In the days preceding last July’s NATO summit in Brussels that President Trump was set to attend, administration officials including Defense Secretary James Mattis worked around the clock with European allies to seal a summit declaration before the alliance leaders’ meeting even began.

The rush by Mr. Mattis and others to complete a deal they knew might not sit well with their boss – who had consistently aired his doubts about the benefits of international defense alliances like NATO and his disdain for what he considered to be freeloading allies – was striking.

What it displayed was one more example of Mr. Trump’s top national security advisers working around the president’s skepticism and unpredictability toward traditional allies to confirm America’s unaltered global leadership role.

Now, after Mattis’s unprecedented resignation and summary presidential dismissal following Trump’s decision to pull US troops out of Syria, US officials and close allies are wondering who, if anyone, will put a brake on “America First.” The president’s foreign policy vision is one that sees alliances and other commitments abroad in terms of dollars and cents rather than as part of the bedrock of America’s global security and influence.

The growing assumption both in Washington and in foreign capitals is that Mattis’s departure, coupled with not only the Syria withdrawal but also word of Trump’s intention to cut the deployment of US troops in Afghanistan by half over the next few months, announce both an end and a beginning.

On the one hand it’s the end of the period in the Trump White House when a new president still getting his sea legs deferred to national security advisers who pushed back against and even worked around Trump’s instincts.

And on the other hand, it’s likely to be the beginning of a period of sharper challenges to America’s traditional alliances and of accelerated withdrawal from a global leadership role the US has played since World War II.

More confident after two years

“After two years in the White House, the president has reached the point where he’s saying, ‘No more meetings, no more pressure, no more groups of people around me telling me what I can and can’t do, and please, no more arguments about the liberal world order and the requirements of American leadership,’” says Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

What the Mattis departure and Syria and Afghanistan withdrawals signal, Mr. Gvosdev adds, is Trump declaring, “ ‘I’m going to start doing what I have always wanted to do.’ ”

Others second this view, saying the events of the last week have showcased a president shedding the restraints initially accepted as part of taking on a daunting new task.

“What’s changed is that after two years in office, Trump is feeling confident in his own ability and his own instincts,” says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official during the Reagan administration who is now a national security analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “Even a self-confident person like himself felt overwhelmed when he first came into office, so he deferred to the people around him, particularly on foreign policy.

“But now he's saying, ‘I’ve listened to everybody else, but things haven’t gotten any better, so I’m going to go ahead and implement my campaign promises and what I always sensed was best,’ ” Mr. Korb adds. “ ‘If Jim Mattis or anybody else doesn’t like it, they can leave.’ ”

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan speaks to reporters outside the Pentagon, Dec. 19, 2018. President Trump said he's naming Mr. Shanahan as acting secretary to replace Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who will leave his post Jan. 1.

Trump has long disparaged America’s overseas military commitments: whether it was those in Europe and South Korea, which he has blasted as costly gifts to wealthy allies building ever-larger trade surpluses with the US; or those in the Middle East, which he has cast as sinkholes of US blood and treasure.

With his surprise trip to Al Asad Air Base in Iraq Wednesday, Trump appeared to signal both continuity and the coming change in US foreign policy.

Apparently seeking to reassure jittery Iraqis and other US allies after the shock of the precipitous Syria troop pullout, Trump said he would not be withdrawing the approximately 5,000 US troops in Iraq anytime soon. And he endorsed the option of shifting some of those troops to undertake possible future cross-border strikes into Syria, an idea Pentagon officials first floated last week after Trump announced the Syria withdrawal.

‘We’re no longer the suckers, folks’

But on the other hand, the president, clad in a military bomber jacket, told the troops at Al Asad Air Base that the days of America fighting others’ wars and paying for others’ defense are over.

Lamenting that for too long the world has been “looking at us as suckers,” Trump told about 100 assembled troops, “America shouldn’t be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price, and sometimes that’s also a monetary price,” he added. “We’re no longer the suckers, folks.”

