“Victory” is the word used by Syria’s pro-regime media to mark President Bashar al-Assad’s survival of the most brutal war of the 21st century, which on March 11 will have blazed for a decade.

President Assad made no compromise with internal opponents calling for more inclusive, democratic rule, nor with the Islamic State jihadis who tried and failed to turn Syria into their caliphate.

Instead, Mr. Assad avoided defeat by using chemical weapons, systematic torture, and no-holds-barred tactics that turned whole cities to rubble and left several hundred thousand Syrians dead.

But his victory is pyrrhic, analysts say.

“Victory for Assad was first and foremost survival,” says Julien Barnes-Dacey, a Syria expert and director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

“From the outset, Assad and his supporters made clear it was, ‘Assad or the country burns,’ and he delivered on that in his fight against the opposition,” Mr. Barnes-Dacey says.

“So he is now king of a devastated country whose outlook is one of utter despair and intensifying collapse,” he says. “If the price to be paid for survival is ongoing implosion, I think the regime is perfectly prepared to pay that price.”

Yet the continued cost to his people is incalculable.

Children have frozen to death in refugee camps, among more than half the prewar population displaced from their homes. Foreign forces or their proxies occupy large chunks of territory and control the bulk of Syria’s resources.

Chronic food scarcity stalks 60% of Syrians and is still soaring – along with food prices – as the economy collapses, according to the United Nations.

And fear of Mr. Assad’s rule is as pervasive as ever, with no end in sight.

Survey of young Syrians

The scale of the damage to Syria’s social fabric is clear in a survey of 1,400 young Syrians – 800 of them inside the country – released Wednesday by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

It found a generation scarred. In Syria, nearly half of young people knew a close relative or friend killed in the conflict.

“This has been a decade of savage loss for all Syrians,” marked by the “loss of loved ones, loss of opportunities, and loss of control over their future,” said ICRC director Robert Mardini.

Indeed, even as the war grinds into a stalemate on the battlefield – with comparatively little fighting in the last year – food scarcity “has never been worse,” according to the U.N.’s World Food Program. It reports a record 12.4 million Syrians are “food insecure,” with severe cases doubling in the past year alone.

Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters/File

Tents of internally displaced Syrians in the Northern Aleppo countryside, Dec. 19, 2020.

Despite the regime claims of victory there is little sense of one. 

“Internally, the regime is starting to feel that burden of the win: You have survived, but you control almost nothing,” says Abdulrahman al-Masri, a Syria analyst with the Atlantic Council.

“The future is definitely dim for all Syrians, for Assad, for all those actors on the opposition side. There are no hopeful prospects for anything moving forward.”

That has consequences not only for Mr. Assad and the Syrian people, but for the outside forces still deployed across the Syrian landscape, some of whom are assessing the costs of their own engagements.

A country divided

Pro-government forces have advanced to the limits of territory regained in the fighting. 

One quarter of the country, to the northeast, is controlled by the American-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which for years played a crucial role in the U.S. fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).

This is the breadbasket of Syria, and home to its oil resources, now under ethnic Kurdish administration, supported by a residual force of several hundred U.S. troops.

In the northwest, some 12,000 Turkish troops are in the country, to protect the Idlib enclave and a border buffer zone, as well as prevent the creation of an ethnic Kurdish statelet that might help Turkey’s own Kurdish militants wage their war against Ankara.

Adding to the weakness of “victory” for Damascus is a resurgence of ISIS jihadists, whose guerrilla tactics on Syrian government forces – still backed by Russia and Iran – have surged in the past year. Multiple ISIS attacks in the central desert in February, for example, killed more than 50 pro-regime soldiers.

“Today if you look at the military landscape in Syria, the government lost 80% of the natural resources and they’re going to remain out of reach for the foreseeable future,” says Dareen Khalifa, the senior Syria analyst for the International Crisis Group.

“Everyone might get dragged into mission creep. Trump tried to pull out of Syria three times and couldn’t,” she says. “And that’s not because it was Trump, but because it’s really, really difficult.

“There was never a viable exit strategy in place,” Ms. Khalifa says. “The whole rationale behind the war against ISIS was based on defying the local demography and geopolitics around it, and supporting a minority group [the Kurds] that is de facto at war with a neighboring country [Turkey]. It makes it really hard for the Americans to pull out without a catastrophe happening there again.”

