stand to make room. They discuss political developments, fluctuating prices at the market, and swap recipes inspired by the limited produce of a city under siege.

And they worry about how to feed their children in the Syrian city with the highest rate of malnutrition. According to a UN survey, nearly 12 percent of children under age 5 in Eastern Ghouta are acutely malnourished, about a third experience stunted growth, and mothers struggle to breastfeed.

Worsening indignities

The impossibly slender fingers of Shams drum away at the derbake.

She met the host back in 2011 while collecting medical supplies from Sabah. It was a year when the women of Eastern Ghouta came together to organize demonstrations, ferry medicine to field hospitals in their handbags, and distribute food aid to families in need.

Before that, says Shams with laughter, life had been “simple, with no action.” She lived with her parents and divided her days between social activities and making tablecloths. Politics did not concern her until she witnessed indiscriminate security raids in her neighborhood.

She describes as “good fortune” the night when a security officer turned a blind eye to her twin cousins – who lived in the same building and were old enough to be taken for military service – during a massive security sweep. Other young men were beaten and loaded into cars.

“At that point, I knew that they (the regime) are treating us not as humans, and we saw them for who they really are,” she says.

The indignities grew in scale and severity. A soldier setting up a machine gun at a checkpoint told her mother to run, warning that the weapon could “go off” by itself.

“Imagine telling just anybody you are a target,” Shams says via a messaging application, the means for interviewing the other women in this story. “You cannot bear this, nor can you bear the fact that these people are the ones ruling your life.”

Uncertainty as a constant

In between uplifting moments of song and dance, memories bitter and sweet, the women share their present fears. These range from going out for an errand and never coming back to, even worse, returning to a home that has collapsed and crushed their relatives inside.

Sarah, an unmarried 27-year-old teacher, works at a local elementary school, which, like much of the rest of the city, gets underway early to get as much done as possible before warplanes hit the skies.

Lessons start as early as 6 a.m. In her class of 30 first-graders, some are so traumatized that they have learning and speech difficulties. An alarm system has been developed so that the children and teachers can shelter underground when there is shelling or air strikes near the school.

“I go to work not knowing if I will come back or, even worse, if I will find my house standing and my brothers alive if I do make it back,” she tells The Christian Science Monitor. “When the bombardments happen at school, my anxiety is double. It is terrifying because we worry about the safety of the children and how they will get home.”

Bassam Khabieh/Reuters

A girl inspects damage in a site hit by what activists said were airstrikes carried out by the Russian air force in the besieged Syrian town of Douma, in eastern Ghouta, on Jan. 10, 2016.

Before the war, she says, it would never have crossed her mind to live away from her father. Society in Douma is relatively conservative, with most women wearing the headscarf and girls living with their parents until they marry. While the new millennium brought with it increased educational and employment opportunities, few strayed beyond nearby Damascus to work or study.

Sarah could have carried on teaching and living in relative safety in Damascus with her elderly father. Instead, she chose to live with her two brothers in Douma and care for the youngest, who was seriously wounded by shrapnel.

Sarah says the lack of empathy among people in the government-controlled capital for those suffering in Douma, her hometown, contributed to her decision to move back in 2015.

“Here we are home,” she says. “The people around me feel my pain, because we are all living the same conditions.”

Navigating life under siege

These friends could talk for days about their shared traumas: the first time their home was raided, the first time they crossed a checkpoint or saw someone shot by a sniper, or how they took tunnels to get out of Douma to bring supplies or visit loved ones, before the underground passages were destroyed by the regime.

They’ve learned how to navigate life under siege. Sabah says half-jokingly that the strength and resilience of women in Douma is the outcome of dealing with stubborn and hardheaded men on the home front. It is also the outcome of being an integral part of the local economy. In the past, when Douma was mostly farmland, women tilled the land alongside men and made textiles when it wasn’t harvest season. Today, despite the siege, they are just as active.

Sabah feels privileged for having access to generators that are strong enough to keep the lights on and electronic devices charging at night, even if they are too weak to keep a refrigerator going.

Fuel might be scarce and costly, but Sabah doesn’t hesitate for a second to dedicate the little she has to power speakers and a phone to play songs that get the women dancing. She knows that good memories are not enough to sustain them. They must also make new ones.

“If Sabah tells me right now that there is a gathering at her place, I will go over there immediately,” says Sarah speaking over the sound of bombing. “Life must go on.”

Bombardment, siege, loss, and death, she adds, became “normal.”

A 'right' moment to be happy?

Her favorite memory of life under siege is the wedding of Lama, Sabah’s daughter, which took place last year on a day of intensive shelling and aerial bombardment.

