Republicans have a storied tradition of minding the nation’s fiscal store. Calvin Coolidge pushed for tax cuts, but also for spend-less-than-you-earn budgets. After World War II, the party contributed to fiscal plans that rapidly unwound a war-related surge in debt. In ​the 1990s, ​members of the GOP supported spending restraints that helped usher in a brief era of budget surpluses​ under President Clinton​.

And as recently as 2015, as they faced off on fiscal matters against President Obama, Republicans in Congress were rallying behind fiscal plans that aimed for a balanced budget within 10 years. Yes, they wanted tax cuts, but paired with deep cuts in federal spending to reduce deficits.

Yet as the current GOP Congress takes up tax reform, there’s been a notable absence of concern about debt and red ink. Tax cuts seem to be the sum total of the Republican fiscal agenda, for now at least. The plans are accompanied by less-than-convincing assertions that the resulting economic growth will be enough to overcome any shortfall of revenues versus federal spending.

Whatever happened to the conservative deficit hawks?

In part, their decline or silence may be the latest symptom of a polarized Washington. Past instances of fiscal discipline have often involved collaboration across party lines – since tackling deficits is easiest when you have bipartisan cover.

But what’s on display is also a case of political pragmatism. Republicans know that, after failing in their efforts to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, they’re in desperate need of a legislative win heading into the next election cycle. As they seek to use their control of both the White House and Congress to pass a bill, the reality is that their ability to do that rests on a razor-thin two-vote majority in the US Senate.

Tax cuts are politically relatively easy, and a clear “win” in the eyes of conservative voters. Tax reform that addresses the nation’s long-term fiscal health is much harder – whether on a partisan basis or otherwise.

The result is that Republicans are finalizing proposals that will be scored by the Congressional Budget Office as adding to future deficits, at a time when federal tax revenue already fails to cover rising costs for entitlements including Medicare.

“Republicans are on the verge of adopting a budget that would not balance, would increase spending, and would increase the national debt, which is pretty much the polar opposite of everything they’ve been arguing for, for the years when they didn’t quite have the political power to pass their agenda,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group advocating for controlling the national debt.

The current fiscal line from Republicans is that tax cuts will spur economic growth. With a larger tax base, plus some newly closed loopholes in the tax code, the result will be progress rather than backsliding on overall tax revenue, they say.

“I believe tax reform can move us toward a balanced budget rather than away from it,” said Rep. Kevin Brady (R ) of Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, at a breakfast for reporters hosted by The Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday.

Still unclear is what form this tax legislation will take. Representative Brady said key proposals from his committee will emerge next week.

Michael Bonfigli /The Christian Science Monitor

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady speaks about prospects for tax cuts, at breakfast for reporters hosted by The Christian Science Monitor in Washington on Oct. 25.

A lone Republican vote

Even at a time of diminished voice for deficit hawks, some in the party have raised concerns.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was a lone Republican vote against the Senate’s budget plan last week – a plan that opened a procedural door to passing tax cuts that could expand projected federal deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

“Nearly all Republican Senators just failed a litmus test on cutting spending,” he tweeted at the time. Still, he also tweeted to President Trump that “I’m all in for tax cuts @realDonaldTrump. The biggest, boldest cuts possible – and soon!”

Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee stands out as a fairly lonely conservative skeptic on the emerging tax-cut plan. He’s echoed economists, who widely reject that tax cuts will automatically pay for themselves, albeit while adding that he’s open to some assumptions that tax cuts can fuel economic growth – and thus make losses to federal revenue somewhat smaller than traditional models allow.

Senator Corker, who has recently announced he won’t be seeking reelection, could be vocalizing a concern that some of his colleagues share on the emerging tax plan. “I hope that in the end, if it’s a big deficit creator, then our caucus will not support it,” Corker told Politico recently.

“There are still a lot of moderates who I think are not comfortable with this,” adds Ms. MacGuineas.

But she and other analysts say the desire for a legislative win on tax cuts may outweigh anxiety over deficits.

In fact, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who was known as a fiscal hawk during his House career, now frames the goal of tax cuts as boosting economic growth, period.

