Carlos Barria/Reuters

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the Senior Chinese Leader Event held by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the US-China Business Council, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, Nov. 15, 2023.

In the spring of 2019, Matt Pottinger, then the Asia director for the National Security Council, was working at his office in the White House when a rare document caught his attention.

A secret speech delivered by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to China’s Communist Party Central Committee in 2013, not long after Mr. Xi took power, had just been published in China’s top party journal, Qiushi. Mr. Pottinger found it especially revealing of Mr. Xi’s worldview.

“The language was so explicit,” Mr. Pottinger recalls of the speech, in which Mr. Xi laid out an ambitious strategy for China’s Communist Party to win a fierce ideological struggle against the capitalist West. “Capitalism,” Mr. Xi said, “is bound to die out.” 

The stark difference between Mr. Xi’s internal call for party leaders to steel themselves for protracted conflict with a hostile West and his outward promotion of “win-win” cooperation abroad underscored what Mr. Pottinger saw as a pattern of deliberate deception and dual messaging by Beijing. 

“I was struck by how wide the disparity was,” says Mr. Pottinger, a fluent Chinese speaker who helped craft a major U.S. policy shift on China during the Trump administration.

In recent years, trust between Washington and Beijing has hit rock bottom. At the root of the mistrust is Washington’s belief that China seeks to undermine the current international order, and Beijing’s view that the United States seeks to curb China’s rise and overthrow its Communist Party leadership. Exacerbating such fears on both sides are deep feelings of betrayal – over words and actions that don’t align.

“That’s the danger – you have these behaviors that are not in line with what each country is saying publicly, and they are regarded by the other as ... hypocrisy, if not betrayal, in original understandings and commitments,” says Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert in Chinese defense and foreign policy.

Johnson Lai/AP

Taiwanese soldiers take part in drills at the army defense command base in Taitung, Taiwan, Jan. 31, 2024. Taiwan is holding spring military drills following its recent presidential election and amid threats from China, which claims the island as its own territory that it is determined to annex, possibly by force.

From engagement to suspicion

For decades, the U.S. had operated on a strategy of engagement. It was predicated on the belief that China’s market reforms and opening would promote the country's integration into the U.S.-led, liberal post-World War II order – as well as, possibly, political reforms.

Yet Beijing’s increasing assertiveness abroad and repression at home convinced Mr. Pottinger and other senior U.S. officials that such assumptions were wrong, and that China’s leaders had disguised their true intentions. The 2017 national security strategy that Mr. Pottinger helped design labels China as a threatening, “revisionist” power determined to reshape the international order and displace America in Asia – a position shared by the current administration.

Trust, some officials concluded, was no longer relevant in U.S.-China relations. “The idea that you can build trust” with China’s leaders “is an oxymoron,” says Mr. Pottinger, now chairman of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank focused on national security, and author of the forthcoming book “The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps To Defend Taiwan.”

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, who also served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, put it bluntly on a Wall Street Journal podcast last August. “We’d like to have a great relationship [with China], but if they are going to keep lying and cheating as a modus operandi of the state ... you would be a fool to go into that ... negotiation not cognizant of what they’re doing,” he said.

Ng Han Guan/AP

Polling officers count votes in New Taipei City, Taiwan, Jan. 13, 2024. Experts say Taiwan was able to rebuff China's efforts to meddle with its democracy by taking the challenge of disinformation seriously.

For its part, Beijing, too, is suspicious of what it views as incongruity between U.S. words and U.S. actions. It sees growing American support for Taiwan – especially military sales and training – as violating past U.S. commitments, with the aim of making Taiwan a sovereign security ally and weakening China.

“The U.S. has no heart to honor its commitment to China ... no intent to preserve the consensus reached with China [on Taiwan],” says Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar and expert on U.S.-China ties. “The U.S. wants to stop China from attaining unification.”

Beijing sees U.S. controls on technology exports to China not as valid national security measures, but as part of a broader plan to hurt China’s economy and threaten the party’s legitimacy. Beijing believes “the U.S. wants to prevent China from challenging America, to sustain America’s overwhelming dominance,” Dr. Shen says.

