After the biggest primary day of the US midterm election season, both parties have reason to be hopeful. But barring some game-changing development, control of Congress is shaping up to be a cliffhanger.

Heading into Tuesday’s eight primaries, including in all-important California, momentum appeared to be shifting slightly in favor of Republicans, bolstered by a strong economy and President Trump’s messaging.

Those influences were clearly a force at the ballot box. In California, for instance, Republican businessman John Cox advanced to face liberal frontrunner Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in the race for governor in the fall. That was not a given in this heavily Democratic state, which promotes the top two primary vote-getters, regardless of party.

The president’s endorsement of Mr. Cox, who pumped $5 million of his own money into his campaign, apparently helped bring out voters. Now that Cox will be on the November ballot, that could help boost Republican turnout for endangered House seats in the general election. It also spared Republicans from the spectacle of an all-Democratic general election for governor in the country’s most populous state. The strong performance of GOP Rep. David Valadao, in a California district that Hillary Clinton won by 15 points, also buoyed Republicans.

But Tuesday was a good day for Democrats, too. In California, they had worried about being shut out of key House races. It looks like that didn’t happen (though final results could be days away). Democratic voters’ determination to “resist” Mr. Trump and retake the House was evident particularly in New Jersey, where voters backed all three candidates favored by the national party, including a pro-gun, conservative Democrat, Jeff Van Drew.

“Democrats had a good night,” says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which handicaps elections at the University of Virginia. But “I’m still at 50-50,” he says, about whether a “blue wave” will hand Democrats the House in November. “Showing any sense of certainty about which way the House is going to go is premature.”

Open seats and enthusiasm

One thing Democrats have going for them is a massive number of open seats – 60 districts with no incumbent running. Some of those are in California and New Jersey, where Democrats hope to flip a total of 10 seats. If they succeed, that would cover a lot of ground on the road to the 23 seats they need to win back the House.

Another thing Democrats have going for them is enthusiasm.

“I am bullish about our chances in November,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D) of Maryland, the No. 2 in the House Democratic leadership, told reporters Tuesday. “All over the country I know there’s great enthusiasm, there’s great optimism, there’s great energy.”

Sacramento voter Dan Janos, a professor of film production at California State University, Sacramento, biked to a vote center near his home to drop off his completed ballot Tuesday afternoon. The longtime Democrat was less concerned with any particular race or issue than the looming presence of Trump.

“It’s more important to vote than ever because we’re so incredibly divided,” said Mr. Janos, who lived in San Francisco during Lieutenant Governor Newsom’s time as mayor there and voted for him Tuesday. “Maybe 2016 will be the motivation for people to get out and vote instead of sitting back and watching.”

But turnout in California, though it exceeded the 2014 primaries, was lower than Democrats had hoped.

David Mermin, a Democratic pollster based in Berkeley, predicts that the relative clarity of the general election will draw more voters to the polls in November. Tuesday’s primary was a noisy, confusing affair with a very crowded field of Democratic candidates to choose from – a crowding that caused party leaders to worry they might split their vote and not make it into the first or second spot in targeted districts. 

“The ‘top two’ primary is strange. It’s not about issues; it’s about who’s spending money to take out other candidates,” Mr. Mermin says. “The energy and anger over Trump didn’t necessarily translate as we thought it might, but that doesn’t portend it won’t happen in November.” 

Other Democratic strategists are more concerned about November.

“I’m worried,” writes Democratic pollster Celinda Lake in an email. “We need an economic message.”

It's the economy, stupid

Indeed, economic indicators appear to be putting a wind at Republicans’ backs. The jobless rate in May dropped to 3.8 percent, the lowest since April 2000. For the first time since record-keeping began, there are more job openings than Americans looking for work, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The number of Americans who say the country is on the “right track” has increased to 39 percent, according to the Real Clear Politics average. Meanwhile, the president’s job-approval rating, after hitting an average low of 37 percent in December, has climbed up to 44 percent.

To bring home their economic message, Republicans are touting their new tax-cut law, attributing to it not only middle-class tax relief, but also wage increases and job growth. But while the overall news is positive, not all voters are feeling it yet, cautions Republican pollster David Winston.

