Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

President Donald Trump addresses U.S. mayors in the East Room of the White House in Washington, January 24, 2020.

By all indications, President Donald Trump is drawn to drama. 

The former reality TV star loves to perform, loves being the center of attention, loves to shift the media discourse with a well-timed tweet. Even now – after the leaking of a book manuscript by a former top aide that adds fuel to the charges at the heart of the impeachment trial – President Trump appears unfazed. 

And unlike former President Bill Clinton, who “compartmentalized” his way through impeachment, Mr. Trump seems to be fully embracing the trial as part of the “Trump show” and using his time in the split screen to capture attention and keep his supporters firmly on board. In fact, by staying away from the Capitol – despite saying he’d love to attend, after a senator offered him a ticket – he may be garnering more attention than if he had to sit there in silence. 

From the start of the trial, Mr. Trump has worked hard to stay in the public eye: grabbing global attention while in Europe; hopscotching around the country for televised campaign rallies; tweeting up a storm, including a personal record for tweets in one day (142); hosting prominent foreign leaders at the White House.

Some items on the president’s busy schedule were long in the works, but they still feed into Mr. Trump’s larger purpose at a time of maximum stress. He pays close attention to TV ratings, which have been low for the impeachment trial, and he complained when his defense lawyers had to start their argument on Saturday morning, calling that time slot “Death Valley." Like a TV producer, he aims to create a competing narrative designed to attract public attention, both allies and detractors of Mr. Trump say.  

“He’s trying to counterprogram,” says a source close to the White House who participates in multiple calls a day with Trump aides focused on public messaging during the impeachment trial. 

For President Clinton, only the second U.S. president in history to be impeached, the coping mechanism was to keep any scandals he was dealing with in a separate place, mentally. 

“Clinton was always a compartmentalizer,” says veteran Democratic strategist Peter Fenn. “He had an amazing talent for putting personal things into one box and public things and governing into another box.”

Mr. Trump, in contrast, “takes everything personally,” says Mr. Fenn. “He can’t operate outside the realm of, ‘It’s all about me.’”

For Trump aides, as with all presidential staff, pleasing the boss is paramount. And so staff who aren’t directly tasked with addressing impeachment have to compartmentalize to some degree, even as the boss is consumed by what he sees as a “witch hunt” – a term that many a Democrat applied to President Clinton’s 1998 impeachment. 

In a 2006 interview with scholars at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, former Clinton personal secretary Betty Currie agreed that during their impeachment whirlwind, most of the staff kept their noses to the grindstone and focused on work that had nothing to do with investigations and, eventually, impeachment. 

“We had to run the country,” Ms. Currie said. 

Mr. Clinton also had an impeachment “war room,” led by lawyer Lanny Davis, who pursued a “very defined” strategy. One rule forbade the president from speaking publicly about the impeachment proceedings. 

That, of course, is anathema to Mr. Trump’s style. For starters, no one tells him what to do. Or if someone does, there’s no guarantee he’ll listen. 

By having a press secretary who has never conducted a press briefing, Mr. Trump is effectively serving as his own spokesman. Thus, he lives or dies politically by his own guile and gut. The approach may be working: His average job approval rating registered Monday at its highest point – 45.5% – since the earliest days of his presidency.  

On Monday, as Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial resumed, the president’s expected story line – easy acquittal at week’s end, followed by a victory lap – may already have been dashed. The New York Times scoop posted Sunday evening about former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming book has increased the chances that the Senate will vote to subpoena witnesses. If a majority of senators make that call, the trial will extend beyond this week.

In his manuscript, Mr. Bolton – long at the top of Democrats’ wishlist for impeachment trial testimony – wrote that Mr. Trump had ordered a freeze on security aid to Ukraine until the country had agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a 2020 presidential rival, and others, according to the Times story. This represents the first time a firsthand witness has made such an assertion. 

But at the White House Monday, the programming centered on a completely different topic: Middle East peace. Mr. Trump welcomed ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, separately, Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz, for meetings on the Trump administration’s plan for the region. 

The meetings seemed to serve the domestic political goals of all concerned, but not much more. The Palestinians, who were not invited, rejected the U.S. plan sight unseen. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu will hold a joint press conference. 

This week’s focus on Israel recalls comments by Elaine Kamarck, a former aide to then-Vice President Al Gore, in her Miller Center interview from 2008. She spoke of how both Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush turned to Middle East peace as they struggled with domestic political challenges.

