Last week’s summit between South and North Korea was full of feel-good symbolism. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un grinned and held hands while stepping back and forth into each other’s territory. They planted a tree using water and soil from both sides of the Korean border. They took tea and talked for 30 minutes.

After the meeting was over, North Korea even announced it would shift its time zone to align with that of the South. Mr. Kim had found it a “a painful wrench” to see two clocks showing different times on the wall at the summit venue, North Korean state media said.

This show of apparent fraternity went over very well, in South Korea at least. And intentionally or not, it may have raised world expectations for the upcoming summit between Kim and President Trump. True, North and South Korea were one nation for hundreds of years prior to division at the end of the Korean War. But if they can embrace after decades of enmity, can’t the United States and North Korea strike some sort of tension-lowering nuclear deal?

The problem is that the South-North summit was just the opening act. Any real peace deal for the region will likely need the approval of the US and China, as well as the two Koreas. That would be a complicated negotiation. And it remains unclear what North Korea means when it makes statements about possible “denuclearization.” Even defining that term could occupy negotiators for months, no matter the intent of national leaders.

“Trump and Kim are not going to sit down and do an arms control deal in an afternoon,” says Scott Snyder, director of the Program on U.S.-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Confounding developments

This doesn’t mean the South-North Korea summit wasn’t a big deal. In South Korea, television images of the two leaders interacting transfixed a population that has grown used to the constant threat of hostilities. North Korea state media covered the events at great length, though how the isolated North Korean population reacted remained mostly unknown.

In the US the summit seemed just one piece of a string of North Korea news that’s been more dreamlike by the day. Mr. Trump’s agreement to meet with Kim was a surprise. Developments since have been confounding. Reports from Seoul on Monday, sourced to the South Korean government, said that North Korea’s Kim had agreed to abandon his nuclear weapons if the US agreed to a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War, and promised to not invade North Korea.

“Overall, this is a very positive first step. But the future remains very unclear, and there are innumerable opportunities for all of this to fall apart very rapidly,” writes Abraham Denmark, director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center, in a flash analysis of weekend events.

Trump administration officials say they see the possibility of an historic breakthrough, but have no illusions that progress is a foregone conclusion. North Korea and South Korea have had previous hopeful summits that did not in the end change much, noted national security adviser John Bolton in a Sunday interview on Fox News.

“We’ve heard this before,” said Mr. Bolton.

Heavy diplomatic lifting

North and South Korea agreed to pursue this year a peace treaty formally closing the hostilities of the Korean War. But North Korea suggested no timeline for any dismantlement of its nuclear weapons and nuclear development infrastructure. It provided no details on what it means when it talks about a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, or what it wants in terms of the future deployment of US troops in South Korea. 

That leaves a lot of heavy diplomatic lifting for the future, if a US-North Korea accord is actually to be reached.

“The Kim-Moon summit wasn’t even really intended to accomplish much other than serving as an opening salvo,” says retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities. “President Trump has the hard job – now he has to get into the nuts and bolts of disarmament.”

One possible problem is that the US and South Korea have different – though complementary – interests in engaging North Korea. President Moon wants to start a process that could lead, in the distance, to reunification. In the short term he’s interested in tension-lowering moves, such as a possible mutual fisheries zone along the Korean borders, and the Korean War peace treaty.

The US, for its part, is interested in those things too, but its primary national interest is the elimination of any nuclear threat to the US homeland or US or allied military forces. Negotiations between the two Koreas, and the US and North Korea, may need to be carefully synchronized to ensure that differences in speed of progress towards different goals don’t become a source of tension between the parties. 

There is also the worry that Trump may not understand, or accept, the tedium of diplomatic processes. His desire for quick, obvious “wins” may push him to premature declarations of victory before details have been delineated and agreed upon.

“It’s just that you would want someone who cared about the process a little bit,” says Mr. Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s so easy to imagine that once they have a ceremony and a nice meal he’s going to lose interest.”

Andrew Harnik/AP

Frst lady Melania Trump, second from right, and Brigitte Macron, second from left, watch as President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron participate in a tree planting ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. The sapling, a gift from Macron on the occasion of his state visit, is gone from the lawn. A pale patch of grass was left in its place. The White House hasn't offered an explanation.

