Carlo Allegri/Reuters/File

Then-GOP nominee Donald Trump and Omarosa Manigault attend a church service in Detroit on Sept. 3, 2016. Ms. Manigault has published a new tell-all book about her time in the White House.

Some years ago, I accidentally carried a tape recorder into an interview with a senior national-security official in a secure US government building. (Actually, “accidentally” probably isn’t the best way to describe what happened. “Cluelessly,” or “without thinking” might be better descriptors.)

As a reporter, I was ushered around normal security by a media handler, which is how it happened. Upon entering the official’s office, I set my stuff down on his desk, and then peeled a newspaper off the top of the stack to reveal the offending item.

To me, the recorder was a means to accurately get down every word of an important conversation. To everyone else in the room, it was contraband of the highest order, a security breach on a floor where the trash was shredded and burned every night. They leaped back as if I’d unveiled a coiled snake.

“Whoa,” said the handler, after a moment’s silence. “Don’t ever tell anyone we let you bring that in here. Somebody could get fired. Probably me.”

Such is the power in politics of audio (and in some circumstances, video) recording devices.

In an industry marked by dissembling and spin – and even outright lies – snippets of electronically captured moments often provide rare glimpses into a public figure’s true self, and the atmosphere in the rooms where it happens. Weapons, levers of influence, historical records: Tapes can be all these things. They can be quite useful for the person possessing them. But it’s dangerous to let records like that into the wrong hands.

Omarosa Manigault Newman is just the latest figure to try and use the tale of the tape to support her version of a Washington narrative. Indeed, this summer has been marked by a steady stream of “tape-gates.” Just a few weeks back, Washington was abuzz over Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former fixer, and his tape of their discussion of buying the story of an alleged Trump mistress. More recently, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes was recorded at a closed-door fundraiser characterizing congressional Republicans as Mr. Trump’s last line of defense in the Mueller investigation. 

This is why politicians want the “record” button in their own hands. Even if their words repeat things that are already largely known, the immediacy of a tape makes it all seem more credible, more real.

“It makes us think we have a window into what’s really happening,” says Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, an associate professor at Texas A&M University who studies the history of American political discourse.

US presidents, of course, have been responsible for the most – and probably most consequential – secret recordings of unguarded political conversations. More on that in a moment.

But for recent effect, it is the newer developments of smart phones, social media, and partisan news organizations that have combined to weaponize a practice as old as F.D.R.

'Guns or religion' and the 47 percent

In 2008, for instance, an unpaid volunteer for a Huffington Post citizen journalist initiative went to a Barack Obama fundraiser in San Francisco and recorded the then-candidate saying of white working-class voters, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Rival Hillary Clinton seized on the remark as a means to try and discredit Mr. Obama. They are still used by Obama’s critics as an example of what they call the former president’s elitism.

In 2012, a leaked video of a closed-door Mitt Romney fundraising event caught the then-presidential candidate dismissing 47 percent of the population as government-dependent. “My job is not to worry about those people,” Mr. Romney said.

The tape delivered Romney’s struggling campaign a roundhouse blow, as critics used it to frame the former Massachusetts governor as an unfeeling plutocrat.

As a candidate and White House occupant, Trump has proved a diamond mine for clandestine tapers. Prior to the election, many people – including some of his own aides – saw the “Access Hollywood” tape of his vulgar talk about woman as politically fatal. It wasn’t.

Trump’s former associate, Mr. Cohen, promises he has more tapes of presidential conversations. So does Ms. Newman.

But so far, Newman’s motives in releasing tapes are subtly different, says Dr. Mercieca of Texas A&M. Many tapers and leakers want to influence a particular policy, or damage an official. By releasing snippets of the discussion of her being fired, and Trump’s reaction to it, Newman is just reaffirming stuff we generally knew. The point is to bolster her credibility as her new book becomes available.

“She lacks credibility, she’s been portrayed as a villainess,” says Mercieca. “The tapes were brought out as evidence the quotations she had in her book were true.”

It’s possible Newman could face legal trouble. She signed a nondisclosure agreement before taking a White House job, Trump said in a tweet. She appears to have taped chief of staff John Kelly during her dismissal conversation in the Situation Room, a supposedly secure place where personal electronics are prohibited.