“The economic war”

Compounding Mr. Assad’s loss of territory and resources are tightening sanctions, which mean the regime is also “losing the economic war,” she says. Even teachers and technocrats are leaving their government positions for better salaries in the SDF zone.

“They have American protection, they’re sitting on oil, so it’s a better deal,” says Ms. Khalifa.

That result also highlights the growing challenge of providing even basic services, much less food. Syrians increasingly rely on government-subsidized bread, as supplies dwindle and their currency collapses.

Even Russia has started interactions with the Kurdish leadership, and recently began recruiting local militiamen in Kurdish areas under regime control, “though nothing major will happen until the Americans are clearly on their way out,” says Mr. Masri.

Russia wields influence as a broker of cease-fires across multiple frontlines, he says, “but they are really in a trap. They have to manage this constantly and give deep attention to it until actually it can sustain itself.”

SANA/Reuters

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his wife, Asma, plant trees in the city of Draykish, near Tartous, Syria, Dec. 30, 2020. Despite regime claims of victory there is little sense of one.

Along the way, Mr. Assad has shown there are no limits to regime savagery.

The U.N.’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria last week released findings based on a “staggering” wealth of evidence – and 2,500 interviews conducted over 10 years – that the fate of tens of thousands of detained and imprisoned civilians remains unclear, and that thousands more have been subject to “unimaginable suffering” of torture, sexual violence, and death in captivity.

Haunting photographs

There could be no more graphic display than the tens of thousands of photographs smuggled out of Syria in 2013 by a military defector known as “Caesar,” whose job for the regime had been to document deaths in custody. Most of the 6,786 separate victims identified in the images by Human Rights Watch were emaciated and showed horrific signs of torture.

The images still haunt Syrians, according to one man standing in a bread line in the Damascus countryside, who is quoted in detailed research for the Newlines Institute for Strategy & Policy in Washington.

“The moment I start thinking [about revolting], the images of Caesar appear before me,” the man says, according to writers Elizabeth Tsurkov and a Syrian analyst. “It’s as if each photo is etched in my memory, how frail their bodies looked, where they were wounded. I imagine what would happen if I screamed, cursed the regime, and revolted.”

That is one result, after 10 years of a war in which the U.N.’s last estimated death toll was 400,000 – way back in 2016.

“Perceptions about the extent of regime brutality are so well entrenched now in society that even if the economic and security situation deteriorate rapidly, I think people are just too drained to try to mobilize against the regime,” says Ms. Khalifa of ICG. “They now know where the balance of power lies.”

And that power does not lie with Syria’s embattled citizens, the U.N., or any outside actor.

“Assad’s strategy was, at its very essence, one of coercively imposing of his rule on the country, much of which rejected him,” says Mr. Barnes-Dacey of ECFR, who before the war lived in Syria for more than three years.

“We continue to see that calculation given that the regime won’t cede an inch on any kind of reform, which I think reflects a belief that, once they open the door an inch, everything will give way.”

Drew Angerer/Reuters

Merrick Garland testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on Feb. 22, 2021.

If the United States had not taken in Merrick Garland’s grandmother when she fled anti-Semitism in Europe, it’s not just that he would be living in Belarus. He wouldn’t be living at all, he says. 

“My grandparents knew that they owed their lives to the willingness of America to take them in. And the same is true for me,” Judge Garland told University of New Hampshire (UNH) law school students in a talk last fall. “The reason that I and my siblings and my parents try to do as much public service and as much community service as we could was to pay the country back for the sanctuary that it provided to my family.” 

When the Harvard-trained lawyer got a call back in 1989 asking him to quit his private practice and come work for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., Mr. Garland said yes, leaving his law firm office for a windowless cubbyhole studded with stale cigarette butts.

It wasn’t the last time his commitment to public service would be tested. After Mr. Garland won widespread praise for his handling of the Oklahoma City bombing investigation in 1995, his nomination to become a U.S. circuit judge in Washington, D.C., languished for 18 months before the Senate confirmed him. President Barack Obama thrice considered nominating him for a Supreme Court appointment; when Mr. Obama finally did, the Republican-led Senate refused to hold a confirmation hearing before the 2016 election, which ushered in President Donald Trump and a trio of conservative justices. 