With a pair of major foreign policy challenges looming in the coming days – the future of the Iran nuclear deal and the prospect of a trade war between America and its European allies – it’s easy to lose sight of the longer-term goal behind French President Emmanuel Macron’s dramatic state visit to Washington.

France’s World War II resistance leader, President Charles de Gaulle, was famously, if perhaps apocryphally, quoted as saying: “Je suis la France! (I am France!)" Macron’s message is actually more ambitious: “Je suis l’Europe.” In fact, he is seeking to position himself not just as the embodiment of a reinvigorated European Union, but as a key defender of the whole edifice of postwar international cooperation and liberal democracy built by the Americans, with Europe’s support, seven decades ago.

That, beyond his forthright rejection of the “America First” approach of US President Donald Trump, was the point of his nearly hour-long address to the US Congress last week. And the degree to which he succeeds is likely to have major implications for the direction of world affairs.

The immediate prognosis remains uncertain. Speaking to reporters before returning home, Macron said he doubted he’d persuaded Trump to stay in the international agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program when it comes up for recertification on May 12. He seemed equally unsure of the prospects for avoiding the imposition, as soon as May 1, of steep US tariffs on European steel and aluminum, even with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s follow-up talks in Washington the day after Macron left.

In the short term, either of those things could further destabilize an already violent Middle East and a fraying US-European alliance. The EU says it will take retaliatory action against a targeted list of American imports if Trump’s new tariffs come into force. When it comes to the Iran deal, France, Germany, Britain, and the rest of the EU, as well as Russia and China, are also signatories to the 2015 agreement. All have signaled they’ll stay in. But if the US pulls out and imposes strict new economic sanctions – especially so-called secondary sanctions affecting European-Iranian trade as well – the possibility has to arise of Iran attempting to resume its drive for nuclear arms.

Macron, however, is concentrating on the longer run. Though he has been president for less than a year, he has already given France its most powerful voice on the European stage for decades.

Part of this results from a mix of history and serendipity. Under a constitution adopted after de Gaulle returned to power in the late 1950s, French prime ministers may come and go in periods of crisis. But the president has a five-year term, with explicit control over foreign and defense matters. Britain, meanwhile, is dealing with the effects of a national referendum that mandated its withdrawal from the EU, and is up to its eyeballs in negotiations to achieve this so-called Brexit without seriously weakening itself diplomatically and economically. Germany remains the main economic power in Europe. But Chancellor Merkel has begun what is almost certainly her final term in office, weakened somewhat by a coalition deal that took months to put in place.

Macron’s main worry is the rise of what, in his speech to Congress, he called “raging … extreme nationalism” and a climate of “anger and fear” in both European and American politics. In Washington, his remarks were taken as a reference to the Age of Trump, but he is concerned as well about political trends on the eastern edges of the EU, notably in Poland and Hungary. He’s also aware of the rise in recent years of right-wing nationalist groups like the National Front in France and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.

Instead of “isolation, withdrawal and nationalism,” he is sounding a call for renewed, international action, with the Western alliance at its core, to deal with the issues that have been used to feed nationalist flames – trade imbalances and Iranian military expansion in the Middle East among them.

For now, he seems in damage-limitation mode. He has little choice, especially if the Trump administration indeed goes ahead with tariffs and pulls out of the Iran deal. It was little surprise that he told reporters before leaving Washington that he planned to phone Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the flight back, or that he’d spoken to Russia’s Vladimir Putin on the way in.

But his longer-term hope is to persuade American and European leaders to resist the “tempting” remedy of turning inward and playing to purely national interests, and pursue a strengthened commitment to the rules-based “liberal order” they built after World War II. The need in this new century, he argues, is for a united, multilateral approach to dealing with their shared threats and challenges.

It will be a tall order, but one which the youngest president in French history is unlikely to abandon.

Erik Mcgregor/ZUMA Press/Newscom

The Museum of Jewish Heritage at 36 Battery Place, in New York, shown the day of a Refuse Fascism conference in 2017. Last Wednesday, a conference of major American Jewish organizations gathered to honor Muslims who protected Jews during the Holocaust, along with modern Muslim activists working to battle anti-Semitism.

Laziza Dalil had butterflies before she took the stage at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan last week.

