Andrew Harnik/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends a news conference at the U.S. Embassy Annex in Hanoi, Vietnam, April 15, 2023.

When fighting erupted in Sudan last month between the country’s armed forces and a powerful paramilitary group, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Vietnam, solidifying ties aimed at counterbalancing China’s growing dominance in Southeast Asia.

Suddenly Mr. Blinken’s press encounters were less about China and more about the safety of dozens of U.S. diplomats in Sudan and the fate of thousands of American citizens living there.

Then came questions about the potential for Sudan’s violence to expand into a full-blown civil war that could spill over into fragile neighboring countries and destabilize the entire Horn of Africa.

Once again, the U.S. aim to pivot to Asia and shift military and diplomatic resources to the Indo-Pacific region was being stymied by events threatening American interests in the greater Middle East.

And now, with violence deepening across much of Sudan and a wider regional war threatening, the United States must turn to humanitarian priorities as well as steps to discourage neighboring countries from feeding the fighting and becoming embroiled in the war themselves, regional analysts say.

“The U.S. has made a lot of mistakes in Sudan, not the least of which has been trusting the two generals who are now fighting each other to the death in a war that risks destroying the country,” says Cameron Hudson, a former director for African affairs on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.

“We need to focus first on humanitarian steps like facilitating corridors for getting civilians out” of intense fighting to safety and on “directing delivery and access to humanitarian assistance,” he says.

Moreover, the U.S. needs to “help build a wall around the country to prevent weapons and fighters from coming in,” says Mr. Hudson, now a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Africa program in Washington. “If we can keep the neighbors out of the fighting and cut off the flow of funding and arms to the two sides,” he adds, “then we can get back to thinking about a permanent peace.”

On Monday the United Nations declared Sudan at a “breaking point” as violence flared despite a cease-fire agreement. The country’s armed forces, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, resumed a bombing campaign against positions of the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. The RSF leader ruled out talks until the bombing stops.

Mahamat Ramadane/Reuters

Fatma Dahab Ousman, a Sudanese refugee who fled the violence in her country, sells tea and porridge to other refugees near the border between Sudan and Chad, in Koufroun, Chad, May 1, 2023.

The U.S. has been deeply interested in Sudan for more than three decades. It declared the country a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993, and it labeled the scorched-earth campaign against rebels in the western province of Darfur in the early 2000s a genocide. It was elements of Hemedti’s RSF, known then as the Janjaweed, that carried out the brutal war in Darfur.

More recently the U.S. has tried – over a succession of coups and civilian-rule false starts – to balance its own security interests against often-stated American civic values: the promotion of democracy and buttressing of Sudan’s vibrant civil society.

Attempt at outsourcing

But in recent years the “Asia pivot” and a certain “Sudan fatigue” akin to a broader Middle East fatigue have diluted U.S. attention to Sudan, some regional analysts say, leading Washington to increasingly rely on partners and allies in the region to do more of the diplomatic heavy lifting.

Others say factors like a lack of continuity in U.S. policy and heavy turnover among the country’s Africa diplomats have led to “wishful thinking” in U.S. deliberations with Sudanese leaders – and most critically with the two military leaders dragging the country toward civil war.

“The U.S. under the Biden administration doesn’t have a coherent plan for dealing with Sudan and its significance in both the Horn of Africa and the Middle East,” says Jihad Mashamoun, a Sudanese researcher and analyst of Horn of Africa affairs based in London. “They have been focusing on China – and leaving it to their partners in the region, including the Emirates, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, to take on more.”

But what he calls an “outsourcing” of policy implementation is not serving the U.S. well, Dr. Mashamoun says, adding that the strategy is “showing its weaknesses with Sudan falling deeper into war.”

Echoing Mr. Hudson, Dr. Mashamoun says the U.S. is trying to cut the war short by denying the antagonists the resources to continue fighting indefinitely. “They are telling their allies, the Emirates and the Saudis, to cut off funding to the two sides as a way to help stop the fighting,” he says.

But that could be easier said than done, he adds, since these U.S. partners have developed ties of their own to the belligerent parties. Others concur, noting that few of Sudan’s neighbors place the same priority that the U.S. does on Sudan’s democratization and civil society.

“The neighbors and the countries just across the Red Sea have a particular vision of what should be happening in Sudan that does not necessarily align with ours,” says Susan Stigant, director of Africa Programs at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington.

And, she notes, there are deep divides among Sudan’s neighbors: Egypt, with its own military ruler, strongly supports General Burhan, for example, while the UAE and Chad have close ties to Hemedti’s RSF.