“We need to have new deficits because of that,” Mr. Mulvaney said on Fox News recently. “If we simply look at this [legislation] as being deficit-neutral, you're never going to get the type of tax reform and tax reductions that you need to get to sustain three percent economic growth.”

At the Monitor breakfast, Representative Brady predicted the tax cuts and related growth effects would boost American paychecks broadly. He added that he’s tried engaging Democrats in discussions, and that the two parties share goals such a tax code that’s fairer and simpler, with lighter burdens on the middle class and incentives for companies to bring jobs home from overseas.

But the two parties are sharply at odds over the details.

'Tax cuts are popular'

Although tax cuts aren’t a huge priority for the general public, they have the potential to be a winner with voters, especially if pitched as benefitting the middle class.

“Tax cuts are popular. It’s as simple as that,” says Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Reducing deficits matters to Americans, but “almost everybody is much more concerned with how am I going to put the food on the table,” he says.

Add in a president who’s prone to making exaggerated claims and shows little appetite for hard fiscal choices, “and it’s proving very hard for his party to go against him,” MacGuineas says.

But delay in addressing chronic imbalances in the budget is an issue that could come back to bite the nation. There’s the risk of credit-rating downgrades and rising interest rates for the government, which could harm taxpayers and long-term growth.

For now, though, “fiscal hawk” is a persona being picked up mainly by Democrats as they critique Republican plans.

Staff writer Francine Kiefer contributed additional reporting from Washington. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and other Senate Democrats, from left, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., discuss consumer protections in the wake of a massive data breach at Equifax and a scandal at Wells Fargo, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2017. Executives for both Wells Fargo and Equifax will testify in Senate committees next week.

By the barest of margins, Congress delivered a major win to the financial industry, repealing a new federal rule that would have made it easier for consumers to sue financial companies.

Normally, even though it affects millions of Americans, a rule banning the arbitration clauses that companies insert into the fine print of consumer agreements might not garner much attention.​

But in the wake of scandals involving financial giants Equifax and Wells Fargo, both of which tried to use the arbitration clauses to avoid class-action lawsuits, the subject took on sudden political relevance. Even a majority of Republican voters supported the ban, a recent poll showed.

Nevertheless, the GOP-controlled Senate voted 51-50 Tuesday on the side of the financial-services industry. Vice President Mike Pence broke the tie when two Republican senators defected.

Why risk bipartisan consumer ire to support big banks?

​Some finance experts ​say it reflects the enormous clout of banks and Wall Street firms in Washington, and a penchant among political conservatives to see lighter regulation as an economy-friendly move, even in the wake of the 2008 crisis, which was rooted partly in financial-industry excesses and improprieties.

Yet consumer advocates argue it is precisely that Wall Street clout that makes the watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which originated the rule against forced arbitration, a helpful counterweight for average Americans.

GOP lawmakers ​say they ​want to avoid an explosion of class-action lawsuits against big banks and others that the new rule might have fostered. They were also eager to rebuke the CFPB and deliver an antiregulation win to business in a session that so far has failed to undo some other Obama-era regulations.

And they may have been anxious to stop anything that might derail the stock market’s seemingly inexorable climb – a surge that helps them politically.

“As long as the market continues on the upward swing, nobody wants to rock the boat,” says Seth Kaplowitz, a lecturer in finance at San Diego State University.

Big banks and other financial companies stick arbitration clauses in the fine print when consumers sign up for credit cards and other types of loans. The language keeps customers from banding together in class-action lawsuits if they have a dispute.

Industry officials praised the vote. “The rule was always going to harm consumers and not help them,” American Bankers Association President Rob Nichols said in a statement. “Today’s vote puts consumers first rather than class-action lawyers.”

But consumer advocates – and a 2015 CFPB study – suggest otherwise: The arbitration clauses mostly favor the industry.

Nine out of 10 cases favor companies

For one thing, consumers have little incentive to use arbitration for disputes over small amounts, since it costs them $200 or more to have a hearing. So arbitration hearings typically involve larger debts – an average of almost $16,000.