Trump also hinted that the days of him listening to advisers is about to be reversed. “I think a lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking,” he said. “It’s time for us to start using our head.”

For some analysts, the sense of shock among some US allies over the Mattis departure and US troop withdrawals suggests some widespread wishful thinking that an unconventional president would continue to be restrained by wiser and experienced national security advisers.

“The problem is that the public and allies and adversaries alike were oversold this idea that even if the US had elected a disruptive and unpredictable president, there would always be adults in the room to keep control of things,” Gvosdev says.

He recalls that just a year ago, the world was still being reassured that the quartet of “MMTK” – Mattis, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and departing chief of staff John Kelly, widely dubbed the “axis of adults” – were steadying the ship of state and holding the president back from rash decisions.

Now that team will be a memory as of January, with a team much more willing to support and facilitate the president’s instincts in its place.

Most Pentagon analysts expect Trump’s choice to replace Mattis, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, to focus on internal Defense Department matters and forego the frequent globe-trotting and policy pronouncements carried out by Mattis. Mr. Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, has no foreign policy experience.

Shanahan will come on board the first of the year as acting defense secretary, but Trump indicated Wednesday that he could keep Shanahan in his new role indefinitely.

Announcement by Twitter

Korb says he welcomes Trump naming a nonmilitary person to what traditionally has been a civilian position to oversee the military. For that matter, he says it’s also possible to make the case for Trump’s troop withdrawals, particularly from Afghanistan after a 17-year commitment there.

But he says it’s the precipitous, inform-the-world-by-Twitter manner of announcing the decisions that throws the world for a loop and that will damage rather than enhance US interests.

“We have to remember that we’re in Afghanistan as part of a NATO mission, so how can we expect our NATO allies to see us as reliable and committed to burden-sharing after a decision like this that was taken without any consultation?” Korb says. He also notes that France has about 1,000 troops in Syria as part of the anti-ISIS coalition, and will feel “left in the lurch” by the sudden US pullout there.

“It’s fine to say, ‘I made the promise and I’m keeping it,’” Korb adds, “but you also have to ask, ‘What will be the lasting impact?’ and that’s what I’m not sure is happening.”

Traditional allies are likely to count on the US less to fulfill its decades-old role of leading and upholding what appears to be a fracturing postwar international order. Indeed, European officials and security analysts seemed to interpret the news out of Washington over the past week as a watershed moment that will be viewed as a turning point in transatlantic relations.

Senior aides to both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have said both publicly and privately that their bosses feel only more certain of the view they’ve held since Trump was elected that Europe must learn to rely less on the US and more on itself for security.

The next NATO summit

Analysts say they also expect the president to return now to his campaign criticism of long-term basing of troops on allied soil, particularly in Europe and in South Korea – both of which run trade surpluses with the US.

Indeed, Korb says he recently quipped to a South Korean official that the prosperous North Asian ally, which currently pays about 48 percent of the cost of maintaining the 23,000 US troops based there, should quickly boost its share of the cost to just over half to head off Trump’s “freeloader” criticisms.

But humor aside, most analysts say US allies have good reason to buckle up for a Trump-led foreign policy – and to be concerned about the changes ahead in how the US exercises its global leadership.

“What happens at the NATO summit next year when there’s not someone of Mattis’s stature or inclination willing to stand up to the president and push for something different from what he wants?” Gvosdev says. “We’re not going to be out of NATO, but we could very well redefine our role in NATO and what it means for the US to be part of the alliance.”

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

The U.S. Supreme Court is seen at sunset in Washington Oct. 4, 2018.

The United States Supreme Court term so far has been highlighted as much by what the court hasn’t done as what it has.
The high court naturally backloads much of its work, with its impact on American society often unloaded in a deluge of June decisions. This term has also seen oral arguments in several important cases, ranging from the scope of the Endangered Species Act to civil asset forfeiture.