“We hear the constant refrain, ‘African solutions to African problems,’” she adds. “But when you consider the conflicting interests of all those influencing Sudan, it seems clear there has to be something more than leaving it to Africans.”

Mohammed Benmansour/Reuters

U.S. Embassy staff and Navy officials help an evacuee in a wheelchair to disembark from the USNS Brunswick fast transport ship, which arrived from Sudan with Americans and others, at the Jeddah Sea Port in Saudi Arabia, May 1, 2023.

Another factor is that in a period of waning U.S. influence in the region, other global powers have moved in – notably China and Russia.

Indeed, a significant piece of the Sudan puzzle is the growing influence of Russia as it seeks to extend its reach in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. Russia has been seeking to build a naval base at Port Sudan on the Red Sea, a proposal strongly opposed by the U.S. At the same time, Russia’s Wagner paramilitary group, which is playing a pivotal role in the war in Ukraine, is a significant player in Sudan’s resource industries, including gold mining, reportedly exporting billions of dollars in gold to Russia in recent years.

Picking a side

Over the initial weeks of Sudan’s war, the U.S. has sought to be pragmatic and evenhanded in its dealings with the dueling generals, seeking the assistance of both in facilitating humanitarian deliveries and civilian evacuations and in imploring both sides to end the fighting in the interest of the Sudanese people.

But U.S. officials now say privately that the rivalry and mutual hatred between the two generals have reached a point of no return, making any war-stopping negotiations very unlikely.

And that, says Mr. Hudson of CSIS, means the U.S. is going to have to pick a side. Moreover, he says the U.S. has no choice but to go with General Burhan and the country’s armed forces.

“Yes, there is a humanitarian imperative to try to freeze this thing, but the fact is we need the army to win,” Mr. Hudson says. “Because if they don’t, we’re faced with a version of the Janjaweed running the country.

“The armed forces are a morally bankrupt institution,” he adds, “so it tells you something if the prospect of an RSF victory is worse.”

Others say that no matter what course Sudan’s war takes, the U.S. must not lose sight of the country’s civil society, finding ways to sustain it so that it can play a key part in a postwar political transition.

“At the end of the day,” Dr. Mashamoun, the Sudanese researcher, says, regional interests including stability and security will be better served by making the Sudanese people’s aspirations the priority and “not the fighting military leaders.”

That focus on the Sudanese people should begin even now as war rages, some say.

“In any response on the humanitarian front, we need to find ways to support and build on the credibility and legitimacy of the Neighborhood Resistance Committees and other groups based at the community level,” says USIP’s Ms. Stigant.

“We don’t want to be giving the credit in any way to the generals, after the awful destruction they’ve caused with their war,” she adds. “Instead, we should find ways to leverage that assistance as a future investment in the democratic foundation the Sudanese people have laid for themselves.”

Nikki Haley is speaking to some three dozen voters, mostly women, over pizza and sodas at an Italian restaurant in Denison, Iowa. Toward the end of her 20-minute stump speech, the former ambassador to the United Nations offers a critique of former President Donald Trump, albeit in diplomatically careful language.

“We have to leave the drama and the baggage of the past,” says Ms. Haley. “Don’t elect someone who is going to win a primary and not win a general. You know what I’m talking about.”

Since launching her presidential bid in February, Ms. Haley has avoided attacking her former boss by name, instead making veiled comments about electability and the need for “a new generation” of leaders. Like every other Republican White House hopeful not named Trump, she’s attempting a difficult – some would say impossible – balancing act: Trying to persuade wavering Trump supporters that they ought to go with someone else, without provoking the ire of the former president’s die-hard fans, while simultaneously cultivating the Trump haters who are looking for a conservative alternative.

It’s a familiar dynamic to anyone who watched the 2016 primary campaign, and it may well result in a similar outcome this time. So far, Mr. Trump is dominating in the polls, while Ms. Haley has been stuck in the low single digits.

Still, it’s early, and much could happen in the nine months before the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Trump is under criminal indictment and contending with multiple investigations. Lately, the second most popular Republican, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has seen his poll numbers plummet before even announcing his campaign, creating a potential opening for a Trump-adjacent-but-not-Trump candidate.

And if anyone can successfully walk that tightrope, it might be Ms. Haley.