As the bride did her hair, first responders put out a fire sparked when a missile hit the building next door. Warplanes screeched overhead as Lama was driven to the wedding venue. A flat tire created further delays. Lama thought she would never make it but was overwhelmed with emotion when she reached the wedding hall and found it packed with people.

Al-Hesba, a committee that oversees the application of Sharia law as Islamist rebel factions are the dominant force in town, did not permit the groom and his friends to join the celebration in the hall. They only allowed them to be at the main entrance. Undeterred, the men and women crammed into the designated space and broke out in song.

“It was amazing!” recounts Lama in a later interview. “We danced and they sang for us. We had balloons filled with glitter, and they popped the balloons so all of us were sparkling.”

Each in their own words, the women explain how if they wait for the “right” moment to be happy there will be none. The future does not carry with it the promise of immediate relief. Death is always at their doorstep with the regime closing in.

Sabah, who is a regular participant in public meetings about negotiations between the regime and opposition, remains defiant and says there is no turning back. “There is no way we can accept Assad as the president anymore or to be back under the control of the security forces.”

The women had a fright early one morning last week in what appears to have been another chemical attack. Half asleep and unaware of what had happened, Sabah opened her bedroom window, letting in toxic fumes. Her friends had to rush her to hospital for oxygen treatment, but she is now on the mend.

NASA/File

A photo from Neil Armstrong's first moonwalk in 1969 features a bag of trash resting at the foot of the lunar module. Human space pioneers have left more than 400,000 pounds of human-made material on the moon, including American flags, defunct spacecraft, empty packages of space food, used wet wipes, and baggies of human waste.

As we push into the final frontier, we are leaving our mark. We have already left more than 400,000 pounds of human-made material on the moon. Rovers and bits of defunct orbiters litter the surface of Mars. And scientists have sent robotic spacecraft hurtling out past Pluto with no final destination.

In our own cosmic backyard, space trash abounds. Between abandoned satellites, pieces of old spacecraft, and spent rocket stages, more than 21,000 pieces of debris orbit Earth. The threat of such debris colliding with expensive satellites or careening to Earth has prompted some wild ideas to tidy the immediate area of space surrounding our planet. Those ideas have ranged from slingshots and nets to gecko-like sticky pads and lasers.

As we explore beyond our own backyard, the stuff we leave behind may not have an effect on us as directly. So should we care? Is it our ethical responsibility to minimize the space junk that we leave in the rest of the solar system? The answers hinge on how humanity chooses to ascribe value to things like life, the natural world, and the unknown potential and desires of of future generations.

Current constraints

We can’t yet travel around the solar system picking up after ourselves. But we can minimize what we leave behind, scientists say. Some probes, like NASA’s Stardust mission to sample a comet’s dust, can return to Earth at the end of an exploration. For more far-flung missions, scientists have sent spacecraft to a fiery end in a planet’s atmosphere, as they did at the end of the Cassini mission in September.

When we make the decision to protect a place from our mission leftovers, it highlights what we consider to be worth preserving. Current international planetary protection policies place a high priority on preserving places where there might be life.

Guidelines set in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 direct signatories to minimize contamination of potentially life-bearing worlds. Although these international guidelines are not binding, NASA’s policy aligns with them and scientists are expected to incorporate detailed planetary protection plans into end-of-mission plans for places where there might be life or habitable worlds.

That was the case with NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, says John Rummel, a former NASA Planetary Protection Officer who is now a senior scientist at the SETI Institute. When the probe began to show signs of falling apart, mission scientists worried that they could soon lose control of its trajectory. That possibility was particularly troubling given scientists’ growing suspicion that Jupiter’s moon Europa could be habitable. Furthermore, modeling suggested that Galileo might even be jostled out of Jupiter’s orbit by other satellites if left to its own devices.

“Do you really want to have 36 pounds of plutonium wandering around on its own? Everybody agreed that that was probably not a good idea,” Dr. Rummel says. So he and fellow mission scientists directed Galileo to crash into Jupiter’s atmosphere where it burned up. That plan spared the potentially habitable Europa.

Beyond life

But does responsible stewardship of our solar system only extend to places where life can thrive?

“We should be in the business of protecting what you might call the integrity of these places,” says Tony Milligan, a professor of philosophy and ethics at King’s College London. “There’s something about the uniqueness and the history of these places which makes them worthy of our consideration.”

For some, the potential for scientific discovery adds inherent value to every spec of the universe. For others, the intrinsic beauty of heavenly bodies makes them equally worthy of protection as any canyon or river on Earth. And others still, associate an abstract sense of wrongness when it comes to destruction of nature, here or elsewhere.

“There is an argument to be made for the intrinsic value of nature, that rocks and rivers, whether on Earth or on Mars, have an intrinsic value to them and that there should be some degree of regard for that value,” says Margaret McLean, director of bioethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

Dr. Milligan points to a thought experiment frequently used by environmental ethicists known as the last man argument. Envision that the last human alive decides to level Mars’ Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, he says. Although it wouldn’t harm humans or any other lifeforms, most people react poorly to that idea. “It just looks as if they’re doing something wrong,” he says.