But then there are the moves it hasn’t made. Major cases, on prayer by a high school football coach and a defamation lawsuit against Bill Cosby, have been relisted from conference to conference for months without getting the four votes necessary for the justices to take a look at them. And earlier this month two-thirds of the court declined to hear a high-profile case regarding whether states can deny funding to Planned Parenthood.

Justice Clarence Thomas, in a dissent joined by two conservative colleagues, accused the majority of dismissing the case for purely political reasons.

“What explains the Court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood,’ ” he wrote. “Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty.”

The justices haven’t avoided politically charged cases entirely – they have decided to hear one in February related to adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, for example. But the court’s institutional integrity has faced stiff challenges so far this term, including a bruising confirmation battle and public sparring with President Trump. Jumping on politically divisive cases could further erode that integrity, some experts say, but with more litigation on hot-button issues like immigration and abortion brewing in the lower courts, it will be only a matter of time before the high court weighs in.

“The fact one justice called out the rest of court gives this more life than it normally would; that maybe what’s going on here is political avoidance,” says Paul Gowder, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. “But maybe that’s a good thing. Historically the court has often tried to not unnecessarily inject itself into truly extreme and radical social controversies too often.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather for a formal group portrait to include the new Associate Justice, top row, far right, at the Supreme Court Building in Washington, Friday, Nov. 30, 2018. Seated from left: Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr. Standing behind from left: Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Elena Kagan and Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

New attacks, tougher defenses

The Trump administration has not been shy about asking the Supreme Court to inject itself into high-profile issues, requesting that the court bypass lower courts and hear legal challenges to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as the president’s bans on transgender service members and on asylum for immigrants who enter the country illegally. Last Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four left-leaning justices to deny an administration request to lift a lower court order blocking the asylum ban. The court also declined an administration request to halt a climate change lawsuit brought by youths against the federal government.

The White House’s desire to leapfrog the lower courts may stem from its experience last term. While the Trump administration routinely lost in lower courts, particularly with the travel ban, it won that case when it reached the Supreme Court.

And while the Supreme Court has repeatedly insisted that cases follow the normal legal process through the lower courts, Mr. Trump has continued to accuse members of the federal judiciary of bias against him. The attacks date back to February 2016, when he accused US District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel of being “very hostile” toward him because of his Mexican heritage. The nation’s highest court stayed silent until late last month.

After Judge John Tigar, of the US District of Northern California, ruled in favor of advocacy groups challenging the asylum ban this fall, Trump accused him of being an “Obama judge” and called the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which covers the western United States, a “disgrace.” (After a Dec. 18 hearing, Judge Tigar renewed the temporary injunction against the asylum ban.)

Chief Justice Roberts responded in a statement the next day. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges,” he said. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Justices are historically averse to making political statements in public, and direct responses to other branches of the government are virtually unprecedented. This suggests to some observers that Chief Justice Roberts’ desire to reinforce the independence of the judiciary has reached new heights.

“Of all the attacks President Trump has lodged on the judiciary, Roberts has not responded to any of them except this one,” says Steven Schwinn, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. “That shows remarkable restraint on his part and speaks volumes about how important he feels about defending the independence of the judiciary.”

“I’m not sure if there was some sort of tipping point,” he adds. “My guess is that it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it was a really heavy straw.”

The Kavanaugh factor

No one except the justices themselves can know if they have been going to extra lengths to avoid potentially divisive cases, but it is not just Trump who has injected the court into political debates this term. Dialing up the political heat more than anything this term, perhaps, was the bitter confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

With Trump promising during his presidential campaign to appoint justices who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 high court decision legalizing abortion nationwide, Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation was always going to be emotionally charged. His response to allegations that he committed sexual assault as a teenager added an unprecedented layer of partisanship, however, as he characterized the accusations as an orchestrated political hit by Democrats and the Clintons before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

That statement “might well impose a serious constraint on the court,” says Dr. Gowder, author of “The Rule of Law in the Real World.”