But there’s also the question of why Mr. Kelly was using the Situation Room, a national security crisis management center, as a space to fire people.

“The character of the folks involved is truly the bigger point here. I don’t think Omarosa’s actions (at least those identified so far) violated criminal law,” wrote national security lawyer Bradley Moss on Twitter on Monday.

Presidential recordings

As noted above, the White House itself, as an institution, has by far the most experience in semi-clandestine and completely secret taping of political conversations. Presidents pioneered the practice.

Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a string of presidents used taping equipment with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Their motives ranged from defending themselves against inaccurate news leaks (F.D.R), to help in preparing memoirs and developing political leverage. Along the way, these tapes become an invaluable historical resource, says Dr. Marc Selverstone, an associate professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program.

“They’re an incredible and powerful window into the way power works,” says Dr. Selverstone.

John F. Kennedy, a published author before becoming president, was particularly interested in taping historically important moments. It is likely he planned to use the tapes for any memoirs he planned to write, says Selverstone. His brother, Robert Kennedy, eventually used them to help write his short history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Thirteen Days.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson was the only president to use his tapes for their intended purposes in real time, as he drew on them to produce his own memoirs. The L.B.J. tapes reveal the intentional duplicity of power, however, as he says differing things about Vietnam to different people – telling reluctant senators he sees no path to victory, and telling Pentagon officials the opposite.

L.B.J. recommended to his successor he install a taping system, and Nixon did just that. Those machines produced 3,400 hours of some key moments of the highest foreign policy successes, and lowest political failures, in American history. The famous “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972, in which Nixon concurred with an attempt to use the CIA to get the FBI to back off the Watergate probe, ended his presidency.

Have presidents since then taped their conversations? The lesson of Nixon would loom over them. Trump has intimated there are some tapes of some matters, but then later seemed to back off.

“We assume nobody will want to repeat Nixon,” says Selverstone.

Across the Arab world, cash-strapped governments are flying the anti-corruption flag.

Tunisia, in the midst of year-long anti-corruption campaign, passed a law in July requiring officials and members of Parliament to declare their assets.

That same month, authorities in Egypt arrested the head of the country’s customs authority for taking bribes.

And in Jordan, the government seized on the production and smuggling of counterfeit name-brand cigarettes to launch its own anti-corruption campaign. King Abdullah even issued a rare address to the Jordanian cabinet declaring “we will break the back of corruption.”

“No-one is above the law, no matter who he or she is,” the king told the ministers, adding, “The message to all is that this is a red line.”

So what is going on?

Ask Jordanian Mohammed Hussein, owner of an Amman sweets shop who is $5,000 in debt and unable to meet this month’s rent.

Mr. Hussein sees one reason for his and his country’s economic ills: the “untouchables.”

“The big officials, mafia bosses, corrupt businessmen,” Hussein says. “They steal millions from the treasury to build villas, and we are forced to live on a few dollars.”

Hussein has lived his entire life in Amman, but his travails and his views could fit easily in any Arab capital.

On the streets of Amman, Tunis, Cairo, even Riyadh, citizens are angered by the widening gap between haves and have-nots. And they are challenging the economic and political elites who they say have enriched themselves off of the state yet are now expecting tax-payers to foot the bill for economic reforms.

Today several Arab states are enacting International Monetary Fund- and World Bank-recommended economic reforms to cut back bloated public sectors, reduce subsidies, and raise taxes. But they realize that in order to renegotiate a social contract with citizens used to government handouts, ending corruption – real or perceived – is vital.

Governments have every reason to take the issue seriously: Corruption was one of the top issues that drove protesters to the streets during the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, and Oman.

In January, fighting corruption became the slogan of Tunisians protesting and rioting over austerity measures; in June, nationwide protests in Jordan that erupted over an income tax law began to demand that specific officials be jailed for alleged graft.

“Whenever the government raises taxes, cuts back salaries, reduces the public sector, the answer that comes back from citizens is that the government is corrupt,” says Youssef Cherif, a Tunis-based political analyst.

“It provides an obstacle to any reform.”