And of one third of cases that actually went to an arbitrator in 2010 and 2011, only about 1 in 5 consumers won, getting a total of just over $360,000 in reimbursements or debt forgiveness in those 341 cases, the study found. (The rest of the cases were settled, pending, dormant, or had an unknown outcome.)

By contrast, companies won money in more than 9 out of 10 arbitrated cases in which they filed claims or counterclaims – and they received a total $2.8 million from consumers.

Most arbitration clauses allow consumers to use small-claims courts instead, but there, too, the advantages appear tilted in the companies’ favor. In 2012, consumers in jurisdictions representing about a quarter of the US population filed fewer than 870 small claims against the big banks and other major credit-card issuers. In those same jurisdictions, the issuers filed more than 41,000 small claims against consumers, most of which were probably debt-collection cases.

“You'd be stupid to sue over $30,” says Karl Frisch, executive director of Allied Progress, a consumer watchdog organization based in Washington. “But a bank can make a lot of money off of $30 [mistakes] … when you multiply it by millions.”

Class-action suits tend to counter this imbalance. From 2008 to 2012, 350 million claimants won 419 settlements that averaged $540 million a year. In a number of cases, they forced companies to change their business practices. Of the cash that was paid out, just under one quarter went to attorneys.

That may explain why the CFPB’s rule, which would have prevented companies from using arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, was so popular.

Two-thirds of Americans – including a majority of Republicans – support the rule banning forced arbitration, according to a survey released earlier this month that was commissioned by American Future Fund, a conservative advocacy group. A 2016 Pew survey found even higher support – 89 percent – for class-action lawsuits against banks.

The furor over Equifax and Wells Fargo

The fallout from two recent financial scandals –  the recent breach of sensitive consumer data at Equifax and the opening of up to 3.5 million fake accounts at Wells Fargo – complicated the GOP’s antiregulation push.

When respondents in the American Future Fund poll were told that Equifax had used arbitration clauses, support for the ban went up from 67 percent to 75 percent. The 800 respondents were all identified as likely voters.

On the flip side, allowing the rule to stand likely would have caused an explosion of class-action lawsuits. The CFPB estimated more than 600 extra federal suits per year, costing the industry more than $500 million in payouts and additional fees.

Those estimates seriously understate the true costs, the US Treasury charged in a report released this week. The CFPB didn’t include class actions at the state level and used a low estimate for attorneys’ fees.  

Of course, someone would have had to pay those extra costs, which led industry spokesmen and many Republicans to say the rule would have cost consumers.

But after 2009, when four credit-card issuers (Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, and HSBC) stopped using forced arbitration as the result of a lawsuit, a CFPB analysis found no statistically significant evidence that their customers paid more in fees or received less in credit as a result.

The data set was too small to guarantee that there was no extra cost, according to Alexei Alexandrov, a former senior economist at the CFPB who wrote the analysis. But data from the CFPB report suggests that even an explosion of new suits would have had little effect on the more than 100 million consumers who have credit cards, he writes in an email.

While difficult to project exactly, and relying on some assumptions, “it should be in the same order of magnitude [as the current cost of class-action litigation] – at most a dollar per consumer per year (and likely much less, if any),” he says. (Mr. Alexandrov stresses he is not speaking for either the CFPB or his current employer, Amazon.)

When Kenyan chief justice David Maraga entered his courtroom Wednesday morning, on the eve of a hotly disputed presidential election here, the whole country seemed to be listening.

After all, what he said next would make political history – and not for the first time.  

Seven weeks earlier, Kenya’s Supreme Court had struck down the results of the country’s August presidential election and ordered it rerun after the opposition claimed the vote counting was rigged – the only time an African court had ever done that, and just the fourth time it had happened in the entire world.

And now, Chief Justice Maraga was going to tell Kenyans whether the new election could go forward on Thursday – or if it should be delayed again to give the country more time to avoid the mistakes of the first vote, as a petition had argued.

But like so much of Kenya’s dramatic election season so far, the justice’s speech did not go according to script.

Instead of coming down on one side or the other, he sheepishly announced that his court had not actually heard the case at all – meaning the election redo would go ahead as planned.

Why? Because only two of the country’s seven Supreme Court justices had shown up to work that day, and that wasn’t enough for a vote. 