Standing in front of a mostly Jewish audience in New York’s memorial to the Holocaust, the political activist from Morocco opened hesitantly, but soon posed the question she often hears about her work: “Why would a group of Muslims be interested in working on Jewish history?”

The answer has many dimensions, said Ms. Dalil, a leader in the Association Mimouna, a coalition of Muslim students who have taken on the task of highlighting the deep Jewish roots woven into Moroccan culture. But tonight, part of her point was clear: such an interest seems startling, and somehow odd, given the past and current histories of enmity and violence between the two faiths.

The same could be said the night’s event: a conference of major American Jewish organizations gathered to honor Muslims who protected Jews during the Holocaust, along with activists like Dalil. The keynote speaker this evening was a major Sunni theologian, Mohammed Al-Issa, the secretary general of the Muslim World League in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He came to publicly condemn Muslims who deny the Holocaust or use Islam to justify acts of violence and terror.

Events promoting tolerance and interreligious dialogue have long been a part of America’s religious landscape, especially among liberal-leaning groups. But there’s been a growing sense of civic earnestness in such discussions recently, many religious leaders say.

Indeed, as anti-Muslim violence continues to rise in the United States, and as public, unabashed anti-Semitism begins to stalk Europe and the US once more, religious leaders in all three Abrahamic faiths have been trying to get beyond ideas of simple “tolerance” and uphold a deeper commitment to the civic ideals of a life shared together, each invested in the mutual dignity and equality of the other.

“Now we’re really realizing that we’re seeing some real fractures taking place in our society, and the alternatives are, let’s get along, or violence,” says the evangelical pastor Bob Roberts, head of the 3,000-member NorthWood Church, in Keller, Texas.

For the past few years, the Rev. Dr. Roberts has worked closely with Imam Mohamed Magid, head of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), one of the largest Muslim communities in the Washington, D.C. area. Both have been working together to plant a nationwide grassroots network called “My Neighbor’s Keeper,” which tries to build “relational bridges” and community ties to strengthen “neighborhoods and cities that are more interconnected and resilient to hate and violence.”

At the Museum of Jewish Heritage last week, organizers were upholding models of such interconnected resilience, including both the past and present.

“The Holocaust’s impact on Sephardic north Africa and Middle Eastern Jewish communities remains a hidden history,” says Jason Guberman, head of the American Sephardi Federation. “Even less well known is the role of righteous individuals, Muslims from Albania to Morocco to Iraq, who protected their Jewish neighbors.”

But it has been Muslim activists like Dalil who have been working “to ensure that this and future generations would preserve its Jewish history,” Mr. Guberman says.

In answering her own question – why Muslims would care about defending Jewish heritage – Dalil told the mostly Jewish audience in Manhattan that the young Moroccans in Association Mimouna “identify with a pluralistic, inclusive identity that is proud of its Jewish component,” she said. “And the most important thing that gathers us as a group are the values we share, such as understanding, respect, dignity ... and empathy.”

But the deeper dimension of her motives are personal, she said. “In my own perception of the world, I have thought this coexistence between Jews and Muslims – it was not only living side-by-side, but sharing crucial parts of their life – was a regular phenomenon,” Dalil said. “I was wrong.”

It was only when she moved to France to pursue graduate studies, in fact, that she really encountered flagrant anti-Semitism. “I was living in a Jewish neighborhood, and one day a very mature lady came up to me on the streets, and said the most horrific sentence I ever heard in my entire life: ‘Paris was cleaner when the Germans were here,’ ” she said.

The experience so shook her that she soon left France and went back home to Morocco. But it also piqued her interest, and she began to see how much of ancient Jewish life had been woven into the fabric of Moroccan Berber culture, from its cuisine to its art and music.  

A Muslim scholar's work on the Holocaust

Mehnaz Afridi often gets the same kind of startled reactions from people who hear about her work. As the head of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College, she notes how jarring it can be to encounter a Muslim scholar working at Catholic institution and heading a center focused on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience.

“In a city so wildly diverse, we’ve put together the most unfamiliar people you can imagine into a room to work on issues of genocide and the Holocaust,” says Dr. Afridi, author of “Shoah through Muslim Eyes,” noting how the rise of white nationalism and the so-called alt-right has only galvanized interest in her research center recently. “And my goal is to eradicate anti-Semitism in the Muslim community,” she says.

