Eun Suk Hong dreamed of attending an Ivy League school. It was the natural evolution for a child brought by his mother at age 10 to the U.S. from South Korea with his father’s words ringing in his ear: “We gave you this opportunity. Study hard. Listen to your mother.”

But no matter how hard Mr. Hong worked or studied, his immigration status in the U.S. was always in question. And when Donald Trump took power four years ago that nagging worry turned to near panic. He still remembers the day in September 2017, two years after he got a job in finance in New York, that the U.S. announced it would rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era reprieve for millions of unauthorized immigrants like Mr. Hong who arrived in the U.S. as children.

“I was at work. I felt so cold. My hands were shaking,” he says. “I realized, oh my God, whatever I thought I had, it can be taken away, and it just was.”

So Mr. Hong did what his family had done, all those years ago: He looked for opportunities in another country, even though he knew that by leaving the U.S., he would be barred from re-entering the only country he knew. He applied, and got accepted to a high-ranked business school in Spain. “And I looked at my life in the States, which is filled with uncertainty ... [in] a country that doesn’t want me.”

Courtesy of Eun Suk Hong

Eun Suk Hong, who is pursuing a dual degree at IE Business School, attends the South Summit in Madrid, October 4th 2019. He was a DACA recipient in the US - his mother brought him to the US from South Korea - but decided to move to Spain to advance his career. He is currently barred from returning to the U.S.

When he left for Spain in 2019, Mr. Hong became one of the so-called Dreamers who have voluntarily left the U.S. after seeing immigration reform wither on the vine. The number who have left, either to move home or to another country, isn’t tracked; estimates show that the overall unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. declined by around 1 million from 2010 to 2018. 

And while President Biden has sounded a new tone, reversing some of Mr. Trump’s most hard-line policies for immigrants in his first week in office, many Dreamers who have found opportunity elsewhere won’t be moving back anytime soon, pushing back against an enduring U.S. idea of freedom coupled to opportunity, one encapsulated in the “American Dream.”

“I grew up thinking that everything you want can only be achieved in the U.S.,” says Geidy Portocarrero, whose parents left Peru for the U.S. when she was 13 and who today lives in Canada. “It was so hard for me to leave the States and not consider any other country. I thought, ‘this is where my dreams will happen. Why leave?’”

Divisive politics

Mr. Biden has already granted protection to DACA recipients by preserving the program that President Trump attempted to rescind in 2017, triggering a protracted legal battle that he eventually lost. Government data shows that as of Sept. 30, there were 640,760 individuals, with an average age of 26, who were recipients of DACA, making them a small subset of the larger number of Dreamers. 

Mr. Biden has also sent legislation to Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for the nearly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Dreamers would be fast-tracked under Mr. Biden’s proposal, which would be the most expansive overhaul of immigration law in decades. On Tuesday, his administration announced further measures, including a task force to reunite family members separated at the border under his predecessor.

Still, not lost on many Dreamers who’ve left the U.S. is that polarized immigration politics preceded the Trump administration. The DREAM Act for immigrant minors was first introduced nearly 20 years ago, only to flounder in Congress, leading Mr. Obama to create DACA in 2012 as a temporary reprieve. And the politics of immigration reform remains just as divisive and dysfunctional, though there is broad public support for legalizing the status of Dreamers.

“Life Outside the U.S.”

Many Dreamers talk about growing up as American kids, only to realize when they tried to get summer jobs or drivers’ licenses, apply to college or start their careers, how constrained they were. When they found out about their status, they finally understood their parents’ fear of police or skittishness while driving. They talk about feeling trapped, suffocated, and ashamed of who they were.

Katharine Gin, who works with undocumented youth in the San Francisco area, recently helped launch a video project called “Life Outside the U.S.” to help them open themselves to the possibilities of leaving.  

“There are no role models for them. When we started the project and were talking to people about life outside the U.S., the first thing people thought about was deportation,” says Ms. Gin, executive director of Immigrants Rising, a nonprofit.