“All these presidents think, ‘Oh, well, I [expletive]-ed up my presidency, so I’ll try to make peace in the Middle East,’” Ms. Kamarck said. “As if this is going to save these guys.”

Amr Nabil/AP

Jordan's King Abdullah II (right) talks to Saudi King Salman ahead of a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, June 1, 2019. While in recent years Jordan has had perhaps the loudest voice on behalf of the Palestinians, the Saudis' focus, for many reasons, has been largely inward.

The Palestinian cause has been the lifeblood of Arab leaders, inspired countless poems and songs, been the subject of entire school textbooks, and was a factor in three regional wars.

It once united peoples from Morocco to the Arabian Peninsula more than even the Arabic language itself.

Yet as the Trump administration is set to unveil a one-sided peace deal potentially legitimizing the Israeli annexation of lands Arabs across the region once vowed to die for, something has happened to Arab support for Palestinian nationalism.

A change in calculations and priorities by Arab leaders, coupled with the wariness with which young Arabs view their own governments, has muddled the message on Palestinian statehood.

Just as startling as the suddenness of announcing President Donald Trump’s long-promised peace plan, the details of which he is expected to release Tuesday, is the collective shoulder shrug in the Arab world.

Gulf Arab nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have emerged over the past decade as the leading political and economic forces in the region, have been silent. So too Egypt, whose battles for Palestinian statehood in the 1960s and ’70s defined its post-independence identity.

Perhaps tellingly, as Palestinians braced over the weekend, the two largest regional satellite networks, Qatar’s Al Jazeera and the Saudi Al Arabiya, focused their coverage on the Jeff Bezos phone hacking scandal – with Qatar pushing the story implicating Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Al Arabiya exonerating him.

Shift in the Gulf

It is part of a trend as Gulf states, which once offered their own peace initiative in 2002, are now more consumed with maintaining their autocratic rule at home and countering any potential democratic Arab movements abroad. In so doing, Gulf leaders are putting aside a Palestinian cause they have deemed energy-intensive and low-reward.

Another factor is their rivalry with Iran, strategically aligning them with Israel and making them ever more dependent on the Trump administration and even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

Gulf insiders say leaders have stayed silent to keep a “neutral stance” – not throwing their full weight to pressure Palestinians to accept an unpopular deal, while not vocally denouncing unilateral announcements by Messrs. Trump and Netanyahu.

Yet Gulf leaders insist they are not abandoning the Palestinians, just humoring the Trump administration.

“Gulf countries just want to smile and nod for Mr. Trump and walk away, hoping that the administration forgets about the whole peace deal in a couple of days,” says one Gulf insider close to decision-makers.

Observers point to the failure of the Trump administration’s peace efforts to produce tangible results, including the much-ballyhooed, first-phase Bahrain economic peace conference last June, which fizzled without a single project pledged.

“What has happened since Bahrain? Absolutely nothing; it was a bunch of nice Power Point presentations,” says Daoud Kuttab, an Amman-based Palestinian analyst and writer.

“One reason we are not seeing a larger Arab response is that people don’t think the Americans are serious about anything. They think all of this is a show and election-year politics because Trump wants Bibi in office,” says Mr. Kuttab, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname. “But you have to be careful, because today’s politics can become policy.”

Palestinian apathy

The reaction has also been muted in the Palestinian territories themselves, where Mr. Trump has boasted that doomsayers’ warnings of violence or instability did not materialize after he moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“Palestinians are not shocked by the ‘Deal of the Century’ or the slow creep of annexation because they are living with it and have seen these types of policies in action for decades,” says Yara Hawari, senior fellow at the Al Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network in the West Bank.

Peace to Prosperity Workshop/Reuters

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner speaks at the "Peace to Prosperity" conference in Manama, Bahrain, June 25, 2019, which regional critics say accomplished little or nothing.

Popular Palestinian action has also been limited by the violence previous protests have been met with, most recently in the Gaza Strip.

“We have very clear examples of what happens when Palestinians do mobilize – with Gaza being the most recent manifestation of this – which is violent suppression. It is a very high cost,” Ms. Hawari says.  

Politically, the largest political actors, Fatah and Hamas, have been divided, while support for each movement has dwindled.

