Tom Brenner/Reuters

White House press secretary Jen Psaki delivers remarks on tax rates during a daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, April 1, 2021.

As President Joe Biden works to sell his massive infrastructure bill, he’s making a big bet that tax hikes, which would pay for much of the plan, are no longer a political liability for Democrats.

After decades in which Democrats often tried to avoid being labeled a “tax and spend” party, Mr. Biden’s own pollster is urging him to publicly embrace certain tax increases rather than justifying them as a necessary evil, citing surveys that show that a majority of Americans support raising taxes on corporations and wealthy people – and have for years.

Many Democrats believe the pandemic’s impact on economic inequality, including boosting the fortunes of big companies like Amazon at the expense of small businesses and individuals, has given Mr. Biden an opening to press the argument. He’s proposing to fund nearly all of his $2.25 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan – which goes far beyond repairing roads and bridges to include investments in “human infrastructure” – by raising taxes on corporations. 

The White House estimates it could raise $2 trillion over 15 years by raising the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%, and working with the IRS and global partners to disincentivize offshoring, tax havens, and loopholes that reduce the amount U.S. corporations pay to the federal government. Mr. Biden has also said individuals making more than $400,000 could see increases in their taxes. The top marginal tax rate, or the amount that rich people pay on each dollar earned over a certain threshold – roughly half a million dollars for individuals in 2020-21 – currently stands at 37% but exceeded 90% during World War II and the early years of the Cold War.

For decades, a majority of Americans have agreed that corporations and wealthy people do not pay their fair share in taxes. According to Gallup, 69% of those surveyed in 2019 believed that corporations pay too little – the same number as in 2004, with slight fluctuations in the years between. Likewise, the percentage who believed rich people pay too little dipped down to 55% in 2010, but rose to 62% in 2019, while public support for “heavy taxes on the rich” to “redistribute wealth” grew from 45% in 1998 to 52% in 2016. Less strongly worded polls about tax hikes on wealthy people have garnered even higher approval rates, including double-digit support from Republican voters. For example, a 2020 Reuters/Ipsos poll found 64% support for rich people contributing “an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs” – with 53% of Republicans saying they strongly or somewhat agreed with the idea, which is essentially a wealth tax.  

“Public opinion has been pretty consistent for the past 20 years,” says Vanessa Williamson, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, who studies the politics of taxation. “What I think has changed is the willingness of Democratic leaders to put forward plans that are often really quite bold.”

Republicans are panning the Biden infrastructure plan as far too broad, and warning that raising corporate taxes will hurt average workers. They credit the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts, which brought corporate tax rates down from 35% to 21%, with revving America’s economy and bringing unemployment to its lowest level in decades. They also don’t buy the idea that Democrats can implement tax hikes without seeing a backlash at the polls.

“I think workers understand that corporate tax increases affect them,” says Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, the most senior Republican on the Senate’s Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee.

But Democrats believe the political tides are shifting. During Sen. Bernie Sanders’ two presidential campaigns, which particularly resonated with younger voters, he spotlighted the issue of income inequality and changed the political conversation in Washington around wealth distribution.

“When you have the middle class paying an effective tax rate higher than billionaires, we need to create a tax system which is progressive, which is fair, and demand that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes,” he tells the Monitor.

A bipartisan group of 20 senators are talking by phone today to work out a possible counterproposal that would focus more narrowly on traditional infrastructure, but it remains to be seen whether the necessary 60 votes could be found on both what should be included – and how to pay for it.

Comparing corporate tax rates

Mr. Biden’s proposed hikes would give the U.S. one of the highest combined corporate tax rates in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a bloc of countries ranging from Australia to Turkey accounting for about 80% of global trade and investment. 

Indeed, even with the 2017 tax cuts, the U.S. tax rate on corporations currently ranks in the top third of OECD countries when taking into consideration both federal and state taxes. Unless accompanied by a drop in state taxes on corporations, Mr. Biden’s proposal would increase the combined rate from about 26% to 32.34%, just above France’s rate of 32.02%, the most expensive in the OECD last year. Such a tax hike would also run counter to global trends. Average corporate tax rates around the world have dropped by nearly half over the past 40 years, down from 40% to 24%.

