J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

The US Capitol is seen from the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington. A proposal to rename the Russell building after Arizona Sen. John McCain was put forward by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer after the veteran Republican senator died Aug. 25, 2018.

When Arizona Sen. John McCain died on Saturday, his friend and fellow Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, tweeted out some words of respect and praise for a “great American,” a terrific senator, friend, and mentor. “May God be with this hero who has earned his rest.”

She was “amazed” by some of the responses she got – and not in a good way.

“I made the mistake of reading some of the comments,” she told reporters earlier this week. “They were just horrible.”

“Traitor,” “warmonger,” and “imperialist” are some of the sharp criticisms of the late senator flying around social media, from partisans on both sides. On the conservative news site Breitbart, comments about the senator and his parting letter to Americans are bitingly negative. In response to the Monitor’s appreciation of Senator McCain, one reader emailed: “He was a disgrace to this country and a traitor. He should be buried in an unmarked grave.”

Senator Collins even speculated that some of the negativity may have been generated by foreign adversaries or bots: “Maybe it’s a Russian troll in St. Petersburg and not a real person in the United States who would say such a hateful thing.”

Certainly if the Russians – or other agitators – wanted to seize on an event to gin up division in America, they’ve had plenty to amplify this week. In a marked departure from past tradition, the president had to be pressured into keeping the White House flag at half-staff and issuing a statement of respect after a veteran senator’s death. And that senator will be celebrated at a memorial service this weekend by two former presidents and other luminaries – but not the current president, who was not invited.

To many, it’s just one more sign of the tribalization of American politics – that even a “lion” of the Senate can’t be eulogized without noisy criticism and controversy.

 “Our country has become so tribal now, that you have to have blind loyalty to your party as opposed to your country, and that’s just incredibly sad,” says Sen. Doug Jones (D) of Alabama, talking about the anti-McCain vitriol punctuating the internet.

He sees the half-staff flag issue, as well as speculation about veiled digs at President Trump in McCain’s final statement, somewhat differently. That’s a “personal dispute on both ends – and that’s also unfortunate, because the bigger message of John McCain’s service gets lost.”

That bigger message was repeated on the Senate floor this week as a succession of senators lauded McCain for putting country above self and party – as a prisoner of war tortured during the Vietnam War; as a presidential nominee magnanimous in defeat; as a global advocate for American exceptionalism, military strength, and human rights; as someone willing to buck his own party and work across the aisle on tough problems like immigration, which remains unresolved despite the bipartisan bill McCain helped push through the Senate in 2013.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The American flag flies at half-staff above the White House in honor of Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, Aug. 26, 2018, in Washington. The White House raised the flag just two days after Senator McCain's death, but hours later, after widespread criticism, President Trump ordered the flag to be lowered again.

“He taught me that immigration, as hard as it is to solve, somebody’s got to do it,” said an emotional Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, on the Senate floor. He was standing next to his best friend’s wooden desk, which had been draped in black, a vase of white roses on the desk top. “He said to me with Ted Kennedy, ‘You’re going to learn, Lindsey, that the other side has got to get something, too.’ ”

Tearful, Senator Graham said, “I do not cry for a perfect man. I cry for a man who had honor and was willing to admit his imperfections.”

Former Senate historian Don Ritchie describes McCain as an “institutionalist” who understood that the only way to get legislation done is through compromise – that’s the way the Founders set up America’s government.

Mr. Ritchie adds, though, that McCain has always been controversial. He remembered a time when he got a phone call from a reporter in Arizona, McCain’s home state, asking about an organized effort to recall the senator. He answered that that’s not a possibility under the Constitution.

But McCain’s bipartisan approach to governing became more of a mismatch in today’s polarized America. Nowhere is this more clear than in Arizona, where he lay in state at the Capitol in Phoenix on Wednesday. Among Republicans there, McCain enjoyed only a 20 percent approval rating. Tuesday’s GOP Senate primary was fought among three candidates who largely battled to prove which one was closest to Mr. Trump, with Rep. Martha McSally – a moderate who lurched right – emerging the winner.

“It’s Donald Trump’s party” now, retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R) of Arizona told reporters on Tuesday, as voting was underway. In the long term, however, he believes McCain’s more bipartisan approach will win out. “It has to,” he explains. “You can’t just continue to drill down on the base. You can only go so far, and anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.”