While Muslims and Jews in New York have been forging ties with a greater sense of civic earnestness, Roberts, the pastor of the evangelical megachurch in Texas, says that conservative Christians and Muslims who adhere to traditional teachings often face deeper obstacles.

Creating a space of deeper civic trust and understanding, he says, isn’t always easy for faith traditions that emphasize their exclusive claims to truth, or a belief that their sacred book alone reveals a singular pathway to God.

“That’s a big deal,” Roberts says. “And being exclusivists, what that does is, it makes us tribal. And the impact of being tribal is, we see each other as objects to be won rather than people to be in relationship with.”

Among American Christians, Evangelicals report being the most suspicious of Muslims, and nearly three-quarters of white Evangelicals say Islam is inherently in conflict with democratic principles, according to a 2017 poll from Pew Research. And in many Muslim-majority nations, residents often express a similar suspicion toward minority Christians and Jews, with eruptions of persecution and violence.

Roberts and Imam Magid, the head ADAMS, have been trying to push through these obstacles, however: first, by bringing together groups of imams, rabbis, and evangelical pastors for a three-day retreat, to get acquainted in an environment of openness and transparency.

But participants must also make a commitment to forge ties between their congregations, by having their members work together, side by side, on neighborhood projects or other civic concerns.

'Do you think I'm going to hell?'

“The first time I met an imam in my neighborhood, we’re five minutes into the conversation, and he said: ‘Do you think I’m going to hell?’ ” Steve Bezner, senior pastor of the Houston Northwest Church, a Southern Baptist megachurch, told The Washington Post after attending a three-day Alliance of Virtue conference in Washington. “I said: ‘That’s what my tradition teaches, yes.’ He said: ‘Good, I think you’re going to hell, too, so now we can have an honest conversation.’ ”

Rabbi M. Bruce Lustig, who heads the Washington Hebrew Congregation, a 160-year-old Reform synagogue in the nation’s capital, runs a similar interfaith effort called “Sarah and Abraham’s Tent,” bringing congregations together to socialize and work to address various civic concerns.

“We don’t agree on [everything], nor do we intend to, since we come from different faiths,” Rabbi Lustig says of the Evangelicals he’s met during collaborations with Roberts. “But the intellectual exchange, the spiritual levels that we’re able to connect to by coming together with ‘the other,’ the things we talk about – how do we serve God? How do we serve humanity? – they’ve been phenomenal.” 

And both Lustig and Roberts say that despite the faith traditions’ exclusive claims to truth and revelation, each also maintain a fundamental doctrine that human beings are created in the image of God.

“As Evangelicals, yes, we want everyone to know what we believe about Jesus, and the freedom to be able to talk about our faith, and have a conversation,” Roberts says. “I would say Muslims want to have that same conversation.”

“But we don’t have to let our relationship stop if, well, OK, I’m not going to follow your religion, and you’re not going to follow my religion,” he adds. “What’s different is, we don’t see each other as combatants; we respect each other as created in the image of God.”

Afridi, the director of the Holocaust center at Manhattan College, has experienced her own moments of anti-Muslim violence, including being spat upon. “When people think of Islam, when my students think about it, they think of ISIS, the oppression of women, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and that has been very disabling for us.”  

“But if there is a place in the world where we can do something different about this, it’s got to be the United States,” she continues. “I’ve lived everywhere in the world, and I always just get so much solace here, because so many people are doing such good work, investing so much in each other in so many unexpected ways. It’s important for people to hear, to reach out and show them what we’re doing.”

Each morning, on opposite sides of this city, two women wake up thinking about water. 

For both Helen Moffett and Musa Baba, entire days are choreographed around the vital resource: Where they will get it. How long the line will be. If it will be safe. How little they can manage with and still get by.

Each morning Ms. Baba, a barista, picks her way down a sandy hillside crowded with tin shacks to the communal tap she shares with about 100 of her neighbors. When it’s her turn, she fills a seven-gallon bucket, hoists it onto the top of her head, and carefully walks home, trying not to let too much slosh out into the powdery dust below. That water, after all, has a long day ahead of it. She’ll use it first to wash herself and her kids, then chuck the same water back into a bucket to scrub her floors. Finally, she’ll squeeze out the dregs from the mop, saving them to flush the toilet.