“If, after saying something like that, Kavanaugh lands on the court and we get a bunch of 5-4, hard-right opinions, that would make the Supreme Court look like an astonishingly political actor,” he adds. “I think it would look really, really, really bad – in a way that could damage the institution.”

Divisive cases are heading toward the high court nevertheless. This week a federal judge in Texas ruled the entire Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, unconstitutional, a decision that will surely be appealed to the justices if it is upheld by the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. (Roberts cast the deciding vote upholding Obamacare’s constitutionality in 2012.)

The challenges to DACA and Trump’s asylum ban could reach the court, and a number of cases seeking to impose new requirements on abortion clinics are also percolating in the lower courts – restrictions similar to those imposed by Texas that the Supreme Court overturned in 2016.

Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the deciding vote in that case. Kavanaugh, his replacement, is widely considered to be more conservative – though he described Roe during his confirmation hearing as “precedent on precedent.” In a private meeting with Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, he said that it is “not something to be trimmed, narrowed, discarded, or overlooked,” according to the senator.

The firm conservative majority on the Supreme Court has only been in place for a few months, and it will have years to leave its imprint on American jurisprudence. Whether the court is trying to keep a low profile at the start of that era is hard to say.

“It’s possible that’s going on, but at the moment we don’t have enough data points to say,” says Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

What does seem clear at the moment, he adds, is that “they would very much like to avoid the perception of the Supreme Court as a partisan institution.”

Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper

Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper leads kayakers on a June tour of the Buffalo River in Buffalo, N.Y. This once-polluted river has become a popular destination for recreational boaters.

Shielded by wraparound sunglasses and a windbreaker against a gusty fall day, Jill Spisiak Jedlicka strides across a lawn toward New York’s Buffalo River.

The grass is part of a fresh public space called Buffalo River Fest Park. Ms. Jedlicka, executive director of the nonprofit Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper, looks around with justifiable pride. Volunteers she and other community leaders directed have planted basswood trees and dogwood shrubs along the shore.

Across the water stands a group of silos turned into a new recreation complex named RiverWorks – complete with waterside seating, docked tiki boats, and a zipline strung above. The scent of Lucky Charms, produced by General Mills along the river, suffuses the air. Signs advertise a brewery called Resurgence and a big regatta, both coming to the riverfront soon.

“In the summer there are traffic jams with all the different kinds of boats on the river,” Jedlicka says, still sounding amazed. “These are good problems to have. Even five years ago, we were the only crazy ones out here.”

If American waterways had ever been voted on, yearbook-style, the Buffalo River could easily have been brutally named Ugliest, or Most Likely to Die Young. It took decades for public perception of the river to shift. But thanks to local resident champions, who collaborated with industry, government, and environmental groups, the Buffalo River gradually went from being considered a lost cause to a place worth fighting for.

Degraded urban rivers are hardly uncommon in America, and neither is industrial infrastructure along them. Still, the Buffalo River was uniquely repellent. An 8-mile water-snake feeding into Lake Erie, the river was once a wetland. To feed industry, it was channeled into the western end of the Erie Canal, then lined with grain elevators, flour mills, malt houses, chemical plants – and everything they dumped into the water.

By the 1970s, the river was pinpointed as one of the worst sources of pollution pouring into the Great Lakes. The Buffalo River had caught fire multiple times, even if the larger world hadn’t noticed. The surface had an oily sheen, and any fish caught there were liable to have tumors.

“Oh my God, it was gross,” says Lynda Schneekloth, professor emerita of landscape architecture at The State University of New York at Buffalo. “Cars, dead animals, shopping carts – we actually pulled those things out. It was so bad, if you fell in the river you were supposed to go get a tetanus shot.”

‘Mr. Buffalo River’

The waterway’s fate started shifting in the ‘60s. Stanley Spisiak was a local Polish-American jeweler by day, but by evening he was the kind of guy who’d chase down dumpers he spotted on the Buffalo River. (After being shot at, he took to carrying a pistol.)