The announcement was emblematic of an election season marred by uncertainty about the political process, which has raised concerns about the health of one of Africa’s most strongly established democracies.

Siegfried Modola/Reuters

Supporters of Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga carry banners during a rally at Uhuru Park in Nairobi, Kenya Oct. 25, 2017.

Since early August, the country has seen a presidential vote go off seemingly uneventfully, only to be abruptly undone by the courts a few weeks later. A top election official has been murdered and another has fled the country, saying she fears for her life. Meanwhile, opposition leader Raila Odinga announced earlier this month that he was pulling out of the new race, claiming the election authorities had made none of the reforms needed to ensure the repeat vote was fairer than the first one. (The chair of the country’s electoral commission, Wafula Chebukati, seemed to echo his sentiment, admitting it would be “difficult to guarantee free, fair and credible elections” in the current circumstances.)

But Maraga’s announcement also epitomized the complicated and at times unprecedented role that Kenya’s courts have played in this year’s vote – and the depth of the challenge that has presented to the country’s political order.

“The judiciary has always been the weakest of our three branches of government,” says Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan writer and political analyst. “These last couple months are the first time the judiciary has really made its presence felt in 30-odd years, and struck out on their own in a way that’s not influenced by the executive or the legislature.”

'Murky waters'

But that newfound independence already seemed wobbly Wednesday, when the majority of judges failed to show up in court. Some Kenyans argued that the judges, thrust into the political limelight, had simply been pushed too far. One of the justices who failed to turn up did so after her driver was shot Tuesday evening in a suspected political hit. And many here speculated that the reasons the other justices hadn’t showed up were also deeply political – that they did not want to cast the deciding vote, or were afraid of the political consequences of ruling in favor of one side or the other.

“The judiciary has stood up … but they continue to threaten our judges,” opposition leader Mr. Odinga told supporters at a rally in central Nairobi Wednesday afternoon, referring to his opponent, sitting President Uhuru Kenyatta, and his supporters. “They have no respect for the rule of law.”

Not everyone has been so clear on the value of the court’s new role. The judiciary’s assertiveness “has plunged us into murky waters,” says Faith Kiboro, a political analyst and PhD candidate at SMC University in Switzerland who studies democratization in eastern Africa. While many Kenyans are happy to see their courts acting independently, she says, others feel they have gone too far. Judges have issued more narrow challenges to the country’s election results before, but never annulled an entire election – or had to deal with the ensuing confusion. 

By ordering a new election, for instance, the Supreme Court here seems to have opened the legal floodgates for disgruntled defeated political hopefuls. Nationwide, more than 100 petitions were filed challenging the results of gubernatorial, parliamentary, and local races.

And at least ten challenges to the validity of Thursday’s vote have come before Kenyan courts in recent days – including the case to delay the election. (Another of those cases found that the appointment of several electoral commission officers had been illegal, a ruling that experts say all but ensures there will be another legal challenge to the validity of the vote by the opposition after Thursday’s poll.)

“It’s a mockery,” says Nairobi taxi driver James Njoro. “The courts have become the worst enemy of the people.”

Buoyed confidence

But for many Kenyans, the new role of their courts is a welcome one. 

After the country’s sitting president, Mr. Kenyatta, was declared the winner of the August poll, protests erupted in opposition strongholds across the country. Police reaction was swift and heavy-handed. At least 33 people were killed by police in the days following the election, according to a report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and hundreds more were injured. The political mood turned sour. Odinga promised his supporters they would “remove” the Kenyatta government.

Three weeks later, however, the Supreme Court nullified the original election result, siding with Odinga in his claim that the electronic transmission of votes had been tampered with. 

“And it just threw cold water on that conversation about violence,” Ms. Nyabola says. “People who had been protesting suddenly felt like they could be a part of this country and be listened to – it changed something fundamental for many of them about their relationship to the state.”

And that shift, she says, will have implications long beyond the tumult of the current election.

For many Kenyans, after all, the courts are the branch of government with which they have the most intimate contact – the place where they go to settle small legal disputes over land, family, or money. The country’s new trust in the independence of the Supreme Court could trickle down to the rest of the judiciary, she says.