Perceptions matter

In a 2016 report by Transparency International in nine Arab states, 61 percent of citizens polled said they believed corruption was on the rise in their countries, and 68 percent said their government was “doing badly” in fighting corruption.

In Jordan, 75 percent of respondents said they believe corruption had increased, while an Arab Barometer survey in 2016 indicated that 79 percent believed state institutions were corrupt. 

In an August 2017 poll by the International Republican Institute Center for Insights in Survey Research, 87 percent of Tunisian respondents stated that the economy is somewhat or very bad, while 72 percent said fighting corruption was the best way to improve the economy.

For many citizens, corruption is not only the cause of economic ills, but ending it is a cure-all. Jail the corrupt officials and return the stolen funds to the treasury and budget deficits will be closed, investment projects funded, prosperity achieved.

Arab citizens often view corruption in terms of shady mega-projects or the siphoning off of government funds, yet experts say that the vast majority of corruption that takes place in the Arab world is much more subtle and small-scale.

It could be as simple as a customs official looking the other way when a shipment comes in, a government clerk awarding licenses without following proper regulations or paperwork, or hiring an unqualified friend or family member to a government post.

Rather than a massive cash drain from a major theft, it is the slow drip of corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement that, when taken as a whole, costs countries tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

“People aren’t aware that there are other types of corruption,” says Rania Bader, board member and spokesperson for Rasheed (Transparency International-Jordan). “And that administrative corruption is much more commonplace than financial corruption.”

According to the World Bank, the indirect cost of corruption, although hard to quantify, is also very real: poor infrastructure, poor access to services, inefficient tax exemptions, loss of foreign investment, and disincentives for local entrepreneurs to open businesses.

Lack of trust

Yet even if governments have the political will and ability to go after graft and corruption, they must first address the huge lack of public trust.

“Part of the problem is that in many situations, the government does not seem to be transparent in its policies and decision-making,” says Musa Shteiwi, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. “People see that the government says something, and does something else.”

That lack of transparency has hit Arab governments’ credibility when it comes to economic policy.

In Jordan, Tunisia, and now Egypt, despite embarking on austerity reforms billed as vital to saving the economy – raising taxes and cutting back on hiring to control debt – inflation, unemployment, and the cost of living are still on the rise.

“The logical conclusion to the people is that these policies are serving the interests of the political-economic elite of the country in a non-legal and legal way,” Mr. Shteiwi says.

A vacuum of facts has been filled instead with rumors: tales of princes who have bought up entire European towns, and government ministers readying private jets loaded with stolen antiquities to escape to London homes should the police come with a warrant.

In Jordan, citizens swear that police squad cars – three in the front and three in the back – escorted trucks carrying smuggled counterfeit cigarettes form the port of Aqaba all the way to Amman to make sure they were not stopped by customs.

Offering little evidence, citizens are openly condemning businesspeople, ministers, tribal leaders, members of Parliament, royal advisers, royalty, and heads of state.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if [President] Trump was somehow involved,” Hussein says while unloading a carton of heavily taxed Kit Kats in his Amman sweets shop, two customers nodding in agreement. “Anything’s possible.”

'Selective' approach

But if Arab governments are hoping that anti-corruption measures will soften opposition to their painful reforms, Arab publics have become suspicious of the campaigns, seeing them not as a crusade to drain the swamp, but a political weapon wielded by regimes to settle old scores. 

Even in Tunisia, which has built democratic institutions and passed strong anti-corruption legislation in the seven years after its revolution, corruption cases have only been brought against former government officials who have recently fallen out with the ruling coalition.

In Jordan, citizens see the government focusing on “small-fries” – middle-men who run the fronts for illicit businesses – rather than the powers behind them.

Many are quick to point out that while Jordan chases a little-known distributor of fake brand cigarettes, a much bigger fish, Walid Kurdi, husband to the king’s paternal aunt and former chief executive officer of the Jordan Phosphates Mine Co., remains at large in Britain five years after being sentenced to 37 years in prison for embezzling millions.

The most extreme example is in Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman led a corruption campaign that saw the imprisonment of 300 rival princes and businessmen in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in what many described as a “purge.”

