Sipa/AP

The leader of the militant Islamic State (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has made what would be his first public appearance at a mosque in the center of Iraq's second city Mosul, according to a video recording posted online on July 5, 2014.

The terrorist attack on London Bridge over the weekend has reignited a debate about tech companies’ level of responsibility in preventing terrorism. Hours after Saturday’s attack, British Prime Minister Theresa May called for a regulatory crackdown on online content and criticized the tech industry for giving extremist ideology “the safe space it needs to breed.”

London Mayor Sadiq Khan echoed that call in a statement Monday. “After every terrorist attack we rightly say that the internet providers and social media companies need to act and restrict access to these poisonous materials,” he said. “But it has not happened ... now it simply must happen.”

But analysts say pushing technology companies to remove extremist content may not be the straightforward solution it seems.

There are expected censorship concerns, but, it’s not as simple as free speech versus security. Some say removing content might not be effective in disconnecting Islamic State (ISIS) recruiters from potential recruits, and may even make it more challenging for intelligence agencies to monitor terrorist plots online. Others suggest focusing on online content is a distraction, and efforts should instead try to prevent those susceptible to extremist messages from seeking them out online in the first place. 

These calls come as reports surfaced that one of the three attackers responsible for Saturday’s terrorist attack may have been radicalized by extremist sermons on YouTube.

ISIS videos and other materials have also surfaced online in the past year that highlight how to maximize damage with a vehicle and knife attack – a script that is eerily similar to the London Bridge attack that left seven dead and 48 injured.

The line between stifling speech and thwarting terrorism

The open nature of the internet has long been criticized by regulatory advocates as offering terrorists a free forum to circulate extremist content. By one count, as many as 90 percent of terrorist attacks in the past four years have had an online component to them. But those opposed to a regulatory approach cite concerns that cracking down on questionable content risks casting too broad a brush, censoring legitimate content. 

When it comes to extremist content, treading that line is tricky. Unlike some content, such as child pornography, holding extreme views isn’t illegal – and neither is broadcasting them in the United States. As such, it takes a value judgment to decide which content to remove.

An algorithm can’t pick up on the necessary nuances to find the line between over-censorship and dangerous extremist content, says Aram Sinnreich, professor of communications at American University in Washington. “There are no paths that preserve anything remotely approaching an open internet, and at the same time preventing ISIS from posting recruitment videos.”

Many large tech companies have tried to compromise by employing an army of human workers to review content flagged by users as problematic. The reviewers use the tech company’s terms of use as guidance, but in the case of extremist content, it’s not always black and white.

But Hany Farid, senior adviser to the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, says it is possible for an algorithm to find the sweet spot, as long as humans work with it. A computer science professor at Dartmouth College, Dr. Farid helped develop the tool now used by most internet companies to identify and remove child pornography. He has also developed a more sophisticated tool that he says can be harnessed to weed out extremist content.

Farid says internet companies’ concerns about crossing the line into censorship are unfounded.

“I’m not buying the story” that it’s too difficult or there’s a slippery slope leading to more censorship, Farid says. “That’s a smokescreen, saying there’s a gray area. Of course there is. But it doesn’t mean we don’t do anything. You deal with the black and white cases, and deal with the gray cases when you have to.”

Tech companies have gone through “an evolution of thinking” recently and are now more proactively removing content on their own, says Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He points to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing as a turning point. Investigators found clues that the attackers may have learned how to make a bomb from Inspire magazine, an online, English-language publication reportedly by the organization Al Qaeda.

“It became so there was less of a level of acceptance for general propaganda to be floating out there,” Mr. Hughes says.

In one initiative launched last year, the tech giants are teaming up to make it easier to spot terrorism-related content. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have developed channels to share information about such extremist content and accounts so that individual companies can find and take it down more quickly.

Whack-a-mole concerns 

Still, some say that removing content might not actually be an effective approach to stem radicalization and recruitment by terrorist organizations.

One concern is that extremist content will simply move to other platforms.

“It’s sort of a whack-a-mole kind of problem,” says Eric Rosand, senior fellow in the Project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution and director of The Prevention Project: Organizing Against Violent Extremism in Washington, D.C. “Terrorists will find another way to reach out with propaganda” if it’s removed.

That could mean moving onto smaller platforms with more encryption and less bandwidth to review and remove content.