All eyes on rerun

But the courts’ central role in this election also means that a challenge to Thursday’s result is almost a foregone conclusion, Ms. Kiboro says. 

In a rally in central Nairobi Wednesday afternoon, Odinga officially called on his supporters to boycott the vote Thursday.

“They want to transform our country into a dictatorship,” he said. “We will not accept it. We will not be moved.”

For many Kenyans, the way the election rerun has disintegrated is deeply disheartening. 

“I fear tomorrow's election could jeopardize peace … Can't we wait?” says Ahmed Omarr, a trader in Nairobi. “I am disappointed in [the electoral commission], the incumbent president, and the opposition for their failure to talk to each other.”

But Nyabola sees at least one silver lining to the messiness of the recent political process.

“I have never seen this level of political consciousness in Kenya before,” she says. “People are talking about the constitution in the bars, in the matatus” – public mini-buses.

“We’ve all become amateur constitutional scholars and I think that’s a good thing.”

Hussein Malla/AP

Kurdish soldiers stand in front of a Turkish suspected member of the Islamic State at a security center in Kobani, Syria, July 21, 2017.

The fall of the self-styled caliphate carved out by the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has been nearly as spectacular and swift as its rise.

ISIS-held cities and towns on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border have fallen like dominoes since Iraq announced the liberation of the northern city of Mosul in July. Iraqi forces took nearby Tal Afar at the end of August, completing that battle in less than a fortnight. And clearing ISIS from Hawijah, its last urban stronghold in Iraq, took barely a day.

In Syria, the jihadist movement is also on the run. US backed forces on Oct. 17 declared the end of military operations against ISIS militants in the eastern city of Raqqa. Presented as the ISIS “capital,” Raqqa, like Mosul, was a major hub for foreign fighters seduced by ISIS’s jihadist state-building project.

The caliphate is in ruins, the vast swaths of territory that once sat beneath its black banners dwindling by the day. Its architects are either dead, on the run, or hiding in desert outposts. Yet the demise of ISIS as a physical entity in Iraq and Syria does not spell the end of this jihadist network.

Gabriel Chaim/AP

This Thursday, Oct. 19, 2017 frame grab made from drone video shows damaged buildings in Raqqa, Syria, two days after Syrian Democratic Forces said that military operations to oust the Islamic State group have ended and that their fighters have taken full control of the city.

Already it has spawned a multitude of affiliate groups, or “provinces,” across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. But these regional branches fall along a broad spectrum in terms of the depth of their connection to ISIS, and few have their origins truly rooted in the battlefields of Iraq and Syria. Many are born of local grievances, their allegiance to ISIS bringing benefits to a cause already long established, and the barriers to any of these groups becoming the heart of a new Islamic State are high.

“I think ISIS will go from being a proto-state to an underground terrorist organization, and this organization will have affiliates in different places in the world,” says Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent closely involved in investigating the 9/11 attacks, and author of “Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State,” who now runs The Soufan Group. “But then there’s the ideological question: What’s going to happen if there’s no caliphate? They gave allegiance to a caliph and to a state that no longer exists.”

At its peak in 2014, ISIS controlled more than 100,000 square kilometers, mostly in Iraq and Syria, an area containing some 11 million people, including up to 40,000 foreign fighters from more than 120 countries. But by early 2017, the number of people living under ISIS had already dropped by 56 percent in Syria and 83 percent in Iraq, according to a study by the RAND Corp.

Some of the fighting has been bitterly contested – witness the nine-month campaign to retake Mosul in Iraq – but with Raqqa now also out of the way there are high hopes military operations in Iraq and Syria will be concluded more quickly than anticipated.

ISIS resilience

These hopes, however, should be “very carefully caveated to be the taking back of territory and seeing the colors on the map change,” says Chris Maier, director of the Defeat ISIS Task Force at the US Department of Defense, “as opposed to the idea that there won’t still be a clandestine or insurgent-type ISIS capability in both Iraq and Syria for the foreseeable future.”

