Evan Vucci/AP

President Trump shakes hands with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Friday.

It's a question that Europe has been posing for more than a year: How do you solve a problem like the Donald?

The continent’s heaviest political hitters offered their answers to that question this week, as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought in turn to figure out what makes President Trump tick, and how to head off a looming transatlantic rupture.

They did so in very different styles: Mr. Macron flaunted a “bromance” with Mr. Trump during his three-day state visit to Washington, while Ms. Merkel displayed her customary restraint on a three-hour working trip. But neither claimed to have had much success on their most pressing common aims – to head off a trade war between the US and Europe and to save the international nuclear deal with Iran.

“It has been a learning curve, and rather a squiggly one” for European leaders dealing with the unpredictable American president, says James Moran, a former European Union ambassador. “It’s anybody’s guess how best to handle him.”

On the face of it, both this week’s visitors to Washington were the kind of politicians Trump likes least – globalist supporters of the post-war liberal world order, built on rules forged by multilateral institutions.

In his public appearances with Trump, Macron sidestepped that reputation and chose bonhomie as his strategy. Hugs, hand-holding, and air kisses punctuated the visit in remarkably physical displays of friendship. The two men have clearly struck up a rapport.

One “somewhat hopeful” way of dealing with Trump “is to very strongly connect the personal with the political, to treat him royally” says Jan Techau, senior fellow at the think tank German Marshall Fund of the United States.

But there is more to it than that. Macron was the only European leader who “immediately treated Trump with respect,” points out French historian Nicole Bacharan, inviting him to the French independence day military parade last July 14 and to dinner half way up the Eiffel Tower. “He treated him as a welcome, legitimate US president.”

Susan Walsh/AP

President Trump and first lady Melania Trump greet French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, as they arrive for a state dinner at the White House in Washington on Tuesday.

Other European leaders sometimes seemed pained just being close to Trump. Merkel herself got off to a bad start, lecturing him just after he was elected; she offered her cooperation “based on … common values — democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views.”

Macron also appeals to Trump because of what the two men have in common, despite their many differences; both are outsiders who won office by challenging their nations’ political establishment and both regard themselves as rather special. Macron describes himself as “Jupiterian.”

Practical realities

But again, there is more to it than that. France and the United States are close allies in the fight against terrorism; Paris joined Washington in airstrikes against Syria earlier this month; and France is on track to spend two percent of its GDP on defense by 2024, a NATO target to which Trump has attached great importance.

Germany is nowhere near that goal, and will not meet it, though the government last week announced a new round of military purchases.

Although much has been made in the press about how well Macron and Trump get on, the American president speaks by phone nearly as often to Merkel as he does to his French counterpart.

And evidence is scarce that Macron has managed to leverage his personal ties to change Trump’s mind on any major policy. “You can give Trump the honorable treatment he wants, but that doesn’t guarantee you success,” says Mr. Techau. “The yardstick for success is whether you can move him on the issues, and we’ve seen precious little of that.”

Trump has come round somewhat on NATO; he no longer dismisses the key transatlantic alliance as an outdated irrelevance and the Pentagon has actually increased spending in Europe over the past year.

The US president seems less enamored of Vladimir Putin than he once was; Washington and Europe are now aligned on Russia, both highly suspicious of Moscow’s intentions. Macron may have convinced Trump to give more thought to his decision to withdraw US troops from Syria.

But on other contentious issues, the US president does not seem to be budging.

Washington is staying out of the Paris climate accord and still planning to open an embassy in Jerusalem. Macron himself left Washington saying he thought it unlikely he had succeeded in convincing Trump to stick with the Iran nuclear deal. And the US is still threatening to impose trade tariffs on European Union exports of steel and aluminum on May 1, possibly sparking a wider trade war among traditional allies.

‘Allies are not poodles’

Macron does not gloss over these transatlantic differences. His speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday was a lucid and impassioned defense of multilateral decision-making and free trade – two of Trump’s top bugbears.

He also launched a head on attack against key elements of Trump’s political program, arguing that “you can play with fear and anger for a time, but they do not construct anything,” and declaring that “I do not share the fascination for new strong powers … and the illusion of nationalism.” 

That went down well in much of Europe, where the speech was widely seen as a defiant expression of European values.

“Bravo, Emmanuel Macron!” read the headline above an opinion piece published by Deutsche Welle, the German national broadcaster. The article praised Macron’s “vision for the world that can be described as an antidote to Trump’s worldview. Highlighting such an alternative was both highly welcome and very necessary.”

“The speech was not aggressive but it was clear,” says Manuel Lafont Rapnouil, head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, an international think tank. “Allies are not poodles.”

