After a skittish performance at qualifiers Sunday night, Simone Biles thought that when she finished competing that night, she would stop feeling judged.

She didn’t.

The global face of the Olympic Games, Ms. Biles continued to feel like the world was watching her even after she received her final score and left the arena. So the next day, she let the world know how that felt. 

“I truly do feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders at times,” the gymnast posted to 5 million followers on Instagram. “I know I brush it off and make it seem like pressure doesn’t affect me but damn, sometimes it’s hard.”

A night later, at Tuesday’s team all-around final, she decided that weight was too much to bear.

On her first apparatus, Ms. Biles ran down the mat intending to execute a 2.5 twist Amanar vault, but faltered midair and hastily landed, a twist short. Walking to her coaches, and then toward the training room, she decided she wasn’t in a place to compete.

Ms. Biles withdrew – and then did the same with Thursday’s individual all-around final, citing the need to protect her physical and mental health. 

Thrust suddenly into events they didn’t warm up for, or even plan to compete in on Tuesday, her three teammates rallied for a silver medal, behind an exacting, consistent Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) squad. For a U.S. group that dominated the international circuit for years approaching Tokyo, anything lower than gold was sure to disappoint expectations. But the U.S. women’s team accepted the cost. If the price of a teammate’s well-being was a gold medal, they would pay it. 

Athletes often say there’s more to the Games than winning the gold, but there are few chances to prove they mean it. Tuesday’s final was a rare – perhaps unique – moment where a team under enormous pressure to succeed had a chance to prioritize something more personal, and did. In the process, the U.S. women’s gymnastics team may have redefined success at the Olympics and set a new standard for supporting a teammate.

“We were telling [Ms. Biles], look, this is for you, this is for yourself,” said teammate Jordan Chiles. “You shouldn’t put yourself in such a high-expectation [environment] because you don’t need to carry that much on you.”

Lindsey Wasson/Reuters

U.S. women's gymnastics silver medalists (from left) Jordan Chiles, Simone Biles, Grace McCallum, and Sunisa Lee react on the Olympics podium on July 27, 2021, in Tokyo. After Ms. Biles withdrew, the team held composure, even without its leader and highest scorer.

Difficult decision

At the team qualifiers on Sunday, the group was uncharacteristically imprecise. Ms. Biles stepped out of bounds during the floor routine and off the mat while landing her vault. Ms. Chiles fell off the balance beam and then fumbled her dismount. At the end of the night, a stunned U.S. placed second, behind the ROC.

Team USA’s high-performance coordinator Tom Forster ascribed the performance to nerves. While the U.S. team had won world championships, all of its current members except for Ms. Biles are in their first Olympics. Sometimes athletes just need to adjust to the stage.

“This might be a great awakening for us,” he said on Sunday, “and we’ll take advantage of it.”

But following Ms. Biles’ first vault at the team final, it was clear there was more at work than nerves. Ms. Biles performs with bravura, especially on this apparatus – where, in May, she became the first woman to attempt a Yurchenko double pike in competition.

So when Ms. Biles abandoned a routine skill midair and stumbled through her landing, silent alarms began ringing, for her and her team. 

“After that vault I was like, I’m not in the right headspace,” said Ms. Biles. If she were to continue at that point, she felt she would either injure herself or cost the team a medal. She spoke to her coaches, who initially encouraged her to keep going, and told them she needed to withdraw. 

In the meantime, her teammates didn’t know what was happening. “We were all so stressed,” said Sunisa Lee, who had placed third overall in the Sunday qualifiers. “We honestly didn’t know what to do in that moment.”

At the end of the warmup period between events, Ms. Biles reentered the arena, huddled with her team, and told them the news – which almost certainly meant the U.S. would struggle to win gold. Ms. Biles is the most decorated gymnast of all time, and even on off days her scores rank near the top of the leaderboard.

“When we were all standing there together, I was like, don’t even focus on the scoreboard because it’s not even important right now,” said Ms. Lee. “We lost a teammate, so we just really needed to come together as a team.”