Activists and residents say there has been encroaching autocratic rule by each group in the West Bank and Gaza that has been intolerant to criticism, muzzled the press, and cracked down on any political opposition.

Human Rights Watch has reported Palestinian Authority security services arresting dozens of journalists, protesters, and even private citizens for “writing a critical article or Facebook post” or “belonging to the wrong student group.”

“Palestinians must focus on political reconciliation among themselves and demand a legitimate leadership that goes back to the discourse of liberation,” says Ms. Hawari.

Jordan and Egypt  

For Jordan and Egypt, the lone Arab countries with peace treaties with Israel, the calculations are even more delicate.

On the world stage, Jordan has been the loudest, often the only voice defending Palestinians, denouncing Trump measures such as the U.S. Embassy move and lodging official complaints.

King Abdullah, an advocate for the two-state solution, has spent much of the past two years drumming up support for Palestinians in European and Arab capitals and has resisted “incredible pressures” from the Trump administration to acquiesce to its plans.

Jordan is also driven by internal concerns: Half of its population is of Palestinian origin, and it fears both a further influx of refugees and the security ramifications of having Israel annex territory on its borders, cutting off the last geographic connection to the West Bank itself.

Yet Jordan and its leaders are constrained by economic and political realities. The cash-strapped kingdom receives $1.5 billion in annual aid from Washington and, under a controversial natural gas deal that went into effect this month, relies on Israel for half its energy needs.

“Even though there is popular outrage, I don’t think Jordan is in a position to take serious steps to pressure the Israelis or adopt a confrontational approach with the Americans on these issues,” says Oraib Rantawi, director of the Amman-based Al Quds Center for Political Studies.

“Jordan has no influence on Israeli policy, and now it has no influence on American policy.”

In Egypt, the calculations are even shrewder, with Cairo concerned chiefly about internal stability.

Cairo is politically reliant on Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which since 2013 has provided President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with more than $20 billion to cement his rule and given him a blank check to crush dissent.

While not wishing to appear to “abandon” Palestinians, Cairo is instead treating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “strictly a security issue.”

“Egypt’s position supporting a two-state solution and the ending of settlements is steadfast and will never change,” President Sisi told foreign reporters in December, writing off annexation talk and the Trump deal as Mr. Netanyahu’s “electoral rhetoric.”

“There is a difference between electoral promises and their fulfillment,” he said. Privately, Egyptian authorities say they hope the issue will go away.

Arab protesters

After the Arab Spring, which challenged the decadeslong rule of Arab autocrats who wrapped themselves in the flag of the Palestinian cause, pundits were quick to declare that freedoms and democracy at home had replaced Arabs’ concerns for their Palestinian brethren. But activists disagree.

“Before, Arab rulers would rant about imperialism, Zionists, and Palestine, teaching us that we could only resist Israel through surrendering our rights, freedoms, and resources to them,” says Hisham al Bastani, of the Jordan anti-normalization movement, which links the Palestinian cause with a lack of democracy at home.

“People have become wiser – we now know that we cannot liberate Palestine until we liberate ourselves from our corrupt rulers.”

Recent polls indicate the Palestinian cause still resonates; in a 2018 survey by the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies across 11 Arab states, 77% of respondents believed “the Palestinian cause concerns all Arabs and not the Palestinian people alone.”

Indeed, Palestinian flags are raised in ongoing protests against corruption in Beirut, Baghdad, and Khartoum, while the poem “Mawtini,” or “My Homeland,” by Palestinian nationalist poet Ibrahim Tuqan has become an anthem for pro-democracy protesters across Lebanon and Iraq.

“The target of our protests or our slogans may change,” says Mohammed, a Lebanese protester, via encrypted messaging. “But our struggle and that of the Palestinians remains one and the same.”

As a grandfather, Robin Burton’s sympathies lie with Queen Elizabeth, the British monarch whose royal castle’s gray crenelated walls loom over this tidy town.

Now that Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have decamped to Canada, the queen won’t be seeing much of her grandson or Archie, her great-grandson, says Mr. Burton, a self-described royalist who is in town to visit his daughter and her baby.

Such a shame that the former Meghan Markle, who married Harry in 2018, couldn’t adapt to life as a British royal, he muses.

But Mr. Burton sees another catalyst in the abrupt parting that has roiled the House of Windsor, as the British monarchy is known. “I blame the papers for all the bad publicity,” the retired airline engineer says. “They destroy people. They build them up and they destroy them.”