Weak institutions

Weak institutions are also hurting public trust in Arab states’ ability to tackle corruption: Egypt, say experts and reports, lacks independent judiciaries, while Tunisia’s progressive laws are not applied evenly.

For Jordan, it is the lack of a strong and independent parliament that undermines anti-corruption efforts.

“Our role as MPs is to monitor, uncover corruption and hold the government and institutions to account,” says Saddah Habashneh, a member of Parliament from the southern Jordanian town of Karak.  “When we remain silent about corruption that we know is occurring – which we all are – we are accomplices in corruption.”

The World Bank and Transparency International have suggested several reforms to couple with Arab states’ anti-corruption campaigns, such as proper legislative oversight, external auditing, transparency in government and business regulations, and required assets declaration for officials and politicians.

Perhaps the most crucial steps proposed by Transparency International are raising salaries for civil servants, procurement reform, and free access to information. The aim is to transparently show how the government awards contracts, and to reduce incentives for bureaucrats and civil servants to abuse their positions.

A few big names behind bars wouldn’t hurt either.

“Once we see the powerful held to account, then we will know the rule of law is enforced,” says Hussein.

Imagine a world with no money.

Or don’t imagine it. Just go to Zimbabwe instead.

Here, grocery store cash registers still yawn open when a payment is processed, as if by instinct, but where cash should be there are only empty plastic slots. ATMs dot the city like relics of another era, their grey screens blinking a stream of apologies: Out of Order. No services available. We apologise for the inconvenience. Signs at gas stations, maternity hospitals, and even informal backyard bars implore customers to pay by EcoCash, a form of digital currency.

Zimbabwe isn’t totally out of cash, but it’s close. Ninety-six percent of financial transactions here are now done by electronic payments. Exchanges as small as buying a single tomato and as large as purchasing a car are largely completed using mobile money, a form of currency stored and exchanged via cellphone.  

Today, mobile money is a global phenomenon, with 168 million active accounts worldwide. But its epicenter and origin story is indisputably African. One hundred million of the world’s mobile money users are here. So is the world’s most successful mobile money company, and the industry’s pioneer, Kenya’s M-Pesa, which is today used by more than half the country’s population. And mobile money in Africa has also been revolutionary for another reason – it has brought tens of millions of people who have never had bank accounts into formal financial institutions for the first time.

But at the foundation of that digital money revolution is a kind of unspoken trust – that money put onto a cellphone can come back off it again, that numbers on a screen can, if needed, transform into old-fashioned stacks of bills.

And on that front, Zimbabwe is raising a new and urgent set of questions about the boundaries of the mobile money revolution. What happens when mobile money is the main money? Can digital money services – which bill themselves as the ultimate alternative to cash – actually survive in a place where there is practically no cash at all?

Noor Khamis/Reuters

A man holds up his mobile phone showing a M-Pesa mobile money transaction page at a market in Nairobi, Kenya on Dec. 31, 2014. Safaricom, Kenya's biggest telecoms firm, is a model of how mobile money can financially include millions of people with telephones but without access to traditional infrastructure such as banks.

***

At 11:30 on a recent Monday night, Teacher Murombedzi tucked a pillow under one arm, a blanket under the other, and walked through the inky darkness of downtown Harare to his bank.

His goal was to get a good place in line so that he could withdraw $20 cash – the maximum daily limit – from his account when the bank opened at 8 a.m. the following morning. If he was lucky, he’d get it in bond notes, a Monopoly-like money that can only be used inside Zimbabwe, though ostensibly equal in value to a US dollar. If he was less lucky, the clerk would hand him the $20 in heavy bond coins. And if the young security guard was really unlucky, after 10 or more hours of queueing, he’d get nothing at all.

But as he spread his blanket on the cracked sidewalk and lay down to wait out the bracing winter night, he pushed that thought out of his head.

“It’s cheaper to live on cash,” he said. Mobile money “is just too expensive.”

That seems an odd thing to say, given that mobile money, supposedly, is just cash in a digital wallet. But in Zimbabwe, it’s no longer that simple.

Since 2009, the country has not had its own currency, but instead uses a mix of US dollars and South African rand, among others. Today, the dollar dominates.