It may be too much to hope that any European leader can change Trump’s mind on important issues, says Ms. Bacharan. But the way that Macron combines “a game of seduction with an insistence that he is not afraid of Trump … keeps the US president in a continuous and open dialog. And that itself is a success.”

At the entrance to one of Baghdad’s biggest amusement parks is an election banner for Hadi al-Amiri, senior commander of the mainly Shiite militias that helped vanquish Islamic State jihadists and now aim to win Iraqis’ votes.

A guard at the gate shrugs at the banner’s having been given such prominent placement, where hundreds of thousands of voters will see it before parliamentary elections on May 12.

“They own the place,” laughs the guard, tongue-in-cheek, about Iraq’s ubiquitous militias, when asked about the banner at a park run by the Baghdad municipality. “They own everything, so they are free to put it here.”

Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), known in Arabic as hashd al-shaabi, don’t “own” everything in Iraq. But since being formed from volunteers in mid-2014 to help repel the ISIS invasion, the militias – originally called to arms by a fatwa from Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric, and beneficiaries of support and advisers from Iran – have seen their numbers and influence grow.

As Iraq now enters its first post-ISIS election, the PMF are trying to convert military victory and popular goodwill into political appeal at the ballot box as they compete with a wide spectrum of political players. Analysts say candidates linked to the PMF will get a boost from their role crushing ISIS, but that a year after victory was declared their influence should not be over-stated.

The PMF have often been viewed, and criticized, as sectarian. But as levels of violence diminish nationwide and bread-and-butter issues come to the fore, candidates from their ranks are espousing unity between Iraq’s majority Shiites and minority Sunnis and Kurds.

Analysts say that the PMF's popularity peaked last spring, after ISIS was finally pushed out of Mosul. But some 500 candidates linked to the PMF, who traded their uniforms for smart business suits, are among nearly 7,000 people vying for the 329 seats in parliament. No uniformed members of Iraq’s security forces are allowed to stand. 

Lots of 'street cred'

“These guys are trying to cash in on their sacrifices, which have to be admired, and the fact is they have a lot of street cred now,” says Sajad Jiyad, head of the Al-Bayan Center for Planning and Studies, a think tank in Baghdad.

“They fought and spilt blood, and toiled and sweat and did not sit in plush offices. They were out there, and that is appreciated,” says Mr. Jiyad. “However, there are no grounds really to see the whole country falling in behind the hashd.

“You can’t use the credit for liberating, for winning a war, for too much,” says Jiyad. “Fact is, last year the war ended, so they rode the crest of the wave … but suddenly people are like, ‘We are liberated, but there are no jobs.’ Or some people living in Baghdad are saying, ‘OK, there is normalcy, but voting you guys in, what’s that going to do for me?’”

Mr. Amiri today heads the Fatah Alliance, the largest grouping of PMF cadres, which is expected to do well. So is Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s Victory Alliance – named after the victory over ISIS. But the PMF faces the challenge of convincing voters that it can provide services and bolster national unity just as well as it held ground on the front lines.

Amiri has a head start as a politician, as a former Iran-based commander of the Badr Brigades, the Iraqi militia that fought Saddam Hussein, and later as an Iraqi minister of transport who has visited the White House.

Yet these days the PMF must carefully navigate their desire to be seen as postwar nation-builders without appearing to clash with the role of the Iraqi state, even as they maintain their own parallel command structure and autonomy. To broaden their electoral appeal, the PMF’s engineering units have been actively working on infrastructure projects, which are highlighted on their websites.

'Who liberated the country?'

The election “is going to be about who liberated the country,” says an Iraqi analyst close to the government who asked not to be named. “They will say, ‘We had this many martyrs, and so-and-so cities were liberated,’” says the analyst, noting that Prime Minister Abadi, and his predecessor Nouri al-Maliki, who was in charge when ISIS invaded, are also claiming credit.

“That’s going to be the flavor of the election, despite the fact that people don’t really want to hear about that. People want to hear about services and job creation,” says the analyst. “Once again, it’s all about the economy. But what are these folks going to talk about? The military.”

Polls indicate the PMF enjoy widespread popularity, certainly among Shiites and even among some Sunnis who credit Iraq’s security forces – backed up by the 150,000-strong PMF – with helping rid them of the ISIS menace that seized control of one-third of the country.

A nationwide poll of more than 1,000 Iraqis in March found that the Iraqi Army had the highest level of trust among state institutions – 88 percent of those polled in Baghdad and 91 percent in “liberated areas” – a leap from 2014 when the US-trained force crumbled before the ISIS advance.

Mr. Abadi’s leadership saw a 79 percent “high favorability” rating, according to the poll commissioned by the 1001 Iraqi Thoughts organization, though two-thirds of Iraqis had not yet decided for whom they will vote. Amiri rated the third most popular figure, with a 60 percent favorability rating.