As a member of the Trump administration, she studiously avoided criticizing the man she had once called an example of “everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten,” leaving on her own terms after a relatively uncontroversial tenure. After the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Ms. Haley said Mr. Trump’s actions “will be judged harshly by history,” but just weeks later wrote in an op-ed that most of his policies as president were “outstanding, and made America stronger, safer and more prosperous.”

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Jackie Sapp (right) attends a Haley event in Des Moines with her sister (left) on April 11, 2023. Ms. Sapp, who sat out the past two presidential elections because she couldn't bring herself to vote for Donald Trump, says she's "100% in" for Nikki Haley.

Then there’s the matter of her campaign itself – which she launched after saying she wouldn’t run if Mr. Trump were to seek the nomination.

To critics, these equivocations smack of inauthenticity – a politician trying to be all things to all people, at a time when the nation needs a leader willing to take a firm stance. Some openly wonder if she’s really running for vice president.

Yet others see her as one of the few figures on the right who stands a chance of uniting a deeply fractured party after a tumultuous few election cycles – who could build on the more popular elements of Trumpism while shedding the controversial ones, and maybe even take that combination all the way to the White House.

At the event in Denison, a rural community a few hours west of Des Moines, where the smell of nearby farms blows across the town, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst praises Ms. Haley as “firm and fair.” She says the former South Carolina governor could be just what many GOP voters are looking for. 

“There are a lot of really wonderful Donald Trump supporters that were here in this audience, but they are excited about seeing new faces too,” Senator Ernst tells the Monitor. “The fact that they are here to listen to her is pretty telling.” 

Women for Nikki

Part of Ms. Haley’s pitch is that she could help woo voters like Jackie Sapp back into the Republican Party.

After voting for former Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012 respectively, the retired high school health teacher who lives 30 minutes north of Des Moines sat out the past two presidential elections because she just couldn’t bring herself to vote for Mr. Trump. Now, here she is: Leaving a “Women for Nikki” event in a Des Moines recital hall, wearing a “Nikki Haley for President” t-shirt and saying she’s “100% in” for Ms. Haley. 

“I think [Trump] did a great job with policy, don’t get me wrong. But it was his demeanor and his mouth. I thought he belittled women,” says Ms. Sapp. 

Of Ms. Haley’s four campaign stops on her Iowa tour last month, two were specifically directed at women. It’s something Ms. Haley deliberately leans into, while also not.

She’s sharply critical of the left’s reliance on identity politics, and laments that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay,” doesn’t go far enough in restricting gender and sexual education in schools. Yet she also closes the “Women for Nikki” event by saying that what the GOP needs to win the White House is “a badass Republican woman.” The audience chuckles and cheers.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Nikki Haley speaks to voters at an event with the Crawford County Republican Women at Bella Sera Restaurant in Denison, Iowa, April 11, 2023. Two of her four events in Iowa last month were directed at women voters.

Certainly, Mr. Trump’s struggles among suburban women – whom he half-jokingly begged to “please like me” – have been well documented, and in 2020 even led to rumors that Ms. Haley might replace Vice President Mike Pence on the ticket. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats defied history and won critical congressional races thanks in part to the suburban gains their party made during the Trump years. 

But while playing up the “woman angle” might boost Ms. Haley’s candidacy, it’s also something she has generally declined to comment on to the media, including to the Monitor.

“She is struggling with both maintaining the conservative stance of being opposed to identity politics … but at the same time wanting to use her identity as a woman as an asset,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “This is going to be a hard thing for her to navigate. She ends up with a pretty muddy message.”

That muddiness extends to a number of other topics.

A daughter of Indian immigrants, Ms. Haley in 2010 became not only the first woman but the first person of color to win South Carolina’s governorship. She rose to national prominence when, after a mass shooting by a white supremacist at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, she called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state Capitol. As part of that effort, she noted that some residents associated the flag with “noble” traditions – a point she would repeat in later interviews, adding that the shooter had “hijacked” the meaning of the flag.

“She has always tried to have it both ways on issues,” says South Carolina strategist Terry Sullivan, who worked for one of Ms. Haley’s Republican rivals in the gubernatorial race.

Similarly, last week Ms. Haley gave what her campaign billed as a “major” speech on abortion, an issue that has become something of a minefield for Republican politicians after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June and many states subsequently banned the procedure. The political backlash has energized Democrats and seemed to hurt Republicans among moderates and independents in elections from Wisconsin to Kansas.

While many Republican candidates have been tiptoeing around the topic, Ms. Haley, who calls herself “pro-life,” promised to address it “directly.” But in her speech, she mostly avoided specifics, such as how far into a pregnancy she would support a ban on the procedure. She did not take questions.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Nikki Haley signs books for voters following an Iowa GOP event in Fort Dodge, Iowa April 11, 2023.

