Jorge Silva/Reuters/FILE

President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin talk during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam on Nov. 11, 2017.

President Trump has wanted to hold a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a long time, essentially from Day 1 of his tenure.

But from Mr. Trump’s perspective, the fact that the long-awaited one-on-one with the Russian leader has now been set to take place just days after a NATO summit he’ll attend with European leaders might seem like a case of good things coming to those who wait.

The president seemed to relish his recent one-two punch of a contentious meeting with America’s chief economic partners at the G7 summit in Quebec, Canada, followed immediately by the historic and ebullient one-on-one in Singapore with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. So for Trump, the prospect of repeating the formula barely a month later is likely tremendously appealing.

But European allies are anxious about a potential rerun of what was portrayed as a kick-the-allies-then-fete-an-adversary performance by the American president. They worry that Trump will use his European tour beginning at a NATO summit in Brussels next week to question transatlantic security and economic ties – only to then team up with Mr. Putin to undermine a united Europe, US-Europe analysts say.

“There’s a building sense of foreboding about a ‘Ground Hog Day the Movie’ scenario where we have a summit with allies that goes terribly wrong, and then a summit with an adversary that goes swimmingly well – and that this is the way things are going to be under this president,” says Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“It’s starting to sink in that if what we have this month is a redo of the Quebec-Singapore scenario, then what the allies are facing is a very different foreign-policy approach from the one the United States has pursued since World War II,” she adds.

Trump has long been set to attend the NATO summit July 11-12, followed by a one-day working visit to Britain July 13. Last week the White House announced that, following a meeting with Putin in Moscow by national security adviser John Bolton, the two sides had agreed to a Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki July 16.

It is not the prospect of a US-Russia summit that is worrisome, European officials say, but the cementing of a pattern from the Trump White House that is hostile to Western allies – and in particular to the “European project” led by the European Union. It is not so much an unpredictable Trump that is raising transatlantic anxieties, they add, but a Trump who is reliably antagonistic toward Europe.

“In fact, the president has been extremely consistent in his criticism of the [North Atlantic] Alliance.… He has been very clear that there is a special Trumpian hell for the European Union and China, with the EU considered to be worse than China,” says a senior European official in Washington, who requested anonymity to speak freely on the US-Europe relationship.

“As for the summit with Putin, we say ‘Why not?’ ” the official adds, noting that the US and Russia should be talking at the highest levels on issues ranging from arms control and Ukraine to Syria and Iran.

“There are a lot of issues you have to handle by going directly to Putin, we understand that,” the official says. “What concerns us is the sequence of having a bad NATO summit and a good summit” with Putin, he adds, highlighting the potential risks – such as the appearance of a ganging up on Europe.

Trump’s words and actions

The Europeans’ concerns are based not on mere speculation but on Trump’s words and actions.

Candidate Trump railed against the North Atlantic Alliance for costing American taxpayers too much while wealthy Europeans paid too little. That theme has attained new vigor under Trump in office.

The president told leaders at the G7 summit that “NATO is as bad as NAFTA” – and there is no mystery as to what Trump thinks of NAFTA, the free-trade deal with Canada and Mexico. Officials attending the Quebec meetings also confirm that Trump deemed the Alliance “much too costly” for US taxpayers and told colleagues the upcoming NATO gathering “will be an interesting summit” – suggesting to them that the president intends to make a few waves.

Highlighting his preference for bilateral relations over multilateral arrangements at a rally in North Dakota last week, Trump told his audience he “loves European countries” but that the EU was “set up to take advantage of the US.”

US-Europe relations have hit rough spots in the past and at times have suffered from Washington’s neglect, some analysts say. But American hostility to the institutions that have buttressed transatlantic ties – NATO and the EU – is new, they add, and suggests an animus that goes well beyond financial grievances.

“What we have never seen before is what looks increasingly like a policy of the Trump administration to undercut what we’ve come to call the European project,” says Ms. Conley. “It starts to feel like this is a policy to divide and erode Europe.”

She and others, including European officials, point to various signs of support from the administration for Europe’s populists and nationalists who target the EU as their worst enemy. More shocking still, they say, are the reports (since confirmed) that Trump at various times has encouraged French President Emmanuel Macron to pull France out of the EU – attempting to lure one of the EU’s most fervent supporters with the promise of a strong bilateral trade deal with the US.