Across this country, opinion is divided over Harry’s dramatic decision to relinquish his royal titles in order to strike out on his own with his wife. Many are wary of the couple’s ambition to be financially independent by cashing in on their trademarked “Sussex Royal” brand.

But few doubt that intrusive U.K. media coverage of their relationship, and particularly of Meghan, a biracial U.S. actress, played a role in the breakup. “The media is never kind,” says Sally Pierce, a retiree doing her shopping in Windsor last week.

“You play the game”

For Britain’s newspapers, royal news and gossip have long driven sales and spurred editors to push the limits of privacy and libel law. While newspaper sales are in decline here, as in many countries, a clutch of tabloids retain a bite and bark that blends the flag-waving of Fox News with the celebrity-chasing frenzy of TMZ and the rule-bending zeal of the National Enquirer.

Defenders of the press, and of the public’s right to know what their taxpayer-funded royalty is up to, say this scrutiny is justified. “You can’t simply be a reigning family that we nod and bow to,” says Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, a professional association. “The British media’s attitude to royals is that we [taxpayers] pay and you play. You play the game.”

To read the tabloids is to plunge into a daily froth of speculation about internal royal affairs and the real reason why Harry and Meghan wanted out. But the couple’s own statements tell a less flattering story, says Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University. “They’re saying this is about being harassed and lied about. From their perspective this is entirely about dishonest journalism and unfair journalism,” he says.

Some press-watchers say the coverage of Harry and Meghan had been relatively restrained, a legacy of the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997 while being chased through Paris by paparazzi. Newspaper editors subsequently swore off paparazzi photos and refrained from photographing without permission her sons, Harry and William.

The global celebrity of Diana and her love-hate relationship with the cameras epitomized the implicit Faustian pact between the crown and the popular press, which keeps them in the public eye and shores up their legitimacy in a modern democracy.

John Stillwell/Reuters/File

Queen Elizabeth (right), Prince Harry, and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, pose for a picture at a Buckingham Palace reception in London on June 26, 2018.

“The dignity of the monarchy was to be touched by the glamour of youth, with weddings of dazzling splendour, photo-opportunities galore, state occasions and relentless pomp globally promoted,” former newspaper editor Simon Jenkins wrote in the New Statesman.

In return, members of the royal family often had to grin and bear it when the coverage was unfavorable. Some also used media interviews to advance their own agendas, most famously during the marital breakdown of Diana and Prince Charles, the heir to the throne.

Still, for royalty and celebrities as well as ordinary people, there should be no excuse for the falsehoods peddled by tabloids, insists Mr. Cathcart, who has campaigned to reform press regulation after a 2011 scandal over phone hacking. “There’s no license for the U.K. press to print lies, just because everyone says they’ve always done it.”

Diana’s legacy

Scarred by his mother’s death, Harry never accepted this pact. He called out the media for intrusive coverage of Meghan, including racist slurs by right-wing commentators. The couple later barred reporters from their son’s christening and refused to identify the godparents.

Their demand for privacy grew excessive, even as they lined up publicity for their charitable appearances, says Mr. Murray. When they got a new puppy, Harry bristled when asked about its name. “This is an instance of a person who is rather thin-skinned,” says Mr. Murray.

Penny Junor, a journalist and author of several royal biographies, including one of Harry, says the U.K. media initially hailed Meghan as a breath of fresh air. “Everybody loved her. The press thought she was wonderful,” she says.

Some of the subsequent criticism of the couple’s highhandedness has been justified, she says, though not all of it. Still, she says the newspapers aren’t the real villains. “I’m not defending the press. But I don’t believe it’s been a campaign against Meghan,” she says.

Last October, the acrimony between the couple and the press hit a new low when Meghan sued the Mail on Sunday newspaper over the publication of a letter she had written to her estranged father. The case has yet to come to trial. In a statement defending the lawsuit, a rarity by a royal, Harry drew an explicit parallel between “bullying” behavior by tabloids toward Meghan and the tragedy of Diana’s death, warning that history could repeat itself.

“I’ve seen what happens when someone I love is commoditized to the point that they are no longer treated or seen as a real person. I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces,” he said.

Ms. Pierce, a former school administrator, says many Britons remember the sad sight of Harry, then 12, at his mother’s funeral, and sympathize with his hostility toward reporters.