Mr. Winston’s surveys show that more than half the country says it is living “paycheck-to-paycheck” and a third of the country is $400 away from a major financial crisis. “People are treading water, they’re exhausted, they’re looking to break out of this cycle, so economic news matters.”

Voters need to feel an improved economic situation in their own lives, not just hear about it in the news, he says. Right now, they’re just beginning to assess their own situation, including the effect of the tax cut. “Is economic change being delivered? If yes, that’s good for Republicans. If no, that’s really challenging.”

Americans may be feeling more hopeful about the future, and even experiencing wage growth, but other costs – like gasoline and healthcare – are increasing, points out longtime congressional observer Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute. “At best, they’re on a treadmill.”

Given this landscape, Trump’s role in ginning up his base – particularly white, male voters – is an important factor, Mr. Ornstein adds. “Trump’s direct effort to rile up that base, and make it about him, ‘You can’t let those evil people win,’ that could limit the damage for Republicans.”

The Alabama primary on Tuesday shows just how much Trump has come to dominate his party. Instead of easily cruising to victory in a deep red state, Republican incumbent Rep. Martha Roby will be heading to a July run-off against an ex-Democrat, former Rep. Bobby Bright. One of the biggest issues in the primary was loyalty to Trump. The congresswoman had vowed not to vote for Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign after the infamous Access Hollywood tape surfaced, urging him instead to drop out.

Tuesday’s primaries also sorted out a few key questions in the Senate: Longtime Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California is likely safe in her seat, having crushed her competitors – including from the liberal left. But the luster has faded from two-term New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, who, after surviving a corruption trial last year, garnered a lackluster 62 percent of the vote against a challenger with no name recognition or reported funds. And Montana’s Republican state auditor Matthew Rosendale will challenge endangered Democrat Sen. Jon Tester in that red state.

Trump has been vowing to defeat Senator Tester for leading the charge against his failed Veterans Affairs nominee.

KCNA/Reuters

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this handout picture released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), on May 31, 2018.

As President Trump’s on-again-off-again summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore draws closer, the Russians are becoming increasingly worried.

What scares them, experts here say, is not the possibility that Mr. Trump will make a deal with Mr. Kim – but the likelihood that he won’t.

Indeed, Moscow appeared more at ease a few months ago, when Trump and Kim were exchanging purple insults and apocalyptic threats. Analysts here say they believe a deal on gradual North Korean denuclearization is possible, but the Singapore meeting can only open the door to what will surely be a long and arduous negotiation, one that will require a great deal of give and take on both sides.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a rare visit to Pyongyang to talk with Kim last week in a clear effort to highlight Russian concerns to the world. The Kremlin fears a possible agreement could be torpedoed by some combination of Trump’s all-or-nothing deal-making approach, toxic Washington politics where Senate Democrats are threatening to sabotage any imperfect deal, and Kim’s own abiding suspicions of US intentions.

Failure at this point, analysts say, could bring the two sides to the brink of real war more surely than if no peace attempt had been made.

“Trump is unpredictable, Kim is unpredictable, yet huge expectations have been invested in this summit,” says Vladimir Kolotov, a Far East expert at St. Petersburg State University. “The security situation can fly out of control, virtually in a moment. If this meeting fails, the region and, indeed, the whole world will suddenly become a much more dangerous place.”

A summit with Russian stakes

Russia, which shares a short border with North Korea, has long had a minor client-state relationship with the reclusive Stalinist nation. The Soviet Union put Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, in charge after World War II, and provided him with arms, pilots, and military advisers to fight the US and its allies in the Korean War in the early 1950s. But Pyongyang’s main patron remains China, to whom Russia largely defers in matters relating to North Korea.

But should peace break out on the Korean Peninsula, Russia stands to gain enormously.

Teams of experts in Moscow have developed plans to extend the Trans-Siberian Railway through North Korea to Seoul, thus creating a direct rail link between the Far East and Europe. Similar ideas for a trans-Korean gas pipeline and a Far Eastern electricity grid have been stalled for decades by the lack of reliable stability in the region. Russia’s own Pacific outpost and gateway to Siberia, Vladivostok, has languished since the Soviet collapse despite its extraordinary location at the crossroads of the Far East, but could be energized by a durable Korean peace deal.