Twenty miles away, Ms. Moffett spends hours each day assembling and maintaining what she calls her “water buffet.” There’s the yellowish water she collects from a spring trickling out beneath a local construction site, jugs of well water she’s bummed from a neighbor, and the trash cans full of rainwater she keeps stashed in her backyard. Bottles and buckets stand at attention around her house, the liquid inside such a wide variety of colors that a friend once quipped that Moffett, a writer, should call her next book “50 Shades of Grey Water.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

People come with plastic bottles and jugs to collect free water from Newlands Spring in Cape Town, South Africa, where residents have been asked to restrict their water use to 13 gallons a day.

A year ago, Baba and Moffett had almost nothing in common, and in many ways, they still live in two different universes. Moffett lives in a manicured gated community flanked by mountains. Baba’s house is two tin rooms she built herself that grip the side of a hill cluttered with other small shacks. 

But these days, the two women, along with millions of others here, share a common preoccupation: how to save water. For Baba and many others, that’s been a lifelong project of necessity. But for another population of Cape Town residents, including Moffett, it’s part of a massive lifestyle pivot that has helped bring the city on the southwestern tip of South Africa back from the brink of the unthinkable.

As recently as March, Cape Town’s government was instructing residents to prepare for an imminent “Day Zero,” when taps across most of the city would be shut off indefinitely. 

Following three of the driest years in the city’s recorded history, the growing water crisis earned Cape Town a dubious distinction: South Africa’s tourist hub, newspaper headlines across the world blared, was about to become the first developed city in the world to completely run out of water.

But behind the scenes, a tectonic shift was under way. As the city bartered for water with local farmers and hustled to build desalination plants, its residents simply started using less water. A lot less. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Cape Town, the second most populous city in South Africa, sprawls out from the foot of Table Mountain – the flat-topped landmark that is a popular tourist attraction in the city.

And it has worked – at least for now. In March, the city government announced that if current water use patterns held and winter rains fell normally (still a big if), there would be no Day Zero this year. 

That’s because since 2016, using a combination of sticks and carrots to coax residents on board, the city has cut its water use by half. Its biggest customers now use 80 percent less. Today, every Capetonian is allowed just 13 gallons of municipal water per day – a little less than the amount it takes to flush a toilet four times. Use more, and the city reduces your pressure to a trickle, and your water bill can turn into a mortgage payment. 

By comparison, during its infamous Millennium Drought of 1997 to 2009, Melbourne, Australia, also cut its water consumption by half, but it took 12 years, and at the end of it, residents were still guzzling 17 gallons a day. And between 2012 and 2016, parched California brought its home water use down 25 percent, to about 100 gallons per person per day.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A man carries a bucket to fill with water at a tap in Khayelitsha township on the edge of Cape Town. People living in informal settlements, like Khayelitsha, use 4 percent of the city’s water despite representing about 20 percent of the population.

Here in Cape Town, suburban residents have become connoisseurs of taking 90-second showers and then flushing their toilets with the water they collected while doing it. On popular water-saving Facebook groups, city residents debate the best way to wash their dog “off the grid” (bottled water, one woman suggests. Scrub him down with used bath water, offers another.) They swap the names of local companies that will sink a personal well in your backyard. Local police, meanwhile, receive a steady stream of tips from concerned residents who’ve seen their neighbors committing the ultimate middle-class drought crime: watering their lawns. 

“There has become a real sense of urgency, even competition [among Capetonians] to see how low you can go [in using water],” says Kirsty Carden, an engineer at the University of Cape Town’s Urban Water Management Research Unit. “Yes, it’s been a crisis, but it’s also good to learn these lessons now. Cape Town isn’t the only city in the world that’s going to need them for the future.”

***

In South Africa – by some measures the most unequal country on earth – water restrictions have had another, less obvious effect: They have given the rich a small but rare experience of how the poor have always gotten by. 

“It’s humbling, learning to think about water the way most South Africans have been doing for a long time,” Moffett says, arranging two gallon jugs of water from another local spring in the trunk of her car. “Every household chore takes three times as much thought, and three times as long.” 