Ms. Gin says that immigrant advocates who have fought so hard for the right to remain in the U.S. have in some ways framed their options as binary: to stay or go, with go meaning a return home that may be tinged with failure. “I think [this binary thinking] plays with immigrants’ understanding of their own freedom to go elsewhere and that they might actually be wanted and valued elsewhere.”

Courtesy of Eun Suk Hong

Eun Suk Hong (second left) takes a day trip to Toledo with fellow MBA classmates from IE Business School in Madrid, one of several trips he has made in Spain with new classmates.

That’s easier said or desired than done, says Rudolf Kischer, an immigration attorney in Vancouver. Canada is a logical destination because of proximity and language, and he says he has fielded more calls from Dreamers in recent years. But many are dissuaded by Canada’s immigration system, which places a high bar, including educational achievements, for most applicants.

“It’s very difficult to do and it’s risky for them to do,” he says, noting that there’s no simple way back to the U.S. if they are accepted.

A one-way street

Indeed, one of the most excruciating decisions that Dreamers face is leaving behind family and immigrant parents who sacrificed everything to get their children to America. Any adult who has lived in the U.S. illegally is usually barred from entering the country for between three and 10 years, subject to waivers.

Ms. Portocarrero left the U.S. in 2011. She talks about the 20-hour days her mother put in: working the morning as a cashier, the afternoon as a nanny, and the evening delivering newspapers in California’s Bay Area.

But after graduating from university, Ms. Portocarrero says she could only take unpaid internships because DACA status didn’t yet exist. And when one of those organizations tried to offer her a paid position and she had to refuse, she knew she had to leave. “That’s what my mom taught me, that I could succeed anywhere,” says Ms. Portocarrero, who works in Vancouver as a data analyst. “I didn’t need to be in the U.S. to fulfill my dreams.”

The two weren’t able to see one another for nine years, until her mom moved back to Peru. 

Mr. Hong didn’t immediately accept the business school offer in Spain, in part because of his mother’s sacrifice for him and her reluctance to see him go. He deferred the acceptance, and worked with a nonprofit to lobby on Capitol Hill for a reentry waiver for unauthorized immigrants who leave to study. Nothing changed. So he got a student visa and moved to Madrid. 

Today Mr. Hong is taking a dual master’s degree while launching two startups. Still, he hasn’t given up on his American Dream. One of his startups is based in Miami with a U.S. partner. He is barred from re-entering, but he is applying for a waiver, and hopes the Biden administration will change the rules for Dreamers, and not just because he wants to do business.

“I want the U.S. to want to have me back,” he says. “I want to show an immigrant is not taking a job away from you. Actually an immigrant can create a job for you.” 

Evan Vucci/AP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken listens as President Joe Biden delivers remarks to State Department staff, Feb. 4, 2021, in Washington.

In his first foreign policy speech as president, Joe Biden unveiled myriad measures, from a return to robust U.S. admissions of refugees and new protections for LGBTQ minorities worldwide, to a pause in a planned drawdown of U.S. troops from Germany.

But perhaps none of the actions announced at the State Department Thursday afternoon encapsulates President Biden’s “diplomacy is back” message better than his dual decision to end all military assistance to the Saudi-led war in Yemen – while at the same time reinvigorating diplomatic efforts to bring a war that launched the world’s worst humanitarian disaster to a negotiated end.

By cutting off the U.S. arms pipeline to the Yemen war while announcing the appointment of a special envoy assigned to reviving efforts to resolve the conflict, Mr. Biden is saying not just that “America is back” – as he said during the campaign to describe how he would pivot from former President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

Instead, it is a certain America that he aims to bring back to the world stage – one of moral leadership and of values that he says Americans support and that much of the world aspires to.

Moreover, Mr. Biden spoke of an America that reorients its international action away from the heavy reliance on military intervention and toward a greater reliance on the soft power of diplomacy, which he said must again become the “grounding wire” of U.S. engagement abroad.

“There were several themes running through Biden’s speech, the return to values-based foreign policy being front and center, but a more subtle idea was this significant focus on diplomacy as the mainstay of U.S. engagement abroad,” says Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

“I took that as a signal of a recalibrating from the over-militarization of American foreign policy,” he adds. “You’re seeing a pivot to a brand of American engagement that is more about diplomacy than it is about military intervention.”