But the U.S. faces increased bills relative to its revenue. And record deficits – including an estimated $1.9 trillion from the 2017 tax cuts and nearly $7 trillion from COVID-19 relief packages – are adding to a ballooning debt. As the wealthiest 20% of citizens in America have seen a far faster rise in their fortunes than the bottom 80%, a trend exacerbated by the COVID-19 shutdowns that disproportionately hurt lower-income service workers who couldn’t work remotely, the Democratic mantra that rich people must “pay their fair share” has been gaining steam.

Even before the pandemic, a paper by the Institute for Policy Studies found that 400 Americans own more wealth than all Black households and a quarter of Latino households combined. 

“It costs money to keep this country running. It costs money to have infrastructure, it costs money to build opportunities, and the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations are not paying a fair share,” says Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, whose detailed proposals for a wealth tax and other measures have added intellectual heft to progressives’ push for redistribution of wealth. In proposing an ultra-millionaire tax, she cited a study by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, which projected that 99% of Americans would pay about 7.2% of their total wealth in taxes in 2018 while the top 0.1%, by contrast, would pay about 3.2%.

In a brief interview, Senator Warren chalks that up to loopholes created by lobbyists in Washington and exploited by expensive lawyers that middle-class families can’t afford. “And the consequence, year after year after year, has been to push more of the burden of running this country onto working families while the wealthy suck out more and more of the benefits,” she says.

Roger L. Martin, a professor emeritus and former longtime dean at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has outlined five eras of thinking on wealth and taxation in the 20th and 21st centuries. He believes the current era will come to most closely reflect the thinking that was prevalent between the Depression and World War II, in contrast to the Reagan-era theory of trickle-down economics. 

“We did an experiment, starting in 1981, and the experiment had an unintended consequence – and that unintended consequence was much greater enrichment of the wealthy than I think anybody had envisioned,” says Mr. Martin. Still, the biggest problem today is not that rich people have gotten richer, he says, but that their increasing share of economic growth has caused median income to stagnate, in what he describes as a zero-sum game. 

He argues that the Trump corporate tax cuts were excellent, but should have been accompanied with increases in personal taxation, similar to the Swedish model. In Sweden, he says, the government incentivizes corporations to provide good-paying jobs, while citizens pay a premium for the privilege of living in a good society with such job opportunities. The country’s combined corporate tax rate is 21%, while the top marginal tax rate is 57%.  

What is “fair”?

Republican lawmakers argue that corporate tax hikes will disincentivize productivity and cut jobs, hurting average workers and the overall economy.

But some Republicans are joining the “pay their fair share” chorus when it comes to how much giants like Amazon pay in corporate taxes. The global commerce company was among 91 corporations, including 60 profitable Fortune 500 companies, that paid no federal taxes in 2018.  

“I don’t support the call to raise the corporate rate to pay for this latest infrastructure boondoggle, which has really nothing to do with infrastructure,” says Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. But, he adds, his voters back home in Missouri do want to see an end to big corporations getting government tax breaks. Smaller businesses and small manufacturers are the ones who usually get hit, he says, because they don’t have the ability to shuffle around their assets from haven to haven, jurisdiction to jurisdiction. 

“So they’re paying full freight, whereas these big multinationals are skipping a lot of tax burden,” says Senator Hawley, who is one of a number of Republicans attempting to further expand the populist wing of the GOP in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, and is seen as a possible presidential contender in 2024.

Nearly all Americans see taxpaying as a civic duty. A 2019 IRS report found that 95% of taxpayers agreed that “it is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes.” That level of consensus is extremely rare in public polling, says Dr. Williamson of Brookings and author of “Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes.” Those who don’t agree are roughly equivalent to the percentage of people who believe Elvis is still alive or think the U.S. faked putting a man on the moon. 

The battleground, of course, is in the definition of what is “fair.”

“I think the question really is what’s a fair tax rate,” says GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “Does it make you globally uncompetitive? … And then the secondary question is, are you using it to grow government? [Or] are you using it to generate revenue for your existing operations?”