Mr. Spisiak got involved with efforts to protect Lake Erie and New York rivers, testified in Albany, and by 1966 found himself winning the National Wildlife Federation’s “Water Conservationist of the Year” award. Seated by Lady Bird Johnson at the dinner, he invited her to visit – and bring her husband.

The Johnsons motored along on a Coast Guard cutter, and Spisiak hauled up a bucketful of river sludge for then-President Lyndon Johnson to smell. There’s a famous black-and-white of LBJ staring into the bucket, repulsed. Two weeks later, he signed an executive order banning polluted dredged sediment from being put in Lake Erie.

David Duprey/AP

Grain elevators line the Buffalo River in Buffalo, N.Y., Feb. 27, 2012. Many of the grain silos that dot the Buffalo riverbanks are abandoned.

Spisiak got a nickname: “Mr. Buffalo River.” But there was only so much he could do – the river was still declared biologically dead in 1969.

Jill Spisiak Jedlicka is his great-grandniece. She picks up where he left off by directing the river’s protector organization, Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper. Professor Schneekloth and seven friends founded the organization as an all-volunteer nonprofit in 1989, after organizing the first river cleanup that year. Today the group employs 27 full-time workers and has helped oversee the Buffalo River’s $100 million restoration.

Even the most ardent environmentalists couldn’t make the area pristine again (it’d been a wetland, after all), but they at least wanted the human animal to be able to enjoy it. Schneekloth, Jedlicka, and their counterparts first had to get people believing the water had potential. That took time, even for residents who were inclined to want to better the neighborhood.

Margaret “Peg” Overdorf had grown up just blocks from the water in the ‘50s, and while she didn’t swim in it, she remembers friends jumping in from the grain elevators. “It was murky and contaminated,” she says. “It was broken-down fences and old industrial sites.”

Later she became executive director of the neighborhood’s Valley Community Association. Decades after she’d avoided swimming there, “I started to realize the Buffalo River is a jewel,” she says. Wanting to build a new park on one overgrown field there, she wrote 17 grants totaling $5.4 million. River Fest Park opened in 2011. A community center sits close to it, and students use the river as an outdoor classroom, learning things like how to monitor water quality.

First, though, leaders had to find funding for a massive river cleanup. Not easy when even the industry along it had cut and run – there was nobody even left to sue. The Buffalo River had come to symbolize the city’s lost power. It was still lined with 175-foot concrete grain silos. General Mills still made cereal in one, and Honeywell researched refrigerants and blowing agents for foam insulation in another. Virtually all the rest were abandoned.

Schneekloth and Waterkeeper’s co-founders advocated for the towers as architecturally significant. At the same time, they pushed to rehab the river via community meetings, sediment sampling, and other technical assessment, and remediation measures like dredging. The Environmental Protection Agency chose Waterkeeper to manage the river’s official remedial action plan. From 2013 through 2016, the waterway was finally dredged to take out toxic hotspots.

General Mills was not considered a major polluter, but Honeywell was an environmental concern. One of its predecessor companies, Allied, had produced dye along the river. Although the company sold that plant in the ‘70s, the business it sold to went bankrupt, so liability reverted to Honeywell, which had held onto its research lab on the same site anyway.

Rather than wait to be sued, Honeywell voluntarily joined the cleanup plan through the Great Lakes National Program Office. The voluntary nature of the program engendered a cooperative rather than adversarial process, says global remediation director John Morris, who oversaw the $24 million corporate contribution to the Buffalo River project. (Honeywell recouped a portion of that money from other companies that had historically polluted the river, although Mr. Morris declined to disclose the amount.)

“The advantage of being proactive is that there is less uncertainty, and you resolve your liability much sooner. As a company that has quite a bit of industrial history going back to the 19th century, we have our share of sites that need attention,” Morris says. He calls the cleanup through the Great Lakes National Program Office “the fairest program we’ve had an opportunity to participate in.”