“Russia wants to integrate into the wider region, but the absence of peaceful coexistence between North and South Korea is one of the big obstacles,” says Alexander Zhebin, director of the Center for Korean Studies at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Far Eastern Studies. “So, we have a lot of interest in seeing a peaceful resolution in Korea, but also a lot to lose if it all goes bad.”

One of the things that increasingly discombobulates the Russians is the lack of any constructive dialogue with their American counterparts, despite the fact that denuclearizing North Korea is one issue where they are mostly on the same page. And trying to read the intentions of the Trump White House has become an exercise for Russian foreign-policy experts that makes old-fashioned Kremlinology look like an exact science by comparison.

A good example of what has Russian experts scratching their heads is Trump’s reaction to Mr. Lavrov’s meeting with Kim in Pyongyang. According to the White House transcript, Trump answered a question about Lavrov’s visit by saying: “I didn’t like the Russian meeting yesterday. I said, ‘What’s the purpose of that?’ But, it could be a positive meeting. If it’s a positive meeting, I love it. If it’s a negative meeting, I’m not happy. And it could very well be a positive meeting.”

'Little more than helpless witnesses'

Experts say the outlines of a workable deal are lying on the table, ready to be grasped if the two sides are willing.

The main reason North Korea’s nuclear capability has become a critical issue for Washington is that it has recently demonstrated a potential capability to strike the continental US with a nuclear-tipped missile.

“That may be the best place to start, with a moratorium on testing ICBMs rather than with the actual nuclear warheads,” says Mr. Zhebin. Pyongyang might also agree to a full halt to nuclear testing, which would freeze its capabilities in place.

“That’s not a full resolution by any means, but it would be a very good start,” says Zhebin. “Starting with the missile problem would take the urgency out of the situation, and it would be much easier to verify than going after all the nuclear activities. So would a test ban.

“But we’re talking about a long process in which the North Koreans will have to see that the US abides by its side of the deal,” which might include sanctions relief, security guarantees, and perhaps economic aid. Washington would also have to stand back and accept the outcome of any long-term political agreements between North and South Korea.

“We're living in a world where the North Koreans have watched the US intervene in countries that couldn’t defend themselves, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. The US has just pulled out of a perfectly good deal it had made with Iran. Kim isn’t going to unsee all that. His suspicions will only be overcome if the US proves over time that it has no political motives that it is pursuing under the guise of nuclear talks,” Zhebin adds.

Aside from posing as an adult in the room, a role Lavrov played to the hilt in Pyongyang last week, Russia has few ways to influence the outcome of the Trump-Kim summit or whatever follows it.

“Russia can’t give security guarantees to North Korea, and we have no influence over the US,” says Mr. Kolotov. “We're little more than helpless witnesses, with a front-row seat. The biggest problem we see right now is the extreme unpredictability of the US. If they want to attack North Korea, they will, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

After Islamic militants in Gaza fired a barrage of rockets into southern Israel last week, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party, posted a sarcastic update on his English-language Twitter account.

“For the sake of Israel’s armchair critics, here’s an official update this morning from the local Israeli municipality neighboring [the] Gaza Strip: A rocket hit a kindergarten. No children were there at the time. Studies will take place as usual today. Now preach [to] us,” he tweeted

The next night Mr. Bennett, the son of American immigrants to Israel who is open about his ambition to one day succeed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, slept in one of the Israeli border communities. More rockets were fired, and he was awoken by the same sirens and dashes to shelters that are an intermittent part of life for local residents.

He emerged from the mostly sleepless night with tough words for Israel’s regional arch enemy, Iran, describing it as the “octopus” whose tentacles control Gaza – as well as Lebanon and Syria.

The rocket attacks were launched several weeks into a series of deadly clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli soldiers at the border fence between Israel and Gaza. The violence and disconnect between neighboring foes living vastly different realities has made an especially tough political atmosphere worse.

In Israel, Bennett is among the more influential leaders opposing accommodation with the Palestinians through a two-state solution, instead favoring partial annexation of the West Bank combined with a form of autonomy for areas with a Palestinian majority.