This content could also be moved to the dark web, a section of the internet that is dense with encryption and challenging for intelligence officials to track. Sure, there’s a limited audience in the dark web, a detail which could reduce recruitment for organizations like ISIS, Hughes says, but those who do make it into the depths of the dark web are particularly dedicated.

And then there’s the question of where intelligence agencies can best keep tabs on extremists, Hughes says. “Is it better for these guys to be on the systems where we know we can [collect information on] them, we know who everyone is, but they can reach more people? Or is it better to push them off to the margins so they’re only talking to who they already were going to talk to to begin with?”

Counter-messaging

Some tech companies and government officials have been weighing alternative options to counteract extremist content. One idea is to harness the tools of the internet and social media to reach people in danger of being radicalized – in other words, use the same tools as ISIS in a sort of counter-messaging effort.

Google’s 2015 pilot project, the “Redirect Method,” tried to target the audience most susceptible to online recruitment and radicalization and, when they searched for certain terms, directed them toward existing YouTube videos that counter terrorists’ messages. The project used similar principles that businesses use to target ads to certain consumers.

Similarly, officials in the State Department’s Global Engagement Center have used paid ads on Facebook as a means of reaching out to young Muslims who may be targeted by extremist recruiters. The ads are for videos and messaging that counteract what they hear from jihadists.

But online content might not be as responsible for radicalizing terrorists as some politicians are implying, says Dr. Rosand of Brookings. “It’s as much about the offline networks, it’s as much about the grievances that drove them to violence, or made them very susceptible to violent messages, as they become radicalized.”

He suggests that politicians instead encourage tech companies to invest in communities by providing other alternatives to the path of terrorism. “How do you give them options, other than going online, to search for meaning in their lives? We don’t invest enough in that.”

Hammurabi's Justice News/AP

A US-backed anti-government Syrian fighter from Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra stands on a vehicle with a heavy automatic machine gun, left, next to a US soldier who also stands on his armored vehicle, right, as they take their position at the Syrian-Iraqi border crossing near Tanf, Syria, on Tuesday, May 23, 2017.

US-backed forces announced Tuesday that they had begun the long-awaited assault on the northeastern Syrian city of Raqqa, the so-called Islamic State's main stronghold in the country and its self-declared capital.

But some 170 miles to the south, in a remote corner of Syria’s southeastern desert, another clash is brewing that is pitting the strategic objectives of the United States against those of Iran, and that could soon bring US troops and Iranian-backed forces into direct military confrontation.

Both US and Russian warplanes have been deployed, and some shots have already been fired, including by US-backed coalition forces on Tuesday, the US military said.

The clash is over a military garrison at Tanf, located near a border crossing on a highway that cuts through hundreds of miles of flat desert. It was captured from jihadist forces more than a year ago and is being used by US Special Forces and allies to train Syrian militias to fight ISIS, which controls territory to the northeast.

But if Tanf’s main value to the US so far has been in the war on ISIS, it has also, perhaps unwittingly, become a front-line outpost in the US containment of regional power Iran, whose allies are advancing on the garrison from two directions.

Their interest in the highway is that it links Baghdad and Damascus and serves as a coveted overland route that could provide Iran with access to its strategic Lebanese Shiite ally, Hezbollah.

At a junction on the highway, 50 miles northwest of the garrison in the direction of Damascus, a combined force of Syrian troops, Hezbollah fighters, and Iraqi Shiite militiamen are mobilizing for a southward thrust to seize the Tanf border crossing.

On the Iraqi side of the border, southeast of Tanf, the Hashd ash-Shaabi, an Iran-supported Iraqi Shiite militia sanctioned by Baghdad, is reportedly deploying in readiness to drive ISIS out of Iraqi territory between Tanf and Al-Qaim, another border town 136 miles to the northeast.

And wedged between these two Iranian-backed forces are the US, British, Norwegian, and possibly Jordanian special forces, as well as the Syrian militia groups they have helped to train.

Shots fired

With both sides girding for a fight, the coming days or weeks could see US and allied troops coming into conflict with Iranian-backed forces for the first time in Syria’s six-year civil war.

“I think any assault on Tanf [by Iranian-backed groups] would meet with a vigorous and effective military response,” says Frederic C. Hof, director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in Washington and previously a State Department liaison with Syrian opposition forces. “I do not know the rules of engagement in effect for US ground forces, but an Iranian-Hezbollah assault on Tanf would, I think, be quite reckless and not likely to succeed.”