Outside of the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, the PMF were the second-most trusted organization in Iraq. And most surprisingly, according to this poll, 65 percent of residents of “liberated provinces” – nearly all of them Sunnis – had “high confidence” in the PMF.

Such results come as Iraqis frequently describe how tired they are of the sectarianism that has torn apart their society since 2006, especially, and how today they reject those divisions. Some PMF groups have been accused of severe human rights abuses, targeting Sunnis suspected of being ISIS members or sympathizers. But PMF officials point out a degree of sectarian balance in the group itself, and state that one-quarter of their members are Sunni.

Fine line on Iran

Jiyad, of the Al-Bayan Center, says that appeal will work with some voters. “They are liked in Sunni areas, and Sunnis will vote for Sunnis on the hashd lists,” he says, adding that “people in the south will vote for hashd politicians who they sent their sons to fight and die with.”

But he suggests the PMF do have a fine line to walk regarding their tight links to and faith in Iran.

“Are elements of the hashd, maybe 50 or 60 percent, under the heavy influence of Iran, if not the control of Iran? Yeah, that is true,” Jiyad says, but he adds: “Would they, right now, come out and clash with the PM and the government, or act against Iraq’s interest? No they wouldn’t.…

“The fact is, they are a component of Iraqi society,” Jiyad continues. “They aren’t Iranians. They are people who believe in this country, but who also believe that Iran is acting in Iraq’s interests – and that’s the vision they have.”

So then where does the PMF sit in the imagination of Iraqis?

“In the heart,” says Ahmed al-Asadi, a former PMF spokesman and MP for Baghdad who, wrist wrapped with prayer beads, wears the carefully tailored suit and large watch typical of many Iraqi politicians.

“We have achieved success with hashd al-shaabi, but we are not using this achievement as our main principle,” says Mr. Asadi, who, like a number of others, was a politician long before joining the PMF. He says it is “natural” for militia members like him to finish their “mission” fighting ISIS and then return to politics.

“The role of hashd is known to everyone, but we don’t want to use it for our purposes…. We want to keep hashd away from the political process, because hashd is a military enterprise,” he says.

But is it possible to separate the military and political in Iraq, postwar?

“No, it’s not. It’s very hard. We know that, and the other [non-PMF candidates] know that, and that is why they are angry,” says Asadi, chuckling at that political reality in Iraq that benefits PMF-linked candidates.

Manifestation of 'things that are wrong'

It remains to be seen whether the PMF will win electoral success in a country where armed groups don’t traditionally do well when they move into politics, says Renad Mansour, a research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London.

He notes that the PMF have maneuvered themselves into a unique legal position, in which they have a seat on the Iraqi National Security Council – alongside the ministers of interior and defense – but do not fall under the formal Iraqi military chain of command.

The government paid the PMF $1.63 billion last year, he says, and a law passed in late 2016 allows its 50-plus brigades to keep their militia names, flags, and leaders.

“The problem with the PMF isn’t the PMF as such, [but as] an extreme manifestation of the many things that are wrong in Iraq,” says Mr. Mansour, contacted in northern Iraq.

“Even though you have this mantle of Shiite militias entering politics, Iraq has been very much warlords and business people intersecting with politics; that defines the Iraqi power process,” says Mansour.

“In that sense, the PMF represents a problem for Iraq because it symbolizes the weakness of the state to be able to control these blurred boundaries,” adds Mansour. “The PMF itself is not one group, it’s so many different actors and interests and ideologies competing with each other. But at the core it represents one of the main things that has been wrong since 2003.”

Anu Mahendran didn’t quite have a panic attack when she learned that the Trump administration might revoke work permits for spouses of foreign workers.

But she came close.

“I was shivering,” she says. “I went through phases where you’re just sitting there, nervous, not knowing what to do and what’s going to happen.”

Ms. Mahendran, who immigrated to the US from India in 2007, is a senior manager at NetApp, a Sunnyvale, Calif., data services provider. Her legal ability to work – and thus help her husband provide for their 11-month-old son and pay their mortgage – rests on an Obama-era program that grants employment authorization documents, or EADs, to spouses of skilled workers here on H-1B visas.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services has been considering revoking the program as part of President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, signed in the fall. The agency reiterated its intent in a letter released this week from USCIS director Lee Francis Cissna to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley.

The change, set for June, would make it illegal for tens of thousands of mostly Indian women to work in the US until their husbands receive their green cards and are granted permanent resident status. A massive backlog in green card petitions, however, means that families of H-1B holders could stay in limbo for years.