Like McCain, Senator Flake has been a strong critic of Trump. He has co-sponsored, along with Democratic minority leader Charles Schumer (D) of New York, a resolution to rename the Russell Senate Office Building after McCain, but that has already met resistance among Republican senators. Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky says he will appoint a small bipartisan “gang” to find a way to honor their colleague.

Constantin Querard, a conservative GOP consultant in Arizona, attributes McCain’s unpopularity among Republicans to the difference between McCain the candidate and McCain the senator. As a candidate facing a primary challenge in 2010, he argued for completion of that “danged fence” on the border, and in his last campaign he promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

But McCain the senator was an “amnesty guy,” as Mr. Querard puts it, advocating a path to citizenship in the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill and going against Trump by voting against the Obamacare repeal last summer. Both positions are viewed as betrayals by Trump supporters.

“I wish the discourse was more polite,” says Querard, who consulted for one of McCain’s primary opponents. “There’s always a certain part of the population that’s going to behave badly, and it’s not restricted to the right. I’ve seen from liberals, ‘Why are you lionizing a guy who was a war monger?’ ” In his recent memoir, McCain admits that the Iraq War was a “mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my fair share of the blame for it.”

Historian Ritchie says this week’s eulogies are an opportunity to get out the larger message that McCain himself pushed – the need for unity. After a memorial in Phoenix on Thursday, McCain will lie in state in the US Capitol on Friday, be eulogized by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama at the National Cathedral on Saturday, and be buried at the US Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Md.

“This funeral will get a lot of national attention,” says Ritchie. “Every local news program will have senators talking to their home states, eulogizing McCain. If anybody’s listening and if anybody cares, the message is going out.”

Ilya Naymushin/Reuters

Combines harvest a barley field on the Solgonskoye farm outside the Siberian village of Talniki, Russia.

Russians have been living with escalating US sanctions for more than four years. For many, it's become a dismal fact of life, like the Moscow weather.

And this week, a new wave of US sanctions hit Russia, with more in the pipeline. But while there's little sign that the American deluge will abate any time soon, Russia seems to be better prepared than ever before to weather the storm.

Many things have changed since the United States and its Western allies imposed comprehensive economic measures against Russia's Kremlin-friendly oligarchs and state corporations back in 2014. Those were meant to punish Moscow for its annexation of Crimea and force it to change its behavior in Ukraine, and the Europeans remain on board.

But the US is basically going it alone with its new sanctions, which seem aimed at a wide variety of alleged Russian misdeeds. The latest salvo bans certain technology exports to Russia over the attempted nerve gas poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England last March. It also promises much tougher measures if Russia doesn't certify that it has stopped using chemical weapons and allow on-the-ground inspections by November.

A more serious battery of measures, which aims to punish Russia for its alleged election interference in the US, is pending. It would block US investments in Russian energy projects and effectively ban major Russian banks from conducting transactions in US dollars. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has admitted those measures might really hurt, calling them “a declaration of economic war” against Russia.

“The Europeans can still tell the Kremlin that, if it changes certain behaviors connected with Ukraine, their sanctions will come off and things can return to normal,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow foreign policy journal. “But all these waves of US sanctions seem directed against just about everything Russia is doing, or allegedly doing, in every way. Basically, if Russia wanted to convince the US that its behavior is changing enough to remove the sanctions, we would have to agree to totally overhaul our foreign policy, admit we were wrong about everything and, well, give up. That's probably too much to ask from any country, but particularly Russia.”

Mr. Lukyanov says that there is little Russia can do to retaliate against the US, despite brave talk of tit-for-tat sanctions from the Russian Foreign Ministry. But simultaneous US attempts to sanction Iran and Turkey, while threatening Europeans with “secondary sanctions” if they do not comply with US demands, does create many new opportunities for Russia to win sympathy from other countries and bypass US measures that did not exist four years ago.

“The main mood in Moscow is that we need to be patient, we need to be wise, and we need to survive this,” he says.