Sadayuki Goto/Kyodo News/AP

Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide leaves his official residence for the airport, in Tokyo, April 15, 2021. Mr. Suga was headed to Washington to become the first foreign leader to have a face-to-face meeting with President Joe Biden, an affirmation of the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

When Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide becomes, on Friday, the first foreign leader to meet with President Joe Biden at the White House, it will break a long and pretty consistently kept tradition.

The first foreign leader to visit the new U.S. president is a distinction generally reserved for the British prime minister to highlight the “special relationship.” Making Mr. Suga the first says everything about America’s shifting focus from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

A reordering of U.S. global priorities was also on display this week as President Biden announced the definitive withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 – the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that launched America’s longest war.

But Mr. Suga’s invitation underscores how Japan, long a stalwart if low-profile and underappreciated ally, is emerging as perhaps America’s key partner in what regional experts say will be the defining geopolitical struggle of the 21st century: the great-power competition between the United States and China, and their divergent economic and political systems.

“The Biden administration has clearly understood that the center of gravity of its foreign policy is the Indo-Pacific, and competition with the Chinese for economic and political influence in the region,” says Lisa Curtis, who served for four years as the National Security Council’s senior director for South and Central Asia in the Trump White House.

For others, just as important as the economic and political dimensions of the U.S.-Japan relationship will be the common principles the two allies promote as an alternative to China’s very different vision for organizing and leading the region.

“It’s the compound of geopolitics and principles that makes Japan America’s last great hope and the quintessential and essential ally in the region,” says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) in Washington. “As the geopolitical future goes, so goes the future of self-government, [which] depends on the strength of our friendship with Japan – just as it used to with Great Britain.”

Japan’s enhanced role

Japan has been a U.S. ally since its defeat in World War II, but its importance to Washington for decades centered on its hosting of U.S. troops and its membership in the elite club of wealthy Western democracies and liberal economies. Tokyo was a quiet, stable partner – the world’s third-largest economy with deep pockets and a willingness to fund Western initiatives, such as international development and health projects launched by the Group of Seven wealthiest countries.

But in recent years Japan has exhibited a desire to play a larger leadership role in its neighborhood. That emergence has only grown as China has demonstrated its intentions to dominate the region and to impose domestically and even to a certain extent regionally its vision of autocratic governance, a statist economy, and limited individual rights.

Kiyoshi Ota/AP/File

Japan's Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide (center) speaks during the virtual summit of the leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, a group known as the Quad, at his official residence in Tokyo, March 12, 2021.

It was former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo who first promoted in 2007 the idea of what has become the Quad countries of the Indo-Pacific – the U.S., Japan, Australia, and India – as the emerging center of democratic governance and free and open economies fostering regional development, says Ms. Curtis, now director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

“The recent first-ever summit President Biden held with the Quad leaders signaled not just the growing importance of the Indo-Pacific to Washington,” she says, “but also how highly Washington values its partnership with Tokyo and the particular strengths Japan brings not just to the Quad but to the intensifying competition with China.”

Japan will play an important role in the working groups that the Quad summit announced on regional COVID-19 vaccine distribution and on climate change cooperation.

But Ms. Curtis says it’s in the third group on vital and emerging technologies that Japan’s assertive regional role is likely to be on fullest display.

“Japan has already emerged at the forefront of the effort to diversify supply chains and reduce an overdependence on China when it comes to resources and supplies ... for technological development,” she says. “Clearly [it] intends to play a leading role in challenging the digital hegemony of China.”

Japan was one of the first countries to ban Chinese companies from participation in development of its 5G networks, Ms. Curtis notes, and it came to Australia’s assistance when China reacted to the Quad country’s criticism of human rights abuses in Xinjiang province by curtailing supplies of rare-earth metals.

China cautions Japan

And there’s little doubt Beijing has taken note of Japan’s new willingness not just to take actions to counter its giant neighbor, but to work with the U.S. in the broader regional competition as well. Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a readout from a phone conversation between the two countries’ foreign ministers that had China’s Wang Yi cautioning his Japanese counterpart to ensure that China-Japan relations “do not get involved in the so-called confrontation between major countries.”