The modern Orthodox resident of a leafy Tel Aviv suburb traces his path to politics to his experience in the 2006 Lebanon war. As a reserve officer in an elite Israeli army unit hunting down Hezbollah missile launchers in Lebanon, he says he felt increasingly frustrated by the futility of the task and the riskiness of the missions he and his men were sent on.

“I can tell you it’s an impossible task because they are embedded among homes, and it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, only there are 130,000 needles,” he tells the Monitor in an interview.

Bennett emerged from the war overcome with grief – a close friend was killed in the fighting – and furious at the army and government, which he believed had deeply misread the situation in Lebanon. It was a turning point in his life that coincided with the then-recent sale of his hi-tech company, which had made him a multi-millionaire at the age of 33.

His next move was now clear: He would go into politics to try to fix the deadly mistakes he saw in person.

On Netanyahu's team

He joined then opposition leader Mr. Netanyahu’s team as chief of staff, serving under him for two years. Next, as director-general of the council of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he was an outspoken opponent of settlement freezes and any notion of a Palestinian state.

Tacking even further right than his political mentor Netanyahu, Bennett went on to helm the Jewish Home party, the rebranded National Religious Party, and led it to its best electoral performance.

The party has since lost some seats in parliament, but the charismatic Bennett is still considered the right-wing heir apparent to Netanyahu. His brash message in the last elections, “No more apologizing,” criticized Israeli leftists for purportedly valuing Palestinian human rights over Israel and its security.

For Bennett, outflanking Netanyahu from the right has been key to building his standing.

“You see Bennett go one way on an issue, and Netanyahu usually follows, because Bennett is Netanyahu’s true north star,” says Jacob Bardugol, a political commentator and host of one of the country’s most popular radio news shows.

That pattern seems to fit whether it is policy on Gaza, the status of African refugees in Israel, or curbing the power of an activist Israeli Supreme Court.

For example Bennett, a member of the security cabinet, coined the name for a doctrine since adopted by the government called “Hezbollah Equals Lebanon.” It means Israel holds the government in Beirut responsible for any military actions taken by the powerful Shiite militia.

“This way Nasrallah knows,” Bennett says, referring to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “that if Hezbollah lets loose on us, Nasrallah will be branded as the destroyer of Lebanon instead of the protector of Lebanon."

Palestinian plan

Bennett is firmly against the establishment of a Palestinian state, arguing it would be an “irreversible mistake.” Instead he proposes annexing the areas of the West Bank currently under Israeli control and implementing what he refers to as a “Marshall Plan” for “autonomy on steroids” for the areas run by the Palestinian Authority. That would include, according to his plan, easier freedom of movement of people and goods through land ports, tourism zones, industrial centers, and the removal of all internal Israeli military roadblocks in the West Bank.

Last year in an interview with the BBC show “Hard Talk” he said, "No one in the Arab world ever accepted the notion of a Palestinian nation. They wouldn't grant them a state. We've granted them a state in Gaza and they turned it into Afghanistan in the heart of Israel. We aren't about to make that mistake again."

"The bottom line," he tells the Monitor, "is I really think is there is no great solution here. I am open to other ideas, like a Jordanian confederation."

Avraham Sela, a professor of international relations at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says Bennett “keeps pushing to the right and for a stricter policy toward the Palestinians because this is his way to corner Netanyahu.”

“Netanyahu cannot afford to let Bennett be more patriotic than him,” he says, “and that patriotism is translated and interpreted as repression of the Palestinians and keeping the left at bay.”

Leadership style

Bennett, who like Netanyahu is fluent in English, is a media-savvy presence in cable news station interviews. Sometimes he appears like a debate club president, touting his unapologetic stance, smiling when he gets a point in during an interview.

And like Netanyahu, he enjoys the special status of having served in the Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli army’s premier special forces unit, which conducts reconnaissance missions deep behind enemy lines.

Says Ofer Ogash, who served with Bennett in the army: “From the time we were young officers he has known how to fix his sights on a goal and then make it happen.”

Commentary from the Israeli right is glowing.

“He is the only one in the political constellation on the right poised to take over as prime minister one day. He’s made of the right stuff, he is calculated but responsible,” says Uzi Baruch, editor of Arutz Shevah (Channel Seven), a right-wing news site.