Restored finances, bolstered economy

The key Russian response appears to be the economic equivalent of circling the wagons. During the course of this year the Russian Central Bank has unloaded most of its US Treasury bonds, about $85 billion worth, and appears to be stockpiling gold as a hedge against future isolation. Thanks to the rising price of oil, the Russian state's main source of international revenue, its foreign currency reserves are a healthy $450 billion. And Russia's once-depeleted National Wealth Fund is now reportedly back up to about $75 billion.

Long-suffering Russian consumers have paid the price for bolstering the country's war chest. The Central Bank has consistently declined to intervene to support the ruble, letting the national currency sink from around 30 per dollar before the crisis began five years ago to almost 70 today. High inflation rates, which threatened social stability early in the crisis, have been beaten down to near-historic lows – currently around 2.5 percent – again at the expense of average Russians. The Central Bank's base interest rate is just under 8 percent, but consumer loans start at upwards of 12 percent, making it very difficult to start a business or make home improvements.

But government finances are in good order, and a new value-added tax intended to kick in next year will add about $50 billion in annual revenue. Other unpopular measures, such the controversial pension reform, may test the limits of public patience but will strengthen the Kremlin's ability to withstand any coming external storms.

Russia may be better prepared for a long-term economic standoff with the US in other ways too. The country's agricultural sector is booming in part due to the war of sanctions and counter-sanctions. To defend against the possibility of being cut out of the SWIFT international bank transfer system, Russia devised its own independent network to bypass international payment systems. It's still a work in progress, and has zero traction outside of Russia, but millions of Russian pensioners and public employees now receive their payments via the new Mir card.

Available evidence suggests that Russians are willing to endure a fair amount of pain if they believe it's the patriotic thing to do. According to a new Pew poll, they are about evenly divided on whether the sanctions are hurting their economy or not. But the same poll found that eight in ten Russians have at least some confidence in Vladimir Putin's conduct of international affairs, with 58 percent expressing “a lot of confidence.”

“Russia has plenty of reasons for social unrest, but sanctions only help Putin,” says Sergei Markov, a former Putin adviser. “If history shows anything, it is that Russians will always unite to resist outside pressure. It's when we are at our best.”

Nothing much seemed amiss in the historic fishing village of Cortez last week as fishermen offloaded an easy 1,000 pounds of crevalle jack – headed to Canada – while forklifts tipped fresh ice into massive coolers.

But for fisherman Kirt Aylward, the dockside commotion belied an existential concern for not just fishermen, but for much of the Florida coast: a noxious tide that he had steered his skiff through that morning. 

A harmful algal bloom known as red tide is forcing Floridians, from the fishing pier to the State Capitol, to confront a universal foe. The scourge has added fresh fuel to political debates over environmental protection in the state. But it has also brought Florida together in defense of its most precious resource: the ocean.

“In the past, fish have been able to outrun the tide,” says the sun-seared Mr. Aylward, who had to go far afield in his 20-foot skiff to bag a modest haul of glass minnows, a local bait fish. “Now it is so big and vast they just can’t get away from it.”

Red tide is a seasonal phenomenon caused by ocean-swirling algae that can creep to shore, typically fueled in some proportion by nitrogen-rich runoff, warm ocean surface temperatures, and heavy rainfall. The offending microorganism, Karenia brevis, produces a suite of neurotoxins and in 2011 was blamed for the deaths of nearly 500 dolphins, pelicans, and manatees in Indian River Lagoon on Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Courtesy of Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission/AP

A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission scientist counts Karenia brevis (red tide) cells during water sampling processing on July 31, 2018.

This year, the phenomenon seems “on steroids,” as one resident says. Here in Manatee County, more than 150 tons of dead fish, sharks, dolphins, and manatees have been dragged out of the once-azure waters, now turned rusty brown. After nine straight months, the bloom is draining millions from local economies.

Understanding the disaster and directing resources to thwart it has become a surging political issue in an election year.

“Policy issues are often far removed; red tide is not far removed,” says Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. “Red tide burns your eyes, you can’t go to the beach, fish are all dead in huge numbers, it’s been here for weeks and months and may go on for weeks and months – holy smokes! Yes, it resonates.”

The gathering tide

As the tide gathers and bends around the coast, Tori, a server at a dockside restaurant in Cortez, has watched all the tourists run away, minus the ones bravely choking down plates of clams between wafts of rotting fish. That has left locals to quibble over drinks about the extent of the tide – and what to do.