“Hope is not a strategy”   

In 2016, Mr. Trump’s rise was aided in part by a crowded GOP field that splintered the anti-Trump vote. This time around, the desire to avoid “another multicar pile-up,” as former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan put it, may already be keeping some would-be candidates out of the race. Along with Governor Hogan, Mike Pompeo, Mr. Trump’s former CIA director and secretary of state, recently announced he wouldn’t run for president after numerous visits to early primary states.

Still, some strategists contend it wasn’t so much the number of primary candidates that allowed Mr. Trump to win the nomination, but the fact that none of his opponents were willing to attack the guy who was leading in all the polls. 

“The thing is, you got to take on Trump,” says Mr. Sullivan, who was Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign manager in 2016. “The strategy that every campaign employed [in 2016] was ‘I hope Donald Trump will evaporate’ – but no one did anything to make him evaporate until it was way too late. ... Hope is not a strategy.”

Ms. Haley’s team says she’s pursuing a “common sense” position, letting voters know where she agrees with Mr. Trump (including recounting positive anecdotes from her time working with him), while also noting where they disagree. In this, they argue, Ms. Haley is not all that different from many Republican voters, many of whom appreciate the former president but also feel ready to move on.

“The idea that you have to be 100% in agreement or 100% in disagreement with someone is silly,” says an official with the Haley campaign. “That’s not how normal people operate.” 

Interviews with more than two dozen conservative voters across Iowa, the first nominating state for the Republican presidential primary, suggest there may be something to that.

At events for GOP candidates other than the former president, it’s clear at the very least there’s curiosity about possible alternatives. Many who previously voted for Mr. Trump say that they’ll back him again if he’s the nominee – but add that they’re hoping for a different standard-bearer.

But if she hopes to convince voters that the standard-bearer should be herself, Ms. Haley has her work cut out for her.

At the Cedar Rapids Country Club last month, around 75 guests sat beneath chandeliers drinking iced tea and listening to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott explain why America needs “a change in leadership.” After the event, which Mr. Scott left without taking any questions, half a dozen voters said they liked what he had to say but weren’t ready to commit to supporting the senator in a presidential run. 

Rather, all of them said they hoped Mr. DeSantis would be the nominee this time around. None brought up Ms. Haley until asked.

“I’d like to see DeSantis as the Republican nominee, and maybe Tim Scott could be his running mate,” says Marilyn, a Cedar Rapids resident who declined to give her last name. When asked about Ms. Haley, she offers: “Sure, she could be good too. I like our candidates, just not Trump. I voted for him twice but enough is enough. Common sense has to prevail.”

Lida and Mark Simpson sit on the steps of their porch with friends while the blues rock band Red Medicine plays in a yard across the street. People crowd all four corners of the intersection, dancing and chatting. It’s PorchFest in Petworth, a neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Some 100 performers will play on porches and yards throughout the day. A new group of people walks up, searching for space with a view of the band. “Sit, sit,” says Ms. Simpson with a big smile, gesturing toward the wall at the edge of the yard.

The Simpsons, who have a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, chose Petworth because it’s walkable, close to restaurants and playgrounds and public transit, and still has a neighborhood feeling. When they first moved in eight years ago, Ms. Simpson says she hoped for an active front porch culture. But it didn’t quite coalesce until people began socializing from their yards in 2020. Happily, says Ms. Simpson, “porch and stoop culture restarted during the pandemic, and it’s stayed around.”

This week, the U.S. surgeon general declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, saying that 1 in 2 adults reported experiencing loneliness even before the pandemic. At a time when neighborliness is decreasing and Americans are growing further apart, some, like the Simpsons, are intentionally building relationships within their communities. And events like porch fests are growing in popularity. Central to a culture of neighborliness, many say, are front porches.

“Front porch culture is just friendliness. It’s community, it’s interaction. It is wanting to have real community in the true sense of the word with neighbors and friends or potential friends. It’s an analog lifestyle in a digital world,” says Campbell McCool, founder of a Mississippi development that centers community life.