Ms. Biles put on a tracksuit, and Ms. Chiles, who had only planned to compete in two events on Tuesday, put on her grips for the uneven bars.

“They were definitely some big shoes that I had to fill,” said Ms. Chiles. 

Ready, set, lead

What proceeded was an impressive display of grace under pressure. In the qualifying round, each of a team’s four members competes on each apparatus, with the lowest score deducted. In finals, the team selects three members for each event, and every score counts.

Suddenly without its leader and highest scorer, the team held composure. Ms. Lee scored one of the highest uneven bar routines of the Tokyo Olympics. Grace McCallum shook off her warmup nerves on the balance beam and held steady. Until the last apparatus, when Ms. Chiles fell during a landing on floor, the team was contending for gold. 

“I am proud for everybody stepping up,” said Ms. McCallum. “It is really hard to lose the best in the world, and we definitely felt more stressed. But I am proud of how we did.”

Until Tuesday, said Ms. Lee, Ms. Biles had carried them to the Olympics – and even as teammates, the “Greatest of All Time” is still her idol. When Ms. Chiles wanted to give up gymnastics four years ago, Ms. Biles helped her find a healthier approach to the sport.

Talented as the other members are, none of them attract Ms. Biles’ level of attention or scrutiny. None of them felt the same burden of defending an Olympic gold medal, or single-handedly representing not only a team or a sport or a country, but also the entire Olympics. None of them were on Team USA when team doctor Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse was exposed, leading to a period of turmoil and high turnover in the organization. 

But when their teammate withdrew, the pressure changed. The weight of expectations shifted to their shoulders. They had to lead their leader.

While speaking afterward, fenced off from a swarm of eager reporters, Ms. Biles began to cry. 

“I know that this Olympic Games, I wanted it to be for myself,” she continued. “I came here and I felt like I was still doing it for other people. So that just hurts my heart that doing what I love has been kind of taken away from me.”

While she spoke her teammates huddled around her and gave her a hug. It was OK, they told her throughout the night, and into the press conference afterward. She was part of the team, and a team stands together.

“If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here where we are right now,” said Ms. Chiles. “We wouldn’t be silver Olympic medalists because of who she is as a person.”

“We didn’t just do this for ourselves,” said Ms. Chiles. “We also did this for her.”

For decades, as the international community has worked toward ending global hunger, the focus has been on the need to “increase.”

Increase food production, increase agricultural lands, increase ocean harvests to make more food available to more people.

Yet as world leaders and international experts prepare a first-ever global food systems summit set for the United Nations in September – and even though the pandemic caused a progress-reversing jump in food insecurity and hunger last year – a shift in thinking has brought new attention to the need to “reduce.”

Reduce conversion of natural ecosystems to agricultural lands, reduce small farmers’ disconnect from food supply chains.

And perhaps most important of all: reduce food waste and loss.

“This year provides a pivotal opportunity for us to get the whole food system discussed more broadly, and food loss and waste raised up the global agenda,” says Liz Goodwin, director of food loss and waste at the World Resources Institute as well as chair of the London Waste and Recycling Board.

Noting that food loss and waste is “not just a developed-world problem,” she says inefficient farm storage systems and supply chains make food loss a critical issue for the developing world’s small farmers.

At the same time, poor food storage systems in developing-world households mean that food waste is far from limited to wealthy-nation kitchens and glittery five-star restaurants.

And then there are the oceans. Currently more than one-third of the world’s fisheries and aquaculture production is wasted every year.

Such statistics and a growing realization that global hunger cannot be ended sustainably with a mind-set of “more” has many experts like Ms. Goodwin hopeful about the food systems summit, slated to run alongside the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York.

“We know what some of the problems are and what some of the solutions are,” she says, and “this year provides both a challenge and an opportunity” to move from dialogue to implementation of solutions.

Andrew Harnik/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (second from left) meets with members of the United Nations' food security agencies at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, June 27, 2021.