On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed him 70-30 to a job that he described in a Feb. 22 hearing as “the highest, best use of my own set of skills to pay back [the United States].”

Four decades earlier, fresh off a Harvard Law School education that he financed in part by selling his prized collection of Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Fantastic Four comic books for $1,000, there was no guarantee he would rise to such an influential position.

“I was sent to Oklahoma City”

In 1979, the young lawyer landed a job “in the room where it happens,” as the saying goes. He was the special assistant to the attorney general of the United States in the post-Watergate era, amid the development of a set of norms intended to protect the independence of the department. “But you don’t actually get to do anything about what happened, except give peanut gallery advice,” he told UNH students in his talk, a Zoom event moderated by one of his former clerks, Maggie Goodlander, an adjunct professor of constitutional law at UNH’s Franklin Pierce School of Law.

Fast-forward to April 19, 1995, and he was once again in the room, but this time he was no longer relegated to the peanut gallery. As top deputy to the deputy attorney general of the United States, he got an email that a gas explosion had occurred at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which housed numerous agencies as well as a day-care center.

Ten minutes later came the update: It was a bomb, not a gas explosion. Images started coming through on CNN that reminded him of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 American military personnel. The U.S. attorney general in Oklahoma City had just become a federal judge, and the acting attorney general was a civil attorney.

“I was in the room … when the acting U.S. attorney called Attorney General [Janet] Reno and said, ‘You have to send somebody,’” he told the UNH students. “I had a lot of experience filing crime cases – I was the only one in the room who did – and I was sent to Oklahoma City.”

By the time Mr. Garland arrived, the FBI had a strong lead on Timothy McVeigh. Mr. Garland, the top DOJ official deployed to Oklahoma City, was taken to an Air Force base where Mr. McVeigh was brought for his first presentment.

Mr. Garland, determined to squelch any conspiracy theories, demanded that the press be allowed into the briefing room on the base. The FBI backed him up, and the Air Force eventually relented. Mr. McVeigh, a 26-year-old Gulf War veteran angered by the government’s 1993 siege on the Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas, that left 76 dead, was charged with the bombing of the building. 

AP/File

The north side of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is shown after a bomb that killed 168 people and injured hundreds on April 19, 1995. When Merrick Garland, who was at the time the principal deputy to the deputy attorney general, was first taken to the site, he recalls it looking like a “battleground.” He later won widespread praise for his handling of the investigation.

When Mr. Garland was taken to the bomb site, he recalls it looking like a “battleground,” with National Guard troops stationed around it. People were worried it could be the beginning of a larger spate of domestic terrorism.

Mr. Garland insisted on doing everything “by the book,” requiring a subpoena even when people offered to hand over evidence, and requiring a second warrant to search a car for a second time, the Los Angeles Times reported. Donna Bucella, former director of the executive office for United States attorneys, who was on the ground with him in Oklahoma City, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month that he also made sure the applications for wiretaps, search warrants, and other investigative tools were reviewed and approved by each federal district where the evidence was sought, as well as by the FBI & DOJ. He welcomed and listened to diverse opinions, she added.

Indeed, many Republicans, and even the lawyers for Mr. McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols, praised his work. 

Mr. McVeigh was convicted along with Mr. Nichols and was executed in 2001. Mr. Nichols was given a life sentence without parole. Some 168 people were killed in the bombing, and Mr. Garland spent significant time meeting with survivors.

“The work that he did after the bombing in 1995 for Oklahoma, Oklahomans have never forgotten,” says GOP Sen. James Lankford, who represents the state and voted to confirm Mr. Garland. “He was very engaged. He was very good.”

Don Ayer, who served as deputy attorney general during George W. Bush’s presidency, described Mr. Garland in a letter supporting his 1997 confirmation as someone “driven more by a sense of public service than of personal aggrandizement.”

“My own service in the Justice Department during the last two Republican Administrations convinced me that government suffers greatly from a shortage of people combining such exceptional abilities with a primary drive to serve interests beyond their own,” Mr. Ayer wrote, urging the Senate to seize the opportunity to add him to the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was confirmed 76-23 amid GOP opposition to adding another judge to the circuit at that time. 