Concern among US officials

Strong reaction to Trump’s approach to Europe has not stopped at European officials but has also surfaced among some American officials.

Last week the US ambassador to Estonia, Jim Melville, announced his resignation over Trump’s recent attacks on the EU, which he termed “factually wrong.” Before that, some members of Congress called on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to fire the US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, after he suggested that one of his goals while in Berlin is to nurture Europe’s nationalist conservatives.

Administration officials say Trump is indeed unhappy with the costs the US bears to lead such multilateral institutions as NATO and the G7 – and that he will continue to push the issue until he gets results. But to jump from that to conclude that the president is hard on allies yet soft on adversaries, they add, is going too far.

“I don’t think anybody ought to have a case of the vapors over discussions we have in NATO or the G7 versus discussions we have with Putin or Kim Jong-un,” Mr. Bolton said on “Fox News Sunday.” “They’re very, very different [and] the president treats them differently.”

That may be, but European officials worry that once Trump sits down alone with Putin, he’ll adopt the Russian president’s positions vis-à-vis America’s allies, as he did with Mr. Kim – as when he adopted North Korea’s language to describe joint US-South Korean military exercises as “provocative.”

Some worry that, after talking with Putin, Trump could say he agrees that US troops stationed in NATO countries abutting Russia are “provocative” – or could confirm his earlier stated view that Crimea, the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia, is indeed Russian because most people there speak Russian.

“The alarm we’re sensing among the Europeans and other allies is in part the still-raw experience of the G7, but it’s also a result of seeing the president of the United States assuming the language of Kim Jong-un as opposed to using the language the US leader has over time settled on with its allies to use about the situation,” says Conley. “It raises the question: Will we see a repeat of that?”

Protests erupted anew in Iran over the weekend, with thirsty residents of the parched city of Khorramshahr raising popular pressure on President Hassan Rouhani by quickly turning their demand for water into anti-regime anger.

“Under the name of religion, the thieves robbed us of everything!” echoed one chant, along with calls for the deaths of Mr. Rouhani and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Khorramshahr protests, a week after three days of protests in Tehran, were the latest sign of popular discontent over Iran’s faltering economy, sliding currency, and the prospect of tough new US sanctions.

But the subdued reporting in the hard-line media about the water shortage couldn’t have been more different from the triumphalist, anti-Rouhani tone that accompanied the previous protests in the Tehran bazaar.

The reaction to those protests – which hard-liners reportedly had a hand in orchestrating, with shops shut for days – was the apparent culmination of a months-long campaign by hard-liners to discredit the president’s leadership and force his resignation.

In the course of a week, however, media coverage morphed from a free-for-all attack by opponents on Rouhani to calls for unity from across the political spectrum to confront problems at home and foes abroad. And that transformation, say analysts, exposes the limited ability of hard-liners to articulate an alternative path, much less convince key power centers such as Ayatollah Khamenei that they could rule more effectively.

Such calls for unity also highlight, say others, that after 20 years, factions in the Islamic Republic are increasingly unable to cooperate on solving the country’s problems.

Protests likely will continue popping up across the country, as Iranians continue to air local and economic grievances and officials try to solve them. And hard-liners likely will continue to try to use them for political advantage, to paint a president they despise as weak.

But in this latest episode Rouhani has prevailed, holding at bay for now the complex challenges that confront the Islamic Republic after nearly 40 years in power.

The internal gamesmanship is playing out even as the US hints at boosting pressure against Iran to the point of regime change in an attempt to alter Iran’s strategic calculus and prompt it to withdraw from interventions in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. But analysts say the Islamic Republic is far from reaching a tipping point, despite the impression given by the vicious infighting and frequent street protests.

“Hard-liners can complain, but they have no strategy to gain power,” says Farideh Farhi, a veteran Iran expert at the University of Hawaii.

“Rouhani is effectively, realistically, the best option the whole system has in steering the very difficult situation that Iran now faces,” says Ms. Farhi. “If under the circumstances something happens to Rouhani, then the outside world will say, ‘Oh my God, Iran is in even more trouble than we thought.’ So [the hard-liners] have no other choice than to stick to Rouhani.”