Senior U.S. officials, including Robert Gates, when he served as President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, have warned of an over-reliance on the military in foreign affairs and a dangerous depletion of America’s diplomatic presence and power on the global stage.

Mr. Biden is pledging to rebuild the diplomatic corps and retool it for a world where America relies less on its hard power. And in his speech he appeared to make the war in Yemen an example of a shift to using the “muscles” of soft power.

The Yemen war

For almost six years, the United States has supplied the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen with arms, including weaponry involved in attacks on the civilian population. Some studies estimate that nearly a quarter of a million Yemenis have died as a result of the war and war-related famine.

But over the same period, the war has made few advances against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who now control an estimated 80% of Yemeni territory.

On Friday, President Biden reversed the designation by the Trump administration, in its waning days, of the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization. The reversal is in part intended to facilitate delivery of humanitarian aid to Yemenis in Houthi-controlled territory.

Hani Mohammed/AP/File

Workers put down a fire after Saudi-led airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, July 2, 2020. President Joe Biden said at the State Department Feb. 4, 2021, that he would make good on a campaign pledge to cut U.S. support for the five-year, Saudi-led military campaign.

Mr. Biden’s cutoff of offensive weaponry was not unexpected nor a 180-degree turn for U.S. policy. In 2019 Congress voted to end military support for the Saudi-led war, a measure that was vetoed by Mr. Trump. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also used his emergency powers to ensure an uninterrupted flow of armaments to Gulf partners.

As part of his step back from the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, Mr. Biden also announced a freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states while a review is conducted.

U.S. arms sales to the region have skyrocketed over the course of the war in Yemen. According to a recent study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia surged from about $3 billion in the five years preceding the start of the Yemen war in 2015 to more than $64 billion over the last six years.

Stronger pivot urged

Still, some foreign policy analysts say that while they heard hints of a good start in the president’s words, they expect Mr. Biden to go further if his intention really is to pivot away from a reliance on military intervention.

“The United States isn’t back [on the world stage]; it never left,” says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a Washington organization that advocates a refocusing of security policy on core national defense needs.

The U.S. under President Trump may have left the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization, he says, but it “did not abandon any alliances – in fact alliances grew, with new forces sent to the Middle East in service of the foolish quasi-alliance with the Saudis and to Eastern Europe.”

Calling “unfortunate” Mr. Biden’s pause of the drawdown of “excessive U.S. forces in Germany,” Mr. Friedman says the president’s announced force posture review “should avoid the logic that more U.S. presence and spending necessarily aids American power.”

Some foreign policy experts found the president’s speech light on how he plans to confront America’s major adversaries, from China and Russia to Iran.

Message to U.S. public

But others saw President Biden’s purpose more as a message to an American public weary of overseas interventions that the task of rebuilding and strengthening America runs through a robust engagement with the world.

“There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy,” Mr. Biden told his State Department audience. “Investing in our diplomacy isn’t something we do just because it’s the right thing to do for the world,” he said. “We do it in order to live in peace, security, and prosperity. We do it because it’s in our naked self-interest.”

Indeed, Mr. Biden’s repeated intention to follow a “foreign policy for the middle class” is acknowledgment that he must convince a wary public that a robust American role in the world is good for them, says Mr. Kupchan, who just published a new book, “Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World.”

“Knowing the country has to some extent turned inward, Biden set out to make the point that we’re going to rebuild the country at home and we’re going to strengthen and rebuild our ties abroad, and those two are really part of the same objective,” he says.

Whether Mr. Biden made any headway with one speech is unclear, but Mr. Kupchan says Americans should expect to hear the same message again as Mr. Biden pursues diplomacy’s return.

“In many respects [the speech] was a response to the Trump era and to the many Americans who have felt the U.S. was spending too much time solving other people’s problems and not enough time solving problems at home,” he says. “By illuminating the ties between security and prosperity at home and engagement abroad, he was making the case that the two go hand in hand.”