The food systems summit will be the culmination of a nearly two-year process leading up to a “pre-summit” taking place in Rome this week – an innovative approach to the well-tread “global summit” format. The Rome meeting is designed to ensure that the September summit at the U.N. results in concrete commitments and plans of action from global leaders.

“The idea of a pre-summit reflects the need for some serious dialogue on this challenge of food security and ending hunger, and how to go about it,” says Jens Rudbeck, a professor of international development at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and an expert in food security issues.

The conversation on solving global hunger has for decades centered on two basic approaches, he says: First, the need to industrialize food production in developing countries; and more recently, “a second narrative that to solve food security you have to start with small farmers” as well as small-scale fishers, female farmers, and Indigenous people.

The hope is that “the pre-summit can bring those two approaches, and the interests behind them, together to work towards the one goal,” Dr. Rudbeck says. With that sometimes “difficult dialogue” hashed out in Rome, he adds, heads of state may be better prepared to “use the big stage” in New York to make stronger commitments to ending hunger.

Yet if the run-up to this week’s Rome gathering is any indication, the debate between big agriculture and small producers looks likely to rage on past September. Already a number of small-farmer organizations and Indigenous groups chose to boycott the pre-summit and hold their own parallel events.

Still, world leaders and experts now in Rome sound determined to bridge divides and address key issues like food loss and climate adaptation so as to provide a road map to the September summit.

Reflecting on the “national dialogue” her country has undertaken in preparation for the food systems summit, Uruguay’s vice president, Beatriz Argimón, told the pre-summit opening session Monday that a key conclusion for Uruguay was the need to “celebrate and enhance the incredible resilience of women and their key role for the transformation of productive systems.”

National dialogues like Uruguay’s have taken place against the backdrop of a global pandemic that experts say was largely responsible for the addition of as many as 180 million people to a total food-insecure population of about 830 million people – slightly more than 10% of the world’s population.

It was the first significant rise in world hunger since at least 2005, according to the State of the Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report 2021, after five years of basically static numbers that themselves were cause for concern for many experts.

Fernando Vergara/AP/File

Workers pack crafts and fruits from the Amazon for subscribers to The Harvest Amazonian Barter service in Bogotá, Colombia, July 7, 2020. A group in Colombia provides farmers in remote areas of the Amazon jungle with food and hygiene products in exchange for some of the fruits they harvest that would otherwise go to waste because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Whether last year’s increase was a “COVID blip” or signals a more long-term rise in global hunger remains unclear, experts say. But NYU’s Dr. Rudbeck says that one thing a half-century of dashed international efforts to end hunger makes clear is that new approaches are necessary – innovations he’s hopeful the food systems summit process will deliver.

“We’ve learned a lot about reducing hunger. We’ve built up a lot of institutional knowledge that has notably helped the World Food Program to become the effective global actor it is. We’ve changed the mind-set of consumers in the developed world about their role” in addressing hunger – notably by reducing food waste – “and we’re getting better at integrating the world’s small producers into the food system.”

But he adds that all of that knowledge and more will be needed to take on hunger in a world of new challenges like accelerating climate change and growing numbers of displaced people.

“These are new worries on top of the challenges to food security we’ve long faced,” he adds. “But if the summit can deliver the message that we have the knowledge to take on these issues and countries are taking steps to use that knowledge, that will be progress.”

It’s 9 a.m. on a mid-July morning, but the campus of Memorial High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is already abuzz with activity. 

Behind the gymnasium, students in the Medieval Fight Club practice sparring in a grassy field with padded swords. Under a nearby tree, teens on orange yoga mats focus on breathing deeply. 

For some students, this four-week program – which also features meals and academic support – is the first opportunity to be with others in a school setting in more than a year.

“I’m pretty happy about this. I definitely have not done anything like this,” says Kianle Frazier, as he takes a break from medieval team battles. A rising sophomore, he spent his entire freshman year learning remotely, even after the school opened for in-person learning in February. “Online you don’t really interact with other students,” he says. 