Policing and voting reforms

In this round of confirmation hearings, Democrats presented Judge Garland as a brilliant and fair advocate for justice, and particularly well suited to the task of investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“He is personally driven to root out hate – and to, especially, stop its most violent manifestation in the terrorism of our fellow Americans,” says Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Mr. Garland, who showed no public bitterness over the GOP’s thwarting of his Supreme Court nomination nearly five years ago, also won support from some Republican senators before his confirmation Tuesday as attorney general – including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who praised him for also recognizing the persistent threat of foreign terrorism. 

But not all were convinced he’d be the right person to take the helm of the Justice Department as a major investigation into domestic extremism gets underway.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican member of the Judiciary Committee and one of a handful of senators who on Jan. 6 objected to the Electoral College results from two battleground states that President Donald Trump lost in 2020, said he was disappointed that Judge Garland did not characterize left-wing assaults on the federal courthouse in Portland and the violence directed against numerous law enforcement officers as domestic terrorism.

Though the new attorney general was seen as a more centrist choice than some progressives were hoping for, some Republicans worried the Biden administration will use the Department of Justice to usher in sweeping reforms to policing and voting that Democrats say are necessary to combat systemic racism and voter suppression. They point in particular to how his more liberal deputies could steer the department, including civil rights lawyer Vanita Gupta, Mr. Biden’s nominee for the No. 3 slot at the DOJ who faced a tough grilling from GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee March 9.

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, another GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, pressed Mr. Garland on how exactly he would define systemic racism. The judge responded that it signified discrimination and widespread disparate treatment of communities of color caused by a combination of historic impact, unconscious bias, and sometimes conscious bias. 

“I’m thinking it through in terms of whether he has what it takes to run the Justice Department in a fair and equitable manner – and that means fair to all Americans,” says Senator Kennedy. “What worries me about many – not all, but many – of my Democratic friends is they just don’t seem to care about average middle-class Americans unless they’re part of a specific minority that they deem worthy. And I think we’re all worthy in America.”  

Still, amid fears of a resurgence in domestic extremism, Mr. Garland’s widely praised handling of the Oklahoma City bombing as well as his role in bringing the elusive Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, to justice the following year, suggests he will pursue the Jan. 6 investigation in a serious way that has a chance of winning bipartisan approval.

Prosecutors have so far charged more than 300 individuals in the attack, including Justice Department indictments against members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Judge Garland has pledged to make the investigation his top priority upon taking office.

“If anything was necessary to refocus our attention on white supremacists, that was the attack on the Capitol,” he told Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in the hearings. “I expect to put all departmental resources necessary to combat this problem into this area, to make sure both our agents and our prosecutors have the numbers and the resources to accomplish that mission.”

Jamie Gorelick, who was Judge Garland’s boss and the No. 2 official at the DOJ when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, says in an interview that his collaborative approach enabled him to coordinate many different agencies in the wake of the bombing – an approach she says will be needed in the Jan. 6 investigation as well. 

In addition to possessing a passion for justice and ensuring the nation’s security, she identifies another reason for Judge Garland’s determination when it comes to investigating such cases. 

“He saw domestic terrorism up close, and he knows how divisive and terrifying it can be – and therefore that it must be addressed,” she says. 

Ian Brennan and Marilena Umuhoza Delli see the world differently than other record company scouts.

The married couple seeks out unconventional musical talent in parts of the globe that have experienced genocide, war, and dire poverty. Among those they have recorded: Viet Cong veterans in Vietnam and Khmer Rouge survivors in Cambodia. Debuting March 12, their latest compilation, “I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be” (Six Degrees Records), consists of field recordings sung by ostracized women in Ghana who’ve been accused of witchcraft and have bonded together in camps. 

“More than danger or hostility, what we’ve encountered is more often amusement,” says Mr. Brennan of the people they approach: “‘What are they doing here?’ and ‘They want to hear us?’” 

Although the languages on these recordings may be foreign to listeners, the emotional qualities in the songs don’t require translation. Mr. Brennan and Ms. Delli hope that the music will engender a compassionate kinship with those living in the longitudes and latitudes that are often marginalized in Western media.

“When I first interviewed Ian, it struck me that he wasn’t interested in recording music as a commercial product,” writes Marco Werman, host of the radio show “The World,” a co-production of WGBH radio and PRX, in an email. “He wanted listeners to know about disenfranchised people around the globe for whom music is their last and only form of expression – albinos in Tanzania, inmates in Malawi, so-called witches in Ghana – meaning it transcends entertainment. And yet every one of these albums is utterly captivating.”