Apparently referring to mounting pressure on Japan to drop the kid gloves it has traditionally donned to address China’s domestic issues, including human rights, Mr. Wang added, “China hopes that Japan, as an independent country, will look at China’s development in an objective and rational way instead of being misled by some countries holding biased view against China.”

But the pressure to fashion a more critical relationship with China is also building domestically, Japan analysts say, as a younger crop of leaders within the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party pushes measures to punish China over human rights abuses and to build closer political ties to Taiwan – a longtime no-no.

Indian Navy/AP

Aircraft carriers and warships participate in the second phase of the Malabar naval exercise, a joint exercise of the four nations of the Quad, in the Northern Arabian Sea, Nov. 17, 2020.

Yet as critical as Japan will be to the U.S. effort to compete with a rising China, Mr. Sokolski says Washington is going to have to figure out how to bring South Korea – another prosperous Asian democracy, yet one with historical tensions with Japan – into any regional effort to challenge the Chinese development model.

Moreover, he says any U.S.-led initiative to specifically challenge China’s Belt and Road initiative for infrastructure development should not aim to simply duplicate what China is already doing. He cites a recent NPEC report, “New Frontiers for Security Cooperation With Seoul and Tokyo,” that recommends focusing any regional infrastructure plan not on the big-ticket projects Beijing favors, but on building schools and hospitals, and what Mr. Sokolski calls “hearts and minds” and “people to people” projects.

“Together with our like-minded regional partners we can be quite effective in Southeast Asia, but not if the idea is to go toe-to-toe everywhere with China,” he says. “The aim of self-governed countries should be to give people choices.”

Japan’s growing concerns

The White House has said Mr. Biden wants to build on the enthusiasm for regional cooperation on critical issues that the Quad summit generated when he hosts Mr. Suga. But White House officials note privately that the president will also encourage the Japanese leader to go public with the growing concerns the Japanese government shares with the U.S. on China’s threats against Taiwan, its aggressive stance in the South China Sea, its crackdown on Hong Kong, and human rights abuses targeting minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.

In the postwar, 20th-century world of an ideological battle pitting the U.S. against the Soviet Union, the focus of the White House was transatlantic relations. Thus decades of new presidents making the British prime minister their first foreign visitor.

But even European leaders say they understand why Mr. Biden would take the symbolic step of greeting Mr. Suga first.

“If the organizing principle of the first half of the 21st century is Sino-American rivalry for global leadership, then of course Japan is more important to the United States than Britain,” says Radoslaw Sikorski, a member of European Parliament and a former Polish foreign minister.

“It’s in the Far East that the issue of who is going to be top dog is going to be determined,” says Mr. Sikorski, who recently took part in a Monitor-organized discussion with Washington journalists. “It’s not in Britain or Europe right now.”

Frank Augstein/AP

People stroll on The Long Walk toward Windsor Castle in England, where the queen's husband, Prince Philip, died last Friday. His death provoked a flood of media coverage that many Britons found excessive.

It must have seemed simply the right thing to do. When Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, died last Friday shortly before his 100th birthday, Britain’s broadcasters tore up their usual schedules. For 36 hours, they filled the airwaves with tributes, special news coverage, and a train of admiring retrospectives.

Yet a huge number of Britons turned off or tuned out. More than a hundred thousand went so far as to contact the BBC to complain.

This wasn’t out of personal animus toward Philip. Something deeper was at work, a trend that’s been developing for decades, not just in Britain, but in America and other countries. It has accelerated in recent years, and has now, with the pandemic, assumed critical importance.

It’s the weakening hold of many of the old institutions, symbols, and traditions – and the shared narratives – that have helped bind people and nations together.

With the pandemic magnifying the need for individuals to care not just for themselves and their families, but for their fellow countrymen and women, political leaders are seeking to shore up these unifying bonds or to forge new ones.

In Britain, Elizabeth still enjoys enormous popular affection. Last spring, when Britain was under lockdown, COVID-19 cases were surging, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson had the virus, it was the queen to whom he turned to bring the nation together. In a rare televised address, she praised frontline workers, comforted the isolated and bereaved, and said, “I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.”

In the island nation of New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern drew on the pandemic challenge itself to forge a similar sense of unity, describing her country as a “team of 5 million.”