Mr. Baruch describes Bennett as an affable straight shooter who, because of his wealth, is impervious to corruption. And, despite Bennett’s pronouncements on settlements and Palestinian statehood, Baruch says he is not an extremist who would expel Palestinians from the West Bank.

“He realizes Israel cannot bus Palestinians to Jordan, that we have to find a way to live together,” he says.

Coming tomorrow, a profile of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, speaks at the St. Regis Hotel, on June 6, 2018, in Washington.

For Kellyanne Conway, the political bungee jump of a lifetime started almost two years ago – first as a top official for Candidate Trump, then as counselor to President Trump. She’s an insider’s insider on Team Trump, lasting longer than many of the president’s top advisers.

But don’t call her a “survivor” – despite the fact that she has witnessed the departure of many senior Trump White House colleagues, from the first chief of staff and spokesman, to two national security advisers, to several communications directors. 

“I look at it as thriving more than surviving,” Ms. Conway told reporters Wednesday at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

Conway speaks reverentially of her daily arrival at the White House, where she says “a daily prayer and begin[s] the day recognizing that I work for a man and a vice president … who are making decisions that impact people’s lives.”

She also praises the president for giving her and other women opportunities to succeed – not just in his campaign and administration, but also in his real estate career. Even Trump critics acknowledge that he did give women leadership opportunities in his business operations decades ago when such a practice was less common. For Conway in 2016, it was a matter of proving herself first as a campaign strategist before she was elevated to manager, after the firing of Paul Manafort.

“Look, I’m 51 years old. I was a pollster and a political consultant for years and years, and everyone knew who I was…. I worked on campaigns, I worked for corporate America, I had a great life, successful business,” Conway says. “However, it is Donald J. Trump that elevated me to campaign manager and counselor to the president. And women should look at that example.”

Conway will go down in history as the first woman to run a successful American presidential campaign – a point that would have gained more notice were she not a conservative Republican, says Conway friend and GOP campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell.

“If she were a liberal Democrat, she’d be the toast of the country,” says Ms. Mitchell. “She’d be on the cover of every women’s magazine.… I mean, Donna Brazile ran Al Gore’s losing campaign, and they thought she was a genius.”

Left unstated is Trump’s “women troubles” – the 16 women who have accused him of sexual harassment and unwanted touching, and the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that surfaced a month before the election, in which Trump brags in crude terms about grabbing women.

It’s also not difficult to find comments by Conway in the not-too-distant past disparaging Trump, from her days early in the 2016 presidential campaign working for a super political action committee that backed Sen. Marco Rubio (R) of Florida. In January 2016, she referred to Trump as one who “seems to be offending his way to the nomination and calling it honesty.”

But in politics, such verbal shape-shifting is commonplace, and no one blinked when Conway joined the Trump train and began singing his praises. Conway and Trump, in fact, go way back. They met when she and her husband lived in Trump Tower, and she joined the condo board.

Today, the women who speak for Trump – including Conway and Press Secretary Sarah Sanders – may help insulate him from charges of sexism. Until recently, Trump’s communications operation was thoroughly dominated by women, also including the now-departed communications director Hope Hicks and Omarosa Manigault-Newman, director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison; director of strategic communications Mercedes Schlapp; director of media affairs Helen Ferré; and various press-shop deputies and assistants.

Technically, Conway isn’t a member of his communications team. She holds the rank of “counselor,” meaning she can play a variety of roles, as the president’s needs require.

“It allows her to associate herself with more than just the word ‘communications,’ ” says Martha Joynt Kumar, a veteran expert on presidential communications with a desk in the White House press room. “She can be involved in figuring out how things are going in the political world with the constituencies. She knows the campaign, she knows what he stood for – and he needs people around who remind him of that.”

Ms. Kumar calls Kellyanne a “floater,” someone who can have a toe in multiple issues and facets of White House operations, similar to the role George Stephanopoulos played for President Bill Clinton.

“People like having flexibility,” says Kumar. “You can get involved in policy in different ways. [Mr. Stephanopoulos] was communications director; it was difficult for him to be involved in policy and then also do briefings. But if you have the comms job, you have to be out front more. It makes you more of a target.”