Summer school is the first stop in trying to get back to normal for many students this year. With federal relief funds in hand and more students signed up than usual, Tulsa Public Schools and other districts across the country are attempting to reengage young people, address emotional needs, and catch up on missed academic skills. Though maintaining funding and staffing could be hurdles in the future, for now educators are gauging the possibilities of enhanced summer programs – whether it be as a path to year-round schooling or simply a rebalancing of academics and enrichment to help student morale and education.

“We’ve taken a big step forward in imagining an expanded learning strategy that launches in the summer but continues across the school year,” says Paula Shannon, deputy superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Jenni Yoder, with the nonprofit Global Gardens, holds “Breakfast With the Birds” with summer school students in a garden outside Eugene Field Elementary School on July 15, 2021, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Major investments by districts

Tulsa Public Schools invested $12 million of its federal relief funds from the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan in its summer program. Other districts in the United States are following a similar model. New York City is spending $120 million on a free summer school that’s enrolled more than 200,000 students. Cajon Valley Union School District in El Cajon, California, is running “Camp Cajon” at 27 schools.

Done well, research shows, summer school can benefit students academically and socially. District leaders in Tulsa hope that prioritizing relationships and student well-being this summer, along with providing some academic instruction, will smooth reentry mid-August. “We believe that keeping kids engaged will pay dividends in terms of their readiness to come back in the fall and actually coming back in the fall, particularly those who struggled mightily,” says Ms. Shannon. 

Every school in Tulsa Public Schools this summer offers a free half- or full-day summer program from July 6 to July 30, including two hours of academic support for math and reading and at least two hours of enrichment activities – such as art and sports – run by school staff or one of the 45 community partners working with the district. Breakfast, lunch, and transportation are provided and are important in a district where 81% of students are considered economically disadvantaged. 

In years prior to the pandemic, 4,000 to 5,000 of the district’s 32,000 students typically signed up for summer school. This year, enrollment more than doubled to just over 11,000 students. But, as with many summer programs nationally that struggle to retain students, site administrators at several Tulsa schools, including Memorial High, confirmed that not all enrolled students are showing up.

“The first year is going to be bumpy,” says Twanna Johnson, a social worker at Memorial High, who is running the school’s summer program. She’s disappointed that only 100 students are attending regularly, when 300 students enrolled. “I’m really hoping we can take lessons learned from this year and make it smoother.”

At Eugene Field Elementary School in northwest Tulsa, the ratio of enrollees to attendees is higher: More than two-thirds of those enrolled showed up on a recent day. Nearly 98% of the student body comes from economically disadvantaged households, according to a state profile from 2019, the most recent year available. (At Memorial High, 80% of students are identified in that category.)

On school grounds, students gathered for “Breakfast With the Birds” in a garden with towering sunflowers and leafy pink hibiscus bushes offering respite from the hot summer sun. Tomatoes, spearmint, and dill grow in student-tended garden boxes, maintained through a partnership with Global Gardens, a Tulsa-based nonprofit that provides science education and social-emotional learning for students. 

Jenni Yoder, an educator from Global Gardens, samples herbs with students and invites them to help her water the plants. Later in the day she’ll teach prekindergarten and kindergarten students a lesson on bugs designed to teach science standards and life skills.

“The garden is so full of metaphors,” says Ms. Yoder. “Gardening can be disappointing. It takes patience, persistence, planning; all of those qualities help you in life.” 

Paris Cooper, a rising fifth grader carefully watering a tomato plant, says she likes gardening at school since “it’s very calming and plus, you get to see friends and it’s really beautiful and there are lots of fun activities.” 

Diana Warren, Paris’ mother, writes in an email that she signed her daughter up for summer school because “I wanted her to be exposed to a little bit of school work since that was lacking during the past year. I also wanted her to have some socialization with her peers because the last few months of school post-COVID just seemed to fly by.” 