Hannah Salkever

COVID-WEB lab manager Matt Metzger prepares a wastewater sample for COVID-19 testing at the University of California, Berkeley, on Dec. 23, 2020. The lab is one of dozens of regional or local efforts worldwide to track the disease through wastewater monitoring.

Matt Metzger is hard at work running samples in Hildebrand Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. In a mere five months, this modest, 1,200-square-foot “pop up” testing lab has been transformed into one of the country’s only high-throughput facilities for measuring COVID-19 viruses in sewage water.  

Behind him sits a stack of boxes with more samples awaiting assays. A vacuum pump hums in the background. 

Each sample that Mr. Metzger pours for testing contains wastewater from a Bay Area collection site: water treatment plants, nursing homes, even San Quentin State Prison. 

A small testing machine, about the size of a microwave oven, is able to tag COVID-19 genetic material with fluorescence and monitor the concentration of virus in each sample. 

“We can turn around samples in 24 hours. That’s about as fast as you can do right now,” says Mr. Metzger, who manages the lab, which now includes three full-time employees. “The lab is really gaining traction with public health officials.” 

The project, called COVID-WEB, is allowing people like nursing home administrators and college chancellors around the Bay Area to ramp up testing when most needed and to identify precise groups for quarantine. Some health officials say this targeted early warning system has helped the region outperform the rest of the country and world in reducing outbreaks during the pandemic. 

This success story is part of a growing number of grassroots responses to the pandemic, in which self-forming groups or broad networks of contributors often prove more nimble than previous generations of top-down actions by public health agencies. From volunteer data collection to tapping health information from wearable devices like Apple Watches, these efforts are creating a new blueprint for pandemic response.

And in turn, it’s part of a broader societal trend of data-driven innovation emanating from the power of crowds and focused groups of individuals.  

“The implications of end users being increasingly able to innovate for themselves – rather than waiting for companies or organizations to develop innovations for them – is that users can get more exactly what they want,” says Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert in open innovation.

This past year, what many scientists and citizens have wanted is rapid response to a health crisis. 

Irene Yi/UC Berkeley

Tim Pine and Al Sanchez, health and safety employees at the University of California, Berkeley, remove a wastewater autosampler from a sewer drain, where it had been collecting samples over a 24-hour period. When analyzed by the COVID-WEB project, the samples can be an early warning of coronavirus infections in specific communities including colleges.

While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention remains a focal point of U.S. federal government work on the pandemic, projects like COVID-WEB are making a significant contribution – often on fast timetables and serving their own localities first. 

“Joyful creativity”

The impetus currently is a sobering global emergency, but Dr. von Hippel describes this type of innovation generally as a form of “joyful creativity” driven by two major trends. One is the rise of cheap and increasingly powerful digital design tools. The other is parallel gains in the ability of people to find one another and collaborate over the internet.

Millions of Americans today fight traffic by pooling data in the Waze traffic app, noting delays and sharing new routes. Thousands of people along the West Coast of the United States have purchased networked PurpleAir sensors, creating a hyper-local real-time air quality map that became a critical tool for Californians during the summer wildfire season. User review sites like Yelp are another example.

In truth, the shift toward distributed innovation goes back long before the computer era. Harvard University researcher Yochai Benkler has tracked the transition from the model of a lone inventor at a lab bench toward networks of researchers coalescing around innovative ideas and trends. Modern technology has accelerated the shift. Today the Linux operating system, created by a collaborative of thousands of programmers, is the software that powers most of the world’s supercomputers and corporate servers.

COVID-WEB also symbolizes a wider collaboration. It’s one of dozens of recently formed regional or local efforts worldwide to track the disease through wastewater monitoring.

“When we test wastewater, we get information about a really large number of people with a very small number of samples, and we get information about asymptomatic infections,” says Kara Nelson, who leads COVID-WEB and is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. 

Equally important, she explains, is the ability to test the wastewater at specific facilities – subsets of a community like prisons or nursing homes. Early positive tests can trigger aggressive individual testing and head off a full-blown outbreak. 

Where agencies such as the CDC can be hampered by legacy systems including paper-based data collection, the local campaigns tend to rely on current digital platforms. 