Indeed, Mr. Maier mentions an oft-used phrase in the Defeat ISIS community: “Taking back territory is necessary but not sufficient,” recognizing the fact that even if their territorial core were gone, ISIS would still be able to find “cracks and seams” in other parts of the world, particularly regions reeling from instability and poor governance.

“Looking into a crystal ball,” adds Maier, “I think you’ll still see a bit of a far-flung enterprise that’s calling itself ISIS, but is really more linked in name and brand than in any kind of cohesive operational coordination.”

Some analysts argue that ISIS saw the end coming and redirected its recruits to other parts of the world. If the so-called Islamic State is to see a rebirth elsewhere, it is likely to be a question of where fresh fighters are drawn, rather than where those already in Iraq and Syria choose to relocate.

In part, that’s because the majority of the ISIS leadership is Iraqi and so is likely to stay put. In part, it’s because many of the foreign fighters were determined to stay to the bitter end – and then the logistics of actually making such a move are daunting in the face of international efforts to cut them off from the rest of the world.

Militant website/AP/File

In this photo released on April 25, 2015, by a militant website, young boys known as the "lion cubs" hold rifles and Islamic State group flags as they exercise at a training camp in Tal Afar, near Mosul, northern Iraq.

Core of believers

“What we have left today is the core of ISIS, the ones who really believe in it,” says Hassan Hassan, co-author with Michael Weiss of “ISIS: Inside The Army of Terror.” The group appears contained for now but, he warns, it could stage a come back if the political and social grievances that set the stage for their rapid ascent in Syria and Iraq remain unaddressed.

“ISIS will continue to be a threat,” says Mr. Hassan. “The chance for them to revive the caliphate is still there. They have the imagination for it, and they have the environment for it.”

Few analysts believe the caliphate project is likely to be resurrected in the short term. Nevertheless that should not belie the threat the jihadists still pose – nor indeed the danger that the remnants of ISIS itself represent, whether its fighters have returned home, travelled to other hubs of ISIS activity, or survive locally as part of an organization that morphs back into something akin to its original existence as an insurgency.

“The image people often have is plane-loads of these guys flying out,” says Daniel Byman, author of “Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement” and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. “But that’s the wrong image: It’s people filtering out in dribs and drabs.”

US Central Command said in April that it had identified more than 40,000 foreign fighters who joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Some analysts, however, believe those figures to be an exaggerated estimate, offering a more conservative range of 20,000 to 30,000 that includes supporters as well as combatants.

There is no doubt that a significant number of foreign fighters have already fled the battlefield. At least 5,600 residents or citizens of 33 countries have made it home, according to a report published by The Soufan Group Tuesday. Accurately assessing the risk posed by returnees is just one of the challenges for law enforcement officials trying to stave off ISIS attacks.

Role of sleeper cells

Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House in London, warns that territorial losses do not necessarily translate into a reduced capacity to stage attacks worldwide.

“Military defeats in Iraq and Syria hurt ISIS symbolically more than operationally, because ISIS activities in areas outside of the Middle East and North Africa are conducted by sleeper cells – sympathizers who take orders from the ISIS leadership who are hiding in the desert between Iraq and Syria in some cases, but who operate in an opportunistic fashion in other cases,” says Ms. Khatib.

An estimated 6,000 to 10,000 ISIS fighters remain in play in Iraq and Syria.

The Soufan Group notes in its report that even as ISIS has ceded control of its territorial caliphate, concern that ISIS may remain viable in the long term, both as a group and as an inspiration, has continued, in large part because it has been so successful in attracting foreign recruits.

“People not only flocked to join it in Iraq and Syria, but have also done so in other parts of the world, whether or not (ISIS) has established a formal province there,” it noted.

Libya is one of the few places that did receive an outflow of fighters from the core of ISIS, and while its ouster from the city of Sirte at the end of last year pushed it out into desert areas, the chaotic nature of that country makes the eradication of ISIS a tough proposition.

Another area of concern is Egypt, particularly in the Sinai, where there has been a recent uptick of attacks and an apparent expansion of the ISIS presence.