And if West Wing real estate is a signal of power, Conway certainly can claim primacy. She occupies the same third-floor garret that once belonged to Valerie Jarrett under President Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton when her husband was president.

At the breakfast, Conway makes clear she has no interest in becoming communications director, a job that some say is effectively filled by Trump himself – a man who is at heart a salesman, and whose use of Twitter has only grown. During the breakfast, the host’s phone lit up multiple times with Trump tweets; at one point, Conway reached over to take a look and check out what the boss was saying. (He was tweeting about “fake news.”)

Conway insisted, in fact, that she can’t become the president’s top person handling communications strategy. “I do feel like we’re impacting lives, and I travel often on behalf of the president, one of many reasons I can’t be a communications director, per se,” she says.

As the mother of four children, some still in elementary school, Conway makes no bones about the challenge of juggling work and family. On a recent day in the press room, chatting with reporters, she complained good-naturedly about the White House’s ban on the use of personal cellphones by staff. But she is always quick to commend Trump for his treatment of the moms who work for him.

“He’s also a great boss to me, as a woman, as a working mother,” Conway said at the breakfast. “We have fun in the workplace, even though the issues are very serious and very grave.”

Among Conway, Sanders (three children), and Ms. Schlapp (five children), the White House could practically open its own day-care center.

Conway’s praise of the president’s family-friendliness may seem incongruous with the administration’s new practice of separating immigrant parents and children at the Southern border. The issue of family separation did not come up at the Monitor Breakfast, though the overarching issue of the GOP and immigration policy did.

“We either are a sovereign nation that has borders with laws on the books that are enforced, or we’re not, and people have to decide what the ‘or not’ looks like and feels like,” Conway said.

For Conway, the juggle of work and family is only part of the sensibility that informs her advice to Trump. Her working-class upbringing in Atco, N.J., is also essential to her persona and to the window into American life that she offers Trump.

“I’m a good version of the American Dream, raised by a single mom who didn’t go to college and found herself with no alimony or child support,” she notes at the breakfast. “At the age of 25, 26, divorced, and very little skill set. I think it’s a very common human experience in this country.”

Richard Mertens

Dairy farmer John Rosenow (r.) talks with one of his workers, Roberto Acahua.

On the farm of Nettie and John Rosenow, folded in the hills of western Wisconsin, 18 massive Holstein cows file in to be milked, jostling and pushing as they find a place. Mr. Rosenow lends a hand, prodding with a broom handle, while a young man wearing rubber gloves and boots moves quickly up and down the line, disinfecting each cow and attaching the milking machines’ rubber cups.

Rosenow has been up since 3:30 a.m., slipping out before dawn “just to check things out.” Born and bred a dairy farmer – he’s the fifth generation of Rosenows here – he began milking cows when just a boy. But he seldom milks anymore. He spends his days selling cow-manure compost – a profitable sideline on the Rosenow farm – while 20 employees do the farm’s heavy work: milking a herd of more than 500 cows, scraping manure, hauling feed and sawdust bedding, filling bags of compost, tending calves, and watching over the maternity shed, where on this day a cow is recovering from a late-night cesarean.

Two decades ago, Rosenow and other dairy farmers faced a crisis. For years they had relied on family members, high school students, and other local help to run their farms. But the farms were getting bigger and local people less willing to do the hard, dirty, low-paid work of dairying. In desperation, the farmers turned to workers from Mexico. Rosenow was one of the first.

“We didn’t want to do this,” he says. “We wanted to hire locally. But we had no choice.”

It’s a familiar story in US agriculture. But it was disorienting to the dairy farmers, who worked closely with their employees and yet knew little of the new workers’ language, customs, and culture.

“They were scared to do it,” says Rosenow, explaining that other farmers asked him for advice. “Why would you want to hire someone to work for you who speaks another language? It wasn’t something we were used to in the Midwest.”

The agricultural agent at the University of Wisconsin’s Buffalo County extension office saw what was happening and recruited a local schoolteacher, Shaun Duvall, to instruct the farmers in Spanish. Ms. Duvall focused on the language of dairying, but the farmers didn’t learn much. “I had no idea it was that hard,” Rosenow says.