The spiral of mistrust assumes a life of its own, leading “both sides to double down on signals of resolve,” and fueling extreme, at times cartoonish, narratives about the other, says Dr. Swaine.

Last fall, the two countries clashed over deception itself. After a U.S. State Department report said Beijing was funding a multibillion-dollar global disinformation campaign, China’s Foreign Ministry shot back, calling the U.S. the “empire of lies.”

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

President Joe Biden (right) walks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Filoli estate on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, in Woodside, California, Nov. 15, 2023.

Building a “workable paradigm”

To be sure, trust between nation states is often challenging. A level of suspicion has always existed between the U.S. and China. But today’s extreme trust deficit is leading to alternative approaches – ones that stress top-level communications, transparent competition, and reciprocity – as ways to promote predictability, experts say.

President Joe Biden and Mr. Xi have pressing domestic priorities – China’s economic woes for Mr. Xi, and reelection for Mr. Biden – and amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, they both seek to lower U.S.-China tensions.

The two leaders signaled their interest in a more stable relationship when meeting outside San Francisco last November. Asked whether he trusted Mr. Xi, Mr. Biden responded, “‘Trust but verify,’ as the old saying goes. That’s where I am.” He added that, over many hours of meetings, Mr. Xi has “been straight.”

Regular calls and meetings between the presidents can help avert misunderstandings, experts say, especially given Mr. Xi’s concentration of power and mistrust within China’s opaque system, which could limit what lower officials tell Mr. Xi.

The Biden-Xi meeting has led to other critical dialogues between the governments. High-level military communications have resumed after more than a year’s hiatus – a step toward preventing dangerous miscalculations.

“We’re definitely at a better place,” says Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a think tank focused on issues related to global peace. “The two governments can actually talk to each other without ... having a complete meltdown.”

Chinatopix/AP/File

An employee works at a solar panel and solar equipment factory in central China's Jiangxi province, Jan. 5, 2021. Beijing sees U.S. controls on technology exports to China as part of a broader plan to hurt China’s economy and threaten the Communist Party’s legitimacy.

Both sides are also encouraging ties between ordinary American and Chinese people, whose friendly bonds can flourish despite official mistrust.

“Now’s the time to look for the opportunities that remain to expand relationships” among scholars, students, and other individuals, says retired Gen. H.R. McMaster, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who served as national security advisor from 2017 to 2018.

Greater stress on reciprocity – in trade and other exchanges – is also creating opportunities for progress, experts say. Unlike during the trade war, reciprocity could be used as positive leverage moving forward, says Yasheng Huang, a professor of global management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You lob tariffs on me; I lob tariffs on you – that is reciprocity but in a negative way,” says Dr. Huang, author of “The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead To Its Decline.”

Instead, for example, Washington could hold off on tariffs for six months, giving Beijing a chance to act to avoid them. “You give the other side some optionality ... rather than immediately undertaking punitive action,” Dr. Huang says.

Moreover, as the two countries vigorously compete in pursuit of their divergent national interests, clarity around their priorities can promote stability, even when trust is absent, experts say. 

“The more candid we are about things that Beijing does that harm our interests, the closer we are to a workable paradigm,” Mr. Pottinger says.

The Ukrainian soldiers burrow into their musty underground bunker, waiting at dawn for target coordinates to fire their 105 mm artillery gun. Russian drones have been active overhead, and two incoming Russian shells had come their way.

But the main topic of discussion below ground – here, on one of the farthest frozen battlefields in eastern Ukraine – is of three new jolts of bad news that these soldiers see as closely interlinked. All are indicative of the urgent need for more American arms and ammunition.

First being digested: a new order to substantially cut back and cap the number of shells they fire at the Russian enemy each day.

“Even without this limitation there was not enough,” says the squad leader of the 1st Presidential Brigade of the Ukraine National Guard, giving the name Sasha. “Soon we’re going to have to fight them with our hands.”