Talk of impeachment

Hard-line elements have orchestrated unrest to tarnish Rouhani before, as they did in protests that erupted last December in the northeast city of Mashhad – which quickly spread nationwide, spinning out of control into serious anti-regime unrest.

Recently, hard-liners have called for early presidential elections and even a military president, in what the Al-Monitor news website called a “well-devised plan.”

“This time, hard-liners don’t just want to weaken the moderate president, but to push him out altogether,” wrote Al-Monitor, noting a series of statements from hard-line officials and clerics raising doubts about Rouhani and the specter of impeachment.

In response, Rouhani declared that opponents who think his government was “scared and will resign” were “making a mistake.” He implied that he had continued support from Mr. Khamenei, and said: “We cannot stand up to America and yet continue our domestic fights.”

Those statements appeared to turn the tide against Rouhani’s opponents, and “pour water on their designs,” says Farhi.

“Iran is not in a revolutionary stage,” she says. “There are no organizational structures that can turn these disparate protests … into a bigger movement requiring fundamental change.”

That hasn’t prevented the president’s many enemies from taking steps to damage him, especially after President Trump said in May that the US would unilaterally withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal – a signature foreign policy achievement for Rouhani that he promised would deliver prosperity and normal relations with the West.

Seen from Tehran, further proof that the US aims for regime change came this weekend, when former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed an annual Paris meeting of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a cult-like Iranian opposition group with virtually no support in Iran that for years has paid senior former US officials to speak at its events.

“We are now realistically being able to see an end to the regime in Iran,” said Mr. Giuliani, an attorney for Trump and a regular at MEK events. “The mullahs must go, the ayatollah must go.… Freedom is right around the corner.… Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran!”

Such pronouncements just feed the political battle in Iran. Hard-liners opposed the nuclear deal from the start, saying the US could not be trusted, and have, ever since Trump’s decision, tried to capitalize on their I-told-you-so moment.

Economic factors

The Tehran protests last week were over the fate of the Iranian rial, which lost half its value this year, and were further fueled by revelations that smartphone importers had made fortunes gaming foreign currency rules.

But hard-line lawmakers lined up to call for Rouhani to step down or be impeached. A military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei suggested that Iran would be better managed with no government at all, rather than with Rouhani. A 370-page on-line book, Iran’s version of a hatchet job, even accused the president of being an agent of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency.

The smear campaign was a sign that Rouhani’s opponents were smelling blood like never before. But as the challenge to Rouhani grew, so did the realization that the anti-Rouhani campaign was being counterproductive, both inside and outside Iran.

Khamenei’s military adviser, former Revolutionary Guard chief Yahya Rahim Safavi, for example, backtracked and called on all Iranians to help the government solve economic problems and “defuse the enemies’ plots.” And even the conservative newspaper Kayhan, a reliable voice of hard-liners, is calling for internal unity to best tackle Iran’s problems. In an editorial July 2 titled, “Neither impeachment nor blank check,” it said now is not the best time to “address the mismanagement and mistakes” of Rouhani’s administration.

“It is clear that Rouhani is weakened compared to this time last year” after his reelection, says Farzan Sabet, a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. The president’s signature achievements are “in tatters,” he notes, and promises of enhanced social and political freedoms “remain largely unfulfilled.”

“But I suspect conservatives who wield real power over unelected power centers in Iran don’t want to bring him down. What would they do without him?” says Mr. Sabet.

“The conservatives understand that their own ineptitude at international diplomacy and economic mismanagement and corruption are among the main factors that have brought the Islamic Republic to the brink of calamity,” he says.

While protests since December have been used for easy point-scoring against Rouhani, Iran’s opaque political system is “prone to friction and deadlock,” says Sabet. That has itself become a crisis, he adds, “because after 20 years of Islamic Republic politicians tearing each other apart with little to show for it, not only have Iranians lost hope in the system, but on a practical level it means elements of the system often cannot work together to solve problems.”

Signs of manipulation

Indeed, while the government and judiciary issued harsh warnings to “saboteurs” after the Tehran bazaar protests – and asked for “true” bazaaris to separate themselves from “troublemakers” – there were signs that those protests were partly orchestrated.