For Indian nationals like Mahendran’s husband, who make up the greatest share of H-1B petitions, the wait for permanent residency could take a decade or more.

“By the time he gets a green card, I’ll be ready to retire,” Mahendran says.  

H-4 EADs serve as the latest front in a broader, intensifying clash on immigration playing out increasingly along party lines, policy analysts say. On the one hand are those who say the US needs to further open its doors to immigrants to cement its place in the global economy. On the other, those who would see a more secure border and put American workers first. The conflict has erupted most visibly on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have repeatedly failed to agree on even narrow actions related to immigration. It has also emerged online and among the public, as advocates for each side – many of whom, like Mahendran, are personally affected – band together in an effort to clear their paths to the American dream.

At stake, they say, is the future of US immigration policy – and whether or not it’s possible to create an equitable, stable system.

“Keeping thousands of people on this very strict temporary visa for this long a time is not fair. In my mind the H-4 EAD was kind of a merited Band-Aid on the situation,” says Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute who recently co-authored a brief on the issue.

“But it’s hard to answer what should be done because there are good arguments on both sides,” she adds. “It is a mess.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

For Shaunaki Bharne, losing her job at Sears Holdings would be devastating. Even worse is the prospect of choosing between giving up work to be able to stay in the US with her husband, a Silicon Valley tech worker on an H-1B visa, or returning to India without her husband so she can pursue her career. With the Trump administration's plan to revoke work authorizations for spouses like her, Ms. Bharne might soon face that choice. "We are being punished for being married to an H-1B holder," she says. Now the 28-year-old is part of a group of advocates, mostly Indian women, fighting to keep the rule in place. "I don't know what the future holds," she says. "But if I don't fight for myself no one else will fight for me."

'I should be able to find work'

John Donaldson never thought he’d be out of a job. A software engineer in his 50s, Mr. Donaldson – known to friends as J.D. – developed applications for 30 years before the utility company he worked for fired him in 2011.

At first he was optimistic. He wasn’t young, but he had experience.

Nearly two years of “pounding the pavement,” as he calls it – meeting with recruiters, going to interviews, and waiting to hear back – yielded nothing. Donaldson began to wonder if something else was going on. Ageism, maybe: “People half my age were interviewing me,” he says. He also noticed that more of his interviewers, and a growing share of the workers in his field, seemed to be immigrants on H-1B visas.

Today, six years after losing his job and long after the unemployment benefits have run out, Donaldson is convinced he’s a casualty of a bloated immigration system. In his mind, tech companies are not only putting H-1B holders before native US workers in their recruitment efforts; they’re also flooding the US labor market with immigrants who are willing to take lower pay, pushing down wages and edging Americans out of the competition.

The H-4 EAD, he says, takes that even further, giving spouses of H-1B workers unrestricted access to the job market.

“It’s gotten way out of control,” Donaldson says, sitting outside an Oakland coffee shop one April morning. “I don't think it’s foreign and wrong that countries have borders and that they can protect them and perhaps give some kind of priority to their citizens versus immigrants when it comes to hiring.”

Multiple studies over decades show that allowing US companies to hire highly-skilled immigrants actually comes with benefits: It raises productivity levels, diversifies innovation, and helps companies hire for hard-to-fill positions in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. It’s like baseball, says Chad Sparber, an economist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. “You need nine players, and if you don’t have all nine then nobody gets to play at all,” he says. “There are advantages to having access to this talent so that everybody can participate.”

Immigrant advocates also say that the labor-market isn’t a zero-sum game – that not every job that goes to an immigrant is one taken away from a native US worker. Jobs in the economy are not just those that are newly created, they point out. Some are existing ones that open up when someone retires. They add that those who started on H-1B visas but ultimately became US citizens shouldn’t count in analyses of immigrants’ effects on American workers, since naturalized citizens are Americans.

“Every May and June, people graduate from high school and college,” says Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy in Washington. “We don’t consider it a bad thing that they’re entering the labor force.”

Data on employers relying heavily on the H-1B program, however, suggests there are some companies who use it to fill mid-level technology positions, as opposed to hiring only the best and the brightest. “If a profession has a labor surplus, producing lots of new graduates in that profession IS a problem,” writes Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis, who has studied immigration in the tech sector for more than two decades. “In fact, occasionally a responsible university will indeed reduce the size of such a program.”

Back in Oakland, Donaldson wards off the morning chill with a cup of coffee and a heavy biker jacket. All he wants, he says, is to be able to work in the field he loves and hold onto his home here, where he’s lived for half his life – though he thinks he could find work as a software engineer outside of Silicon Valley.

“But I shouldn’t have to move,” he says. “This is the high-tech capital of the world, OK? I should be able to find work here.”

'What wrong did we do?'