“There is a network of upwards of 1,000 researchers around the world that communicate through a Slack workspace and webinars and pre-publications of research. They are sharing information at a scale I’ve never seen before,” Dr. Nelson says. 

Faster tracking

In some instances, the bottoms-up efforts are actually viewed as more reliable and trustworthy than state or federal data sources. Witness the genesis and trajectory of the COVID Tracking Project. 

During the pandemic’s initial spread last March, two journalists at The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal, built a spreadsheet tracker of COVID-19 testing rates. At the same time, data scientist and venture capitalist Jeff Hammerbacher created his own tracking spreadsheet. The two efforts joined forces and made a call for volunteers. 

Today the project counts hundreds of volunteers and frequently updates data before national, state, and local governments publish their own findings. Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health manages a similar project that digs deep into county-level and regional data sources and explanations to create more accurate analysis of COVID-19 status from the bottom up, tapping hundreds of sources of information from around the globe. 

“If we find a U.S. state that is running too high, we then drill down to the county level and we can help them understand where they need to do their precision interventions,” says Lori Post, director of the Institute for Public Health and Medicine at Northwestern University’s Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics. The institute creates its own COVID-19 dashboard with CDC and Johns Hopkins data. 

Dr. Post says it’s the grassroots gathering and sharing of data that has made the Buehler Center’s dashboard possible. Algorithms built by the Northwestern team analyze seven-day moving coronavirus averages. 

“We don’t have a top-down system when it comes to COVID surveillance. It’s bottom up, and it’s journalists and universities that are doing it,” explains Dr. Post, a demographer who has run public health surveillance projects for over two decades. “We have one person that does almost all the work. I have APIs [software] that pull the data, so we run a completely automated process that is less labor-intensive and more accurate.”

Volunteering their data

Automated surveillance is another testing ground for sifting data. Though anathema to some for privacy reasons, with individuals’ willing participation it raises tantalizing possibilities of gathering real-time data with an accuracy that was previously unimaginable. One app-based research program called DETECT analyzes participant data from wearable devices like FitBit fitness trackers, which can monitor things like heart rates and sleep patterns. 

Participants download an app that automatically collects data from wearables. The app also asks people to answer questions about how they are feeling and sleeping, symptoms they might be experiencing, and results of diagnostic tests. 

The goal is to detect the early emergence of viral illnesses, explains principal investigator Jennifer Radin of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, California.

“Traditional viral illness surveillance is typically delayed by one to three weeks,” she says. “Being able to have a real-time picture ... can potentially speed up our ability to respond to outbreaks and help us prevent larger spread better than we currently do.” 

Already, some early research has found promise in using wearable data.

“Researchers are exploring how all these novel data streams might fit together,” says Dr. Radin. “There is more potential collaboration that will help identify and prevent the next pandemic. The faster we can detect things, the better we will be able to react in the future.”

Taken as a whole, the distributed, data-driven efforts point toward a future where pandemic tracking is more resilient, widespread, and accurate on a global scale. The CDC is exploring a national wastewater epidemiology program. And public health experts are reconsidering what the future might look like.

“Researchers are exploring how all these novel data streams might fit together,” says Dr. Radin of Scripps Research. “There is more potential collaboration that will help identify and prevent the next pandemic. The faster we can detect things, the better we will be able to react in the future.”

For more than a century, the U.S. Marine Corps has trained new recruits on Parris Island, an inhospitable spit of land on the South Carolina coastline. Nearly all of those recruits were men, but since World War II female Marines have also trained there.

Now the fate of the bootcamp that forged generations of Marines may depend on the Corps’ ability to integrate women into its combat platoons. The clock is ticking on a Congressional requirement for the Marines to do what other military services have already done: train women alongside men to go to war. 

Faced with this challenge, Marine Corps leaders have mulled scrapping both Parris Island and its San Diego camps in order to start over in a new, fully integrated basic training center. It might be simpler and cheaper.

But old traditions die hard, especially in the male-centric Marine Corps, which is now “the last institution of American society that seems to believe that separate is somehow equal,” says Nora Bensahel, who studies defense policy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Last week, six South Carolina Republicans introduced a bill into Congress that would block the use of federal funds to close the Marines’ camp on Parris Island. A similar bill was tabled in October after local officials warned about the potential economic fallout. 