“I’m desperately sorry that this [separation] happened because we all want Harry to be happy,” she says.

“We’re not racist”

But she doesn’t extend any sympathy to his wife, who she calls a “dreadful woman” for taking Harry away from his family. “She knew what she was doing. She’s a little schemer. It’s very sad.”

In this lens, Meghan is cast in the role of Wallis Simpson, the U.S. divorcée whom Elizabeth’s uncle, Edward VIII, married in 1937 and then gave up his title. Commentators claim that Harry’s infatuation has blinded him to his royal heritage and that it will end in tears.

Added to this sexist stereotype – Lady Macbeth meets Yoko Ono – is a racially charged debate over Meghan’s role that has become a cultural touchstone here. Black Britons have accused white male pundits of failing to recognize their own prejudices when they criticize her.

Unprompted, Ms. Pierce says, “We’re not racist,” referring to the U.K. Similarly, Mr. Burton insists that race has nothing to do with how tabloids treated Meghan. A princess was simply a bad fit for a career woman. “It’s a job. I don’t think she realized what she was getting into.”

Views on the breakup cleave along generational lines. A survey carried out last week for the Daily Express found that while more than half of adults age 55 and older said that Harry had made a mistake by giving up his royal titles, less than a quarter of those age 18-34 agreed.

Among British millennials, support for the royals is weakening. Slightly less than half agreed that the monarchy is good for the U.K., according to the same survey. In this and other surveys, the majority of all Brits say the monarchy is a net positive.

At a bus stop in the shadow of Windsor Castle, Qasim Rehman checks his phone. He’s a bus driver waiting to catch a ride to the depot and he has little time for royal drama. “We know it’s all just a show. What do they actually do?” he asks.

He points to the castle, one of several palaces owned by the crown. “They’re racists,” he says, referring to Meghan’s experience. No wonder Harry wants out. “He wants to be free. You can’t hold him captive.”

Charles Krupa/AP/File

A library patron freely crosses from Stanstead, Quebec, into Derby Line, Vermont, on July 11, 2018, as she walks down the sidewalk to the Haskell Free Library, which sits atop the U.S.-Canada border.

Kathy Converse wanted to do something productive after life as an English teacher, so she decided to volunteer at her local library. A straightforward path – not prone to bumps or wild curves.

Or so she thought, she tells me one recent day at the bustling Haskell Free Library. Instead her workplace sits – quite literally – atop the US-Canada border. As such it bears witness to heartache and joy, fear and suspicion, and one time even gun smuggling.

“There’s nowhere in the world like this,” she says.

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which was deliberately built to span the international boundary in 1904, is a symbol of cross-cultural cooperation and has fascinated visitors for over a century. It’s a place where the border at Stanstead, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont, is delineated with a thick piece of black duct tape that runs through the reading room, and where the theater’s stage sits in Canada and most of the seats in the U.S.

It’s perhaps even more enthralling today, at a time when national walls are in vogue. And even the U.S.-Canada border, long heralded as the longest friendly border between two countries in the world – marked outside the library with a row of potted plants – has become more fraught.

On a recent day, U.S. border officials roam the streets of small-town Vermont, watching for comings-and-goings through the library doors. But inside, borders seem irrelevant and random. As I returned from interviewing locals, I found my 9-year-old reading in Canada, while the adults who were supposed to be watching her were doing a puzzle in the U.S.

Pretty shoddy babysitting, I joked.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Monitor reporter Sara Llana's husband, sister, and brother-in-law do a puzzle in the U.S., when they are supposed to be watching her daughter. But when Sara came back, her daughter was in a foreign country by herself – on the other side of the border (marked by the black tape), reading in Canada!

People from all over the world come here – from as far away as South Korea, and as close as Montpelier and Montreal. They take photos straddling the border tape with arms spread, a Canadian flag in one hand, an American one in the other.

Laila Lima, who lives near Montreal, was visiting with her family. “I felt like crying,” she said, after hearing a story recounted by Ms. Converse. The library volunteer spoke of a grandmother and grandchild who met for the first time inside the walls, one of many foreign families split by tougher immigration policies in the U.S., but who find neutral territory in the Haskell. Visitors from Canada can follow the sidewalk across the border and freely enter the library’s doors – they just can’t go anywhere else. Visitors from the U.S. cannot walk too far down that same sidewalk or they could be detained.