Mahendran can’t imagine leaving the Bay Area either, much less the US. In the decade since she’s come to this country, she has earned a master’s degree, met and married her husband, and had a baby. “This is the life I built. This is the life I earned,” she says, almost pleading. “This is home.”

But if her work authorization is revoked, Mahendran also can’t imagine staying. Not if she can’t put her skills to use – she has a bachelor’s in computer science and an MBA – or contribute to the family income for the years they’ll need to wait for her husband’s green card.

“If you take the choice to [be a stay-at-home mom], then it’s different. But here you’re being forced to sit at home,” Mahendran says. “If worse comes to worst, I think we’ll have to leave.”

There are practical considerations, too, for those who’ve been out of the job market for an extended period. When the Obama administration granted the work authorization in 2015, Kalpna Sengar had already spent five years without a job. The gap in her résumé made her a less desirable candidate in her original field: the intersection of biotechnology and human resources. “Nobody entertained me,” she recalls. It was the fall of 2017 by the time she’d collected the right credentials to interview and land a job as a Salesforce administrator with Google.

The notion of once more having to wait years to go back to work horrifies her. “I worked really hard from 2015 to make myself educated again, going to classes, taking online courses, studying, and everything. And now if this rule gets passed, I'll be again jobless,” Ms. Sengar says. “It feels like going back to square one.”

Analysts say that when it comes to immigration, much of the trouble finds its roots not in the Department of Homeland Security, which houses USCIS, or even in the White House, but on Capitol Hill. The last time Congress came to a meaningful bipartisan agreement on immigration was in 1986. These days even narrow deals end in deadlock. For the third administration in a row, most of the movement on the issue has come by way of executive order or litigation. The H-4 EAD dispute will likely go the same way.

“It leads to legal uncertainty,” says Matthew Kolodziej, an immigration attorney at Jia Law Group in New York. That’s bad for the economy, he says, “and it’s negative for our national identity as a country of immigrants.”

“Because Congress hasn’t addressed our immigration laws in so long, the situation becomes increasingly dire,” adds Ms. Pierce at the Migration Policy Institute. “It also becomes more difficult for Congress to address it because some impossible questions have come up, like: What do you with 100,000 women on these employment authorization documents?”

“It’s circular,” she adds.

For those caught in the middle, there’s deep dismay toward American leadership. “I’m not blaming Indians for coming over. Who doesn’t want to be here?” Donaldson says. “I’m blaming the federal government.”

There’s also a sense of disillusionment – even betrayal – with the promise America represents.

“You work hard, you study hard, and good things happen to you in America,” Mahendran says. “I’ve seen people come here from other countries, they get their green card in five months. We followed the system. We’re equally qualified.

“Why us?” she asks. “What wrong did we do?” 

John Locher/AP/File

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System at Nipton, Calif., uses more than 300,000 mirrors to focus sunlight on tubes mounted in a tower, which turns water into steam. Research to advance the heat-gathering ability of such solar "power towers" could help the solar industry reach its high potential as a source of energy in the US and worldwide.

Eric Wachsman thinks he might have an answer to one of the great challenges that’s hindering the rise of electric vehicles: building better batteries.

The need is clear enough. The University of Maryland scientist knows that “range anxiety” has been one of the sticking points for consumers. “We want more and more energy out of every battery” he says.

But Professor Wachsman’s big idea – using a solid ceramic rather than flammable liquids inside the battery – won’t show up in electric vehicles anytime soon. Even when a technology works, proving its commercial viability, refining it, and attracting private investment to scale up production takes time and effort.

Wachsman’s project, part of a federal program to stimulate energy research, symbolizes some of the difficult realities as nations seek to address climate change by moving rapidly toward a clean-energy economy. Breakthroughs in technology are both vital and possible, but they require upfront patience before any big payoff ​​– a patience that private-sector investors typically don’t have.

Experts say the good news is that clean-energy research in the US is continuing, and often with federal funding, despite President Trump’s avowed preference for coal over renewables. But some also say the current level of energy research remains small relative to the need.

“Clearly, we need to deploy lots of [technologies] that are already commercialized in greater and greater numbers…. We also need innovation, across the whole spectrum of low-carbon and zero-carbon technologies,” says Karl Hausker, an energy expert at the World Resources Institute in Washington. “We're making some good progress. But we need to step it up.”

Jens Meyer/AP

A man walks in a BMW energy storage farm during its official opening at the plant of German automaker in Leipzig, Germany, on Oct. 26, 2017. With wind turbines nearby, the storage farm links decentralized self-generation of energy with a local storage station and a large industrial consumer. It's an example of how clean-energy innovation and investment are rising worldwide, at a time when some wonder if the US will fall behind other nations.