In many places where ISIS seeks a foothold, it is in competition with other groups for recruits and resources. In Afghanistan, for example, where there is a robust presence – referred to by some as ISIS-Khorasan – they are under pressure from the Taliban and the Haqqani network. In Yemen and Somalia, Al Qaeda is the main competitor; in the latter, where ISIS attempted to turn the Al-Shabaab militant group, Al-Shabaab resisted and even tried to crush the ISIS presence, meaning that perhaps fewer than 100 ISIS fighters remain.

The ISIS bandwagon

This sequence of events reflects a characteristic of many of the groups that claim allegiance to ISIS: long-established insurgencies that simply jumped on the ISIS bandwagon to attract attention and boost their cause.

“The way ISIS has historically operated, and Al Qaeda too, is they don’t create anything from scratch,” says Seth Jones, director of RAND’s international security and defense policy center and a former assistant secretary of Defense for special operations. “They are leveraging existing local groups.”

This is true of West Africa, particularly the Sahel region, where four US service members recently lost their lives on a counter-terrorism assistance mission in Niger. Boko Haram has long been prosecuting an insurgency in Nigeria and pledged allegiance to ISIS, but a multinational military operation has deprived it of much of its territory.

And then there’s the Philippines, where ISIS-aligned fighters have been battling government forces in the city of Marawi for five months. While the Mindanao region has seen insurgent activity for decades, not least in the form of the Abu Sayyaf group, the explosion of violence in Marawi has taken it to new levels. It also speaks to an increasingly international trend in terms of cooperation between militant groups: the conflict in Marawi has drawn foreign fighters, though mostly from Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.

ISIS jihadists are “clearly able to embed themselves in lawless states, failed states, ungoverned border areas,” says Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, “so there has to be a significant international effort to deny them that.”

Dominique Soguel contributed from Basel, Switzerland.

Sara Miller LLana/The Christian Science Monitor

Guests gather in a private home to listen to opera students singing Verdi's works in Parma, Italy, in October 2017, as part of an effort by the annual Festival Verdi to bring opera to the people. In doing so they also recreated an ancient way of enjoying music.

A young tenor’s voice, in his rendition of “La donna e mobile,” fills the palatial living room with one of Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous canzones from “Rigoletto.”

It’s a late Thursday afternoon and the sun is setting, as guests seated around the piano begin to clap. The hostess is suddenly in the center of the circle for a short waltz.

For a moment, it feels as though we are transported back to the 19th century, when Verdi, among the world’s most famous composers, created 27 operas, some of them the most-loved in the world.

But it’s 2017, and this is the sidelines of the month-long Festival Verdi held each year in Parma, Italy. If any region can call itself a heartland of opera, it's this one.

The festival is an international affair, drawing foreigners from around the globe for four major operas staged each year in the opulent theaters in and around where Verdi was born. But it also aims to bring opera off the stages into the community in a series of events – from Verdi sung in rap, to the staging of “Nabucco” by inmates at the local jail, to these living room performances for aspiring opera stars. And at least with the latter, the festival brings an ancient custom of private home performances that started in mid-18th century Europe to 21st century Italy.

Accompanist Claudia Zucconi, who is studying for her masters and wants to specialize in opera, says that playing these antique keys in such a living room “was very emotional.” 

“The piano was very ancient, so it was special for a pianist to play it. I felt like it was another epoch, in another time, like I could be dressed liked a princess playing in a room like this.”

Her brown eyes light up when she talks. And this Parma native is no anomaly. Opera – and specifically local hero Verdi – are so central to the town’s identity and culture that people debate it at locales the way they might discuss the latest soccer match. Opera marks status to this day: with membership in the exclusive Club dei 27, a group of 27 associations named after each of Verdi’s operas, or in the boxes of Teatro Regio owned by well-off families that include an adjacent private room for entertaining during intervals.

The director general of Parma’s Teatro Regio, Anna Maria Meo, says the responsibility she feels is nothing short of enormous. Only a few nights ago, after a performance that had only one intermission, theatergoers stopped her on her way down from her office and asked why there weren’t two. She replied that the opera was already long. “ ‘But you can’t cut the space for us to discuss what we are watching, we need at least two,’ they said,” she recounts over a cappuccino in the theater’s baroque café.