Second, news emerged that the city of Avdiivka had fallen, after months of fierce fighting that Ukrainian officials estimate cost Russia some 17,000 dead troops. That news came to this cramped bunker in emotional form, with a video of a wounded soldier left behind in the chaotic final stages of Ukraine’s retreat, who called his sister to say goodbye. (Relatives later recognized the soldier’s body, along with five others, from videos taken after Russians seized the position, Ukrainian media reported.)

The third piece of bad news was from Washington. The U.S. House of Representatives had recessed until the end of February, further delaying a vote on a $60 billion military aid package that cleared the Senate with bipartisan support. Ukraine deems that assistance instrumental to the war effort, if it is going to halt Russia’s building offensive, if not reverse it.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Soldiers of the 1st Presidential Brigade of the Ukraine National Guard await targets in their underground bunker before firing mortar shells at Russian positions, in the Kreminna Forest, Ukraine, Feb. 17, 2024.

As the second anniversary nears of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the optimism that heralded Ukraine’s against-all-odds defense in 2022 – which forced Russian troops away from the capital, Kyiv, and recaptured swaths of northeast and south Ukraine – has faded.

It had diminished throughout 2023 with a failed counteroffensive that was bolstered by Western arms deliveries, yet ran headlong into heavily mined Russian positions.

“You Americans ... have to decide”

But today one message is constant from Ukrainian soldiers, at multiple points along the front: an urgent plea for weapons and ammunition, on a scale and timeline that only the United States can provide.

The $60 billion vote is “very critical. Europe can’t provide all the supplies,” says a soldier in the bunker, a former English teacher who gives the name Kostiantyn.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, addressing the loss of Avdiivka and a stepped-up Russian pressure along the front, said Monday that Russia was “taking advantage of the delays in aid to Ukraine.”

“We have enough so we don’t lose, but we are far from getting the means of winning. That’s it,” says Kostiantyn. Like many here, he presents the Ukraine war as a pivotal contest between the democracies of the West, and the authoritarianism and dictatorship represented by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian soldier in an artillery unit carries a 105 mm shell as soldiers fire from a British-made L119 howitzer at Russian positions in the Luhansk region, Ukraine, Feb. 18, 2024.

“You Americans – ‘We the people,’ as you say – have to decide whether to remain a global power,” the former teacher says. “For us, we don’t have a choice, because we have to fight. If not, then someone on TV will tell my kid she is not Ukrainian, she is Russian. And I don’t want that, so we will keep on fighting.

“For you, you have to decide for yourselves, no matter the camp, Republicans or Democrats,” Kostiantyn says.

“I don’t want you to get the impression that the Ukrainian people are not grateful for all your help and support. You owe us nothing,” he adds. “But the fact remains, if the U.S. and NATO allies want us to win, we need more – we need more for winning.”

And winning is not what is happening for Ukraine on the battlefield today, where soldiers daily fend off dozens of Russian artillery, drone, and ground attacks, and have dug deeper defensive positions all along the front line.

“The worst thing for us is when the guys in the trenches ask for artillery support, because they are getting assaulted, and you just have to answer, ‘We don’t have ammunition,’ and that’s just terrible,” says squad leader Sasha. “Every shell can save some of our guys’ lives there.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian gunner removes a smoking artillery shell casing after firing a 105 mm British-made L119 howitzer at Russian positions in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, Feb. 18, 2024.

The loss of Avdiivka – a city and Ukrainian front-line bastion since Russia first seized control of nearby Donetsk in 2014 – was the first significant gain for Russia since last May. It was achieved with overwhelming Russian firepower and manpower, despite losses that appear greater than during the Soviet Union’s decadelong 1980s campaign in Afghanistan.

Russia’s “shell advantage”

Oleksander Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s forces in the south, said in a statement that he had little choice but to withdraw from Avdiivka, citing an enemy “advancing on the corpses of their own soldiers with a 10-to-1 shell advantage, under constant bombardment.”

Indeed, the Russian firepower advantage – and deep Ukrainian need – extends throughout the 600-mile front, where Russian forces fire 10,000 shells a day and have 4,000 artillery pieces in the country, compared with a rationed 2,000 shells a day fired by Ukraine’s 350 artillery pieces, according to an analysis by Jack Watling, a senior research fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.