The two sides have already come to blows twice. On May 18, US aircraft attacked a convoy of Shiite militiamen speeding southeast along the highway in breach of a deconfliction zone of some 20 miles around Tanf. Several vehicles were destroyed in the air strike and six militants were killed.

And Tuesday, according to an official statement from the US-led coalition, a pro-regime force again entered the deconfliction zone and was fired upon. Two artillery pieces and an antiaircraft weapon were destroyed, the statement said, and a tank damaged. There was no word on casualties among the 60 fighters reported in the pro-regime force.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Clash is coming

In light of the militia build-up north of Tanf, a spokesman for the Baghdad-based anti-ISIS coalition said last week that “we have increased our presence and footprint” in southern Syria, adding that the mobilization of Iranian-backed militia forces near Tanf was viewed as a “threat.” US aircraft have also dropped leaflets on the militia forces, warning them to stay away from Tanf.

But the Iranian-backed forces and the Syrian army appear determined to seize the Tanf border crossing, even if it risks a confrontation with US forces.

“Our people are gathering in the Tanf area right now, so a clash is definitely coming,” says a Hezbollah unit commander speaking on condition of anonymity in Beirut.

Iran has a strategic interest in gaining control over the crossing as it represents the last remaining link in securing an east-to-west land corridor reaching from Iran to Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast via Iraq and Syria. Guarded by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, the transport link would allow Tehran to ferry fighters to Syrian battlefronts and armaments to its Hezbollah ally in Lebanon.

But the US-led coalition against ISIS appears equally determined to defend its presence in this remote spot to maintain its ability to continue its unconventional warfare campaign against ISIS-held territory to the northeast.

At least three Syrian armed groups are operating alongside the Americans and British at Tanf as part of the “train and equip” program to defeat ISIS: the Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra (Revolutionary Commandos Army), the Ahmad Abdo Martyrs Group, and Jaysh Osoud al-Sharqiya (Lions of the East Army).

Iran's ambitions

The Tanf border crossing was captured from ISIS in March 2016 by US- and British-supported Syrian forces trained in Jordan. The role of these units, according to a former senior Pentagon official, was to relieve pressure on the border with Jordan, which lies only 14 miles south of Tanf, and to pressure ISIS along the Euphrates River valley, 140 miles to the northeast, which serves as a key communications line for the extremists between Syria and Iraq.

But the coalition’s anti-ISIS agenda has collided with Iran’s strategic ambitions for the area.

“The challenge is that Iran and its proxies would very much like to establish some sort of land bridge from Iraq into Syria and they have had designs on this for quite some time,” the former Pentagon official says. “Initially, the United States and the coalition had planned this unconventional warfare campaign to pressure the middle Euphrates River valley and cut off [ISIS communications lines]. Now, ironically, it’s not just threatening [ISIS], it’s also threatening Iran’s designs for the area.”

In April, the Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra pushed across the desert to the northeast of Tanf into ISIS-controlled territory. The unit, backed by foreign special forces troops, reportedly has captured Jabal Ghrab, a small hill 35 miles north of Tanf that dominates the surrounding landscape. They have also established a new fortified military base, 31 miles northeast of Tanf, according to video footage shot by Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra and uploaded to the internet over the weekend. The footage shows several pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns, as well as an Oshkosh military all-terrain vehicle sporting an American flag.

If the Syrian Army and Iranian-backed Shiite militias succeed in capturing Tanf and securing the border crossing, that risks leaving the US-backed Syrian anti-ISIS units and their special forces advisers stranded in Syria’s southern desert, with ISIS to the northeast and hostile Iranian-supported and Syrian regime forces to the north, west, and south in Iraq.

“Tanf is very important [to the US] not only for defeating ISIS but making sure that it doesn’t come back afterwards. It’s also key to checking Iranian ambitions,” says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Attack by Russian jets

Last week, the US-backed Syrian groups attacked the Shiite militias that had moved south along the highway toward Tanf. Although the Iran-backed militiamen retreated to their staging post at the Zaza checkpoint junction 50 miles north of Tanf, the US-supported forces also were forced to pull back when they were attacked by Russian aircraft.