“We are forced to close our shops,” one unnamed gold-dealer told the Financial Times of London in Tehran. “Anti-Rouhani power centers have sent their agents to the bazaar. It seems there is a plan to make Rouhani a victim of the current economic crisis.”

But the crisis is not going away.

“Our people are in a situation like they have a fish bone stuck in their throats,” the Tehran Friday prayer leader Kazem Seddighi said in his latest sermon. Rouhani’s government “should repent and understand people’s pains. They shouldn’t smile.”

Iran’s economic woes are not due to sanctions, the cleric said, but to mismanagement and failing to heed Khamenei’s call to prioritize the economy.

Such sentiment is echoed on Tehran’s streets, where the owner of a corner grocery shop on Miremad Street was asked about daily price changes.

“Well, I don’t know really where we are headed,” said Meysam, angrily. “We are only filling the pockets of the elite who enjoy import privileges. This has nothing to do with Trump, we have to start at home.”

Daniel Becerril/Reuters

Migrant children from Honduras and Mexico play at the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, in Tamaulipas state, Mexico June 22, 2018.

Satsuki Ina doesn’t call them “internment camps.” The Sacramento, Calif., family therapist has another word for the government facility where she was born seven decades ago.

“We were placed not in internment camps,” she says. “We were placed in concentration camps.”

Dr. Ina and her family were victims of the US government’s forced removal and incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. She was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California, while her father was held in a camp in North Dakota. Her family was reunited only when she was two years old.

As a result of her experience, Ina, who specializes in community trauma, has quite a bit to say about the US government’s “zero-tolerance” policy, enacted by the president in May and withdrawn on June 20. Under the policy, adult migrants attempting to cross the border at unauthorized locations were arrested and charged with illegal entry, a misdemeanor under US federal law. Their children were turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services and then housed in privately run facilities – variously referred to as “migrant shelters,” “detention centers,” and, yes, even “internment camps.” There are currently more than 2,000 children in these facilities.

Pediatricians and psychologists have condemned the practice, saying that children involuntarily separated from their parents exhibit toxic stress, a physiological response to trauma that medical experts say lead to long-term challenges such as learning disabilities, depression, substance abuse, and a wide range of physical ailments.

In a CNN interview last week, Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, labeled the practice “child abuse.” Now, as the legal system takes its first steps to reunite the children with their parents per the orders of a federal judge in San Diego, it’s worth asking what can be done to support these children going forward. 

“Toxic stress is not a death sentence,” says Hirokazu Yoshikawa, co-director of the Global TIES for Children Center at New York University, “and it’s not something that’s going to affect every single child.”

Nevertheless, child development experts say that it’s critical that these children be returned to their families as soon as possible. “The clock is ticking when it comes to toxic stress,” says pediatrician Jack Shonkoff the director of Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child and an authority on toxic stress. “Time is our enemy right now. Every week that goes by, time is making things worse.”

Shonkoff emphasizes that the youngest children will be the most affected. “Consciously they may not have memories at this point,” he says, “but the body doesn’t forget.”

“Not everybody is going to need a whole lot of help, but some kids and families are, and we have a responsibility to provide that,” says Dr. Shonkoff, who suggests that the children be evaluated by child development experts at the time of their reunion. “This can't just be done by border guards or our courts.”

Dr. Yoshikawa says that, once the children are reunited with their families, they would benefit most from a return to comforting routines. “This is particularly important for reestablishing what might have been disruptions to attachment,” he says, “the kinds of everyday things that we take for granted, but which were interrupted and completely absent during this time, which are bedtime routines, or feeding routines, or play routines.”

But reestablishing this kind of stability can be a challenge for migrant families. Many of these children will likely remain in the United States while their parents await their trials and serve out their sentences. Others may return to the so-called Northern Triangle countries – Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador – where violence is endemic.

“Making sure that children are reintegrated or integrated into school, into peer activities, to all the kind of normal aspects of childhood are really what we’d want to see,” Yoshikawa says, “but that’s actually very difficult to do when the family continues to live in fear.”

Longer term, the children would greatly benefit from an official acknowledgement that what was done to them was morally wrong, says Ina.