“In short, without artillery ammunition, the Ukrainians risk being fixed in permanent defense, slowly ceding ground as most recently seen in Avdiivka,” Mr. Watling wrote in Time.

That was the experience of Andrii Rudenko, a combat medic wounded after the Avdiivka withdrawal Monday. He was hit by shrapnel from a grenade dropped by a Russian drone, which had picked up his heat signature while he ran from a position.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rudenko was in a bus full of wounded soldiers being evacuated westward to hospitals far from the front.

“The first point of difference between us and them is the urgent need for artillery,” says Mr. Rudenko. “The Russians can use their mortars again and again to get one man, but we have ammunition hunger.”

As this war nears the start of its third year, he says, “no one is very excitedly running around saying, ‘We are going to go forward and advance.’ We are defending, and everyone understands that we are defending.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A Ukrainian soldier watches for Russian drones overhead, as soldiers in his artillery unit fire at Russian positions in Luhansk, Ukraine, Feb. 18, 2024.

Eye on the House

At another artillery position in the Luhansk region, a few miles from the Russian trenches, a 105 mm howitzer is carefully dug in. The number of shells delivered overnight had dwindled by midmorning. 

“If we had 100 rounds, we would have targets for them,” says the commander of the battery, who along with others in the unit asked not to be named. Two Russian artillery rounds land nearby, forcing the soldiers to race to frigid bunkers dug underground.

“Ask Biden, ‘Where are the shells?’” calls out the battery’s gunner.

The commander points to their gun, which remains silent. “If we had more ammo, that would be working now,” he says.

A senior officer approaches a visiting American journalist beside the gun to ask, unbidden and in English: “What is your view of the House of Representatives on Ukraine?”

Wrapped up to keep the cold at bay, the bearded officer is standing amid empty shell casings on the ground, which smell of smoke from the recent firings.

“Of course we watch this [U.S. House vote], because literally our lives depend on this,” says the officer. “If they won’t help us, then we’re done. I can sum it up in one phrase: the more, the better.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

Supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf, chant slogans as they gather during a protest demanding free and fair results of the elections in Karachi, Pakistan, Feb. 17, 2024.

It was hoped that the 2024 general election would produce the kind of stable government necessary for Pakistan to begin dealing with its myriad problems. Yet almost two weeks after voters went to the polls, the country of 240 million finds itself on the brink of being governed by a coalition of the also-rans.

Defying all odds, candidates affiliated with imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, emerged from the Feb. 8 polls as the largest voting bloc in Parliament. This resulted in several rounds of complex negotiations between the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz and the Pakistan People’s Party to create a coalition government that could counter PTI’s influence. On Tuesday night, the impasse was finally breached when the two parties agreed to a power-sharing formula that would see the PMLN’s Shehbaz Sharif becoming the prime minister and the PPP’s Asif Ali Zardari becoming the president.

“This government is illicit, it is illegal, and it will collapse on its own feet,” says Shandana Gulzar, a PTI-affiliated candidate who won her seat in Peshawar. “I got a whopping majority in the election simply because people are sick and tired of dealing with sycophants, with corrupt dynasties, and they wanted change.” 

The deal between the PMLN and the PPP, who came second and third in the general election, has restored a degree of confidence in the markets, with the Pakistan Stock Exchange rallying by over a thousand points. Yet throughout the country, protests continue to rage over alleged election-rigging, and a perilous economic situation has left almost 40% of the population below the poverty line. Without a clear mandate to govern, the incoming coalition may find it difficult to secure a much-needed bailout from the International Monetary Fund and get Pakistan’s economy back on track. 

“Pakistan has soaring crises across the board, which means there’s much at stake for a new government,” says Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute. The coalition “will be expected to hit the ground running.”

K.M. Chaudary/AP

Pakistan's former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif gestures during a press conference regarding parliamentary elections, in Lahore, Pakistan, Feb. 13, 2024. Under a power-sharing agreement reached Feb. 20, Mr. Sharif is set to become Pakistan's next prime minister.