Officially, every kind of dollar here has equal value – whether it’s a US greenback, a Zimbabwean reserve bank-backed “bond note,” or a digital dollar held in a mobile-money wallet. But in practice, that’s hardly the case. As Zimbabweans’ reliance on EcoCash grows, the fees mobile-money agents can charge customers to cash out tick up. And actual dollar bills – the only internationally recognized version of the currency in circulation – command a steep premium.

At a nearby clothing market, Mavis Magaramombe, like most traders, keeps three prices in her head for each of the pairs of shoes she has lined up in neat rows on a towel in front of her. The cheapest is the price in US dollars, though she can’t remember the last time someone paid her with those. Slightly more expensive is the price in bond notes, also rare. And the most expensive price – some 30 to 40 percent more than the price in dollars – is reserved for people who pay in EcoCash.

“I have to add that surcharge because that’s the same as what the money traders will charge me when I need to change into dollars,” she says.

To get $100 in US dollars on the black market, which Ms. Magaramombe needs to buy her wares over the border in Mozambique, she will need about $170 in EcoCash, or $135 in bond notes.

“As the economy gets worse, the rates are getting worse too,” says one black-market money trader, who asked not to be identified because of the illegality of his work. “The more of a shortage of hard cash there is in our banks, the more I can charge.”

Even EcoCash, the main mobile money provider here, admits openly that its product isn’t valued the same as dollars. “If you go anywhere, there is three-tiered pricing,” writes Eddie Chibi, the chief executive officer of Cassava Fintech Zimbabwe, the subsidiary of the cellphone company EcoNet that runs EcoCash, in an email to the Monitor.

Those drifting exchange rates signal, in part, how little trust Zimbabweans have in their financial institutions, says Naome Chakanya, an economist at the Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe, a think tank in Harare.

And it’s not hard to understand why.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, after then-president Robert Mugabe set into motion the forced confiscation of prosperous white-owned commercial farms, Zimbabwe’s economy tanked. To keep up with its bills, his government began printing money. By late 2008, runaway inflation meant that stores were changing their prices several times a day, and a carton of milk retailed for several trillion dollars. In November of that year, inflation hit 79.6 billion percent, and soon after, Zimbabwe swapped out its failed currency for American dollars, British pounds, and South African rand.

But for most Zimbabweans, it was too late. Their savings had been wiped out.

“So even though our currency became stable after that, people had totally lost faith in their financial institutions,” Ms. Chakanya says. “Now many people feel that if you deposit your money somewhere, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get it back.” 

What little cash people did save, they began hoarding at home. Less and less stayed in circulation. Meanwhile, the broke government was spending far more importing staples than it earned in exports, drawing down its foreign currency reserves.

By 2016, the shortage of dollars – then the main currency in use – was so bad that the government decided to begin printing the now infamous bond notes.

“It drove a panic in the market,” says Easther Chigumira, a development consultant who wrote her PhD on Zimbabwe’s land reform program and its consequences. Soon people were hoarding bond notes too – fearful of what might happen if they handed them over to a bank – and so those began to disappear too.

All of that meant brisk business for EcoCash, the once-small mobile money arm of Zimbabwe’s main cellphone provider. Between 2014 and 2017, the number of Zimbabweans with access to “formal financial services” grew from 33 percent to 55 percent, according to the 2017 Global Findex. And most of that growth happened in the mobile money sector.

“EcoCash [has] been the hero in the whole scheme of things,” says Mr. Chibi, who runs EcoCash. Without it, he says, most Zimbabweans would simply have no other way to buy or sell things.

But many here say EcoCash has gouged them – though the costs are only partially the company’s doing. Most EcoCash agents, who cash out mobile money, now charge a stiff fee for their services, far above what EcoCash posts as its official tariffs. They say they have to – after all, they must buy the bills they sell to customers on the black market, too.

Many Zimbabweans feel they simply have no way out of the cycle. “As long as the government continues to consume more than it receives, and as long as we continue to under-produce, we’ll continue to have this cash crisis,” says Tinashe Kaduwo, an economist with Econometer Global Capital. “And as long as we have a cash crisis, we’ll always keep using this mobile money.”

But many speculate that mobile money will continue to lose value, which could in turn drive up prices in an already impoverished country.