It’s also in direct opposition to the kinds of tragedies that have struck urban, suburban, and rural communities around the country over the past few weeks. On April 13, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot after knocking on the wrong door to pick up his siblings in Kansas City, Missouri. In upstate New York, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed after the car she was in drove down the wrong driveway. And this weekend, a man in Texas killed five people, including one child, after he was asked to stop shooting in his yard because a baby was sleeping.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Max Melnick, Anna Raven-Hansen, dog Maddie, and Lida and Mark Simpson watch a concert from the Simpsons’ front porch in Washington during Petworth’s PorchFest on April 29, 2023.

“As it has built for decades, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart,” wrote Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in The New York Times on April 30, announcing a framework to rebuild community. “Rebuilding social connection must be a top public health priority for our nation. It will require reorienting ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to prioritize human connection and healthy relationships.” 

A front porch is a liminal space, says Michael Dolan, a writer and editor in Washington. “It’s the outside of the inside and the inside of the outside, so people feel safe being on their porch because they are in their place and yet they are in the world,” he says.

“When people who have [porches and stoops] don’t use them, they’re missing out on the opportunity to interact with the environment,” says Mr. Dolan. “And the environment includes humans and includes passersby, includes somebody coming up to ask directions, includes somebody coming by to say hello.”

The type of neighborliness embodied by Mister Rogers is no longer the norm. Over half of Americans say they only know some of their neighbors. Although Americans living in rural areas are more likely to know their neighbors than Americans living in suburban or urban communities, people in the countryside are slightly less likely to interact with one another. Even in urban and suburban neighborhoods, neighborly exchanges are rare. Over half of Americans who say they know some of their neighbors say they never get together socially, according to a Pew study from 2019.

It takes curious and open people to build the kind of community that has block parties, borrows ingredients, and watches each other’s kids, but social spaces like front yards and porches are important too, says Mr. McCool. “A front porch is central to the whole personality of a neighborhood,” he says.

And at Plein Air in Mississippi, a development inspired by the new urbanism movement that promotes walkable and mixed-use communities, the only architectural requirement is that each house have a front porch.

History of the American front porch

Historically, Mr. McCool says, three things sped the decline of the front porch in suburbia in the 1950s: air conditioning, television, and the car. Air conditioning and TV coaxed people indoors. Cars meant more people lived further apart from each other.

When sociologists began studying differences between residents in neighborhoods with and without porches, they found that in the latter there was little to no interaction. People drove straight into their garages, and private backyard decks grew in popularity.

“A lot of people don’t realize that the social nature of the porch in America was imported with enslavement,” says Mr. Dolan, author of “The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place.”

West Africans were kidnapped and brought first to Brazil and then to the Caribbean. There, enslavers directed them to build their own houses, which had porches where people could socialize out of the sun, says Mr. Dolan. That aspect of Indigenous African architecture spread throughout the New World. When French colonizers moved to New Orleans, the housing styles of West Africa were imported into Southern culture and eventually spread beyond Louisiana.

Today, polls show that older Americans are more likely to have neighborly connections. Just 4% of Americans over 65 say they don’t know any of their neighbors, compared with 23% of adults under 30. Older, white, and wealthy Americans are all more likely to say they trust their neighbors than Americans of color and those who are younger and less wealthy.

“Professional porch sitter”

Karen Goddard, who prefers porches to private decks, calls herself a “professional porch sitter” in her attempt to make neighborliness popular again.

Ms. Goddard, who moved to Key West from New Hampshire two years ago, first came across the concept after reading about a self-proclaimed professional porch sitter. “It was all tongue-in-cheek. It was just something made up,” she says. “But it was a great concept.”

The point, Ms. Goddard says, is to meet on front porches without agendas, minutes, or formality – “just meeting and conversation.”

It resonated with Ms. Goddard as something she was already doing. “My friends in my neighborhood in New Hampshire knew that they could come to my house any Friday night and hang out on the porch,” she says.

And, when Ms. Goddard sold her home in New Hampshire, her friends joked that the buyer should be informed that the house came with friends.

In an age of preoccupation with productivity, Ms. Goddard embraces the humor behind her chosen “profession.” It’s a label for, well, doing nothing. She and her husband had a joke: Ms. Goddard would sit on her porch, and occasionally her husband would poke his head out and say, “You’re doing a very good job, honey.”

Jokes aside, Ms. Goddard’s main reason for porch sitting is simple: “I like to smile and make eye contact and say ‘hello’ if possible, because I just think that’s important for human connection and for neighbors.”

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Michael Dolan stands on his porch in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington. The author of “The American Front Porch” calls porches “the outside of the inside and the inside of the outside, so people feel safe ... because they are in their place and yet they are in the world.”