That push and pull has put Parris Island – and the danger and discomforts it represents – at the center of a debate not just about changing norms of masculinity, but how a fully integrated Corps could forge a new approach toward victory in war.

“The Marines are struggling” with gender integration, says Richard Kohn, an emeritus professor of military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s a very complex wrestling match with conflicting values, conflicting worries, and none of it is binary. The fact is, you fight the way you train. So how are you going to parse these conflicts?”

Integrating all-male platoons 

The Marines, as a fast-moving expeditionary force that relies on grunts to carry lots of gear to the front line, sees itself as an odd fit for gender integration.

Training of men and women recruits has until recently been completely separate, and the residential squad bays on Parris Island are still segregated. While every Marine who completes training is a rifleman, women largely fill support roles. Only 9% of Marines are women, the lowest share among the service branches.

The 2017 Marines United scandal in which male Marines distributed and critiqued nude photos of female Marines showed the depth of cultural resistance to inclusion.

“[The Marines] are deeply invested in boot camp,” says Professor Bensahel, while Marine commanders have said that having women there would “wreck everything.” That said, “there is a whole history of military leaders being wrong in their predictions about what happens when there is some sort of change that is seen as undermining the culture.”

After being ordered in 2015 by then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to open all units and specialties to women, the Marine Corps spent over a year studying how integrated recruit platoons performed versus male ones. The Corps found that the all-male platoons performed far better on raw battlefield tasks like pulling a wounded Marine from a turret.

As a result, the Marines asked for a waiver from the order. It was denied, and three years later President Donald Trump signed into law a Congressional mandate that tied Corps funding to gender integration.

Bruce Smith/AP/File

Female recruits battle with pugil sticks during training at the Marine Corps Training Depot on Parris Island, S.C. Feb. 21, 2013. Women Marines have trained on Parris Island since World War II.

But the 2016 study also found that integrated platoons suffered no dips in morale, and that, freed from tradition, Marines improvised new operational standards during simulations.

Marine Maj. Jane Blair helped run those simulations. She watched integrated four-person rifle companies bunk platonically down in the same tents. For male Marines this represented a sea change from past trainings that emphasized how to keep a distance from all-female units.

For Major Blair, it was a glimpse into an organization where there was less focus on gender and more on setting specific performance standards for each job, or specialty.

“When you look at society as a whole, you’re not segregating populations based on race or sex,” says Major Blair, author of “Hesitation Kills: A Female Marine Officer’s Combat Experience in Iraq.” As a result, “it solidifies things better when you’ve got different opinions, different perspectives and different abilities. Those are force multipliers, whatever problem you’re dealing with.”

Joining “a boys’ club” 

When Jackie Huber signed up in the 1980s, few women expressed a desire to fight alongside men. “I wasn’t trying to break any walls down or change how things worked. I understood that I joined a boys’ club,” says the Virginia-based photographer.

Today, more women are serving in combat roles in the U.S. military and that includes the Marines: In 2019, the number of women serving in previously all-male combat units rose 60%.

In that way, deciding what to do with Parris Island “is about understanding that the space of battle has changed, literally the face of battle has changed, and the people who serve in those capacities have changed ... and we need to celebrate that,” says retired Lt. Col. Kate Germano, a former Parris Island training commander.

The service has until 2025 to fully integrate Parris Island. Its hallowed tradition may be an obstacle, because, as Professor Kohn puts it, “the top people in uniform are listening to the culture and traditions of the service in their heads.”

In 2012, Marine Maj. Gen. Bill Mullen, who oversees training at Parris Island, circulated privately a memo suggesting that women combat troops would “destroy the Marine Corps, simple as that, something no enemy has been able to do in over 200 years.”

Last year, General Mullen told Task & Purpose, which obtained the memo, that he has since changed his mind, calling female ground combat troops “a good thing.”

A brand new bootcamp?