Plus, she says, “I can’t believe we’ve set up a system in which we pee into drinking water. What a waste!”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Cape Town police investigate a man who is pumping water from an aquifer into trash cans for use in washing cars – a practice that is prohibited in the city during the current severe drought.

“We have always lived like this – nothing has changed because of the drought,” says Baba, sloshing a T-shirt in a sudsy bucket outside her house. “If now rich people can understand better what that’s like, I think that’s a good thing.”

But in many ways Cape Town’s vast income divide also raises the stakes of its water crisis even higher. For activists in working-class areas of the city, for instance, this is a rare moment when officials have their eye on the same thing as the advocates: how to make sure shared resources like water are divided equitably. 

Like so many things in South Africa, these activists point out, water access is a legacy of apartheid. The people at the outer edges of the city, in places with the worst maintained public infrastructure, tend to be black and poor. The people in areas with the best facilities tend to be wealthy and white. 

“In this city, when a certain group of people are struggling to access water, it’s seen as normal, whereas when another group struggles, it’s seen as a crisis,” says Axolile Notywala, general secretary of the Social Justice Coalition, a local nongovernmental organization. “Right now we have a crisis because middle-class and rich people can’t get water, but once that’s dealt with, we’re worried it will be business as usual in the city.” 

Many of the city’s wealthiest residents have quietly begun to opt out of the city’s water system altogether. As restrictions on municipal supplies have tightened over the past several months, tens of thousands of people have gone essentially off-grid, drilling backyard wells to supply their showers and trucking in treated factory wastewater to fill their swimming pools. One luxury hotel chain recently announced it was constructing its own desalination plant.

“In the immediate future, people tapping into those alternate supplies relieves pressure on the system, so there’s great benefit for us,” says Xanthea Limberg, the Cape Town city councilor in charge of water. But in the long term, she worries, all the extra wells could drain the city’s vital aquifer, which also needs to recharge after periods of drought. Not to mention that the wealthy going off-grid could deprive the city of income it desperately needs to subsidize water access for the poor. 

“They won’t put pressure on the city to maintain that infrastructure, because if it fails, they don’t depend on it,” she says. “But the poor residents in our city don’t have the luxury of alternatives.” 

That divide between those with alternative sources of water and those without them is already beginning to play out in varied ways across the city. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Helen Moffett, a poet and academic, goes to collect spring water near her home in Noordhoek, South Africa. Ms. Moffett has become an expert at conserving water and writes a blog about it.

***

On a recent morning, a convoy of six dirt-streaked police cars screeches to a halt in front of a public beach. Cyclists in spandex, floppy-haired teenagers on skateboards, and elderly women with fluffy white dogs turn to watch as cops pour out and march to the site of the crime – a public bathroom. 

“This is where they’ve been filling up the buckets,” one of the policemen says, pointing to a still-dripping tap.

A group of homeless men here, they explain, were using municipal water to wash visitors’ cars – a violation of city water restrictions. But the culprits have made themselves scarce – and, anyway, the cops know they were unlikely to pay any fine they were issued. So they toss the contraband buckets in the back of a police van and pull away.

“These guys aren’t the city’s worst offenders by far,” explains Inspector Shane Blake. But the big malefactors have more resources to hide what they are doing. “There’s a lot of illegal water use happening, but we can’t catch them all.” So Blake and his team are largely limited to spooking the small transgressors.

“People have to get water somewhere. This guy isn’t the criminal,” one onlooker mumbles at the next stop, a shack settlement, as police hand out a $15 ticket to a man scrubbing down a taxi with water from a communal tap. “This guy is just trying to make a living.”

Across town, water trucks rumble into Cape Town’s tree-lined suburbs, carrying a precious cargo – recycled wastewater from local factories and vineyards. For a few hundred dollars, residents can pay to have their pools filled with the treated discharges, which are clean enough to swim in. 

“Otherwise, this water just goes straight into the ocean,” says one owner of a water delivery company. (He asks not to be identified because past media attention has incited massive public anger against his company. Many Capetonians suspect that most private water suppliers are illegally sourcing their water from boreholes, which are allowed only for personal use.) 

“Look, if you have the money, you can always buy your way – at least to some extent – out of crises, and this drought is no exception,” he says. “You can ask if that’s fair or not, but it’s not illegal.” 