“Florida is as divided as a Trump election” about red tide, says Tori, who declined to give her last name.

The slow-motion disaster comes as the state is already struggling with freshwater blue-green algae growth now clogging some of the state’s iconic springs. Those blooms have definitively been tied to phosphorous pollution from the state’s interior agriculture sector. As the red tide lingers, the economic toll is mounting.

“The situation is a real threat to the Floridian economy,” says Kevin Wagner, a political scientist at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton.

Everything from fertilizer runoff from the sugar industry to red clouds of Saharan dust particles have been blamed. Septic tank seepage and even car exhaust are also possible culprits. 

Although the exact cause is not yet known, “it is hard to imagine that [the current red tide explosion] is natural,” says William Mitsch, director of the Everglades Wetland Research Park at Florida Gulf Coast University in Naples. “Clearly, there is some relationship between nitrogen and these explosions. The question is: Where did that nitrogen come from?” 

The topic has become part of a larger environmental debate in several political elections in the state this fall.

Chris O'Meara/AP

Dead fish are piled up near the Gulf of Mexico in Bradenton Beach, Fla. Aug. 6, 2018. Beach communities along Florida's southwest coast have been contending with the harmful algal bloom known as red tide for nine straight months.

'A balancing act'

Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who running for US Senate against incumbent Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson, has come under fire for his emphasis on economic interests at the expense of environmental protections.

“Florida’s economy is heads and shoulders better than when Governor Scott came into office,” says Professor Jewett, in Orlando. “But environmental protection is a vulnerability: His opponent can hammer that home with images of green algae and red tide.”

Congressman Ron DeSantis, who just secured the Republican nomination for governor in Tuesday’s primary, has already made a name for himself in the state as an advocate for the environment against Big Sugar for its role in the spread of blue-green algae in freshwater areas.

Yet despite hard-charging TV ads, the finger-pointing has started to give way to collaboration. “We need all hands on deck to help,” Senator Nelson said in a press release announcing a bipartisan bill to beef up federal research on South Florida algal blooms.

Indeed, red tide has “actually unified the two parties more than anything,” says Professor Mitsch.

Ed Maro, an Anna Maria Island resident, says the local emergency management has done “an amazing job” cleaning up beaches. To him, the devastation is “God’s plan,” but nevertheless sets up a “balancing act” for state leaders.

Surveying the fish kill from her dock on Anna Maria Island, Lynn Selander, a retired teacher from Toledo, Ohio, takes a breath. “Such a beautiful breeze,” she says. “Too bad it is poisonous.”

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

Resident Lynn Selander surveys the fish kill from her dock on Anna Maria Island, Fla. Aug. 21, 2018. She believes that releases from pollution-choked Lake Okeechobee have likely played a role in the current bloom of red tide choking the southwestern Florida coast.

Having never seen it so bad, she says it is a commentary on humanity’s impact on what is ultimately a “fragile ecosystem” that needs to be protected from polluters, no matter who they are. But she believes that releases from pollution-choked Lake Okeechobee have likely played a role, necessitating “more water treatment plants to keep that from happening.” 

For many like Ms. Selander, the red tide disaster “is a chickens-come-home-to-roost situation,” says John Richard Stepp, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “Connecting the dots [between environmental policy and red tide] is not easy. But Floridians care deeply about water, which leads to awareness. And that gives me a lot of hope.”

At the summit of Afghanistan’s tallest mountain, the Afghan woman climber can hardly keep hold of her country’s flag in the fierce wind – much less control her unbridled joy at her monumental achievement.

But Hanifa Yousoufi’s smile glows as the last rays of sunset illuminate, far below, a horizon of snow-capped mountains and clouds, as evident in an online video. Only two other Afghans, both men, can lay claim to the same achievement. But even as Ms. Yousoufi entered the alpine record books on Aug. 10 as the first Afghan woman to summit Mt. Noshaq, which towers at 24,580 feet in the country's northeast, she joined the equally rarefied ranks of Afghan women role models trying to change a conservative society known more for restricting women’s rights and for honor killings than for female empowerment.