The potential stakes in the standoff at Tanf are huge. The new US administration is less likely to show hesitancy in Syria than before, especially if its proxy Syrian forces come under attack by Iranian-backed militias.

“American unwillingness to confront Iran and its proxies in Syria, if obliged by circumstances, is a thing of the past,” says Mr. Hof, the former State Department official. “And Moscow would now have to anticipate with high likelihood aerial combat with US forces should it elect to provide tactical air support to Iran and its proxies on the ground.”

If the US and Iranian-supported militias do come to blows, it risks retaliatory actions by Iranian proxies against American troops deployed in Iraq, analysts say. But that is unlikely to deter the US from defending its interests in southern Syria.

“If I was Hezbollah, I would not underestimate the willingness of this administration … to kill Hezbollah in Syria,” the former Pentagon official says.

In pushing a plan to privatize America’s air traffic control system, President Trump is reviving an idea that’s bounced around Washington for 40 years.

At least since 1974, Democratic and Republican presidents, conservative think tanks and labor unions have put forward at various times the idea that some kind of private entity would do a better job than the federal government in directing the nation’s airplane traffic.

Many nations have moved to a corporate model and have adopted modern equipment that has streamlined operations and cut costs.

Mr. Trump is hoping the United States is finally ready to follow suit. “If we adopt these changes, Americans can look forward to cheaper, faster, and safer travel – a future where 20 percent of a ticket price doesn’t go to the government,” the president said in unveiling an overview of his plan at the White House Monday.

The proposal highlights a culture divide between the federal government and the private sector, from which Trump hails and which many conservatives laud as more nimble and effective than government bureaucracy.

It’s not that government always fails or that private companies have an untarnished track record. Defenders of the Federal Aviation Administration laud its safety record and say privatization raises the worry that safety and security could take a back seat to cost control. But critics say the FAA has been faltering for years in its modernization efforts, and that the problem lies not just with bureaucrats but with budget fluctuations and a fickle Congress.

“In principle, it’s an excellent idea” to privatize air traffic control, says Peter Schuck, an emeritus professor at Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn., and author of “Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better.” Much depends on how a privatized system is structured, he adds, but “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work here.”

The US is widely regarded as having the safest and most complex air traffic control system in the world. The FAA, which both oversees and runs the system, handles an average of 50,000 flights a day and more than 800 million passengers a year – not to mention more than 3 million tons of air freight.

Smoother financing under private approach?

Yet the FAA remains woefully behind the curve technologically, in comparison with other developed nations. A 2009 research report from Suffolk University Law School in Boston found that privatized or corporatized air traffic systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom were able to reduce costs between 5 and 15 percent per airline flight over a seven-year period, while the FAA’s costs rose more than 20 percent over the same period.

Part of the reason is America’s political process. Although much of the FAA’s budget comes from user fees and taxes, Congress still must appropriate its budget every year. When a shutdown, or even a partial government shutdown looms, the agency has to curtail spending on long-term projects, delaying modernization projects and raising costs.

While GPS navigation has made inroads, many pilots in the US still rely in large part on a 1940s-era navigation system based on VHF radio signals. That system of short-range signals prompts airlines to fly waypoint to waypoint instead of directly to their destination, which is the more efficient route.

“At a time when every passenger has GPS technology in their pockets, our air traffic control system still runs on radar and ground-based radio systems,” the president said in his remarks Monday.

The FAA is supposed to move to GPS under its NextGen modernization program, but FAA efforts have been delayed repeatedly by annual congressional battles. In 1993, a performance review overseen by then-Vice President Al Gore, found the FAA was “constantly hamstrung by budget, personnel, and procurement restrictions.” A 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service concluded the same thing, pointing out the agency lacks a dedicated budget for long-term capital expenditures and can’t float bonds to fund such investments.

Proponents of privatization point to two key advantages: The corporations receive stable funding through various user fees and they can raise money in the capital markets to fund modernization.

Security concerns

Opponents argue, in part, that an entity guided largely by commercial interests may prioritize industry profits over safety and security.

Former Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, writing in The Hill on May 16, questioned for instance whether background checks for air traffic controllers might become less rigorous. He added that the FAA’s role has included securing airspace during high-profile events such as presidential inaugurations, political conventions, other national special security events, and whenever Air Force One traverses the country.