That exuberance is felt inside and outside the theater. In the middle of a production of “La Traviata” at the tiny Busseto theater, inaugurated in 1868 with Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” two guests arrived famished at the cash bar. There was no hot food – but no need to worry. Franco, behind the counter, arranged for a restaurant nearby to deliver anolini, a stuffed pasta in piping broth, in two big bowls.

The living room performance is another way to showcase Italy’s hospitality, says Ms. Meo. But it also serves to recapture lost traditions.

Such private concerts were common in the 1750s, says Giuseppe Martini, an Italian music historian in Parma. They started in France when musicians began to host events to show off their work – and their new status. The practice expanded to Austria, Germany, England, and Italy. It was also the way friends and families simply spent time together – as any Jane Austen book illustrates – before the onset of radios, televisions, and iPhones.

On this afternoon, visitors arrive at a pink façade at the Piazza Duomo. As the bell chimes 6 p.m., they file in through a plant-filled courtyard and up the stairs into a frescoed salon – decidedly not your everyday Italian home. The host is the Marquise Zaira Dalla Rosa Prati, whose family has owned this palace since the 1700s.

Donna Dalla Rosa Prati grew up with music around her. Her first name is a nod to the inaugural performance at Teatro Regio, Bellini’s “Zaira.” Her mother studied music at the conservatory, she says, showing off a family album fittingly covered in musical notes. “My father was a doctor, but he had a great voice,” she explains. “My house was always full of musicians coming through.”

So hosting such an event many decades later feels only natural, and her only hope, she says, is that her guests leave “enraptured.”

They seem to have pulled it off. Simona Tedeschi, a psychologist, came here right after work for a different glimpse of the art form she so cherishes. “In a theater you live the experience of abundance and magnitude because all of the arts come together,” she says. “In the experience of the house you live the closeness of the artist, so it’s more intimate.”

It’s a new endeavor for the performers too. Ms. Zucconi says it’s more intense without the distance of the stage. “At my first living room concert I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It was a very small room and there were a lot of people around the piano. Everyone could read the sheet music,” she says. “But it’s fantastic because music should be everywhere. Not only in the theater or in music halls, but everywhere.”

REUTERS

European Parliament member Terry Reintke holds a placard with the hashtag "MeToo" during a debate to discuss preventive measures against sexual harassment and abuse in the EU at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, Oct. 25.

One good predictor of a country becoming more peaceful, according to the 2017 Global Peace Index, is the degree to which its men acknowledge the rights of women. Security of the state, in other words, is statistically linked to the security of women.

This insight on peace and gender equality may help explain why the #MeToo campaign has exploded on social media around the world in the one month since the story broke of sexual harassment accusations made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Millions of women now feel a new freedom and strength to share their stories of harassment or assault. Many are not only seeking peace for themselves but hoping to shift the conversation about violence against women.

In each country, of course, the words of the #MeToo hashtag are different. In Arabic it is #Ana_kaman. In Spanish, it is #YoTambien. The French hashtag is really a command for action: #BalanceTonPorc, or “squeal on your pig.”

Yet it is important to remember the origins of the #MeToo campaign. The phrase “me too” was made popular a decade ago by activist Tarana Burke in her work with victims of sexual harassment and assault. She sought a succinct way to express empathy with survivors and to ease their pain of disclosure. The healing process, she says, requires “empowerment through empathy.”

Making it easier for victims to talk about such violence without feeling shame also allows a society to deal with the perpetrators, either in seeking justice or even in healing them of gender bias. In fact, all types of violence against women, such as domestic abuse, need to be exposed in order to liberate more men from such attitudes and make society more peaceful. In a book titled “Sex and World Peace,” authors Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Capriolo, and Chad Emmett write:

 “Men who see women as beings to be subjugated will themselves continue to be subjugated. Men who see women as equal and valued partners are the only men who have a true chance to win their freedom and enjoy peace.”

Much of the #MeToo campaign around the world is an expression of anger at male aggressors. Yet below that anger may lie a hope for healing, both for the survivor and perhaps the perpetrator. Empathy toward a victim can go a long way to bring peace for both, and then bring a greater peace to a country.