When the Republican-led Congress passed its omnibus spending bill in March, it ignored Mr. Trump’s call to end some energy programs, notably the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E. The agency is a kind of skunk works for energy innovation, embedded into the massive Department of Energy based on legislation passed in 2007.

The Trump administration has also been busy scaling back Obama-era plans to reduce auto and utility emissions of greenhouse gases that scientists say are warming Earth’s climate.

But Dr. Hausker says that on various fronts, from Congress to corporate and state- or local-government actions, the push toward a cleaner economy is continuing.

“The outpouring of commitments ... is really remarkable,” he says. These entities “are going to maintain a lot of the momentum.”

Meeting the goal

Climate scientists have widely agreed on the urgency of a daunting objective, to hold human-caused warming of Earth’s climate to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That in turn, points Hausker and other energy experts toward the goal of eliminating 80 percent of US carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

That means a lot of innovation would be welcome. Achieving climate-action targets by mid-century will hinge on improved energy efficiency, not just on the increasing the replacement of fossil fuels with cleaner sources of electricity, heat, and power.

At ARPA-E’s annual summit in March, the atmosphere was one of persistence. Doubts may still hang over the agency's future, but Congress actually increased its funding for 2018, and projects are continuing. And new ideas are being pitched to potential innovators, such as whether outworn oil wells can be converted to generate steam-based geothermal energy deep underground.

“Henry Ford once said about the automobile that if you’d asked people at the time what they wanted, most of them would have said they wanted a faster horse. That’s exactly why ARPA-E is so very important today,” Norm Augustine, a former aerospace CEO who helped inspire the agency’s launch, told a crowd at the event. “What’s needed are fresh approaches to the challenges we face.”

Mr. Augustine said it looks like advances in an array of energy fields, not just wind and solar, will be needed to meet future energy and environmental needs.

From wave-power to better solar

The dozens of exhibitors in the summit’s showroom, at a Washington convention center overlooking the Potomac River, ranged from nuclear and ocean-wave power to improved gasoline engines for cars. But they all have something in common: As ARPA-E award recipients, they’re expected to be laser-focused on using their grants to move a potentially viable product toward the marketplace.

Some of the projects push technological frontiers.

The Palo Alto Research Center, a Xerox company, is working with Sandia National Laboratories to develop a “micro chiplet printer” that could dramatically improve solar panels.

Other projects are more mundane, but if successful they could be equally far-reaching. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland are working on data-gathering software that would make it much simpler to provide accurate advice to businesses on improving the energy efficiency of their buildings.

The federal seed money is aimed at filling a gap that the private sector generally doesn’t: the difficult period of applied research, when the science is proven but the prototype is not yet built. Energy expert Varun Sivaram puts it this way in “Taming the Sun,” his new book on solar power: “Achieving successful demonstrations is absolutely crucial to bring down the risks perceived by private investors and firms.”

That’s why Dr. Sivaram differs with the view that government-funded research can be limited to basic science.

Can US stay ahead?

Other nations are also investing in energy research, which raises the prospect that US leadership in this area – and the jobs that can go with it – is far from guaranteed.

Wachsman, who heads the University of Maryland Energy Research Center, says he’s hopeful that he and his colleagues will play a role in tackling the threat of climate change.

“Even back in high school I was involved with and interested in energy,” he says. Partly that grew out of concern for the environment, but also “I was in high school during the first oil crisis, when people actually had to [wait] in line for gasoline.”

As a self-professed car nut, he felt America shouldn’t be dependent on other countries for its energy.

Now he and his colleagues – other professors, some of his students, the first employee at a start-up company – are on the hunt for funds to launch their first product: a solid ceramic-based battery for aerospace or defense applications. That’s a first step toward bringing safer, lighter, and cheaper batteries to the automotive sector.

“We are on a path to do that,” he says, adding that it shows how programs such as ARPA-E are “a critical aspect of what we need to do to be competitive as an energy industry.”

In a hilltop park high above Congo’s capital city, Batekele Mabanza Jose sits watch over his country’s history.

All around him, eras of the country’s past are shoved together like layers of metamorphic rock. On one side of the park, vines crawl over the bars of a cage that in the 1970s held one of former President Mobutu Sese Seko’s pet leopards. In another corner, an oversized bronze statue of the Belgian King Leopold II – Congo’s 19th century conqueror – gazes purposefully out over a cracked parking lot.

Nearby, a small complex of warehouses holds the nearly 50,000-item collection of Congo’s national museum, a sprawling mix of paintings, cultural artifacts, and audio recordings documenting the histories and cultures of Congo’s mosaic of ethnic groups.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Batekele Mabanza Jose, a curator and tour guide at Congo's national museum, says the museum is "the memory of our country."