The porch has always been a place of social interaction, says Mr. Dolan. That’s been his experience for the four decades he’s lived in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, where he says neighborliness shines.

The rise of technology as an intermediary between people is unsettling, says Mr. Dolan. It makes its way onto the porch in the form of Ring Cameras, to which he’s opposed. “I like to answer my door and say hello to the people who come to my house,” he says.

“[One gains] the feeling of trust in the neighborly compact, the ability to rely on one’s neighbors and call one’s neighbors,” says Mr. Dolan. “Or even if your neighbors bother you, ... you tolerate them because they’re neighbors. So it’s a sense of place that reinforces your feeling of being part of something.”

The Simpsons in Petworth say they get together with neighbors throughout the year. The neighborhood has several active email lists, and neighbors swap tools, like the Simpsons’ hedge trimmer.

Despite the overcast sky, PorchFest is packed. Young children have no reservations dancing to music, playing with each other, and exploring neighbors’ yards. A crowd of kids gathers in front of one porch where a band plays “Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” increasing the tempo with each refrain. The pack of 3-foot-tall children ecstatically dances to the song, giggling and trying to keep up, while bubbles float above their heads. As the band keeps playing, parents and teenagers join in.

Portrait by Barron Bixler/Crown

Matthew Desmond

In his powerful, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 book “Evicted,” sociologist Matthew Desmond followed eight Milwaukee families facing the loss of their homes. His clearheaded but impassioned follow-up, “Poverty, by America,” examines the stubborn persistence of destitution in the wealthiest country in the world. The author makes the discomfiting argument that better-off Americans benefit, whether knowingly or unknowingly, from the impoverishment of their fellow citizens. Mr. Desmond calls on readers to consider their moral responsibilities to others, in service of an ambitious aim. “I want to end poverty, not reduce it,” he told Monitor contributor Barbara Spindel. “I don’t want to treat it; I want to cure it.” 

What made you decide to focus more generally on poverty? 

I had devoted most of my adult life to trying to understand poverty – living in poor communities, working with organizers – but I didn’t feel like I had a clear and convincing answer to why there was so much poverty in this incredibly rich nation. 

Is poverty different today? 

Things like toaster ovens and cellphones have gotten a lot cheaper, but as those things have declined in price, median rent has basically doubled in the last two decades; the cost of fuel and utilities and health care have risen. Life’s most basic necessities have gotten a lot harder to afford. A few other things about recent poverty are distinct. One is the rise of mass incarceration. Fifty or 60 years ago this was much less of a force in the lives of the American poor, and especially the Black and Hispanic poor, than it is today. And the housing crisis has accelerated. We’ve really rolled back our investment in affordable housing. 

Government spending on anti-poverty programs has grown over time. Why haven’t we seen progress? 

That spending is a lifesaver to millions of families, but a lot of our programs accommodate poverty and don’t disrupt it. They help people, but they don’t attack poverty at the root. Another main reason is that the labor market isn’t delivering for millions of families today. When the war on poverty was launched in 1964, unions were strong, real wages were growing, and you often could get a job with advancement and benefits without a college degree. We’re so far from that now, and one big reason is that unions are weak and wages have stagnated. 

How are poor people exploited in the housing and financial markets? 

It comes down to choice: Can people exercise a bit of agency in these systems? The only choice for most families below the poverty line seeking housing is to rent from a private landlord and devote half their income to housing costs. That’s because the waiting lists for public housing are incredibly long – sometimes counted in decades, not years – and they’re shut out of the home ownership market as well. The acceleration of rent is well past the acceleration of wages for renters over the past 40 years. In financial markets, the numbers blew me away. If you add up overdraft fees from banks and payday loan interest and check-cashing fees – the money a lot of folks have to pay just to receive their checks – you’re talking about $61 million being pulled out of pockets of low-income families every single day. That’s stunning. 

How are we all “on the dole”? 

Programs going to well-off Americans are often tax breaks – for home ownership or college savings or retirement plans. A lot of folks have a hard time seeing a tax break as the same thing as a welfare check, but they both cost the government money and they both put money in your pocket. The country’s welfare state is incredibly lopsided. We’ve chosen to subsidize affluence instead of alleviating poverty. 

What do you hope readers will do after reading this book? 

I hope that they become poverty abolitionists, that they decide that poverty isn’t an inevitable part of our nation but an abomination. A poverty abolitionist evaluates their own life: how they spend and invest, where they live. A poverty abolitionist supports rebalancing the safety net, with less rich aid and more poor aid. And a poverty abolitionist strives for inclusive communities and turns away from segregation. That might sound abstract, but it means showing up at zoning board meetings and saying, “I want this housing development here. I want other kids to get the opportunity my kids have received by living in this community.” 