Mounting evidence of rigging 

On Feb. 20, the Election Commission of Pakistan, which has been excoriated for the way it conducted the vote, heard petitions filed by candidates from around 40 constituencies, many alleging that their results had been manipulated. 

Their experiences resemble that of Shoaib Shaheen, a PTI-backed candidate who had taken a commanding lead in his Islamabad constituency before election results suddenly stopped on the evening of Feb. 8. The next morning, when the results resumed, Mr. Shaheen and many others saw their leads evaporate. 

Literature professor Shaheena Bhatti, who voted for Mr. Shaheen, describes the results as a robbery.

“If we were in a remote part of the country, I would have said, ‘OK, maybe there’s been a problem with the counting of votes, or some kind of issue in communicating the results,’” says Dr. Bhatti. “But not in the federal capital. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

On Saturday, a senior bureaucrat added fuel to the fire when he admitted to his involvement in large-scale vote-rigging.

“We converted the losers into winners, reversing margins of 70,000 votes in 13 National Assembly seats,” said Liaqat Ali Chattha, who resigned from his position as commissioner of the garrison city of Rawalpindi shortly after the announcement. “I should be punished for the injustice I have done, and others who were involved in this injustice should also be punished.”

Mr. Chattha’s admission, however, was met with skepticism by some observers after he absolved the country’s politically powerful military of playing a role in the manipulation. Instead, Mr. Chattha blamed the Election Commission of Pakistan and the chief justice of Pakistan, Qazi Faez Isa, for tampering with the results. Both the commission and Chief Justice Isa have denied the allegations.

Navesh/Reuters

Staff members empty a ballot box after polls closed at a polling station in Lahore, Pakistan, Feb. 8, 2024.

A government on shaky footing

Irrespective of who is to blame, the former commissioner’s allegations have had the effect of discrediting almost entirely an election that was already steeped in controversy before a single ballot had been cast. 

In the days after the election, protests broke out across the country with footage emerging of demonstrators being roughly handled and arrested, and of police using tear gas to disperse these gatherings. And when evidence of poll tampering began to circulate on social media, authorities made the decision to restrict access to X, formerly Twitter. The site remained inaccessible on Wednesday.

“There’s no transparency on the government’s side ... so everything is based on conjecture,” says digital rights activist Usama Khilji.

In this atmosphere of confusion, political analysts doubt that the PMLN and PPP will be able to govern effectively. 

“Given the lack of a majority by any of the parties of the coalition, the new government will be walking on eggshells,” says journalist Taha Siddiqui, who has been living in exile since 2018. “Plus, with such a weak coalition, the powerful military establishment will be able to easily manipulate the Parliament into doing its bidding by using one political group against the other, as it has been known to do in the past.”  

The army has ruled Pakistan directly for 32 out of the country’s 75 years of existence and spent the rest of the time controlling the country from the shadows. Ms. Gulzar, the PTI-candidate from Peshawar, says that the only reason former Prime Minister Khan is in jail is because “the status quo and the forces that be” cannot abide by the idea that “Pakistan could be a country that actually would head towards genuine development.”

Under the constitution, the president is duty-bound to convene the inaugural session of the new National Assembly by Feb. 29, and, provided the coalition agreement holds, that is when the new government will officially be formed.

When the Great Salt Lake sank to its lowest levels on record, a group of Utah journalists were busy looking for hope. They formed the Great Salt Lake Collaborative to invest in a solutions-driven approach to covering the health and environmental concerns tied to the lake’s shrinking shores.

The collaborative of now 19 news, community, and education partners began in 2022 through a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network, which has also funded separate Monitor coverage. Trust in a solutions approach has meant investing in relationships with readers and sending local reporters to study similar water issues in California, Israel, and Kazakhstan.  

Trust has taken another form, too, as former newsroom competitors turn to collaboration, says lifelong Utahn Heather May, director of the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. Ms. May spoke with the Monitor about the group’s distinctive coverage, and what its impact looks like. The conversation has been edited and condensed. 