“This place is the memory of our country,” says Mr. Jose, a curator and tour guide for the museum, as he waits for visitors on a recent Saturday morning.

But as a reservoir for a country’s collective memory, the museum complex has one major downside – it’s been almost entirely forgotten.

Entire days often pass here without a single visitor. The same is true at another branch of the museum at Kinshasa’s Academy of Fine Arts. There, a lone air conditioner rasps as it blows tiny puffs of cool air over a dimly lit room crowded with sparsely labeled masks, weavings, and spears.

“This is what colonization did to us – it cut us off from our traditional culture, it made people forget where they came from,” says Marie Salome Mwemena, the director of that museum, surveying the empty room. “We are like a people with amnesia. We have forgotten our own history.”

But now, the concrete skeleton of a new national museum building is rising on one of Kinshasa’s main boulevards, slotted into prime real estate near the Palais du Peuple, Congo’s parliament, and the country’s national stadium. It’s being bankrolled by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), which says it hopes the new museum will encourage more Congolese to engage with the country’s past, and help forge a sense of national unity in a country splintered by violent insurgencies. For many Congolese, meanwhile, the museum project is a hopeful step in their decades-long battle to have tens of thousands of Congolese artifacts repatriated from European and American museums.

But perhaps no one knows better than the Congolese how complicated a project it is to build a country – or for that matter, a national museum. In the 1970s, after all, the flamboyant Mobutu tried to do both. Mobutu’s museum, indeed, was in many ways meant to be a laboratory for Congo itself, says Sarah Van Beurden, an associate professor of African American and African studies at The Ohio State University: intended as a place where the dictator-president could redefine a national identity brutally suppressed by Belgian colonial rule. 

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

A statue of King Leopold II of Belgium – Congo's 19th century colonizer – stands on Mont Ngaliema near the national museum in Kinshasa.

And the story of its rise and fall, some observers say, offers a cautionary tale for the new museum, and a reminder that what makes it into a country’s past is very much determined by the goals of those in power in the country’s present.

That was something Mobutu knew well.

“During the colonial period we suffered … from the barbarous, systematic pillaging of all our works of art,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in October 1973, his trademark leopard-skin hat cocked carefully to one side. He was referring to the mass flight of artifacts from the country under Belgian colonial rule – the vast majority of them to the Royal Museum for Central Africa near Brussels.  The robbery of these artifacts, he said, had made his country “poor not only economically but culturally.”

And so, he announced to the UN, Congo wanted its history back. And do to that, it created a vast new national museum, one that would bring Congolese back to what he felt were their “authentic” cultural roots – before Western imperialism got in the way.

“Back then we had everything to do our research – vehicles, cameras, money, anything you needed,” says Christian Briki Kond’ji, the director of the contemporary art museum in Kinshasa, who then was a young researcher for the Institute of National Museums. “This was authenticité put into practice,” he says, referring to Mobutu’s broader project to purge the country of foreign influences, including its very name. The dictator-president rechristened Congo as “Zaire,” dropped his own French first name, Joseph-Désiré, and urged his countrymen to do the same.

In those days, he says, the museum’s staff – Belgian and Congolese – would load up their gear into one of the institute’s two Land Rovers and head out from the capital on teeth-rattling dirt roads to the country’s most remote corners, where they purchased tens of thousands of pieces of traditional art, weaponry, musical instruments, and other cultural relics from local communities.

Back in Kinshasa, they meticulously tagged and organized their new collections, which were stored in an old barracks on Kinshasa’s Mont Ngaliema. In a nod to how important the museum was to the president, it backed up onto one of Mobutu’s palaces and his personal zoo. Meanwhile, the president himself was deep in negotiations with Belgian officials to return objects they had taken out of the country during the colonial period.

Then, things began to fall apart.

At the same time as Mobutu was trying to reclaim his country’s history from the Belgians, he was trying to take back its economy as well. By the mid-1970s, he had nationalized most of the country’s foreign-owned companies, doling them out to his friends and political confidantes. Many were quickly pillaged or run into the ground. The country’s economy tumbled.

As government coffers emptied, plans to build a massive new building for the national museum quickly fell by the wayside.

“That was when things really began to decline,” Mr. Kond’ji says.

And it only got worse. As two major wars gripped Congo in the 1990s and early 2000s, valuable pieces began disappearing from its museums and storerooms, only to later appear on international markets. And the presidents who followed Mobutu seemed to have little interest in splashing out on fixing up their museums when so much of the rest of their country – from schools to hospitals to roads – was in an equal state of disrepair.