Last October, Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger floated the idea of closing Parris Island, along with its San Diego counterpart, which is required to integrate by 2028, and combining West and East Coast Marines at a new facility, probably in the American heartland. “Nothing, the way we’re organized right now, lends itself to integrated recruit training,” General Berger told a symposium.

From her own experiences and watching a new generation of Marines at work, Major Blair remains hopeful that, within a decade, male and female Marines will train and fight together, regardless of which location recruits are sent to. 

In her view, Parris Island will likely have some part in that transformation, if only as a reminder of what it takes to step on the famous yellow footprints that mean you graduated from recruit to Marine.

“You can’t erase Marine culture, and you can’t erase Parris Island by any means,” she says. “Yes, it’s a miserable place, but it ... is ingrained in the Marine Corps culture that you’re forged in Parris Island. It’s where you were born.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the title of Nora Bensahel. She is an expert on defense policy at  Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Linda Vilagi built her personal training and fitness business like anyone else – working with clients in-person in gyms. 

When strict lockdowns rolled out last March, she started hosting fitness classes online not as a sustainable business model, but “as a way to keep everyone moving, and their minds occupied.” As the pandemic stretched on, however, Ms. Vilagi realized that there was a completely new market to tap into, if she could figure out how to inspire and forge connections through tiny Zoom windows the same way she did in person.

So she launched Linda’s Fit Club, where she offers live and recorded group workout classes six days a week to clients across the United States and the world. It’s a vast geographic expansion from her previous business, based around Cleveland.

Through the pandemic, extended gym closures have caused a shift in how some people like Ms. Vilagi and her clients are approaching home fitness routines – a shift that the fitness industry has been swift to move into. From buying up weights to using exercise apps to connecting with groups online, the popularity of amped-up home workouts may be permanent.

“The fitness lifestyle has fundamentally changed because of the length of the pandemic, and I really believe that these new habits are going to be solidified,” Ms. Vilagi says. After 15 years as an in-person trainer, she says she’s found the transition to online remarkably easy. “I think that you’ll see a hybrid approach [of in-home and in-gym training] moving forward.”

Equinox and Gold’s Gym had started expanding their at-home offerings in recent years, and virtual fitness classes were a growing niche trend. But “I don’t think it would have caught on as quickly as it has” without the lockdowns, Ms. Vilagi says. Her classes are still going strong.

Sales across all categories of fitness equipment had risen 130% by May of 2020, including weight benches, free weights, stationary bikes, and yoga mats, according to market research firm NPD Group. Peloton, which sells top-end stationary bikes, treadmills, and subscriptions to online workouts, quadrupled subscriptions to its app last year and anticipates continued revenue growth through fiscal year 2021 to the tune of at least $3.9 billion.

Jeff Chiu/AP/File

Alexis Garrod demonstrates an exercise over Zoom in an empty gym April 24, 2020. Ms. Garrod is the CrossFit Potrero Hill partner and head coach in San Francisco. The club currently offers outdoor-only classes to comply with city ordinances.

Other companies are also betting on efforts with a high-tech edge. Mirror, Tempo, and Tonal all produce smart home gyms with a mirror-size profile. Like brick-and-mortar gyms, these companies predate the pandemic. Their devices can display stats and workout moves, as well as offer a mix of artificial intelligence-based and livestreamed classes, depending on the brand. Apple has also stepped into the fitness streaming game with its paid subscription service, Apple Fitness+.

Used to working out five to six times a week, Shadya Sanders began doing exercises from memory in her Rockville, Maryland, living room at the start of the pandemic. When she got tired of kickboxing, she switched to jumping rope. Then she thought she’d start lifting weights.

“You couldn’t get kettlebells, you couldn’t get dumbbells when I was looking for them,” says Ms. Sanders, a doctoral candidate in atmospheric sciences at Howard University. She resorted to lifting household items, like five-gallon water jugs. But then she got an email from the university announcing Beyoncé had partnered with Peloton and was offering a free two-year membership for Howard students. 

“I downloaded the app and everything and put it on our TV, so now me and my family will do these workouts – arm toning, leg strengthening, or a mix of a couple of 10 minutes workouts. I love Beyoncé, and even more now,” Ms. Sanders says.