In the U.S., an early thrust of President Joe Biden’s has been to try to bridge the partisan divide with unifying themes: shared mourning for lives lost, for instance, and a message that harks back to an earlier era in American politics, that “there is nothing we can’t do if we do it together.”

Still, the old bonds have been fraying for a long time.

As news broke of Philip’s death, I was deep into a remarkable 750-page tome on America in the 1950s, the decade in which Elizabeth ascended to the throne.

The book is called “The Fifties.” Written by Pulitzer-winning journalist David Halberstam, it’s full of wonderful pen portraits of figures redolent of that era, from Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy to Elvis Presley and Hugh Hefner. But the wider story is of a decade very different than it seemed.

Carolyn Kaster/AP/FILE

A group of friends play music for passersby under cherry blossoms in Bethesda, Maryland. Shared values and narratives have been losing their influence over society, and in the face of the pandemic, world leaders are seeking to restore frayed bonds.

Yes, he writes, it was a time of growing affluence, a rising middle class, in which “few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society.”

But not least because of the new impact of television – which initially reinforced a new, suburban vision of the American dream, but soon allowed more discordant narratives to emerge – there were the unmistakable rumblings of the wholesale challenge to accepted verities that would erupt in the ’60s. Also, the first stirrings of dissent and protest around a group then largely excluded from the national narrative: African Americans.

The centrifugal forces have only intensified since. If TV played a key role in the American ’50s, it was a minor tremor compared to the impact in our own century of the internet, smartphones, video streaming, and social media.

Like television, all these were initially expected to bring us closer together. They still can, and in some ways still do. But the shared narrative, the agreed story that we once told ourselves about one another as a community or country, has given way to a more atomized landscape in which we can each create individualized narratives of our own.

All that’s here to stay. But the pandemic has provided a powerful reminder of the importance of a shared story. Those countries that did best at containing the pandemic, such as New Zealand, galvanized a sense of common cause against a common challenge.

In those places that have done worst, like the U.S., appeals to citizens to protect one another as well as themselves by taking precautions such as wearing masks and social distancing have often fallen on deaf ears, with many individuals deciding to chart their own course instead.

Whether a new sense of common purpose will emerge – and if so, whether it lasts – is not yet clear. It’s telling, perhaps, that the most eloquent voices championing that cause have sought inspiration less in the future than the past. In her national TV address Elizabeth recalled how, as a young child, she had delivered a similar message to children separated from their parents by war in 1940.

President Biden, too, has looked to history for examples of a unified nationwide spirit. A few days ago, my old high-school friend David Ignatius wrote about Mr. Biden’s foreign policy in The Washington Post. His words could equally have applied to the president’s broader domestic message. He portrayed the president as “a genial, white-haired guy driving a Ferrari” whose ideas about the world were “rooted in the past.”

But he added, more hopefully, that this attitude was tempered by “a very modern view of the art of the possible.”

Seth Carico began singing in the Tennessee mountains of his youth. As an adult, he’s decided to practice his craft in Germany.

About a third of all opera performances worldwide take place here, and Germany has cultivated a society where children are schooled in music theory and adults commonly budget for opera season tickets.

“Berlin is a city where I’ve gotten into taxis and said, ‘Take me to Deutsche Oper,’ and the driver launches a discussion about ‘Don Giovanni,’” says Mr. Carico, a freelancer who was formerly salaried at Berlin’s premier opera company. “Music is baked into society here in a way I haven’t experienced in America.”

That kind of cultural reverence comes with benefits. As the pandemic shut down performance centers around the world, German opera grieved over canceled international tours and plans to stage joint Japan-Europe productions of “Madama Butterfly.” Yet while American cultural institutions large and small struggle with budget shortfalls, Germany’s musicians and artists are finding that a tradition of state funding of culture has installed a floor beneath them. Their financial situation bolsters Germany’s status as a keeper of the arts – but also makes it harder for needed reforms to take root.

“What we learned in the crisis was that the public purse was very much willing to keep [opera] alive in Germany,” says Dieter Haselbach, a German cultural sociologist and consultant. “But in the long run the state-funded system covers a structural crisis which is an oversupply of theaters and opera houses, with [growing] competition from digital performances.”