The picture of the lake is grim. How do you cultivate hope for solutions and build audience trust in your approach?

I’m a former daily print reporter. As journalists we’re good at pointing out problems, right? And that’s really crucial to do. 

But I think focusing solely on the crisis doesn’t create room for people to get involved or to feel hope that what they do matters. That’s why this collaborative has been so important to the community and helped really engage the community, because we focus on solutions. 

That doesn’t mean that we don’t talk about the problem. We’ve talked about the problem with the shrinking lake, the growing lake bed, more dust storms. … But this grant catalyzed the focus of: What’s working elsewhere? Nobody has saved a lake that has reached this level before. But there are other communities that conserve water differently than Utah.

We don’t advocate for solutions. So we’re not saying that the way Las Vegas has saved a lot of water is the way for Utah. Our role is to go out and say: Here’s what’s happening in this community. What are the limitations of this response in Las Vegas? What are the insights that Utahns can learn from? That has created trust among our audience. And it has translated into quite a lot of involvement by the public. 

What does that involvement look like?

We create events to engage the public. One of our community partners is the Community Writing Center at Salt Lake Community College. Anybody who submitted their fiction, nonfiction, artwork, got into an anthology that we created. Then we held a gala. … We’ve done library panels. We created a book club. 

Courtesy of Spenser Heaps/Deseret News

FOX 13 News videographer Manuel Rodriguez, center, at work on Mono Lake, August 2022. A team of reporters from three Utah newsrooms – The Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, and FOX 13 News – reported from California for the Great Salt Lake Collaborative.

But more broadly, the coverage has resulted in people in Utah caring about a lake that they really forgot. They thought it was just a stinky place to avoid and a waste of water. Now a poll has found 74% of Utahns are concerned about its drying. There was just a rally, late January, at the [Utah State] Capitol. Twelve-hundred Utahns came out, rallying for the lake’s future. Some were wearing brine shrimp costumes, bird costumes, bird masks. 

There are leaders of different faith groups who are advocating together for the lake. There’s a youth lake coalition that meets with farmers and lobbies policymakers. There are lawsuits about the lake now. Lawyers and scientists have created their own sort of collaboratives to accelerate policy changes for the lake. And Utahns are buying up low-water grass seed and ripping out their lawns in a groundswell of involvement.

I’m wondering how the Great Salt Lake Collaborative measures its impact.

We measure impact in a couple of ways. You could look at the number of news stories that the collaborative has produced – nearly 600 in two years. 

Another way of measuring impact is for the newsrooms to work together on a project. We’ve sent a team of reporters from formerly competing newsrooms together to cover Las Vegas. Same with reporters going to California for Owens Lake and Mono Lake. I do look at the engagement piece – all of the community involvement – as impact, and those polls that show how much people care about the lake now. 

Public policy change is another huge impact. Lawmakers say they’ve done more than ever before for the lake and on water issues since 2022, which is when we formed. … The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has donated permanent water rights to the lake. 

Can we take credit for all that? Of course not. Part of the reason so many people are engaged in this topic is also because, of course, the lake sunk to its lowest level ever recorded [in fall 2022]. But we have been told by policymakers and advocates and regular folks that we have changed Utahns’ relationship to the lake. Made them care about it. You can see how that’s translated into action. 

What’s next for the collaborative in 2024? 

We will continue to focus on the Great Salt Lake. In our first year, we showed what was at stake. In our second year – and in our first year – we pointed to evidence-backed solutions. Third year going forward, we are looking at: Is water making it to the lake? There have been a lot of structural changes that have happened in law and policy that policymakers say sets it up so that more water will get to the lake. I don’t want to speak for what all the newsrooms are going to be doing, because they choose what they cover. But I think the public wants to see if water has made it to the lake. 

What gives you hope?

I want to give a shoutout to these newsroom partners. They put aside their longtime competition, and even the drive for page views, because all of their work is shared with other newsrooms, and it’s shared on the Great Salt Lake site. I want to shout out their willingness to do that and be such amazing, collaborative partners, because they have put the community first. I think that local journalism – local journalists – need to be celebrated for the work they’ve done. 