Users are also turning to free apps to record or even lead their workouts. The fitness tracking app Strava recorded 2 million new users each month during 2020, and attributed “a boom in global exercise amid the COVID-19 pandemic” for part of its growth. Elsewhere, people tuned in to trainers’ personal online platforms. 

“I have most of these online coaches on both YouTube and Instagram that I look at,” says Ikem Ejimnkeonye, a police officer in Prince George’s County, Maryland, talking to the Monitor on the phone as his baby daughter coos in the background. “They give pointers on types of exercises that you can do during the pandemic.”

For those new to working out at home, Ms. Vilagi says not to overthink things. Body weight exercises – planks, push-ups, squats, and lunges – are great for beginners and those without equipment. Online classes, or even traditional home workout programs that have been around for decades and debuted on VHS or DVD, such as Beachbody, can keep things fresh for people who might get bored easily.

But the live classes, because they can build community, especially help with accountability, she and others say. Members of her online offerings have grown close, Ms. Vilagi says. “If someone doesn’t show up to class,” she explains, “someone else will say to me, ‘Hey is Lori OK? I haven’t seen her in a couple days.” 

That sense of community is also cited by some people who – drawn to working out with others for the camaraderie and motivation – are eager to get back to the local gym. Ms. Sanders joined outside group exercise classes at her local fitness center in the fall. Some of those classes have now transitioned inside because of the cold, adopting strict protocols such as signing up 24 hours before a class, wearing a mask, and taking participants’ temperature at the door.

But given the time, money, and effort invested in establishing new workout routines over the past year, some people might not revert to their pre-pandemic fitness habits – at least not fully. In New Jersey, Maron Soueid, who built a set of pull-up bars in his backyard over the summer, says he doesn’t plan on forgetting about his pandemic-inspired handiwork.

“I might not spend as much time at the gym, now that I have the convenience of this pull-up bar at home,” says Mr. Soueid, an adjunct professor at a local community college. “I still fully expect it – especially during the summer – to be used quite often.”

Courtesy of Laily Rachev/Indonesia's Presidential Palace/Handout via REUTERS

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (r) greets Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin in Jakarta, Indonesia, Feb. 5.

Worldwide, fewer than 1 in 10 people live in a full democracy. In fact, largely as a result of COVID-19 restrictions, last year saw the biggest rollback of individual freedoms ever undertaken by governments during peacetime, according to the Democracy Index. And now a military coup against an elected government in Myanmar has only worsened the trend. What can existing democracies do about it?

That’s exactly what Indonesia and Malaysia, two of Myanmar’s neighbors, asked on Friday. Their top leaders requested an urgent meeting of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to address Myanmar’s “backward” step on democracy.

“We fear the political unrest in Myanmar could disturb the security and stability in this region,” said Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin in a meeting with his Indonesian counterpart.

For his part, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said, “It is important for all of us to respect the ASEAN Charter, particularly rule of law, good governance, democracy, human rights, and constitutional government.”

As a regional grouping, ASEAN itself is unlikely to act against one of its members. Six of the 10 countries – Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam – have authoritarian regimes. Yet in the past, its democratic members, especially Indonesia, have used Asian-style consensus-making – dubbed “enhanced interaction” – to bring democratic change in Myanmar. In 2012, its military rulers allowed ASEAN election observers to monitor parliamentary elections.

“While ASEAN may work on the principle of consensus, ASEAN also works on the principle of peer pressure, and peer pressure can be very effective,” said George Yeo, Singapore’s former foreign minister, a decade ago.

Other regional groupings, such as those in Latin America, Europe, and Africa, have also found neighborly nudging to be effective. Nations in proximity to one another and often with shared history may carry more moral weight in holding dictators accountable than global institutions. The African Union, for example, helped mediate a democratic transition in Sudan in 2019.

Brunei, a small sultanate that is ASEAN’s current chair, has yet to call a meeting over the Myanmar crisis. Yet it did cite the ASEAN Charter’s democratic principles in asking for dialogue in the country. Geographic neighbors not only watch each other, but they can also watch out for each other.