The new approach by Tulsa Public Schools is promising, says Curt Adams, a dean in the College of Education at the University of Oklahoma and co-founder and co-director of the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy.

“I think it’s great that the traditional summer school model is really being re-imagined,” says Dr. Adams. “We know kids learn when they are engaged, when they are curious, active, and exploring.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Rising fifth grader Paris Cooper waters her garden during “Breakfast With the Birds” outside Eugene Field Elementary School on July 15, 2021, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

How much can summer school help?

Underlying the summer school effort in Tulsa and nationally are questions about how much summer programs can catch students up on content they may have missed during the pandemic’s fractured school year. Tulsa Public Schools plans to track student enrollment and attendance in its summer program and compare math assessments from before and after the summer. School leaders expect that daily academic work will help students, but not completely close pandemic gaps. 

“We are eager to see the impact that the daily [academic] intervention time will have. I don’t think it’s going to fully bridge the gap, but I think it will absolutely support students in beginning to recover unfinished learning,” says Ms. Shannon, the deputy superintendent. 

Enrichment activities build knowledge and vocabulary critical to reading comprehension, educators note. Having free, district-run programs that offer those opportunities is a matter of equity, says Ms. Shannon, who points to research suggesting that students from middle- and upper-income households gain 6,000 more learning hours by sixth grade than peers in poverty, due largely to participating in extracurricular activities during the summer and after school.

Elsewhere, some commentators suggest using this moment to pivot to a year-round school calendar. Jennifer Sloan McCombs, a senior policy researcher and director of the behavioral and policy sciences department at the Rand Corp., says the research around year-round schooling isn’t particularly strong because, unlike summer school, it doesn’t increase the number of instructional days for students since vacations are still spaced throughout the year.

Dr. McCombs was a key member of the Rand team that conducted a major study looking at summer learning programs in five districts from 2011 to 2017. Her team recommended that districts offer voluntary summer programs for at least five weeks with three hours of academic instruction per day. Now, Dr. McCombs is encouraging districts to use this moment to plan for long-term summer programs, since students benefit from participating for multiple years.

“I hypothesize that what we will see is that this type of model is going to be adopted much more widely on an ongoing basis,” she says. “We may have ... districts thinking about 12 months of programming and different ways of structuring summer programs that they can offer to students and their families.”

Winning parents over may be a big lift. A nationally representative June survey from the Understanding America Study at the University of Southern California found that a majority of parents oppose a longer school year, such as more days of instruction and fewer days off, for the 2021-22 school year. It also showed only 25% of parents whose children’s schools offered summer school had signed up. 

Recruiting staff is another challenge. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia delayed summer school for 1,200 students with disabilities because it couldn’t hire enough teachers to staff the program. Research indicates teachers enjoy summer school when pay is high, curriculum is provided, and they have small classes and flexible schedules. 

Tulsa Public Schools boosted teacher pay this year from $30 to $40 per hour and hired roughly 400 certified teachers, up from 170 in 2019. The district also hired about 1,000 support staff this summer, such as teacher assistants and nurses.

Besides federal aid, this year’s Tulsa Public Schools expansion also draws on community support, including from the city and Tulsa County. In June, the district signed a $3 million, one-year contract with The Opportunity Project, a local education intermediary group to coordinate and provide enrichment programs during the summer and 2021-22 school year. (Local and national philanthropies, including the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a champion of boosting early childhood education in the city, together donated $1.3 million to The Opportunity Project to support its work with Tulsa Public Schools over the summer.) 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Teacher Kristen Robinson takes questions from students in summer STEM camp at Darnaby Elementary School on July 15, 2021, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In Tulsa, lots of experimenting

Another district that serves Tulsa students is also testing a new program. Union Public Schools, with around 16,000 students, draws about 77% of its students from Tulsa and the rest from a neighboring town.