An ongoing effort

The Buffalo River’s water quality is an ongoing issue, as sewage can overflow into the river after storms. Habitat restoration continues as well; fish and plantings will be sampled in 2020 to measure how well it’s gone. Still, the results have been impressive enough that in 2015 the river cleanup project won the first-ever North American Riverprize from the International RiverFoundation.

Just a few years later, the Buffalo River now hosts paddleboarding, kayaking, breweries, distilleries, history tours, ice rinks, beehives, art installations, and even weddings.

Doug Swift is a local developer who invested $30 million in that first recreation complex across from the park, RiverWorks. As a teenager, Mr. Swift had water skied on the Buffalo River when Lake Erie was too choppy. He jokes that whatever was polluting the water didn’t stunt his growth (he’s 6’5).

Still, Swift acknowledges that RiverWorks wouldn’t draw the more than 1 million people he projects it will have by the end of 2018 if the river hadn’t been cleaned up. While an architecture student at SUNY Buffalo, Swift had studied with Schneekloth and her husband, architecture and planning dean Bob Shibley, who helped inspire him with their new vision for the waterfront. Thanks to farsighted citizens like them, Spisiak, and Jedlicka, that vision has now come to life in a way that the larger world never expected.

“Most people wouldn’t have really felt comfortable if the water was the way it always was. Not to say it’s perfect now, but they’ve gotten the worst of it out,” Swift says. “The river generated the wealth that made Buffalo successful 150 years ago, and now it’s the center of its new economy, entertainment and tourism.”

This story was produced with support from an Energy Foundation grant to cover the environment.

The story began with a Canadian man named Stephen Watt. A man who, like thousands of other citizens of this country, was jolted in 2015 from the comforts of his middle-class life to aid victims of far-off conflict in Syria.

But Mr. Watt's narrative, one that he's the first to admit is typical, turned into a story that centers just as much around a Syrian man named Wasim Meslmani: a refugee whom Watt helped bring to Canada, yet who in his own act of benevolence, became the “go-to guy” for newcomers here before he even arrived.

The two, on a recent Sunday afternoon, sit in Watt’s living room in Toronto. They bear an uncanny resemblance: fair-skinned with beards shaven the same way. “We often get mistaken as brothers,” says Watt, Mr. Meslmani agreeing with a nod and shy laugh.

They are about to film a video for the Facebook page that Meslmani started when he was still living in a basement in Jordan as a refugee and that the two now run together. It’s called Hand-to-Hand, Supporting Newcomers, and its purpose is just that: to help new arrivals in Canada prepare for job interviews, enroll in language classes, find winter boots for their children.

“As much as I have gotten, I wanted to return some smaller part to others in my situation,” says Meslmani, who today lives in Watt’s basement.

Populism and anti-immigrant sentiment may have flared across the West as Syrian refugees fled their homes, but so too has altruism, among Canadians and Americans, Germans and Jordanians. Watt’s circle alone has sponsored scores of refugees and their families – including Hassan al-Kontar, the Syrian stranded for seven months at the airport in Kuala Lumpur who just arrived in Vancouver. Often lost, though, is the story of the refugee who, motivated with a sense of belonging or purpose, is playing a key role him- or herself in the humanitarian spirit of the era.

“This virtuous circle, it’s the way life should be,” says Watt. “And it’s like this in Canada, where people say they feel like they belonged when they arrived in the airport,” he says over kebabs with Meslmani after the video shoot. “So you feel like you're part of the community, which allows you to immediately start thinking, ‘Well, now that I'm part of this community I can start extending the favor to other people.”’

“It gets away from that idea of the white hero, the Canadian all-powerful sponsor, and the lowly Syrian newcomer,” Watt says.

Mobilizing to help

The image of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Kurdish Syrian who drowned on a Mediterranean coast in September 2015, was a turning point for Canadians regarding the Syrian war. They donated funds, or called their lawyer friends. Others went to volunteer in Greece, where desperate refugees were crossing from Turkey. Many of them sponsored refugees with their own time and money.