In 2011, however, the Congolese government struck a deal with KOICA, the Korean development agency.  It would fund the construction of a new national museum, as well as help to digitize its collections and train its staff on museum management.

But like the old museum before it, the project has often seemed less about the museum’s contents and more about the performance of building it, says Dr. Van Beurden, the author of a book on the history of Congo’s national museum.

“There’s this idea that just having a museum puts you on the map as a place, that it legitimizes you as a country,” she says. “There’s concern that the museum isn’t going to be so much about its contents as its shell.”

And that worry isn’t just about Congo’s approach to the museum. It’s about South Korea’s as well. As a rising star in the aid world, Seoul wants to show it’s capable not just of handing out sacks of flour or vaccinating children, but also of pulling off a big cultural project like a museum, Dr. Van Beurden says.

“The story they tell about themselves is about a formerly colonized country that has overcome its past to become a highly successful developed nation,” she says. “And they’re using that image to say to the Congolese, you don’t need to work with your old colonial overlords, you can work with us instead.”

Given Congo’s fraught history with European countries like Belgium, that’s a meaningful offer. However, so far the plans for the new museum have been light on many details – like what exactly will be exhibited there, or what the long term plans for funding and maintaining it are. (KOICA declined to comment for this story.)

The museum is expected to open next year, but some speculate the country’s current political turmoil could push that date back. President Joseph Kabila, who has been in office since 2001, has resisted repeated calls to step down after his last term expired at the end of 2016. Since then, the country has been wracked by protests, several of which have been violently put down by the country’s police force.

And although many local museum officials say they’re hopeful the new project will turn out well, they also know better than to rely on government to come through for them.

Kond’ji, of the contemporary arts museum, part of the Institute of National Museums, says he long ago stopped waiting for government to fill his museum’s bank account, and now devotes most of his time to hustling for funding from outside sources like embassies and foundations. And it’s working, he says, at least for now.

On a recent morning, a crowd of schoolchildren toured the contemporary art museum’s current exhibition, a series of paintings and sculptures honoring Congolese women, tucked into a hall beneath the city’s iconic Limete Tower. As they moved from painting to painting, gasping and giggling, one of their teachers explained why she had brought them here.

“Our kids, they need this – they need to see that Congo has art too,” said Diasadila Godelieve. “And it’s fun.”

Back at the national museum complex, meanwhile, Jose, the curator, wandered out of the single, small exhibition hall, where he had just finished his first tour for the day at 3 p.m. He blinked back the white midday light as he locked the door. Then he made his way slowly back to the park’s entrance, where he sat down and once again began to wait.

Tshoper Kabambi contributed reporting. 

AP Photo

Recently freed Nigerian girls from Dapchi pose for a photograph after a meeting with Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja, Nigeria, March 23.

On Monday, the president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, will become the first African leader to meet President Trump at the White House. Much of the meeting will probably focus on what the United States can do for Nigeria. The continent’s largest economy has a median age of only 18, a sluggish economy, and endemic corruption.

Yet Mr. Buhari could have something to offer the US as well.

Nigeria may be one of the few countries willing to negotiate with a branch of Islamic State (ISIS), part of its decade-long struggle with jihadi groups such as Boko Haram. Most other nations, including the US, refuse to talk to ISIS or its affiliates.

On Feb. 19, militants from Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) seized 112 schoolgirls and one boy from the town of Dapchi in northeast Nigeria. A month later, after negotiations with the government, the group accepted a temporary cease-fire and released most of the children. The government said it paid no ransom. It is possible that ISIS leaders in the Middle East ordered the release.

Whatever the motive, the negotiations may represent a critical shift in how to deal with terrorists other than a strictly military approach. Under Buhari, Nigeria has beefed up its armed forces to counter Boko Haram and ISWAP. But it has also started to tackle corruption and improve the economy, especially in the largely Muslim northeast where the militants have found support.

Nigeria’s soft power against jihadis included the election of Buhari as president in 2015. He was the nation’s first candidate to defeat an incumbent president and achieve a peaceful handover of power from one party to another. Such democratic success stands out in Africa, which still struggles to remove long-ruling leaders who suppress opponents and tinker with constitutions and elections to stay in power.

As a former general, Buhari has improved the military’s capabilities against the insurgents. But he also relies on other tactics, such as an offer of amnesty to militants who surrender. “We are ready to rehabilitate and integrate such repentant members into the larger society,” he said.

Nigeria, with a highly diverse population of more than 180 million people, has far to go in improving its democracy, economy, and military. Yet it has shown leadership within Africa on many fronts, such as helping restore democracy in nearby Gambia. Perhaps it might also be a pioneer in how to talk with militant groups. As Mr. Trump prepares to talk to North Korea, a country he has designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, perhaps Buhari can offer some advice.