“Privatization of the air traffic control ... would pose a multitude of chain of command issues, differing priorities, and perspectives that could potentially elevate risk and interfere with the end goal of ensuring aviation security,” Mr. Sullivan wrote.

Although the Trump plan represents a sweeping change, outside analysts generally have not voiced deep concerns about safety. The FAA would still oversee the system, monitoring it for safety, they say.

For its part, the Trump administration has included security issues in its stated principles for privatization. Those principles call for a system with integration and cooperation aimed at ensuring “sustained national security and law enforcement capabilities” and interoperability with the military. And the principles say the system “must be secure, robust, and resilient” in the face of cyber threats. 

A complicating factor for privatization is that the issues and the stakeholders range far beyond security interests.

Players competing for influence

One difference between the US and other nations is that the US has a large and politically influential contingent of private pilots and small aircraft owners, who have resisted the privatization plans put forward by Democratic and Republican presidents over the years. Their fears center around two threats: 1) that the corporation’s board would be dominated by large airlines and unions, which would ignore the needs of private pilots at smaller airports, and 2) that in the search for increased funding, the corporation would begin to impose fees on small planes just as the FAA currently does on large planes.

Local pilots have significant clout. When the FAA tried to trim back the 1,000-plus radio-navigation ground stations to save money, small-plane pilots and others came out in force to oppose the closings.

“It was really just painful,” recalls Frank Frisbie, a retired senior FAA executive who now runs an air traffic management consulting firm. “Every one of these [stations] we tried to shut down had a local constituency.” Pilots didn’t want to change their equipment; farmers found the FAA’s weather broadcasts useful, he says. “And every one of them has a congressman.”

The administration’s proposal builds on an FAA-privatization bill introduced last year by US Rep. Bill Shuster (R) of Pennsylvania. Unlike previous privatization bills, his bill at least got out of committee. It’s not clear, however, how much of Congress is ready to enact Trump’s sweeping reorganization.

“Congress ultimately has authority over this system,” says Mr. Schuck. “The question is to what extent it’s going to relinquish that power in favor of a less politicized, more flexible, more forward-looking governance structure.”

Much may depend on the details of that structure, especially how the proposed entity’s executive board is structured. Rather than guaranteeing slots to representatives from various aviation interest groups, the Trump plan would have the Transportation secretary pick the initial board’s members from the nominating lists of five groups. 

One potential hang-up: General aviation (the private pilots) and airport lists would provide only one member each, while the airlines, unions, and Transportation Department’s lists would provide two each. That eight-member board would then select five additional board members.

How unions workers fare

As in many other nations, the corporation would be nonprofit, funded by user fees, and free to sell bonds for capital improvements. Existing union workers would lose their federal status but would “have similar rights to those they had as federal employees at the FAA.” Left unsaid is what kind of pay and benefits new hires would get. With such concerns pending, the air controllers union has given its provisional backing for the thrust of Trump’s plan. Like FAA controllers, the new employees would not be allowed to strike.

If Congress does pursue privatization, the change won’t be quick. “You can't just snap your fingers and pass a regulation that makes the system modernized,” says Mr. Frisbie, the consultant.

The administration envisions a three-year transition.

Staff writer Mark Trumbull contributed to this report from Washington.

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Nikki Haley became the first US ambassador to the United Nations to address the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 6.

It was no surprise when the United States, responding to recent repression of Venezuelans protesting food shortages and antidemocratic measures, condemned President Nicolas Maduro’s “disregard for the fundamental rights of his own people.”

What made the unvarnished criticism noteworthy was that it came not from the nation’s chief diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, nor from a State Department statement, but from the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

Last month, Ms. Haley was captured by global television cameras packing boxes of staples for Syrian refugees during a visit to an aid distribution center in Turkey – clad in her khaki pants and aid worker’s vest. The intrigue was not so much that an American diplomat was rolling up her sleeves to call attention to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Rather, it was that here was a representative of the new president promoting international humanitarian action and pledging US support for refugees and human rights at the same time her boss is seen widely to be downplaying those traditional American foreign-policy values and goals.

Four months into a Trump presidency typified by transactional diplomacy, retreat from American-led multilateralism, and Mr. Tillerson’s brand of interests-first, values-later international relations, Haley is the foreign-policy outlier.