“I was doing this for all Afghan women,” says Yousoufi in a video interview from Kabul.

Now the 24-year-old Yousoufi and her fellow women climbers of the nonprofit organization Ascend: Leadership Through Athletics face a new challenge: going public, and striking a safe and effective balance between serving as inspirational examples of what Afghan women can achieve, while not also becoming targets of ultra-conservative elements such as the Taliban.

The women of Ascend have largely labored in secret since the group's founding in early 2015. They have aimed to avoid dangerous, unwanted attention in a country where high-profile women like television presenters are often threatened with death by the Taliban, or even male members of their own families. 

So the Ascend team kept details of this climb quiet until it was complete. Still, security concerns from Afghanistan’s ongoing conflict meant they had to make last-minute changes. At one point, the remote airstrip where they were scheduled to land was shut down due to a Taliban attack in the next district.

“I am a role model for other Afghan women, [because] in these conditions it is not very secure for Afghan women to go to the mountains, and I do it – I can show to the women that everything is possible,” says Neki Haidari, an 18-year-old member of the Noshaq team who did not reach the summit.

“Another woman, maybe she is not a mountaineer, but she is doing some other activities and she can [be inspired to] do it in this society,” says Ms. Haidari.

The Ascend program is not just about team training sessions five days a week. Besides physical fitness and climbing techniques, there are classroom courses in leadership, conflict resolution, being role models, and even outreach tactics like giving speeches. These are all aimed at empowering Afghan women and changing minds.

But crucial to inspiring their fellow women is awareness in the wider community about what they have conquered. Noshaq is the second-highest mountain the Hindu Kush range. And while not so technically challenging, its altitude is daunting. It is 4,000 feet higher than Denali in Alaska, the tallest peak in North America.

“When we started our activities, we tried not to make it so public, and not to be in Afghan media,” says Shegufa Bayat, another 18-year-old Noshaq climber who did not summit. The climbers recall visiting one location for training in 2016: Local residents threw stones at them.

“Now that we are getting public, we have this fear of being targeted,” says Ms. Bayat, as the other two nod agreement. But they are undeterred, and insist on using their full names when the Noshaq expedition is described.

“Now we have made a story and we are the first team of Afghan women who went to Noshaq, and one of our team members made it to the top, so we don’t want to keep it a secret,” says Bayat. “We don’t want to hide it – we want to tell to the people. Now we want to share it.”

Beyond the burqa

Before the US military toppled the Taliban in 2001, Afghan women were allowed outside the home only when entirely covered in a burqa. Education for girls and outside work for women was banned.

While life has changed significantly for women since then, many conservative and male chauvinist views persist – as do honor killings, and even poisoning of water supplies to girls’ schools in remote districts.

Yet an increasing number of women work in the police and security forces, and women hold many jobs and attend university in record numbers. But even among Afghanistan’s most ground-breaking women, choosing to scale mountains is a rare path.

“People ask me all the time, ‘Why mountaineering instead of, like, basketball? Or something cheaper, like soccer?’ ” says Marina LeGree, the founder of Ascend, and a lifelong sportswoman from Washington State.

“It’s the symbolism, and that’s why we always wanted Noshaq,” says Ms. LeGree. “People respect a climb and a summit. People who don’t know anything about climbing register that it’s really high, and it’s really difficult, and whoever has done it has really suffered and worked hard, and done something the vast majority of human beings can’t or won’t do.”

“So Hanifa has earned respect from men from all over Afghanistan that just plants a little seed in people’s minds that she is worthy of respect, and that she is physically capable,” says LeGree.

“We’re not trying to turn all Afghan women into mountaineers, and most women who hear about this aren’t going to be able to do the things Hanifa is doing,” she says. “But they are going to have that seed planted in their minds, too, that one of their own did it – and that it’s possible for them. And the power of that translates into their own lives.”

Ascend is a nonprofit that accepts about 25 new would-be women climber applicants a year, which usually whittle down to 15 to 20 for the two-year program. Funding comes from a range of individual donors and a few small family foundations, as well as the Danish Embassy in Kabul. Some 16 self-funded volunteers, including a professional guide and a professional trail runner, have given instruction and provided some equipment.