The Canadian government resettled more than 25,000 Syrian refugees between November 2015 and February 2016. Some 14,000 of them were brought in with the support of regular citizens, as part of Canada’s landmark private sponsorship program, in which individuals or organizations raise money for housing and pledge to provide moral and logistical support to new refugees.

At the time, Watt had responded to a request from Community Matters Toronto, a neighborhood organization, for volunteers to help with its Syria project. They put him to work creating a Facebook page called Syrian Sanctuary, intended to channel newcomers to their services. Instead, it caught the attention of thousands of Syrians outside Canada who contacted him. One was Meslmani.

Meslmani was not in Syria during the war, but it still uprooted him. He had been living in the United Arab Emirates since 2007, and when his job contract expired, the country refused to renew his visa. His only choice was to go home or flee to a country that would take him: He found one in Jordan.

There, he and his brother Hussam were doing odd jobs in home renovation under the table to survive. Once he was caught and told if he ever worked again he would be sent straight to Syria. He spent his time blogging about nutrition, what he studied at home, when he saw Watt’s Facebook page.

Meslmani and Watt's online friendship grew for months before Watt started the sponsorship process. Watt insists it’s possible to know those you’ve never met face-to-face – and says of all those he has since supported, he’s never misjudged. The application process itself requires painstaking details that trace the most vulnerable and excruciating moments of a refugee’s trauma. “How often do you sit with your closest friends and say, ‘let’s talk about the hardest part of your life in extreme details?’ ”

Aid from afar

Meslmani says that as his friendship with Watt and other sponsors in his circle grew, he realized there was a hole in the support network. There was no shortage of organizations trying to help, but they weren’t always working together. Some refused to cross-post information from other groups, even though they shared the same goals.

Meslmani decided to try to bridge that gap with Hand-to-Hand, which Watt says quickly became the “Craigslist for refugees in Canada” – ultimately doing what his page, Syrian Sanctuary, had sought to do. “He was playing the role of a sponsor, even before he came here,” Watt says.

Bruno Moynie, a Frenchman who volunteered to shoot the video in Watt’s living room, starting following Meslmani online like so many others who noticed a man posting about this family’s housing needs or that job fair. At some point Mr. Moynie had his own piece of furniture to donate to a family, which Meslmani managed adroitly, to the exact address and hour.

That was when Moynie learned Meslmani wasn't local. Moynie recounts: “‘By the way, I’m coming to Canada next week,’ he said. I said, ‘What do you mean, you are coming back? You were traveling somewhere?’ ‘No, I live in Jordan.’ ‘What do you mean? You’ve never been here?’ ” They both laugh.

The day they are filming this video, it’s exactly one year and a day since Meslmani started Hand-to-Hand.

“Attention, 1, 2, 3, and rolling,” Moynie says. Meslmani addresses the camera in Arabic. He’s creating a video about Canadian culture, from manners to national foods. In another video, they run through specific “do’s and don’ts” in job interviews.

Meslmani says this might seem basic, but not all newcomers have equal access to information. Government-sponsored refugees don’t have the same support as those privately sponsored. They film videos in Arabic because many newcomers lack English. “I focused on these people, because many of them have a lack of information about how it works,” he says.

‘We can help one another’

These days, Watt has picked up some of the work running Hand-to-Hand because, after all, Meslmani is now a newcomer, having arrived in Canada only on Aug. 2. He is busy studying academic English so he can pursue his dreams of becoming a nutritionist or physiotherapist, while trying to find work in home repairs or renovation.

And now Watt’s work as a sponsor has grown even more intense. With a full-time job, his evenings and weekends are full of logistics, filming, mentoring – time he says he used to spend trying to pen novels. The Meslmani brothers are one of six families Watt has co-sponsored in the past two years; he’s also helped sponsor individuals in the LGBT community, written over a dozen applications (spending Christmas of 2016 doing just that), and helped refugees find jobs and housing once they arrive.

The obligation for any Canadian sponsor is a year, but in reality there is no end point. “I love these guys,” Watt says. And he says the experience of sponsorship has shifted his perspective on what is happening in the world.