But mining dead space rocks for resources has also been seen as a way to clean up our own planet while sustaining a ballooning and advancing human population on Earth. “A lot of people are all for solar system mining if it’ll shut down the mine around the corner that is leaching materials into the river,” Rummel says. And if we can extract resources without upsetting the balance of another planetary environment, “I’m all for it,” he says.

So how, then, do we decide what to prioritize?

One generation’s trash ...

“How we value things is a sliding scale,” says Dr. McLean. “We have a greater obligation to another human being than we do to a rock.”

That obligation extends to future generations. But how do we know what they will value?

Today, much of society places value in the pristine nature of wilderness. One could argue that a similar kind of wilderness experience applies to, say, the Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars. Future generations might want to hike in a pristine Martian canyon system.

Or they might actually value our space trash, “one era’s debris can be another era’s historic object,” Milligan says. The stuff we’ve left on the moon and are leaving on Mars may be seen by future generations as valuable monuments to human achievement worthy of protecting, too.

Or perhaps they, too, might want to mine ores and other resources found in space, and if we plunder it all right away, what will be left for them?

So what do we do?

When exploring, “leaving no trace is impossible,” says Margaret Race, a senior research scientist in planetary protection at the SETI Institute. “If you really want to have it be pristine, just don’t go.”

And space policy discussions make the assumption that we’re going to explore outer space.

So “what we’re asked to do is to balance the risk with the benefit that we may gain, and to do so in a way that minimizes the risk,” McLean says. And, she says, the interdisciplinary planetary protection dialogues that governments and scientists already engage in are good conduits for finding that balance.

“Going slowly and going carefully makes a whole lot more sense than rushing into something and wishing you had done it later,” Rummel says. “The bottom line is that we have only one chance to move out into the solar system in an appropriate manner.”

Still, “we’re not going blind into this,” McLean says. Space may be unchartered territory, but we have past experiences pushing into new frontiers here on Earth to draw from. “We are explorers, but we need to take the lessons that we’ve learned from our last place of experience with us as we explore.”

AP Photo

In this March 26, 2017 photo, people march against corruption and in support of the Car Wash investigation on Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The prime minister of Norway made a welcome suggestion at this year’s World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. She asked that a #MeToo-style campaign be launched against corruption.

“We need to see who is taking money, who is bribing others, and show that this is unacceptable in all our societies,” said Erna Solberg, one of the co-chairs, who are all women, at Davos.

The #MeToo movement does indeed have three key aspects that inspire imitation: It is largely grass roots. It is global in scope. And it started with empathy (or “me too”) for a set of victims, specifically those who have experienced sexual misconduct.

In recent years, many countries, from Romania to South Korea, have seen popular uprisings against corrupt rulers. These national movements did not go global. Nor did they come with a catchy hashtag. Yet they were all grass roots. They reflect a rising expectation for honesty and transparency in government.

If there is any cross-border movement against corruption, it is in Latin America. Several countries such as Brazil and Guatemala have demonstrated dramatic shifts in public thought against graft in high places. One reason is that a regional construction firm, Odebrecht, has been caught bribing officials in several countries. Another is that Pope Francis has visited Latin America twice with an anti-corruption theme. “This is a battle that involves all of us,” said the head of the Roman Catholic Church on his latest visit.

And a survey last year by the watchdog group Transparency International revealed that 70 percent of people in the region believe ordinary people can make a difference in fighting corruption, which is defined as the abuse of public office for private gain.

Brazil has made the most progress in exposing corruption, even up to the presidency. “Impunity is no longer the rule,” writes Sérgio Moro, the judge overseeing the so-called Car Wash investigations that have felled dozens of top leaders, in Americas Quarterly.

Lately, Argentina has taken the spotlight. Since the election of Mauricio Macri as president in 2015, and after a renewed mandate in 2017, the country has seen social and economic reforms that reflect a popular demand against corruption. At least five prominent former officials, including a vice president, have been charged with corruption.

“People showed in [the] 2015 and 2017 elections that they were tired of decay, inefficiency and corruption but ready and hungry for a different and effective recipe for individual and national progress,” states Laura Alonso, the head of Argentina’s national anti-corruption office, in the same publication. Mr. Macri’s reforms are built on “a sustained social demand,” she adds.

This year, Argentina assumed the presidency of the Group of Twenty, a club of wealthy countries that has helped set higher global standards against corruption over the past decade. If Argentina can use the experience of Latin America to propel this cause into a truly global movement, then perhaps Norway’s prime minister might get her wish.