Already the administration’s lone voice demanding global respect for human rights and democratic aspirations, the former South Carolina governor and daughter of Indian immigrants took her soapbox from New York to Geneva Tuesday. There, she addressed the UN’s Human Rights Council – underscoring the importance she assigns to the issue. (Her staff made a point of trumpeting that Haley would be the first US ambassador to the UN to speak to the council.)

Indeed Haley is so outspoken and public with her message – especially compared with the private and rhetorically parsimonious Tillerson – the world might be excused for thinking she is the new administration’s chief diplomat.

While Haley’s high international profile offers President Trump some advantages, foreign policy experts say, it can also be confusing both to Americans and to the world.

“The juxtaposition of her outspokenness and Rex Tillerson’s reticence may have some value for the president, but it becomes particularly problematic in terms of the administration’s messaging to the world,” says Stewart Patrick, a former policy planning staff member in the George W. Bush State Department who now focuses on US policy and international organizations at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“It can be jarring to people here at home, not least to Congress, but it’s also confusing to allies and problematic in dealing with adversaries abroad,” he adds. “Ultimately that weakens the US position in the world.”

He cites the administration’s mixed messaging – generally with Haley as the outlier – on issues ranging from Russia and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to the place of values in US foreign policy. Tillerson has said Mr. al-Assad might stay; Haley says he must go. Tillerson prizes repairing relations with Russia; Haley blasts Moscow’s obstructionist work on Syria and other issues at the UN.

And Haley places human rights and values at the core of foreign policy. Tillerson, meanwhile, is probably best known so far for his interests-first speech in April in which he warned that conditioning international relations on values “creates obstacles to our ability to advance on our national security interests and our economic interests.”

In contrast, Haley told the Human Rights Council, “Respect for human rights is deeply intertwined with peace and security,” while “human rights violations and abuses often serve as triggers for instability and conflict.” Moreover, she said her presence at the council was meant to “underscore our strong conviction to the protection and promotion of human rights.”

Haley went on to host a council session on Venezuela’s human right abuses, and later gave a speech at the Graduate Institute Geneva on needed reforms and strengthening of the Human Rights Council.  

Washington vs. New York

The “tension” on display is not new to US foreign policy, Dr. Patrick says. But it is much more pronounced in the Trump administration, he adds, “with Nikki Haley at least a little bit out of sync with the more nationalist coterie of the president” – a group he says has  “abandoned the traditional position of stature the White House has given to human rights and promoting American values.”

Indeed some experts say that while there is nothing new in the tension between “Washington and New York” – meaning between the State Department and the US permanent representative to the UN – what is new is the switch in terms of which of the two is the iconoclast, and which represents more traditional US foreign policy.

“Being named the permanent representative in New York is an invitation to quasi independence, but typically it’s been the permanent representative who is the maverick pushing the limits,” says Michael Doyle, an international relations expert at Columbia University in New York. “The irony here is that it’s the permanent representative who is in the mainstream of traditional US foreign policy,” he adds, “and the administration in Washington that is the ‘ex-treme’.”

Dr. Doyle, who has decades of experience working with the UN and observing US ambassadors there, cites a list of Washington’s representatives who hewed their own path and often maintained contentious relations with the White House – from Jeanne Kirkpatrick under President Reagan to John Bolton under President George W. Bush.

“It got to the point with John Bolton that [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice had to insist that he restrict his comments to strictly UN matters and give up the commentary on broader US foreign policy,” Doyle says.

Outliers as assets

But outliers are sometimes useful, and both Doyle and Patrick see ways in which Haley is an asset to Trump – first and foremost, politically.

“Trump’s foreign policy doesn’t sit well with many more traditional Republicans, and so appointing [Haley] was essentially throwing a bone or a chip to the mainstream of the Republican Party,” Doyle says.

“I think there’s a recognition she can be useful to the president to reassure and attract some of the values promoters and the more neoconservative elements” in Washington, Patrick says.

Indeed Haley at times sounds like she’s channeling Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whom she supported in the Republican primaries. And last month Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, a staunch advocate of prioritizing human rights in foreign policy, lauded Haley for her “moral clarity” – a quality he said was necessary to “drive us in the right direction.”

On another level, having Haley represent the US might help Trump smooth relations with allies who have been thrown for a loop by the new administration’s apparent aversion to multilateral engagement.

“Haley’s rhetoric is more traditionally American, and thus is much more acceptable to the community of democratic nations,” Doyle says, “and something of a reassurance that not all of America has gone off the deep end.”