The runners arrive just after 8 o’clock on a frosty Saturday morning. They greet each other with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks before retying their shoes, adjusting their hats, and synchronizing GPS signals on their watches.

This is team Stride for Stride, a running collective started by Tom O’Keefe in 2018 with the simple vision of democratizing the starting line at road races. Mr. O’Keefe aims to give everyone the opportunity not just to run, but to race, by purchasing race bibs and raising funds for charity bibs for those who can’t afford them. Stride for Stride currently sponsors close to 400 runners from 26 countries across its Boston, New York, and Miami teams. 

For many on the crew gathered here in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, the team offers more than a path to competition.

“We are family,” says Ramón René Ballesteros Aguirre. He even calls one of his teammates “tío” – Spanish for “uncle.” Mr. Ballesteros had been a casual runner previously, but it wasn’t until he joined Stride for Stride that he started setting competitive goals. Finishing the 2023 Boston Marathon was “the best day” of his life, he says.

Running is often described as a widely accessible sport – if you are able-bodied and have training shoes. It doesn’t necessarily require a team, facilities, or fancy equipment. Racing, however, can be expensive. The entry fee for the upcoming 128th Boston Marathon is $230, if you qualify. The 2023 New York Marathon cost $295 for nonmembers of New York Road Runners. 

“One of the great stories that sports tells is meritocracy,” says Michael Serazio, author of “The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture.” “You can’t actually celebrate the best in sports if there’s not a diversity of opportunity for people to take part in them.”

Barriers to entry at road races first occurred to Mr. O’Keefe at a race on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The mostly white runners he saw lining up didn’t mesh with the number of talented runners of color he personally knew. While many factors likely contributed to this homogeneity, he saw one clear hurdle that he could help to remove: the cost of racing bibs.

Courtesy of Alex Roldan/Stride for Stride

“What I love about [running], it’s kind of this equalizer. As long as you can get to the starting line, everyone is equal.” – Tom O’Keefe (right), founder of Stride for Stride, seen above with teammate Jorge Rosales after running together in the Boston Athletic Association Half Marathon in 2023.

“Racing is everything” 

Stride for Stride athlete Eduardo Rodriguez had never run before April 2018. But now, “racing is everything,” he says. Two years after he took up the sport, the restaurant worker, who is originally from Oriental, Mexico, happened to see a TV interview in Spanish between Mr. O’Keefe and Estuardo Calel, the first member of Stride for Stride. Mr. Rodriguez felt as though they were speaking directly to him. So on a whim he signed up to join online. 

He’d never considered racing because of the costs. “Sometimes it’s a struggle to pay the bills,” he says. “I live check to check. And I would definitely not be able to spend money on races.”

The first time he met any of the Stride for Stride team members was at a virtual 10K race during the pandemic. (Virtual races are a way to race either alone or in small groups against others online.) 

“That was my first-ever race,” Mr. Rodriguez says. “I remember finishing the race, I celebrated like I won the Boston Marathon. For me it meant a lot.” 

It’s a feeling Mr. O’Keefe understands. Competing in his first road race changed his life. He began his running career in his 40s. New Balance offered him a charity bib in exchange for promotion of the 2015 Falmouth Road Race on his Twitter account @BostonTweets. The 7-mile race on Cape Cod was like nothing he had ever experienced. Not only did the Falmouth race launch his competitive running career, but it’s also where he got the idea for Stride for Stride.

Courtesy of Alex Roldan/Stride for Stride

Anny Sanchez waves to the camera while racing in the 2023 Boston Athletic Association Half Marathon.

Building community

Today, Stride for Stride is a 501(c)(3) organization and receives part of its funding from donations, grants, and partnerships with certain races. However, the majority of sponsorship money comes from charity bib fundraising by participants at large-scale races such as the New York City and Boston marathons. Upon acceptance into a race, individual runners choose a charity or organization to raise money for. Mr. O’Keefe says that people raise at least $9,000 per bib at these major races. Those who opted to fundraise for Stride for Stride helped the organization cover $64,000 in racing fees for hundreds of runners across dozens of races in 2023.