What makes you optimistic? 

I have hope because we’ve been in this situation before. The early 1960s were incredibly polarized, but major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed, and the Great Society was rolled out, cutting poverty in half in 10 years. It happened because the civil rights and labor movements put unrelenting pressure on lawmakers. ... I have hope that we’re reaching for something better. An America without poverty is a safer America, a healthier America, a happier America. I think that’s something a lot of us pine for.

In the short interlude between musical pieces, Tuqeer Ali Khan looks suspiciously at his harmonium.

“Has someone tried to tune this?” he asks, his eyes squinting in disapproval.

“No one has touched it but you,” replies his brother and musical partner, Khurram.

“Are you sure?” says Mr. Khan, raising an eyebrow. “It sounds a little off to me.”

If it is, no one in the small audience seems to have noticed. Though he is only 10 minutes into the mehfil-e-samaa – a concert given in an intimate setting – he has created a mood of rapture. He resumes the performance with one of the numbers that made him famous. “Spring has come but my beloved has not,” he sings. “My heart cries in anguish.”

Though he comes from a family of musicians and is now considered one of Pakistan’s most promising classical vocalists, up until a couple of years ago Mr. Khan was virtually unknown outside of Dipalpur. Then he and his brother were featured on The Dream Journey. 

Now in its ninth year, the audio-visual project is helmed by a small group of friends who record Pakistani musicians and publish their material on a dedicated YouTube page. The Dream Journey aims to promote traditional, Sufi-style music, the popularity of which has declined in recent decades due to geopolitical pressures. Their channel has amassed over 36 million views and 169,000 followers, and has launched several careers. But above all else, it serves as a source of joy not just for international audiences, but also for the project’s music-loving founders and featured musicians.

“My brother and I used to go around begging music producers to give us a chance,” Mr. Khan says. “It was only when we were featured on The Dream Journey’s YouTube channel that our careers began to flourish.”

“I pray for them every day,” adds Khurram, who is himself an accomplished singer and tabla player. “All of our success is due to them.”

A joyous surprise

The Dream Journey project was started by eight music enthusiasts.

“We basically got to know each other online,” says Musab bin Noor, a medical doctor. “It was always a desire to someday get together and listen to music as a group and that finally happened in 2014 when everybody’s schedules aligned.”

They decided to visit musicians in their homes – the place where they practiced and felt most comfortable. “There’s nothing made up about it,” explains Arif Ali Khan, a founding member who lives in Canada but regularly travels to Pakistan to work on The Dream Journey Project. “The focus is only on the music.”

After the group’s first trip to Karachi, team member Mahera Omar, a documentary filmmaker by profession, published her concert recordings online.  

“YouTube was becoming quite big in Pakistan at that time,” she remembers. “The response we would get and people’s comments would just blow us all away.”

Asif Hasnain, another founding member, describes the success of the YouTube channel as “miraculous.” 

“When you put up a video and it gets 10,000 hits, you say ‘Oh my God, it’s huge!’ Then suddenly it gets 50,000 hits, and you say, ‘It’s huger!’ And then suddenly you find that something has hit 3 million,” he says. “I think the beauty of it is the surprise.”

And for listeners, discovering the sounds of traditional Pakistani music – including new twists on familiar qawwalis, or Sufi devotional songs – brought its own kind of joy.

“So heartening to see a young qawwal party deliver a performance that would make the old maestros proud,” writes one YouTube commenter by the name of Talha Khan. “Thank you for sharing and giving these artists the recognition they deserve!”

Hasan Ali

Brothers Tuqeer Ali Khan and Khurram Ali Khan perform a qawwali, a style of Sufi Muslim devotional music, in February 2023. The duo rose to prominence after being featured on The Dream Journey’s YouTube channel.

Decline of Pakistani music

The launch of The Dream Journey channel came at a time when Pakistan’s classical music scene was stagnant, leaving many performers struggling to make a living. 

“The job of the artist is not to go around begging people to listen to them. We are supposed to practice and perform,” says Akbar Ali, a classical vocalist based in Lahore. “Musicians who were millions of times more talented than I am have left this world in a state of destitution.”

According to Dream Journey member Vaqar Ahmed, the decline of classical music was a direct consequence of the Islamization policies instituted by military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, who took over in a 1977 coup d’état.