“Normally when you watch the news you feel hopeless. And once you start – Wasim can probably relate to this – once you start helping people, there's no bottom to it. Not in a bad way, in a good way,” he says. “You suddenly realize that as an individual, you can help, in major ways. It’s like, wow, this awakening, like suddenly the news looks different, it isn't just a bunch of tragedies that are beyond your scope.”

Meslmani nods his head in agreement, but he talks about his impact in more concrete terms: the families whose homes he helped furnish, the job leads, the online mentoring, and the thousands of connections.

It turns out that for as “typical” as Watt considers himself, Meslmani considers himself pretty typical too. And in fact each day more and more newcomers join his page, to help new newcomers. It’s the purpose in the very name of the Facebook page he started, well before he knew where he’d be today. “My one hand can’t do anything,” says Meslmani. “So I shared my hand with other people, so we can help one another. Hand to hand.”

This story is Part 12 of the series “On the Move: the faces, places, and politics of migration.”

Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool Photo/via AP

Russian political and military leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, oversee the test launch of the Avangard hypersonic missile from the Defense Ministry's control room in Moscow Dec. 26. The Kremlin says it successfully hit a designated practice target in Kamchatka, 3,700 miles away.

Twenty-seven years ago Russia was destroying nuclear weapons. 

Monitor correspondent Dan Sneider was on hand at Kapustin Yar, the “windswept flatlands of the vast Russian steppe,” as he wrote in May 1991. “In a burst of orange explosive fire, the last Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missile in existence was destroyed” while US inspectors and officials looked on. 

The event ended a multi-year process that eliminated “an entire class of nuclear weapons,” a culmination of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. 

“This road was not easy,’’ Lt. Gen. Vladimir Medvedev, chief of the Soviet National Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, said at the time. “But the struggle for peace and common sense won.’’

On Dec. 4 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would abandon the INF Treaty within 60 days if Russia did not remove a deployment of missiles banned under the treaty. 

Russia has not agreed to do so. Instead, yesterday Mr. Putin attended the test launch of a new class of intercontinental missile capable of traveling as fast as 20 times the speed of sound (15,000 miles per hour) and able to adjust its course en route to further avoid defense systems. The hypersonic missile’s speed could leave an opponent only seconds after a launch to decide on a response.

Russia declared the test a success. The new nuclear missiles, dubbed the Avangard, will begin to be deployed in 2019 and “will reliably ensure the security of our state and of our people for decades to come,” Putin said, according to Tass, the government news service.

(The Avangard is not banned under the INF Treaty, still in place at this moment.)

The test is being taken seriously by US observers. But some questions remain, including whether Russia has developed heat shields capable of protecting the missile at such high speeds. More important, perhaps, is whether Russia will commit the rubles to build the missiles in significant numbers.

If deployed, “these missiles will trigger a new arms race for offensive superiority,” concluded Stratfor, a geopolitical intelligence website, referring to hypersonic weapons in general earlier this year. China and the US are also believed to be developing such weapons, but now apparently lag behind.

Another existing missile treaty with Russia, New START, reduces deployment of strategic nuclear missile launchers by half. It expires in 2021. US National Security Adviser John Bolton hasn’t shown any enthusiasm to renew it. 

“We could end up sleepwalking into a new international arms race,” warns Richard Burt, the chief US negotiator for the original START signed with the Soviet Union in 1991. Together, he says, the US and Russia are now spending more than $1 trillion “on a new generation of nuclear arms systems.”

All this eagerness to rebuild nuclear capabilities is part of what some observers see as an emerging new or second cold war. What’s happening needs to be questioned by Congress when that body reconvenes next month.

Why can't the US move toward outlawing hypersonic missiles instead of developing them?

The US administration also needs to explain what it sees as the advantages of abandoning hard-won treaties. Presumably it is to make even better ones. And it should explain how a policy of developing ever more lethal nuclear weapons will promote more peace and stability in the world.