UPS spent just over $780,000 of its stimulus funds on expanding summer school. It extended its program, which is by invitation and focused primarily on academics, from one to two months. The district also created popular stand-alone summer enrichment camps this year. Some of the elementary programs that focused on sports or STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) filled up within minutes. 

At Darnaby Elementary School, in south Tulsa, nearly 44% of students are from economically disadvantaged families. Recently, 15 students who enrolled in a two-hour morning STEM camp used VexGo kits to program robots to maneuver through courses they created using colorful painter’s tape. 

“What I want you to remember is how much problem-solving you did this week,” says fourth grade teacher Kristen Robinson at the end of the session. “How many of you had fun this week?” she asks as hands shoot into the air. 

Sandi Calvin, assistant superintendent at UPS, says the district expects to use summer programs in tandem with other efforts, like tutoring come fall, to address learning gaps.

“This is just the beginning. We’re beefing up what we’ve done in the past. We’re looking at creative ways to deal with learning loss and some of those gaps,” says Ms. Calvin. “What we do this summer will not be the end-all and be-all.” 

Back in neighboring Tulsa Public Schools, Angela Graham-Callahan, principal at Eugene Field Elementary, says summer school, with its playfulness and balance between enrichment and academic activities, gives her “great hope” for next school year. 

“I see joy in the teachers,” she says. “It’s helped me clarify my vision for fall. We need to come back in a balanced way and avoid teacher and student burnout.”  

Marton Monus/Reuters

A man holds up a poster in protest against the Hungarian government for using Pegasus spyware to monitor journalists, opposition leaders, and activists in Budapest.

A new arms race has erupted around the world, with implications not just for countries’ security, but their citizens’ fundamental rights too. Unlike the old competition – over missiles and munitions – this one revolves around a powerful, 21st-century weapon: cybertechnology.

And in what could lead to a diplomatic tug of war as well, the Biden administration has begun pressing both Russia and China to agree to practical limitations on this new threat: in effect, a new kind of arms control for a new kind of arms.

That’s the message from a recent series of dramatic developments, culminating in last week’s revelations concerning a piece of Israeli software called Pegasus, which has given governments from Mexico to Morocco, and from Hungary to India, the capability to target, hack into, and take control of individual mobile phones.

The company behind the spyware, NSO, says it explicitly tells clients that it is to be used only against terrorists, drug dealers, and people-traffickers. But last week’s leaked list of more than 50,000 mobile phone numbers – apparently candidates for Pegasus penetration – left little doubt that some clients are ignoring that caveat.

Vetted by a consortium of major world news organizations, which managed to identify the owners of nearly 1,000 numbers, the list included 85 human-rights activists, nearly 200 journalists, and more than 600 politicians, diplomats, or other officials.

This aspect of the cyber arms race – heralding the prospect that Pegasus and similar software will become ever more commonplace – is only one part of a larger cyberwarfare struggle.

China, Russia, and the United States are the major players, though other would-be actors, including North Korea and Iran, have been building up their capabilities. Reports in the United Kingdom this week, citing a leaked Iranian security document, suggested the Iranians may be seeking the capacity to target civilian infrastructure with cyberattacks.

Until recently, Russia was the main focus of American and allied concerns.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow used social media to attempt to influence the past two American elections. This year, U.S. government departments and private companies have suffered a number of cyberstrikes from Russian territory, one of which Washington blamed on Russian state actors.

In May, a Russia-based ransomware group forced the temporary shutdown of one of America’s main oil pipelines, the Colonial, causing fuel shortages in states from Texas to New Jersey.

But last week, the spotlight fell on China.

NATO and European Union allies joined Washington in an unprecedented rebuke for a series of China-based ransomware operations, as well as a major attack they said was sanctioned by China’s Ministry of State Security – hacking into Microsoft’s main email servers. Wendy Sherman, the second most senior figure in the U.S. State Department, reinforced that message in talks this week with Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Just how much cyberwarfare the United States wages itself is largely shrouded in official secrecy, but Washington is widely believed to have mounted a number of assaults against Iran. And it may have been an American operation that this month shut down the “dark web” sites of Russian ransomware group REvil, responsible for recent attacks on U.S. businesses. 