Kids sing along to Mozart

Opera may be regarded by some as an elitist relic predating a more youth-oriented culture, and in the United States opera attendance has been declining for years. But if you’re a schoolchild in Berlin, you might hear Mozart’s arias by grade 8 and study musical composition by grade 9. Nearly half of German preteens play an instrument, according to the Association of German Music Schools.

Mr. Carico, a bass-baritone, remembers a recent performance of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” attended by schoolchildren. “When Papageno came on, the entire audience of kids started singing along,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is different.’ The art of music has been part of Berlin for longer than America has existed.”

With Germany’s long history of composers and musicians revered around the world, arts appreciation has been institutionalized. The home of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner has always thrown its support behind classical music, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall a united government invested in capital projects and hiring that helped ensure opera houses in the former East Germany would thrive.

Today, state and federal governments provide the majority of funding for 80-some opera houses; in 2018, they supplied roughly €2.7 billion ($3.3 billion) of the nearly €3.5 billion required to fund music and theater in the country. In contrast, arts funding in the U.S. is almost completely dependent on private sponsorship. During the pandemic, Germany has committed an additional €2 billion to arts funding, supporting commercial art galleries and museums, cinemas and music clubs. 

Nearly every midsize German city has an opera house, which has gifted fans an enviable set of statistics. Germany is home to 1 of every 7 of the world’s opera houses, and nearly 4 million people attended the opera during the 2018-19 season. 

Organizations like the Metropolitan Opera in New York, arguably the world’s most prestigious and important opera venue, quickly canceled seasons and furloughed or laid off workers last spring. But German opera houses could tap into Kurzarbeit, a government program which helps employers pay worker salaries to avoid layoffs. In-house artists could collect a good portion of their pre-COVID-19 salaries while waiting for seasons to get back on course, and freelancers could apply for grants based on 2019 income.

Crowded stages, then empty seats

Artistic Director Peter Theiler recalls the days before the coronavirus pandemic closed his Saxon State Opera in Dresden. “We were just putting on the biggest production [known to the opera world], the Gurre-Lieder by Arnold Schönberg,” says Mr. Theiler. “More than 120 musicians and 300 choir singers. It was crazy.”

Within two months, the opera was shut down, forgoing nearly all revenues from its 270 annual performances.

After a shutdown period, the house was selected to experiment with a limited season to audiences of about 300, with hygiene plans that conformed with accident-insurance laws. That left 1,000 empty seats per performance and a huge drop in revenues.

“The state financed us through this situation,” says Mr. Theiler. “We aren’t in danger of going broke because there is a vested interest in keeping us afloat and running, so that we can be here as soon as we are allowed to re-open.”

More than a year into the pandemic, the Saxon State Opera hasn’t let anyone go, keeping about 800 musicians, singers, dancers, administrators, and other workers, including the house tailor. Freelancers on contract were also paid.

They are now waiting, and rehearsing in coronavirus-tested groups, for a return to normal.

Too big to innovate?

Aside from the upsides of surviving a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, some say a publicly funded opera system can result in a large and bumbling bureaucracy that’s resistant to change.

Opera is an art form best viewed live. The audience can react not only to the voices, but also to the live orchestra and the physical vibration of the music in a way that’s not possible with a CD recording. Yet during COVID-19, audiences have acclimated to digital and virtual versions of the real thing. They may be reluctant to return once the pandemic is over, says Mr. Haselbach, the cultural sociologist.

Older audiences may be “too scared” to return to theaters, says Mr. Haselbach. And, opera houses that rely more on government funding than ticket sales may “not sense the crisis. A system like this is big and thriving, and lots of people are employed and involved. But innovation comes from the outside. From the fringes.”

German audiences also like the status quo, which keeps them flocking to performances of classic works by Wagner or Mozart. Only the smaller, more nimble houses can reliably and regularly stage new pieces.

Further, in the U.S., museums and theaters may close, and people can raise bold new ideas often without sparking protest. In Germany, change is typically accompanied by a furor that “the middle class and cultivated peoples are being robbed of something,” says Mr. Haselbach. “I feel the cultural scene is suffocating itself.”