“If you’re hated, and that message comes across if you’re in prison, even though you haven’t done anything,” she says, “that gets internalized by a child.”

Ina says that she has carried the trauma from her experience through her whole life. But the US government’s official apology, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1988, marked a step toward recovery, she says. “When the government acknowledged that they had they had committed a terrible mistake, that what they had done was wrong, that’s when people started talking about what happened.”

Ina suggests that incarcerated migrant children today could benefit from a similar admission of wrongdoing. “If there is acknowledgement that the child is not at fault,”  she says, “that this was a terrible thing that had happened to them, the empathy for the child is is going to be an important part of their healing.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Students chat in the food court at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn in May of 2012. The changing climate in the US is causing some international students to rethink studying at US colleges and universities.

Landry Bado has a new bachelor’s degree in architecture from Temple University in Philadelphia, and he hopes to design museums, community centers – places that bring people together.

A citizen of Burkina Faso in West Africa, he’s also vocal about the benefits of coming together across borders for higher education.

He’s one of many students and staff who offer warm smiles as they convey the message, “You are welcome here” in a Temple video, designed to reassure prospective international students who may be concerned about what climate they’d land in if they come to study in the United States.

Hundreds of US colleges and universities have joined the #YouAreWelcomeHere video and social media campaign, depicting the sense of home they try to forge on their campuses. It’s also one way higher education is pushing back against President Trump’s rhetoric and policies that cast globalization as a threat.

US higher education needs to “make the case for continuing to be a destination for international students … in response to a narrative in the country that is more anti-global engagement, more anti-immigrant,” says Gil Latz, associate vice chancellor for international affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. At heart, he says, it’s about addressing the question, “How can we both be safe and open to the world?”

A $30 billion bump to the economy

Competition for international college students is growing globally, and many US colleges want to bolster their numbers – to boost both diversity and their bottom line. Just over 1 million international students contribute more than $30 billion a year to the US economy, and they help American students prepare for joining a global workforce.

But admissions staff have been hearing rumblings from students and parents abroad – some alarmed by news headlines about violence and bias incidents at US schools, others worried about real or potential visa restrictions.

Because of the political climate here, interest in coming to the US decreased for one-third of 2,104 prospective international students surveyed  in February 2017.

SOURCE:

EAB/Royall & Company: Effect of the Current Political Environment on International Student Enrollment, 2017

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

But that’s not the only factor fueling a recent decline in new international enrollments. After at least 12 years of steady growth, those numbers actually dipped before the election of Mr. Trump – by about 10,000 students in the fall of 2016, a 3 percent decline from the previous year.

One contributing factor: a winding down of government scholarship programs in Brazil and Saudi Arabia for students to go abroad, says Rajika Bhandari, a top official at the Institute of International Education in New York, which publishes the “Open Doors” data report. Other factors include the growth of opportunities in large countries, such as India, and competitive strategies by nations like Canada, which markets itself as safe and welcoming.

Decline in students in 2017

Higher education groups here want to stave off a worsening decline of US market share. A survey of 500 US institutions indicated a 7 percent dip of new international students in the fall of 2017. 

“Things started to feel more scary after the elections [in 2016],” says Mr. Bado, from Burkina Faso. “A lot of people are becoming more and more anxious with the idea of traveling here.”

His parents cautioned him about sharing too much on Facebook after the election, worried that his own visa prospects could be harmed. Bado also knows students from Iran who have not been able to see their family members because of Trump’s travel ban, upheld June 26 by the US Supreme Court.

A host of education groups spoke out against the decision. “At a time when we should be making every effort to create connections and ties around the world through robust international exchange with all nations, especially those in the Middle East,... the chilling effect of this policy and the uncertainty for our international students and scholars will undoubtedly continue the current downturn in U.S. international student enrollment as the world wonders whether America will hold true to our values,” said Jill Welch, an official at NAFSA: Association of International Educators, in a statement.

Nevertheless, Bado has had a good experience in the US and is enamored with the City of Brotherly Love. “I tell [potential international students] about all the people that I’ve met that actually do not agree with all these immigration policies,” he says.

Abdulrahman Alsulaiman, a Saudi and a rising senior at Temple, says the #YAWH video made a difference in his cousin’s decision to come to the US this summer to study English, and perhaps stay for an undergraduate degree. It “helped his parents really trust that their kid will be safe,” he says.