The program has grown primarily by word-of-mouth. Mr. O’Keefe says referrals are the organization’s biggest asset – creating a “stronger connection right off the bat,” he says.

Anny Sanchez, originally from Colombia, was recruited by Mr. Rodriguez after the two happened to meet while she was working at a convenience store in Chelsea, a city near Boston. When she spoke with a Monitor reporter over Zoom, she proudly showed all of her race medals on display behind her. Since joining Stride for Stride, she’s finished at least 38 races.

Both Mr. Rodriguez and Ms. Sanchez say Stride for Stride offers them a community, one that supports them as they strive to achieve not just their athletic goals, but their personal and professional goals as well. 

“The team is wonderful. When I can hear everyone telling a different story, it’s inspirational ... and makes me feel like I’m strong enough,” Ms. Sanchez says. 

An unexpected relay

Back at the Saturday meet-up in Brookline, Mr. O’Keefe watches his team stretch. He normally runs or bikes with the group, but today he is resting to prepare for an expected kidney transplant. 

Mr. O’Keefe had felt defeated when a family member was rejected as a match the year before. Two days later, Stride for Stride member Jorge Rosales started the process to become his donor. If everything goes as planned, they will line up at the start of the 2024 New York City Marathon side by side, as donor and recipient. This time Mr. O’Keefe will be on the receiving end.

AP

A man holds a poster reading "Freedom for Seva Korolev and all political prisoners" on Feb. 21 as he comes to pay tribute to Alexei Navalny at a monument, a large boulder from the Solovetsky islands, where the first camp of the Gulag political prison system was established in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Recent protests in the United States, Israel, and Iran have been notable for being leaderless. Held together mainly by civic values spread on social media, they were able to draw greater attention to their message than a messianic leader. This is now the position in which Russia’s democratic movement finds itself following what appears to be the killing last week of leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

His exiled widow, Yulia Navalnaya, vows to carry forward the campaign against the regime of Vladimir Putin that Mr. Navalny began 15 years ago. It is too early to tell if many Russians will coalesce behind her. Yet like her husband, she reflects the vision of a Russia that someday embraces honest governance and a freedom from fear.

“Russia can be a normal European country,” she told the European Union this week. “A country where political conflicts are resolved through fair elections and not through prisons, poisons, and bullets. ... Full of dignity, justice, and love.” Earlier the same day, she posted a video on YouTube encouraging pro-democracy supporters to not be afraid. 

Her words mirror her husband’s conviction that individual Russians have the capacity to lift up their country. “That’s his legacy, the raising of at least one generation of politically aware and kind people who understand that democracy, truth, freedom of speech is a good thing,” one of his campaign’s volunteers, Anna Kovalevskaya, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

He led by example as much as by organizational skill. “Perhaps [Mr. Navalny’s] most important political insight was his recognition of how his own moral leadership – the sacrifices of his health and freedom he was willing to make on behalf of his cause – could cut through the cynicism that so often dominates Russian political life,” wrote Dylan Myles-Primakoff, a Russia expert at the Atlantic Council.

Many public memorials to Mr. Navalny reflect the call to action that he inspired. Some people are “saying that hope died together with Navalny,” Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the exiled Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot, told The Associated Press during a protest outside the Russian Embassy in Berlin on Sunday. “But it seems to me that with [the death of] Navalny it wasn’t the hope that died, but rather responsibility was born.”

In his closing statement during his 2021 trial that led to his Siberian imprisonment, Mr. Navalny rooted the certainty of his democratic cause in a line from Jesus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” He saw those words as “more or less an instruction to activity,” or “participation in the battle between good and neutrality,” as he told Russian writer Boris Akunin.

Ms. Navalnaya urged European leaders to withhold recognition of Mr. Putin as Russia’s president after next month’s elections that are set up for his victory. But her most important suggestion was to “always distinguish” between Mr. Putin and the Russian people. They are the leaders more than any one person.