Back in the bank queue, it’s now approaching 10 a.m., and Mr.  Murombedzi, whose eyes are dark from his poor night of sleep on the sidewalk, is near the front of the line. Just then, a woman walks by him.

As she passes, a purple $5 bond note flutters out of her pocket and drops on the sidewalk in front of him. He scoops it up and holds it for a few seconds in his palm, staring down at it.

Then he turns in the direction of the woman.

“Hey,” he yells towards her, “you dropped this.”

Charles Platiau/Reuters/File

A view of the harbor of Saint-Malo in French Brittany.

The main road through this charming Breton town separates stone cottages from a pale green marsh that leads to the sea. But in Cherrueix, neither the beach nor the picturesque farmland have been enough to attract fresh faces to live here.

After François Goblé retired this March, the town and surrounding area of 5,000 inhabitants were left with one primary care physician. “I was working from eight in the morning until 11 at night,” says Dr. Goblé. “After 45 years as a doctor, it was impossible to continue in this way.”

Cherrueix is just one example of a “medical desert” – where the number of doctors is 30 percent lower than the national average in France. This is especially a concern for elderly patients or those with reduced mobility. It’s also a symptom of a larger problem in France and across the globe: An increasing number of small towns are struggling economically and demographically to remain competitive in the face of urbanization. As more young people move to major city centers, the vibrancy and economic viability of small and medium-sized towns are slowly dying. Now, local leaders, grassroots efforts, and €5 billion in state aid are working to reverse the trend.     

“The problem is jobs in many small towns,” says Marc Ivaldi, research director at the Toulouse School of Economics. “It’s difficult to keep doctors and other professionals in these areas, plus transport costs are going up, so people are inevitably leaving for larger cities.”

Enhancing the core 

France’s small towns have long had an image of enchanting tranquility for tourists and city dwellers alike. And while a quarter of the population live in small or medium-sized towns and many French still invest in second homes in the countryside, living full time in such areas has become increasingly less attractive.

To combat the exodus to larger cities, in March the government named 222 towns that will receive €5 billion ($5.7 billion) over the next five years – to revitalize city centers, create jobs, and improve transportation and quality of life.     

Through the “Heart of the City Action” plan, so far more than 500 projects across France are under way. The town of Louviers, in Normandy, has enlarged and enhanced sidewalks and offered free parking to bring more business back to the city center. The north-central city of Chartres plans to create new housing and several cultural centers. 

Some cities got a head start with local initiatives. Saint-Malo, a popular Breton beachside hangout for Parisians looking to beat the summer heat, has been attempting to attract more young people, many of whom have been pushed out because of climbing housing prices in the city center. They’ve begun offering tax breaks to first-time homeowners as well as putting more funding into schools and cultural events like music festivals – measures City Hall says will inevitably lure young couples. (According to INSEE, the national statistics bureau, 60- to 74-year-olds account for the largest segment of the town’s 47,000 residents, and there have consistently been more recorded deaths than births from 2007 to 2016.) 

Working against such initiatives are harsh realities – many small towns have lost industries essential to economic survival, with employers moving to larger cities to improve operating costs and find workers.

“Deindustrialization in the last 40 years is definitely a major cause,” says Emmanuel Martin, an independent economist based in the south of France. “Many small towns relied on one industry or factory and when it closed down, what could they do?”

A knock-on effect has been the trend toward hypermarkets and commercial zones on the periphery of small towns, generating competition for small businesses in town centers. And as the state invests more into tramways and metro lines in cities, and less into roads to connect small towns with larger ones, people are finding themselves increasingly isolated.

Creating new balance 

Maxime Lebigot is a cardiology nurse at a local hospital in Laval, a town between the Brittany region and Paris. Laval is part of the government’s Heart of the City Action plan, and has seen a consistent drop in population over last decade. Mr. Lebigot says that the hospital staff is severely overworked owing to the demands of an aging population and a lack of general practitioners. 

“They’ve gotten rid of dozens of hospital beds and the ER is constantly clogged up,” says Lebigot. After he was told his son would wait months for a doctor’s appointment, Lebigot and his wife, Elodie, headed up the Mayenne regional branch of a citizens’ rights group whose specific aim is to tackle the medical desert problem. “There are enough doctors in France in terms of numbers, but they are very poorly divided up.”