It was not always this strict. Scott Wheeler, a local historian who publishes the Northland Journal, recalls growing up with a border that felt more like somebody else’s imagination.

“We knew Stanstead and the Derby Line were in two different countries, but you didn’t really think about it as such,” he says. On Saturday nights, when there were hockey games in Quebec, all you had to say was “hockey” at the border. “And they’d wave you on.”

That of course all changed after 9/11. Mr. Wheeler has become an unofficial guide for visitors in this region, and he always finds their perspective illustrative. Europeans accustomed to passport-free travel across their continent are dismayed by the restrictions now in place. The South Koreans, he says, are amazed that two countries are separated with flowers.

As for locals, some have refused to adapt. Instead, they avoid the border altogether. “I think a lot of it is our fierce stubbornness, that we don’t want things to change,” he says.

If most residents are resigned to a new post-9/11 normal, in some ways the library faces more challenges today. Irregular border crossings have spiked northbound, as the U.S. under President Donald Trump has placed more restrictions on immigrants and refugees. More than 16,000 were stopped crossing into Canada by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 2019.

It plays out in the library when family or friends can’t get permission to see each other any other way, which then brings heightened attention from the border establishment. “The best word would be ‘challenge,’” Ms. Converse explains of the effort to keep their heads down. “Our job is to serve our patrons.”

That job is harder here than in most libraries, says local Peter Carragher. And that’s not just because it’s a bilingual collection and clientele. In 2018, a man was sentenced for smuggling guns into Canada, at one point via a stash in the trash bin of the library bathroom.

“There’s people who come by casing the joint. They have to be ready for them and not reveal too much,” says Mr. Carragher, who lives on the Quebec side but comes daily to Jane’s Cafe in Derby Line, where he and his wife leave their own mugs that bear their names. “It puts them on the spot, and they’re not qualified or trained for that. That’s not their function as a library.”

As I head out of the library with my daughter, husband, sister, and brother-in-law, we are stopped by a border patrol officer. He asks for our passports because another officer notified him we may have illegally passed into Canada. That’s cause for arrest, he explains. He’s kind about it as he lets us go, but it’s disconcerting.

It did give me a glimpse of life on a tighter border – and a deeper appreciation for that sanctuary within the library’s walls.

AP

Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks to journalists in Beijing about the virus outbreak Jan. 26.

Much of the world is watching China closely to see if it can contain a virus that has spread to other countries. Its government has already quarantined nearly 50 million people in 16 cities and rushed to build new hospitals. Yet what should be watched just as closely is how much China has learned about containing public fear. Since the country’s last major virus outbreak in 2002-03, Chinese officials have come a long way in their capacity for calming.

International health officials often talk of the need to battle two epidemics at once – an epidemic of disease and an epidemic of fear. With social media able to spread both falsehoods and genuine warnings, fear can propagate even faster than a disease.

In fact, unnecessary panic can do its own kind of damage. It can break community ties, increase distrust of leaders, create false narratives of victimization, or lead to temporary panic in the global economy. Once amplified, fear can prevent people from hearing accurate information.

To avoid such damage, Chinese officials have tried to be more transparent and precise in their daily briefings about what they know of this outbreak and what is being done. They have allowed the official news media to be relatively free of normal censorship. And to regain public trust after making mistakes early on, some officials have apologized. The mayor of Wuhan, the city that is ground zero for the outbreak, offered to resign “as long as it is conducive to the control of the disease and to the people’s lives and safety.”

In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) held off hitting its own panic button and declaring a global emergency in the first weeks of the outbreak. It, too, has learned how to better balance issuing alerts about real danger against the possibility of provoking undue alarm.

Fear during an epidemic needs its own kind of vaccines. And what are those? A report last year from an independent panel set up by WHO and the World Bank recommended a number of nonmedical ways that officials can be ready before an epidemic to deal with the “fear factor.” In short, the 15-member panel stated: “Long-term, sustained community engagement is crucial for detecting outbreaks early, controlling amplification and spread, ensuring trust and social cohesion, and fostering effective responses.”

In other words, avoiding a health panic requires a community to have a reservoir of unity, compassion, and openness. These are some of the traits for resiliency and are as needed as medical supplies and health workers. They help keep caution from escalating into fear. And when a health crisis is over, they also help heal any broken bonds of community.