Still, that could also have been the result of a stern phone call from President Joe Biden earlier this month telling Russian leader Vladimir Putin that he needed to clamp down on Russia-based hackers as a matter of “national security.” That call came only weeks after Mr. Biden’s summit meeting with President Putin, at which he also pushed for Russian cooperation.

The idea that some new form of arms control is needed to set “guardrails” around this new arms race has become a major foreign policy priority for the Biden administration. 

At the summit, Mr. Biden was explicit about what he saw as a necessary first step: a mutually accepted list of key infrastructure and security targets that should be deemed off-limits.

Echoing that approach, a White House statement last week urged China to recognize that its involvement in ransomware and other hacking attacks was “inconsistent with its stated objective of being seen as a responsible leader in the world.”

Russian and Chinese participation in Washington’s drive to establish international cyber-guardrails will be critical to its success. It is still not clear whether they are ready to join in.

Politically, the signs so far point to no. Russia and China have been drawing closer together diplomatically of late, and that’s already having some cyber-effects: Last month they agreed on a joint position on “management of the internet,” including a bid to secure international recognition of their right to “regulate the national segment” of the World Wide Web.

Still, the Pegasus disclosures may give them a powerful practical reason to join cyber-arms-control efforts: the sheer power of the increasingly advanced cyber tools available.

In other words, it’s not just about Facebook meddling or even ransomware attacks. Every electronic device on earth and every mobile phone could ultimately be vulnerable.

China’s and Russia’s, included.

Korea Summit Press Pool via AP/FILE

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, poses with South Korean President Moon Jae-in for a photo at the border village of Panmunjom in 2018. Moon and Kim agreed July 27 to restore suspended communication channels between their countries.

Steps in the right direction, even if small, need to be noted – especially when the stakes involved are high.

This week, North and South Korea announced they would resume communication with each other after more than a year of silence. “The whole Korean nation desires to see the North-South relations recovered from setback and stagnation as early as possible,” the official North Korean news agency said.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and an unnamed senior U.S. official quickly nodded their approval.

Some 13 months ago, in a display of displeasure, the North blew up a joint liaison office (unoccupied at the time) that had been constructed in its territory for the purpose of better communication with the South. It was seen as a dramatic signal of a new era of chilly relations with its southern neighbor.

That move followed a showy 2019 summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then-U.S. President Donald Trump. The United States sought to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear missile program in exchange for an end to economic sanctions on it. But no agreement emerged.

Mr. Kim’s aim still seems to be to use the threat of building a stockpile of nuclear missiles capable of reaching the U.S. mainland as a way to win concessions, but without giving up the nuclear arsenal.

In itself the fresh move to reopen communication with South Korea, a longtime U.S. ally, doesn’t get at the nuclear standoff. But it’s a welcome start.

Changing times may be forcing Mr. Kim into new approaches. The threat from the COVID-19 pandemic and the effect of economic sanctions may be taking a toll.

North Korea does not admit to having any cases of COVID-19, and no signs of starvation or social unrest have been observed as a result of the sanctions.

But after making a splash with a large delegation at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, Mr. Kim has kept his athletes home from the Tokyo Games now underway. His concerns over the possibility of spreading the pandemic in his country, which maintains tight controls on its borders, may have outweighed the opportunity for any propaganda victories from attending these Games.

In January Mr. Kim displayed some uncharacteristic contrition, acknowledging the economic challenges his country faces and saying that he had learned “painful lessons.” He may have decided that warming relations with South Korean President Moon Jae-in now represents the best path to influencing the U.S.

“Our patience will achieve more than our force,” Edmund Burke, the 18th-century statesman and member of the British Parliament, once observed. More favorable conditions for peace on the Korean Peninsula, and a lessening of nuclear tensions, may be emerging. Those who long to see t​hose results must remain open to each opportunity that offers progress.