Mr. Brennan produces the recordings. Ms. Delli photographs and films the proceedings. The couple’s first project was a 2010 documentary, “Rwanda’ Mama,” by Ms. Delli, who is Italian and Rwandan. She filmed her mother’s journey from Italy to her original home of Rwanda many years after she’d been orphaned by a genocide. That led the couple to discover The Good Ones, a music trio consisting of representatives from all three main tribes of Rwanda. For Mr. Brennan, who’d previously produced Grammy-nominated albums by American songwriters Peter Case and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, recording The Good Ones sparked his desire to “de-exoticize” music from other cultures.

More than 30 albums later, he and his wife visited Ghana’s “witch camps” in December 2018. “The music becomes like a form of therapy [for the performers], especially in this project,” says Ms. Delli.

The duo recorded more than 100 Ghanaian women in three locations. The songs, sung in rare dialects, feature titles such as “Hatred Drove Me From My Home” and “Abandoned (Forced Into A Life Of Prostitution).” The short songs feature haiku-like lyrics or phrases repeated over and over in chant-like rhythms.

Many of the women have been exiled after being blamed for a natural calamity, a mishap, or an illness. The accusations often result from superstition. Ms. Delli says some women have also been labeled as witches in a cynical bid to deprive them of their land. 

“We had the chance to meet these incredible human beings who really, truly embody resilience and strength,” says Ms. Delli. “The women have been ostracized, dehumanized, stripped of their dignity, stripped of their land, and now, through music, they were able to convey all of those experiences.”

“The surest way to healing is to share your stories,” says Mr. Brennan. “We all feel better when we talk about things, when someone is receptive and empathic.”

Mr. Brennan funds the recording of his mostly unprofitable album projects through his sideline business: teaching courses in nonviolence. After years of working inside psychiatric hospitals, he developed sought-after techniques for handling volatile situations. He’s also written related books such as “Anger Antidotes” and “Hate-less.” The producer’s interest in nonviolence often dovetails with the duo’s musical projects, many of which feature musicians who’ve experienced brutality.

“What I love about Ian and Marilena’s work is their respect of voice,” writes Corin Tucker, a singer and songwriter in the indie rock band Sleater-Kinney and a guest on the couple's 2019 recording of The Good Ones, via a spokesperson. “Voice in songwriting is not just the singing, but the style each artist tells their story with. With each album, I think they strive to help underrepresented artists find their unique voice and bring their songs to the world with it.”

Most of the songs on “I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be” are solo pieces, but several, such as “Love,” feature a joyous chorus of villagers whooping and harmonizing together. In place of percussion instruments, the album’s performers tapped rhythms on cornhusks, tin cans, and even a balloon. During one of the recording sessions, Mr. Brennan and Ms. Delli noticed another woman lingering nearby, her face full of emotion. They encouraged her to sing something. 

“We were being pressured by the leaders of the village to get out,” recalls Mr. Brennan. “They were interrupting as we were trying to record her. They were trying to stop us before we began: ‘She can’t sing. You don’t need to hear her.’” 

Mr. Brennan says the woman’s song, “Left to Live Like an Animal,” is the album’s most transcendent moment. It exemplifies how he seeks to capture an intimacy in his recordings that he believes is often missing in overly rehearsed, overdubbed, and overproduced modern music. 

“It comes from leading with love – love of music, love of people, and showing an interest,” he says. “Most people are denied intimacy even with the people that they’re supposed to be intimate with, wherever you are in the world. ... So it’s a very powerful thing to give someone sincere attention.”

For the couple, the satisfaction of their work comes from shining a spotlight on places in the world that some people have never heard of. Case in point: Their next release is an album recorded in one of the world’s tiniest countries – Comoros, comprised of a group of islands in the Indian Ocean. The duo’s projects aren’t destined to be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which they say is just fine by them. They prize the musical connections they’ve forged. 

“We discovered that the Tanzania Albinism Collective continues to get together twice a week to make music just for the sake of making music with people who had never made music,” says Mr. Brennan. “That’s, to me, much greater success than for them to be ‘stars.’” 

For the past couple of years I’ve been volunteering to help Guatemalan refugees who have made their way to, of all places, northern Maine. I translate, connect them with social services, negotiate difficulties their children are encountering in school, and generally help them adjust to an environment that couldn’t be more alien to them (think snow).