‘Does everybody like Nikki?’

Still, there have been signs of White House irritation with Haley’s outspokenness and independence. In April, the State Department drafted a memo to Haley’s aides directing them to clear her comments with Washington first, according to The New York Times. The memo also advised that public statements should be constructed with “building blocks” provided by Washington, especially on “high-profile” issues like Syria and North Korea.

Then there was the joke that Trump cracked over lunch with UN Security Council diplomats, whom Haley had invited to the White House.

“Now, does everybody like Nikki?” Trump asked, adding, “Because if you don’t, otherwise, she can easily be replaced.” After a few nervous laughs, the president added, “We won’t do that, she’s doing a fantastic job.”

So for now Haley continues on her path, extolling the place of human rights in US foreign policy, and reassuring refugees that the US has not forgotten them. And that outlier position may retain its potency for some time to come, some say, at least until the fate of Trump’s proposed deep cuts to the UN and to humanitarian assistance provide some fresh clarity.

“Her rhetoric will continue to provide reassurances about the US for a while,” Doyle says, “but ultimately it’s the budget decisions that will determine if there’s really anything behind the rhetoric. And of course while there may be some independence with the rhetoric,” he adds, “the budget decisions are made in the president’s shop.”

John Gress/IBM

Nine young women and men earned their associate degrees in technology from Daley College at the commencement held by the City Colleges of Chicago at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago, IL on May 13, 2017.

As a freshman, Stephanie Mula found the University of Massachusetts's engineering program "overwhelming." A first-generation college student, she wasn't sure what to expect, how to get the most out of her classes, or where to look for internships. Nevertheless, she went on to beat the odds of the famously leaky science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline that produces only three professionals for every 100 female students who begin studies in the field. Today, Ms. Mula is an industrial engineer at Raytheon Missile Systems. 

She credits her success in part to the academic and professional advice of her upperclassmen mentor, a participant in a UMASS Amherst pilot program that's revealing significant benefits for same-gender peer mentoring.

Mula says that even in her mostly male classes she never felt like an outsider, but suggests that female-female mentor pairings bond faster. "It helps having similar things to talk about if you’re with a female, similar hobbies or activities," she says in a phone interview. 

An astonishing 100 percent of female engineering students in the study mentored by advanced female students continued on to their second year, a transition point that often sees many choose a different path. Researchers concluded successful female role models made the difference, stemming the decline in self-confidence seen among those with male mentors or no mentor at all. The results, published April in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest identity may play a role in effective mentoring, which could inform programs targeting other underrepresented groups.

Mula later became a mentor herself, and enjoyed setting an example for another future engineer, who she says had concerns about the demanding curriculum's work-life balance. "We lived in the same dorms when we were freshmen and we had gone through the same classes, so seeing that I was going to be successful answered the questions she typically had about how she was going to get to that level," Mula explains. 

Researchers recruited 150 female engineering students without mentioning the study’s nature, and randomly assigned each to a female mentor, a male mentor, or no mentor at all. After a year of monthly one-hour meetings, 100 percent of female-mentored students remained in the engineering program, compared with 89 percent of those with no mentor and 82 percent of those with a male mentor.

“The male mentors that we had were actually really good, but ... I think the mentees didn’t infer that the male mentors’ success had any bearing on their own likely success,” explains author Nilanjana Dasgupta, who stresses that the male-mentor and no-mentor figures fall within the experiment’s margin of error, and do not indicate that students were adversely affected.

She attributes the difference to students having role models who proved female success was possible in the male-dominated field. Quarterly surveys revealed that while male-mentored and no-mentor groups suffered sharp losses of self-confidence and feelings of belonging, the female-mentored group maintained the same levels throughout the year, benefits that persisted even after the mentors graduated.

It was in part this lack of role models that motivated Mula to stay involved with the program. "Sometimes as a female in engineering, if you don’t have any female friends who are also in engineering it’s more difficult. So I wanted to be that person who someone could ask about professors or classes."

For Professor Dasgupta, the program’s results merit swift implementation. She hopes to “take it, package it, and deliver it to the institution so it can be scaled up,” but thinks the “really important question is whether the findings from this gender study generalize to race or social class.”

Jennifer Lindwall, a PhD candidate at Portland, Ore., State University with years of experience overseeing minority youth mentoring programs suspects that they might.