A push to woo students

Whether part of the campaign or not, many American colleges have been working double time to allay worries – and to provide opportunities for international and domestic students to interact.

Tufts set up a travel hotline for international students and scholars. The University of New Hampshire sent representatives to China and India to encourage students who had been admitted to actually enroll. Eastern Michigan University put up banners on their lightpoles featuring photos of international students. Temple hosted a week of activities, including a speed-dating style cultural exchange.

The US State Department continues to promote study here through its EducationUSA offices around the world.

But the State Department and other US agencies are also taking action to address growing concerns about the theft of intellectual property and threats to national security by individuals from certain countries, including China.

The State Department is issuing new screening guidelines for Chinese students studying in highly sensitive fields such as aviation and robotics, acknowledged Edward Ramotowski, the deputy assistant secretary for visa services in the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, during a congressional hearing  June 6. 

The exchange at the hearing suggested the new guidelines would require annual renewal of visas, primarily for Chinese graduate students in these fields. A State Department official would not confirm this to the Monitor, however, stating in an email that the maximum validity for a student visa for Chinese nationals is five years and is unchanged, and that consular officers have always had the right to limit the length of visas on a case-by-case basis.

While the security concerns are important, the new guidelines, in conjunction with other immigration policies, could end up “contributing to a signal to foreign students that they’re not welcome in the US,” says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education in Washington.

'US is not safe'

Kang, a Chinese citizen who attended graduate school at Columbia University in New York, recently launched Lighthouse Academy in Beijing, a business that consults with students there about study abroad, primarily in the US. Visa and safety concerns do make a difference for students, he writes in an email interview. He requests that his full name not be used because of concerns about possible trouble with the Chinese government if his name appears too frequently in foreign media.

Many parents have told him they fear discrimination against their children since Trump’s election, and they’ve also been disturbed by violent crimes against several Chinese students in the US. Add to that the recent media coverage of gun violence and “it conjured up a logic that is solid to parents: US is not safe,” he writes. 

Half his undergraduate clients ask if they can apply to the US and Canada or other countries at the same time. Still, many Chinese students who can get into top-ranked US universities and afford the tuition will probably attend despite concerns, he says.

Wu Ying, a sophomore at Shantou University in China, says she is wondering whether a master’s degree in the US would be worth the price. Chinese students here have given her the impression that “though it might be tough and challenging sometimes it still has considerable merits,” she writes in an email. “After hearing their ideas I feel inspired and want to ‘have a try.’ ”

Even those who have been negatively affected by violence in the US have urged people to see the bigger picture. After the Santa Fe, Texas, high school shooter killed Pakistani exchange student Sabika Sheikh, her father, Abdul Aziz Sheikh, told the Associated Press: “One should not lose his heart by such kind of incidents…. One should not stop going for education to the US or UK, or China, or anywhere. One must go for education undeterred.”

There’s a sense of mission among international admissions directors like Michelle Kowalsky of Western New England University in Springfield, Mass., which is one of several schools offering two #YAWH scholarships for students starting in 2019.

“This is going to sound corny, but I feel like part of my job is this idea of world peace,” she says. “The more you get to know people from other places, you understand that some of the things that you really care about, your family [for instance], are intrinsically important to people around the world.”

Courtesy of the Kaofang Group

The sun shines on the Pun Pai organic farm, part of the Dare to Return community in Thailand, which champions a return to agriculture for sustainability.

When asked why he resigned from an engineering career to start anew as a farmer, Pasawut “Jack” Roongrasmi simply replies, “Because I wasn’t happy.”

Dozens of young men and women in Thailand are turning away from the modern comforts of big cities, determined to make a self-sufficient life for themselves through agriculture. To help them, a grassroots network of experienced farmers has developed a smart agricultural community called Dare to Return, assisting the youngsters in setting up their farms with modern and sustainable methods. 

“I went through all kinds of training, but I wasn’t able to build upon what I had,” Mr. Roongrasmi says. “The training I got from the Dare To Return initiative opened a whole new dimension for me. I was able to learn from those who had experience working and living a better life, and little by little I was able to transform myself.”