So Duvall doubled down. She took them to an intensive language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico. At the end of a week, they made a side trip to Veracruz, the mountainous state from which most of the workers hailed. Some of the families came down from their villages to meet them. The visit created a local sensation: People told the farmers it was the first time employers from the United States had ever come to Veracruz.

“I came away thinking that this was one of the most powerful things I’d ever done,” Rosenow says. “I thought, this has to continue.”

The visits did continue, and a few years later, he helped Duvall start Puentes/Bridges, a nonprofit that sponsors trips to Mexico. More than 150 farmers have made the trips, most of them from western Wisconsin and southeastern Minnesota. “It’s opened their eyes to a different culture,” Rosenow says.

Duvall says it’s also made them better employers – more compassionate. “It’s helped them understand why their employees do what they do. It’s built trust and commitment between employer and employees. That’s the greatest thing about it,” she says.

Hugs and pictures

The focus of the trips today is less on learning Spanish and more on introducing the farmers to the workers’ families. They exchange hugs, hold small children, and pose for pictures. They pass along clothes, shoes, and sometimes tools from up north. They receive tortilla towels (to keep the tortillas warm when they’re served), beans, and other gifts to take back.

“It’s always a little awkward,” says Duvall, who has organized the trips and served until last year as the program’s director. “What do you say after hi? They always have a meal. Chicken and tortillas, or eggs and tortillas. Some kind of very simple meal. Beans. It’s always prepared with great love and respect. They’re excited we’re there. Mostly it’s, ‘How’s my son?’ ‘How are they doing?’ ”

Rosenow has gone nine times. He’s seen the poverty that sends workers north. He’s observed how workers use their earnings to build bigger and stronger houses and send their children to school. And yes, he’s gotten to know their families. “It’s had a huge impact on how my employees see me,” he says.

On an early trip, Rosenow discovered that one of his workers had opened a bakery. “I had no idea,” he says. He returned home determined to help other workers who wanted to start businesses. He found a teacher at a local university who agreed to give classes on entrepreneurship.

The dairy workers of western Wisconsin are not Hispanic but indigenous. They descend from the Aztecs, and their first language is Nahuatl. Often as many as half of the men from a village are working in the US. Usually they stay a few years and then go home. Many, perhaps most, enter the country illegally.

Rosenow found his first Mexican worker through an ad in the back pages of Hoard’s Dairyman, a magazine for dairy farmers. He met the man at a bus station in Winona, Minn. They couldn’t exchange more than a few words, but “he knew what he was doing,” Rosenow says. The man worked seven days a week and refused to take a vacation. “I thought, ‘Wow!’ ” Rosenow says. “The only person I knew who would work that hard was me.”

It’s a typical reaction. Farmers say the more they get to know their workers, the more they see how much they have in common, including an affinity for rural life and a willingness to work hard. “You just like people who are on your side,” says Stan Linder, a farmer in Stockholm, Wis., who has gone on 11 Puentes/Bridges trips, more than anyone else.

Jill Harrison, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has spent years studying Wisconsin dairy workers. She applauds the work of Puentes/Bridges. “They’re building compassion among people for immigrant workers,” she says. “They’re humanizing them.” But, she says, even the most sympathetic farmer cannot erase difficult circumstances for the workers, including isolation, homesickness, poverty, and hard physical labor.

“These are rough jobs, with long hours, late-night shifts, cold, manure,” she says. “It’s very dangerous. They’re making just over the minimum wage.”

US dairy farmers employ tens of thousands of foreign workers. But efforts to foster better relations between the two groups have been rare. Puentes/Bridges inspired a similar program for dairy farmers in upstate New York, but the trips lasted just two years. “It was too dangerous,” says Thomas Maloney, an extension agent at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who organized the trips.

Amid the federal crackdown

Meanwhile, the federal crackdown on unauthorized immigrants has cast a shadow over dairy farms, uniting farmers and workers in a common anxiety. According to Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights group in Milwaukee, immigration authorities recently detained four dairy workers in Wisconsin. US farm groups have tried to persuade lawmakers to introduce a visa program for dairy workers, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

“I’ll tell you what I want,” Rosenow says. “It worked well when they weren’t enforcing the law. Let the market decide.”