According to DREES, a state-run statistics body, around 8 percent of French – or 5.3 million people – lived in a medical desert in 2017, with the most affected regions in the east of the country.  Here in France’s northwest region of Brittany, one initiative proposes making it easier for replacement doctors to become permanent fixtures in their towns, while another in the Vendée region uses virtual visits with doctors to treat some patients. In many regions, doctors are coming out of retirement to deal with the lack of practitioners.

Professor Ivaldi, the economist, says that paying doctors to live in deprived areas could be one solution, but that more money must be invested into small and medium-sized towns in general to boost their vitality – instead of dealing with each symptom individually.

“We need to create more schools and public services outside big cities, and that costs more because local tax rates have increased a lot,” says Ivaldi. “We used to have more harmonized development [between small and large cities] but now it’s more expensive to maintain forests, roads, and infrastructure outside the city, plus this is being covered less and less by the state.”

Mr. Martin says that – although an unpopular idea to most – adjusting the minimum wage to reflect the cost of living regionally could help balance out the divide between small and large cities, eventually making products and services cheaper in smaller towns. Right now, France’s minimum wage – at nearly €1,500 per month ($20,400 per year) – is one of the highest in the world and is the same whether you live in Paris, Périgueux, or Pesmes.

But Martin, who himself lives in a small town, says that the effects of urbanization are not necessarily surprising nor should they always be viewed as a negative. “People are leaving but isn’t it the natural, evolutionary process?” he asks. “Towns have to answer the needs of the people and if they’re not able to do so, it’s part of life.”

Chris Ison/PA /AP/File

British author V.S. Naipaul in Salisbury, England. The Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose celebrated writing and brittle, provocative personality drew admiration and revulsion in equal measures died Saturday, Aug. 11, 2018, at his London home, his family said. He was 85.

We are now enjoying the final days of summer, a season when tourists often seek idealized versions of their vacation getaways: the sugar-white beaches of a distant shore, the cooling serenity of a mountain peak, the cheerful bustle of a city not our own.

It was on just such a day this past Saturday when the world said goodbye to V.S. Naipaul, an acclaimed novelist who passed away in London. He gained fame for his densely textured travelogues that suggested few places are as simple as they seem.

His work helped revolutionize the way travel writing is done, setting a standard that inspired younger masters of the genre such as Paul Theroux, who had a lengthy and sometimes tempestuous friendship with Mr. Naipaul.

Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, learned early how easily complicated communities could be reduced to travel-brochure clichés. “A House for Mr. Biswas,” the 1961 comic novel that first earned him widespread attention, revealed Trinidad as something more than an idyllic locale where affluent visitors could get away from it all. One of his abiding themes was the way that native peoples adapted to the effects of colonialism.

Naipaul, the son of a journalist, blended the pacing and structure of a novel with extensive reportage in his travel books, populating them with richly drawn characters, sweeping narratives and a wealth of sociological insights.

"India: A Million Mutinies Now," his 1991 project, is typical of his technique. As the title suggests, it identifies the emerging culture of postcolonial India as an evolving negotiation among a seemingly countless array of social and political vectors – so much so that the book defies easy summary.

He interviews dozens of locals, weaving their personal biographies and impressions along with his own to create a  complex narrative tapestry.

Naipaul had a gift for establishing a sense of intimacy with his interview subjects; they seemed willing to tell him anything. In "The Masque of Africa," a 2010 account of his journey through much of that continent, a forest dweller in Gabon discloses to Naipaul his spiritual connection with the trees: “The search for the truth comes from the forest. I adore the forest, and even if I spend years abroad I have to come back and rush to the forest. I need the thick forest to feel alive.”   

Naipaul’s rapport with his subjects seemed all the more remarkable given his reputation as a difficult person. He could be gruff with interviewers, and his relationships with women involved allegations of physical and emotional abuse. He was also known to nurse grudges against friends. His critiques of both colonial rule and post-colonial cultures were unsettling for readers of many political stripes. He and Theroux had a famous falling out, then reconciled. Theroux is among a number of observers who have accused Naipaul of racist remarks.