Before creating Ascend, LeGree had worked five years in Afghanistan in places like the lawless northeastern Kunar province and other spots where “pretty nasty things happened.” She says that gave her a “very real” appreciation of the risks. 

The climbers have only slowly begun to publicize their efforts locally, as they search for a balance between the pros and cons of publicity. They decided only in recent days that their names should be made public, says LeGree, after returning home from the mountain during a Muslim religious holiday, and thinking it through again.

“If we don’t tell this story, it doesn’t have anywhere near the impact,” says LeGree. 

“[They] fully recognize that, they want to be role models, and they want to own their achievements,” she says.

The longest journey

The climbers agree. Perhaps the longest journey has been made by Yousoufi, who was unable to do a single sit-up when she first joined Ascend three years ago. A divorcée who had been married at 15, she proved to be determined, had remarkable stamina, and quickly grew strong.

Those traits helped Yousoufi during the most difficult moments on the mountain.

“When I was going up, I felt like I was falling down,” the climber says, of a particularly steep face that required ropes between Camp 2 and Camp 3. Encouraged by non-Afghan guides, she made it through.

Coming down was also a struggle, and she recalls rappelling down the steep rock faces, afraid that her hands were too cold to keep hold of the rope that was controlling the speed of her descent.

“I thought I was going to die,” the climber says, with a grin.

“It’s a time that Afghans in general, and women in particular, really need hope and inspiration, and Hanifa is going to embody that because she is such a person who is not privileged, who was not handed anything,” says LeGree. “She just earned everything, and that’s going to resonate with other women.”

AP Photo

Myanmar's civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, speaks with university students at Yangon university Aug. 28.

Not every country has had its identity challenged by the United Nations. Nor had Facebook remove the social media accounts of its most powerful figures for hate speech.

Yet that is exactly what happened to Myanmar on Monday with the release of a UN investigation into the killing of more 10,000 Rohingyas by the military last year and the forced exile of nearly 700,000 of the minority Muslim group.

The UN report accuses six top generals in the Southeast Asian nation of “genocidal intent” and recommends they be prosecuted in an international tribunal. But with little chance of such trials soon or the Rohingya refugees being able to return safely, the report makes a point of highlighting possible reforms within the country itself.

Notably, it cites this blaring need: “There is no unifying ‘Myanmar’ national identity.”

Indeed, of all the countries lately trying to define their identity mainly by ethnicity or religion – such as China, Hungary, and Israel – Myanmar stands out in the extreme. Its military has long seen itself as the only institution representing the majority Burmese, who are largely Buddhist. Few in its rank and file are non-Burmese. And despite limited moves toward democracy since 2008, the military remains the dominant political force. That fact has greatly restrained the reform efforts – and any criticism of the military – by Aung San Suu Kyi and her party on the civilian side of this hybrid democracy.

Yet nearly a third of Myanmar’s 52 million people consist of other ethnic or religious groups. For decades, many of them have fought for autonomy or independence, chafing at the military’s control of their resources.

The Rohingya, who were considered citizens after independence in 1948, have been treated as stateless since 1982. They are also easy targets of hate for the top brass who feel a need to boost their public standing. Last year the commander in chief, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, posted on Facebook that the task of getting rid of the Rohingya was an “unfinished job.”

The military’s atrocities reflect Myanmar’s struggle as a nation-state to form bonds of loyalty based on civic rights, such as the protection of individual liberties and respect for ethnic or religious differences. Myanmar has yet to see diversity as central to its identity. The UN report recommends that it promote a concept of the state and nation that is “inclusive, based on equality and respect for the human rights of all.”

In her position as state counsellor, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has held several national dialogues among the ethnic groups to come up with a new distribution of power. In July, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate described her efforts to design a democratic federal union this way: “Our approach has to be holistic and inclusive.”

When recently asked if the military deserves amnesty for its past wrongs, she said, “The term we use is “national reconciliation.” One indication of possible change: The military has lately begun to recruit a few officers from minority groups.

It may be a long time before Myanmar will hold its military accountable for the recent mass atrocities. Yet both the national dialogue and the military’s halting reforms are signs that it is at least trying to find its integrity and identity. Or as Aung San Suu Kyi puts it, Myanmar is constructing a nation “founded on a lasting unity created out of diversity.”