He’s in his office now, taking orders for compost. He wears an old pair of striped overalls. His phone buzzes frequently, and truckers come through the door, asking for a load.

After a while he goes out to show a visitor around. About half his workers are from Mexico, including the young man in the milking parlor. As he moves about the farm, he exchanges small talk in Spanish.

“I can communicate if it’s not completely out of the ordinary,” he says. Sometimes it’s a struggle. He spends several minutes with a worker in the maternity shed trying to determine what animals the man is raising in his feedlot back home. “Alimento,” he says. “Animales?” They go back and forth until Rosenow finally understands. “Sheep!”

Out in the yard, two men wrestle with a giant polyester tote of compost while a forklift waits to sling it into a waiting truck. One of them is Roberto Acahua, who has a knit cap pulled low over his forehead. Mr. Acahua comes from Astacinga, Mexico, a mountain village of 723 inhabitants. He’s worked on the Rosenow farm for four years.

“It’s a nice place,” he says. He explains that working on a dairy farm is “kind of hard” but that he has to do it. “My children need support,” he says. “We need the money. We have no choice.” At home, he says, he can earn $7 a day in construction. On the Rosenow farm, workers earn between $10 and $14 an hour.

“The only thing is, we have no freedom up here,” he says. “If you drive and get pulled over, you can get in trouble.”

Rosenow says that finding employees like Acahua has been “the best thing that’s happened” to dairy farming.

“We were going to make the experience here with immigrants, especially with Mexican immigrants on dairy farms, a good experience rather than a bad experience,” he says. “I think we’ve accomplished that.”

• For more, visit puentesbridges.org.

Three other groups involved in food issues

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations around the world. All the projects are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause. Below are links to three groups that are involved with providing food or growing it:

• Warren Majengo Foundation gives stability, security, and support to vulnerable children in Tanzania who have nowhere else to turn. Take action: Help pay for food for these children.

• Osa Conservation applies scientific and other expertise to protecting the biodiversity of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. Take action: Assist in maintaining a sustainable farm.

• Helen Keller International aids vulnerable individuals by combating blindness, poor health, and malnutrition. Take action: Donate money to empower women through gardening.

Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un acknowledges a welcome from military officers during a 2017 visit to the Army's Strategic Forces.

If somehow North Korean leader Kim Jong-un agrees to a disarmament-and-peace deal with President Trump at talks planned for June 12, one reason may be this: He wants to reduce the heavy burden of paying for one of the world’s largest standing armies.

North Korea’s spending on its military eats up about a third of the official budget – yet one more cause of its mass poverty. No other country ranks as high in military expenditures as a percentage of the overall economy. And to add to this burden, 1 out of every 25 North Koreans serves in the armed forces.

One possible sign that Mr. Kim could be seeking cuts in the military was an unconfirmed report that he recently replaced his three top generals. The top brass may be unhappy about Kim possibly putting butter before guns. In April, he told the political elite that it’s time to adopt a “new strategic line” that emphasizes the economy.

Given the history of Pyongyang breaking past agreements on its nuclear program, any deal reached in the talks in Singapore must go through a reality check. Still, if Kim’s main motive for a deal is to boost the economy (as a way to stay in power), then North Korea will be joining dozens of other nations that have lately trimmed their military spending.

According to the latest Global Peace Index, nearly three-quarter of countries have reduced the number of armed services personnel per 100,000 people, from 458 a decade ago to 396 last year.

In addition, military spending as a percentage of gross national product is also in a decline. It fell from 2.28 percent of GDP in 2008 to 2.22 last year. Twice as many countries cut their spending in 2018 as raised it. And in another measure of demilitarization, more countries also reduced their export or import of weapons per capita last year.

Is North Korea ready to jump on this global trend?

Domestic pressure on Kim to focus on the economy may be driving him to the summit with Mr. Trump. But just as possible is that he is more aware of other countries seeking to invest in peaceful pursuits rather than spending on weapons and armed personnel.

Since the end of World War II, violence in armed conflict has been in decline. Many diplomatic successes in curbing weapons and putting a focus on economic development are one reason. After decades of isolating itself and threatening its neighbors, North Korea could be ready to follow this trend. Peace can be an attractive force.