But Nazeer Sonday doesn’t see it that way. A farmer and activist in Philippi, a township of Cape Town, he says this crisis is about more than shifting water use off the grid. 

“For me, water is a big social justice issue,” he says. “A golf course consumes 2 million liters a day, and how many liters are people wasting watering English gardens in Africa? How many liters are filling private swimming pools? Hello! Water is our shared resource, and those people are taking more than their share.”

For him, solving Cape Town’s water woes requires a different approach than just forcing people to use less water from the city system. As climate change and the extreme weather it brings close in, people need to learn to see water as finite.

“The city sees this as a supply and demand issue – as in, we have the demand, so let’s find the supply,” he says. “But we can’t go on like that forever. At some point, we have to learn how to conserve, too.”

Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Comedian Michelle Wolf performs at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, April 28.

Two days after comedian Michelle Wolf’s raunchy (and to some, offensive) speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Washington is still buzzing about her remarks.

By contrast, President Trump’s campaign-style rally in Michigan Saturday night, staged as counter-programming to the press dinner, was a mostly forgettable 80 minutes.

In fact, I’m probably one of the few who will remember what Mr. Trump said that night. Because I was there.

I had a ticket to the correspondents’ dinner, but the Monitor’s turn to travel with the president and write “pool reports” – dispatches shared with the rest of the press corps – came up, and so I gave my ticket away. Late Saturday afternoon, off I flew to Michigan on Air Force One.

That evening, as my colleagues in the Washington press corps sat uncomfortably through Ms. Wolf’s comedy routine, I watched Trump eviscerate them all, to the delight of his base.

“You may have heard I was invited to another event tonight – the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Trump began, eliciting boos from the crowd. “But I’d much rather be in Washington, Mich., than in Washington, D.C. right now!”

Several thousand Trump supporters gathered to hear the president at an indoor sports complex, many wearing Make America Great Again caps. We were in Macomb County, birthplace of “Reagan Democrats,” now Trump country. The crowd was mostly white, and skewed older.

And they were ecstatic that Trump had come to see them instead of going to “that dinner,” as attendee Paul Allen put it.

“I like that he’s bringing jobs back to Michigan,” said Mr. Allen, adding that he feels most media is biased, and that he gets his news primarily from YouTube and InfoWars.

Vicki Lewis, a retired art teacher, came to the rally from Westland, Mich., an hour and a half away. She said she had had emergency surgery just a few days before, but “nothing could keep me away.”

Despite Trump’s disdain for the correspondents’ dinner, he had encouraged members of his administration to attend the soiree. But he brought some allies with him on the trip, including senior adviser Stephen Miller and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

I ran into Mr. Lewandowski at Andrews Air Force Base before we left for Michigan, and he echoed his former boss: “I’d rather be doing this than going to the correspondents’ dinner.”

Paul Sancya/AP

President Trump gestures during a campaign-style rally in Washington Township, Mich., April 28.

‘She burns facts’

Much of the controversy surrounding Wolf’s routine stemmed from the fact that she didn’t just tell the expected jokes about Trump and Vice President Mike Pence (who skipped the event too), but also went after senior White House aides who were there – including spokeswoman Sarah Sanders and adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Ms. Sanders sat at the head table, with cameras capturing her every reaction as Wolf called her an “Uncle Tom” for white women and compared her to the grim Aunt Lydia on the dystopian TV show “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“She burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye,” Wolf said. “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”

Having missed the dinner, but seen the Twitter-verse explode in its wake, I was actually prepared for worse. I had seen the tweet from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman defending Sanders against attacks on her physical appearance and praising her for not walking out.

As I watched a video of Wolf’s speech Sunday night, I wondered: Where was the mockery of Sanders’s appearance? The smoky eye? Maybe I’m being too literal. Wolf did attack Sanders, right to her face. And even in an age of declining civility, it felt jarring.

But Wolf was just doing what standup comedians do – they mock people, they tell off-color jokes, they cross the line. Past comedians at White House Correspondents’ Dinners have done the same, including Stephen Colbert’s infamous trashing of President George W. Bush (and the media) at the 2006 dinner.

The difference now is that Trump is president, and he is waging war on the media.

Monday morning, Trump tweeted that the correspondents’ dinner was “a total disaster and an embarrassment to our great Country,” proclaiming it “DEAD.”