While this looks like good work, and I believe that it is, not everyone would agree. I was recently approached by someone who extolled the benefits of a southern border wall to stem the flow of the type of immigration that I, in this man’s opinion, was abetting. “You’re part of the problem,” he told me.

I don’t want to dismiss my detractor’s criticisms out of hand because, truth to tell, he’s not wrong. I acknowledge that there are immigration laws, and that, when people follow the law, things tend to run more smoothly. So why do I do what I do? Let me explain by way of example. 

The other day I took 17-year-old Martín to a thrift store so he could buy some warm winter clothing. Martín doesn’t speak English, and Spanish speakers are few and far between in my part of Maine, so he stayed very close to me. I told him that he could pick out anything he liked, but that he should prioritize a heavy coat and boots. When we got to the cashier he opened his wallet, but there was only $2 in it. I assured him that the clothing was my treat, and he beamed.

Once in the car, Martín told me more than I previously knew about his personal story: the long walk from Guatemala to Mexico, crossing the U.S. border, being detained, making his way to Maine with neither family nor friends for comfort and encouragement. As we drove along, his narrative unwound in a matter-of-fact fashion, begging neither sympathy nor approval. 

And then something happened that gave me pause.  

We were stopped at an intersection where a disheveled, middle-aged man was holding up a sign that read, “Homeless. Please help.” Martín intuited the man’s need and, turning to me, asked, “Does that man have a home?” I told Martín what the sign said and watched as he pulled out his wallet, extracted his $2 – all the money he had – and reached out the window to give it to the man.

In that moment of elucidation there was much that I suddenly understood. I still acknowledged that, at some level, the man who had told me I was part of the immigration problem was right. But I can’t get my head around that monumental issue that has stymied legislatures for years. In short, I can’t take care of everybody. But I could take care of the young man sitting next to me by providing him with warm clothing, just as he had, in small measure, taken care of the homeless man by handing him his last couple of bucks.

I think that, once I divorce politics from the better angels of my nature, the issue becomes clear: If somebody comes to my door and tells me he’s hungry, I would not first ask him if he was here legally, any more than I would ask an accident victim if he was wearing a seat belt. The only question that would matter in that case is, “Are you OK?”

Just as I was considering this, I paused in my ruminations to ask Martín if there was anything else I could do for him.

Always hesitant to inconvenience me, Martín pulled himself together and said, “I’m hungry.”

And so I fed him.

AP

Protesters in Manila hold slogans against a new law in China that authorizes its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels and destroy other countries' structures on islands it claims.

When it was first set up 14 years ago, the loose alliance of nations known as the Quad – Australia, India, Japan, and the United States – clearly had the purpose of constraining China’s aggressive behavior in Asia. It was widely seen as a potential “Asian NATO.” The four democratic states even held joint naval exercises last November.

Now on Friday, their top leaders will be holding the first Quad summit (virtually). And this club of nations is wondering if it should be better known by what its members have in common – their shared values, such as rule of law – than what they oppose. Merely defining China as a foe might give that country more power than it deserves.

For his part, President Joe Biden is portraying the Quad as a showcase for what democracies can deliver in the region, from delivering COVID-19 vaccines to taking action on climate change to boosting economic growth. Without mentioning China, the U.S. State Department said the Quad still has an interest in maritime security. But its shared interests go well beyond that. The Quad will move “towards the more positive vision that we all seek,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price.

A key test for the Quad’s identity could come after the summit. In a visit to Seoul next week, U.S. security officials may ask South Korea to become associated with the group. That puts the Asian country in a tight spot. South Korea’s largest trading partner is China. It has already felt Beijing’s wrath after deploying a U.S. anti-missile defense system on its soil to deter North Korean attacks.

Seoul prefers the Quad be seen as a group of like-minded democracies that does not treat China as an enemy. It wants the Quad to be transparent and inclusive, standing up for rule-based international norms.

Values-based partnerships among nations do have a longer shelf life. The United Nations, for example, has survived 75 years because its charter is based on principles common to humanity. Britain has lately proposed a club of 10 democratic countries (“D-10”). The world still needs to balance power and interests between nations. But sometimes the best glue for peace is something more enduring. India says the Quad stands for freedom, openness, and prosperity. It’s hard to be an enemy of that.