“What he started no one has been able to reverse,” he says. “He vocally and practically suppressed art, music, and writing. Those were the dark ages of Pakistan’s culture.” 

Yet veteran performer Babar Niazi credits The Dream Journey with helping to revive the genre, saying “they’re basically filling the gap left by state institutions who have stopped doing their jobs.”

For Vienna-based team member Asif Hasnain, those political events were manifestations of a much deeper issue. “The problem is that in Pakistan, since independence, there’s been an eternal debate on your cultural identity,” he says. 

Specifically, is it more of a subcontinental nation, drawing from the cultures and musical traditions of India, or a Middle Eastern nation?

“From the beginning of Pakistan, this tension was there, and its implications are very profound,” he adds. “If you start talking about a Middle Eastern identity you’re talking about a certain aridity. If you’re talking about the subcontinent, you’re talking about a certain explosion of cultural influences which all crystallized into qawwali and Sufi music and art.”

Global audience

It is no surprise then that a large proportion of The Dream Journey’s audience comes from neighboring India. In the view of Dream Journey member Mian Shaukat Hussain, this is clear evidence that the joy of music can bring the people of these two historically antagonistic countries together. “I definitely believe that music goes to the soul, not to the body, and that the soul has nothing to do with politics and has to do with some higher values,” he says.

Even the devotional Islamic music published on The Dream Journey’s YouTube channel has a large audience across the border, receiving praise not just from Indian Muslims but also from Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians. 

“Our ancestors came from there and we still sing the way they did,” says Tuqeer Ali Khan, the harmonium player and qawwali singer. “So, when people in India listen to our music, they feel a connection with what we’re doing.”

Chicago-based team member Saad Alvi credits the channel’s success to the team’s high standards. “A good thing is always a good thing; it’s timeless,” he says. “We are very careful in what we choose.”

As part of this process, the Dream Journey team encourages musicians to perform their more obscure works. 

“We don’t want to listen to the famous few pieces that everyone is performing,” says architect and music lover Mushtaq Ahmed, who is credited with discovering many of the Dream Journey’s lesser-known performers. “We ask them to perform the music that is unique to their household.” 

He says artists often tell them that these become some of their most requested pieces.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic has meant the team hasn’t been able to travel since 2020, their next listening tour is planned for the end of this year, and at some point, the group plans to release a feature documentary on Pakistan’s classical music scene. Till then, there is the small business of sifting through hundreds of hours of material to select the music to publish on their YouTube page, which continues to gain subscribers year after year.

Reuters

Zamzam Adam, a Sudanese woman who says she gave birth while fleeing the violence in her country, holds her baby among her belongings near the border in Koufroun, Chad, April 27.

Now in its third week, a civil war in Sudan between competing armed forces has something working against it: a high degree of hospitality in neighboring countries toward people fleeing the violence as well as gratitude for those assisting the exodus and offering sanctuary. The world saw a similar response in Europe just 14 months ago toward Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion. That compassion helped fortify Ukraine’s morale.

The United Nations warns that 800,000 people could soon leave Africa’s third most populous nation, up from the more than 100,000 people who have already fled to neighboring countries such as Chad, Egypt, and South Sudan. More than 330,000 are internally displaced. The prospect of even greater outflows helps explain why so many officials are thankful for any sort of welcome mat across Sudan’s borders.

“Chad has been generously welcoming in Sudanese refugees,” says David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee. In Egypt, people have “opened their homes and everyone is racing for free full hospitality” while the Sudanese refugees insist they pay for their accommodation “so as not to become a burden on the Egyptians,” according to the EMEA Tribune. In addition, the U.N. thanked France for help in evacuating its personnel while Germany thanked Egypt for assisting 700 people of 40 countries to exit.

Sudanese are also aiding their own, especially people from the capital where the fighting is fierce and who have headed toward Port Sudan. “Every village & town we passed thru people would come out with their kerkade (hibiscus) juice and cold water for the ‘Khartoum travellers’,” tweeted one Sudanese woman. Near the Egyptian border, one woman living in a mud hut offers bread to the displaced people. “We will welcome any guest who comes to us. Generosity exists and goodness exists,” Naamat Jabal Sayyid Hasan told Africanews.

The northeast region of Africa has experienced so many conflicts that most of the countries have long hosted refugees from the others. Last week, the African Union asked Sudan’s neighbors and its international partners to “facilitate the transit” of civilians fleeing the violence “without hindrance.” It was a subtle reminder to keep expressing the generosity that already largely exists.