“This idea, ‘if you can see it, you can be it,’ it’s a real thing, and I think for somebody who’s in a challenging academic program, if you don’t see anyone like yourself, whether it’s your gender or your race or your socioeconomic status, it’s kind of impossible to concretely believe that you can succeed,” she explains.

And research backs up Ms. Lindwall’s experience. A 2007 survey of faculty-mentored African-American students among the mainly white student body of Florida State University found that while mentors of all backgrounds helped, a common background facilitated communication and bonding, relieved feelings of loneliness, and correlated with slightly higher grades.

As programs across the country look to mentoring to close achievement gaps, experts say the growing body of mentorship research offers lessons to apply today.

“Make no assumption that all mentors work equally,” recommends Dasgupta. “Oversample the mentors from underrepresented groups so they can work with people coming in from their own group.”

But until a wider pipeline delivers more diverse mentors, coordinators know that’s a tall order. “The reality is, whether it’s ideal or not, mentors and mentees are going to be different in a variety of ways,” says Lindwall.

In the meantime, male and non-minority mentors shouldn’t despair. “If the active ingredient is similarity and feelings of closeness, figure out ways to enhance that similarity,” Dasgupta says.

Lindwall agrees that effective mentoring should be teachable: “If mentors focus on understanding where the student’s at and what they need ... these relationships, even if they’re across gender or race, can go a long way.”

Timing matters too. “The pipeline doesn’t leak evenly,” explains Dasgupta. “It leaks more at the joints, and the joints are when you move from one life phase to another.” She urges intervention at these transitions, such as high school to college. At later stages when identity is more established, or in fields with equal representation, she predicts same-gender mentoring plays a lesser role.

Dasgupta urges young women in STEM to seek out mentorship, formally or informally, both in light of her results and her own experience with mentors. “Some were women, some were men ... it varied but they really played very important roles in nudging my career in ways that I can only now see in retrospect.”

Mula agrees that mentorship is essential for career growth, regardless of the mentor's identity: "It’s really easy to get siloed in your own experiences, and seeking out people who have different roles could open up new opportunities or paint a picture in different ways."

AP Photo

Sultan Qaboos, second right, receives Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, left, at Al Alalam Palace in Muscat, Oman, March 12, 2014.

Yet another crisis has struck the Middle East. Four Arab states led by Saudi Arabia have cut ties with Qatar over accusation the tiny Gulf kingdom supports terrorism. The intra-Arab rift comes on top of four armed conflicts in the region, ongoing tensions over Israel and Iran, and struggles against terrorist groups. As these problems pile up, the Middle East is in need of a country that can be a calm center, perhaps even a model and mediator.

Outside powers, such as the United States, often fail in that role. And while young people in the region increasingly seek peace and liberty, their voices are still largely stifled by their rulers. The one Middle East country that has a history of acting as a neutral arbiter with a message of peaceful coexistence is Oman.

This small country, ruled for decades by Sultan Qaboos bin Said al‑Said, certainly has strategic interests to act as a middle man. It borders Saudi Arabia and lies just 35 miles across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran. With much less petroleum wealth than its neighbors, it must welcome trade and ties with countries that are often at odds with one another.

Because of an independent foreign policy, Oman has hosted an Israeli prime minister, helped bring the US and Iran together for talks, and sought peace in the current war in Yemen. It carefully chooses sides, if at all, in Middle East disputes. With this latest crisis between Qatar and other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Oman could play a pivotal role.

Since the 1990s, Oman has been home to a desalination research center that brings Israelis and Arabs together. Its women enjoy more opportunities and freedom than in most other Muslim countries. And no Omani has been convicted of a terrorist crime.

Yet beyond national interests, Oman practices peacemaking because of its dominant brand of Islam called Ibadhi, which straddles the region’s religious divide between the Sunni and Shiite branches. Ibadhi Islam teaches unity and inclusivity among Muslims. In Oman, where the regime controls Islamic institutions, other religions enjoy far more freedom than in neighboring states. Its government is largely nondemocratic yet its society is relatively egalitarian.

All these characteristics have given it respect as a mediator, or at least neutral territory for adversaries to talk. In a region known for its violence and export of terror, such a country should be honored and supported for its ability to see beyond conflicts and to balance interests, opening the possibilities for peace.