Like Truman Capote, who feuded with friends but nevertheless insinuated himself into a small Kansas community to write "In Cold Blood," Naipaul was apparently able to mute his sharp edges when he researched his travel books, becoming a confidante to countless people he met on the road.

Naipaul was, perhaps most memorably, a traveler into the future. "A Million Mutinies Now" keenly anticipated India’s ascendance as an economic power, and "Beyond Belief," a 1998 chronicle of Naipaul’s travels through parts of the Islamic world, foresaw three years before 9-11 the degree to which extremists could pervert religion as a rationale for cruelty.

Naipaul’s travel writing was visionary because he knew that, at heart, the best journeys are also acts of imagination. “To arrive at a place without knowing anyone there,” Naipaul recalled, “and sometimes without an introduction; to learn how to move among strangers for the short time one could afford to be among them; to hold oneself in constant readiness for adventure or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried along, up to a point, by accidents; and consciously to follow up other impulses – that could be as creative and imaginative a procedure as the writing that came after.”                         

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Louisiana, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House. 

AP Photo

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, left, and Oman's Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf bin Alawi, stand at attention during a ceremony welcoming Alawi to the Pentagon July 27.

Since May, the United States and Iran have appeared on course for confrontation. President Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. Iran’s forces in Syria began to threaten Israel. In August, Mr. Trump imposed new sanctions on Iran and sought to reduce Iranian oil exports to zero. Iran then warned of a regional war if the US pushed too hard.

Those, at least, were the big headlines, the type that feed off conflict and fear. Less visible were quiet efforts at diplomacy that could eventually quell the escalation.

In recent weeks, the tiny country of Oman has again stepped into its role as a third-party mediator in Middle East disputes. A top Omani official, Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah, met with top leaders in both the US and Iran, including the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Qassem Suleimani. Just the fact that both Iran and the US met with this Omani diplomat is good news that each side may want to step back from the abyss and reach a settlement.

Oman’s role, however, is far more than one of mere messenger. For that kind of back channel, the US and Iran could be using Switzerland, which represents US interests in Iran. Instead, Oman brings special qualities to difficult negotiations, the kind that many peacemakers admire.

Oman’s ruling sultanate has long preached tolerance to its people and others, an approach which has helped it become a neutral player in the Middle East and allowed it to have cordial relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran and many others. It has a track record of knowing how to build trust and mutual respect. This includes its pivotal role in facilitating the talks between the US and Iran between 2011 and 2015 that led to the agreement curbing the Iranian nuclear program.

But for Oman, neutrality and tolerance are not enough for peacemaking. It also relies on a command found in the three Abrahamic faiths: Love your neighbor as yourself.

In a recent talk, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi, secretary-general of Oman’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained that his country’s pursuit of good relations in the region goes beyond merely assisting its neighbors. It entails living as “though we were as them, to see the world through their eyes.”

“You enter the [diplomatic] process not seeking to maximize gains in line with your own perception of your own interests, but by seeking to understand the interests of your neighbor: What does he want? How might what he wants be compatible with what I want? Is there some solution to this problem that neither of us have yet thought of that might turn out to work better for both of us?” said Mr. Busaidi.

The solution to a dispute starts with a dialogue, and dialogue starts with humble listening. “Put your own interests to one side for one moment, and start with your neighbor’s interests,” he said. The love-your-neighbor command, stripped of its ethical or sacred connotations, starts with the assumption that you and your neighbor share the same fundamental interests.

“I’m aware that this might seem to fly in the face of many orthodox accounts of international relations, which assume a realist attitude on the part of global actors,” he said. But the realist paradigm has so far been unworkable in the Middle East. Instead, the region needs “one in which no negotiation is ever seen as a zero-sum game.”

In coming weeks or months, the US and Iran may announce an agreement that involves compromises on each country’s part. If so, their grand bargain will probably be scrutinized to see who gained, who lost. Economic and military pressure may be seen as the driving forces. Yet little noticed could be Oman’s quiet role as mediator, one that starts with the power of a simple commandment found in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Love may not break out between the US and Iran. But they might at least begin to respect each other as they do themselves.