Bettina Stoess

Australian soprano Alexandra Hutton sings the role of Musetta in "La Bohème" in a pre-pandemic production at Deutsche Oper Berlin. “I’m so lucky to be in Berlin – I know the industry is going to be around," she says.

Non-starving artists

Alexandra Hutton is happy to leave debates over the economic future of German opera to the administrators and experts. An Australian soprano, Ms. Hutton relocated to Germany in 2013, having won a competition that secured her a young artists’ spot at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

Joining the ensemble allows her to collect a salary, but also freelance her talents.

Worldwide, “for most working opera singers, the pandemic pulled the plug out of the wall,” says Ms. Hutton. “But I’m so lucky to be in Berlin – I know the industry is going to be around. There’s money coming in to pay my rent and keep me comfortable until everything opens back up again.”

Bass-baritone Milan Siljanov was to debut in “Carmen” as Escamillo in Dublin when the coronavirus came roaring through Europe. He left Ireland in a hurry, and though he lost freelance income, his status as a member of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich means he’s privileged and can pay basic expenses.

He’d debated freelancing a few years ago at the urging of his manager. Now, he notes that a number of high-profile men and women, who previously commanded large contracts for leading roles, are asking around German houses about ensemble roles.

Mr. Carico, the Tennessean, is also gainfully employed and grateful. He recalls time he spent in Detroit, Michigan, as a young opera singer. He and fellow singers would go into schools to educate children about opera, their visits funded by company and private donors. In down times, such “luxuries” are first to go. “It’s such a tightrope when the stock market gets to decide whether people are making private donations,” says Mr. Carico.

“Being a middle-class opera singer is a possibility in Germany. That opened my eyes to what being in this country can be.”

[Editor’s note: The story was updated to better reflect Mr. Carico’s current employment status.]

Reuters

A view of the Qom River in Qom, Iran.

Iran and the United States resumed talks in Vienna on Thursday, and from news reports, one might think the Middle East’s future rests on a result that restrains Iran’s aggression and nuclear ambitions. Yet other negotiations are afoot that may have far more impact on the region. They are not over weapons but over water.

In March, Bahrain signed a $3 million deal with the Israeli state water company Mekorot to tap its knowledge on water desalination. That follows a similar deal in which Israeli startup Watergen will provide Al Dahra Agricultural Co. of the United Arab Emirates with technology to produce drinking water from humidity in the air. Both deals come after Bahrain and the UAE normalized relations with Israel last year.

In fact, it may be that the two Arab states decided to recognize Israel in part to get help in coping with the effects of climate change on water supplies. The Middle East is heating up faster than any other region. Forecasts indicate parts like Bahrain and the UAE may not be livable in 30 years. The World Bank predicts the Middle East and North Africa will see the highest economic losses from climate-related water scarcity.

That makes collaboration over water issues far more appealing than conflict over religion, Israel, or other traditional issues. “Climate change is a faceless enemy that knows no borders and building fences will not be enough. We need regional cooperation,” Michael Herzog, a former Israeli general and fellow at the Washington Institute, told The Times of Israel.

In particular, Iran has struggled with acute droughts, resulting in regular protests by farmers over water supplies. About 85% of the country is arid or semiarid, and now higher temperatures have forced the regime to improve water management. Iran’s Department of Environment estimates about 70% of the population will be forced to leave the country by 2050. Such a possibility could push Iranian leaders to seek cooperation from their Arab neighbors – the very neighbors now cooperating with Israel on water solutions.

Environmental cooperation already exists between Iran and the Gulf states. Since 1978, they have worked together on protecting their shared marine areas from pollution. Expanding that collaboration to water resources could result in a potential for “environmental peacemaking.”

They have models to follow. For nearly three decades, Israel and Jordan have cooperated on water supplies with the help of the nonprofit group EcoPeace. Another example is the Indus Waters Treaty, brokered by the World Bank in 1960, which brought archrivals Pakistan and India together to cooperate on the Indus water basin.

History has many examples of nations deciding to cooperate rather than compete over natural resources, leading to periods of peace. Faced with a common foe like climate change, the Middle East might be next. Weapons have helped divide the region. A shared thirst in a parched land might bring it together.