By inviting Wolf, the White House Correspondents’ Association effectively walked into a trap. Back in February, in announcing Wolf as the dinner speaker, WHCA president Margaret Talev praised her “truth-to-power style” and “feminist edge.” So the WHCA knew up front what it was likely to get.

After the dinner, Ms. Talev, a White House reporter for Bloomberg, put out a statement saying that “unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit” of the WHCA’s mission, which is to promote freedom of the press and give out scholarships.

A red-carpet festival of chumminess

But the real problem isn’t that the WHCA invited the wrong speaker. It’s the way these dinners have evolved. They have turned into televised, red-carpet festivals of chumminess, featuring reporters, government officials, and other denizens of the “Washington swamp.” In past years, the dinners have featured numerous Hollywood stars.

It is exactly what Trump was elected to fight. Now, the WHCA is pledging to rethink its dinner altogether.

The idea of having a dinner isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s good for officials and reporters to get to know each other a bit as people.

Washington’s other annual press gala, the smaller, un-televised Gridiron Dinner, managed to bring together Trump, Vice President Pence, their wives, and senior reporters just two months ago without incident. There, reporters (including yours truly) put on satirical skits, which aim to “singe, but never burn.” Trump tweeted afterward that he had “great fun.”

The WHCA, by contrast, invites an edgy comedian to “entertain” its dinner, and lets him or her rip. The remarks are not vetted in advance.

As for me, I was sorry to miss Saturday’s dinner, but proud to represent the White House press corps by doing “pool duty.” Journalism is often a team sport, and as I type this, I am reminded of the larger principles involved.

News alerts report that ten journalists were killed in Afghanistan today. Freedom of the press, and the ability to do our jobs without fear, is nonnegotiable.

Fancy dinners, we can do without.

AP Photo

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde during a news conference at the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, in Washington, April 20.

After a period of introspection, one of the most powerful bodies in global governance announced in April that it had not been doing enough to stem corruption. This self-reflection by the International Monetary Fund could do wonders for the world economy.

The IMF admitted that it had long used vague phrases such as “the need for a level playing field” to describe rampant bribery in the troubled economies that it rescues from a financial cliff.

And despite having had a 20-year-old policy to deal with corruption, it now says its official “guidance” to graft-ridden countries has been inconsistent.

The IMF also failed to point a finger at wealthy countries that facilitate the flow of ill-gotten money from poor nations.

Having cast the beam from its own eye, the IMF said it will now become more “intrusive” in a country’s affairs if it sees “hanky-panky” in official spending or market regulation. It will also be more candid and evenhanded in applying standards on fiscal integrity and rule of law.

“Corruption prospers in the dark,” says the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde. The IMF’s new efforts, she adds, will help “harness the immense power of sunlight to put the global economy on a healthier and more sustainable path.”

More than half of people worldwide say their government is not doing enough to curb corruption, according to the watchdog group Transparency International. One out of 4 people says he or she has been either asked for a bribe or offered one to access a public service. Overall, bribery reduces the world’s economic output by more than a $1 trillion, finds the World Bank.

The IMF says its anti-corruption drive is necessary to rebuild lost public trust in institutions and prevent a further slide in tax evasion and income inequality. Fighting corruption will also help ensure that governments pay back the loans they’ve received from the IMF. Countries that suffer a “reputational risk” from a corruption scandal, such as Brazil, can be hit hard by global financial markets.

In a few developing countries, some officials welcome stronger intervention by the IMF. “It can help make a country a star rather than a falling star,” says Lea Giménez Duarte, finance minister of Paraguay. Anti-corruption activists will also be emboldened in many countries by the IMF’s new stance.

The most intriguing aspect of the IMF’s new focus is its request for advanced countries to volunteer to be “assessed” on their efforts to prevent foreign corruption. Do they prosecute bribery of foreign officials by their domestic companies? Do they prevent money laundering by foreign entities?

So far, about 10 countries have stepped up to be held accountable, including Britain and the United States. Their willingness to clean their own house may be a model for other countries to do the same.

“All countries may want to do an introspective look at how they operate,” Ms. Lagarde says. The IMF certainly has. A bit of humility about one’s own faults can help others to correct theirs.