The Dare To Return initiative is a collaborative effort to empower a new generation of self-sufficient farmers in Thailand, at a time when rural populations are aging. According to the Thai National Economic and Social Development Board, the number of people over 60 living in the countryside rose to more than 11 million in 2017 – or 17 percent of the total population. 

The network aims to encourage young people who emigrated to the cities to return and develop their rural hometowns with innovative farming technologies. They believe agriculture is a vector of sustainability and resilience that can provide a long-term foundation for a society ready to adopt technological change. Through mutual assistance, community learning, and self-transformation, they hope to bridge the gap between old and new generations and build the basis for a more collaborative society, improving the quality of life for all.  

“Once I internalized the fact that I am a farmer, I found that it’s a much better life than that of a salaried worker. I’ve gone further than I ever thought I would. Agriculture works beautifully when it becomes a state of mind, focused on doing what is actually feasible,” Roongrasmi says.

He says he is happy with his farm in Chiang Mai’s Mae Rim rural district, where he uses automatic irrigation and electrical supply systems to grow bromeliad plants for export. He is also taking classes at Maejo University in Chiang Mai, studying the optimization of light for plants.

Purich Singkharaj, another young Thai farmer, has a horticulture degree from Chiang Mai University. Born into a family of farmers, he chose his career path as a journey of self-discovery, among other reasons. 

“After graduating, I used to work six days a week, doing overtime every day, until the company sent me to Nigeria for three years,” he says, noting that the trip gave him the chance to think about what he really wanted from life. “I realized that I was wasting my time, and that I should start my own farming operation while I still had the strength.” 

Two years after returning to Thailand, he decided to open a homestay guesthouse. Visitors could use the land surrounding the house to grow onions, rice, and organic strawberries.

“My return to Thailand coincided with an economic recession. I had zero capital apart from my chickens and my plants,” he recalls. “My income came from day-to-day product sales. But I had time to pursue my interests in art and music, unlike when I was working at the company. I like this version of me better.”

Aside from owning and running the Innkham Homestay and producing organic chrysanthemums and strawberries, Mr. Singkharaj organizes one of the Dare to Return networks of new-generation farmers. He also helps care for orange and lychee orchards on several acres of family-owned land in Chiang Mai.

Another young Thai farmer, Duangjai Sirijai holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and lives in her family home in Chiang Mai’s Doi Tao rural district. She worked in Chiang Mai for seven years before transferring to Bangkok. But her life changed when her parents fell ill, forcing her to return to her hometown. 

Ms. Sirijai started preparing for her move three years ahead of time – saving money, renovating the family home, making investments, and learning about agriculture, particularly longan fruit.

Because the sandy soil of her land is particularly suitable for growing roots and tubers, Sirijai turned to permaculture farming methods. She prepped the soil for four months, growing groundnuts, then cultivating Japanese mountain yams and onions. Her agricultural activity is small-scale and focuses on quality, she says.

Today, Sirijai owns two longan orchards, which she harvests in and out of season. The first has 130 trees on 2.7 acres, while the second has 60 trees on 1.2 acres.

Her farming activities not only provide for her family of six, but also help others in the community learn how to develop their own operations. She makes some of her land available to the Doi Tao Agricultural Learning Center, where she teaches agriculture.

Sirijai’s determination has inspired a whole network of Dare to Return farmers who are now fully integrated into local communities and organizations.

This story was reported by Khaosod, a news outlet in Thailand. The Monitor is publishing it as part of an international effort by more than 50 news organizations worldwide to promote solutions journalism. To read other stories in this joint project, please click here. 

Reuters

The "pop.up next" concept by Audi, Airbus, and Italdsign, an electric driver-less autonomous vehicle with vertical take-off and landing, is pictured during the Viva Tech start-up and technology summit in Paris May 25.

This year marks exactly two centuries since the publication of “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” by Mary Shelley. Even before the invention of the electric light bulb, the author produced a remarkable work of speculative fiction that would foreshadow myriad ethical questions to be spawned by technologies yet to come.

Today the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) raises fundamental questions: “What is intelligence, identity, or consciousness? What makes humans humans?"

What is being called artificial general intelligence, machines that would mimic the way humans think, continues to elude scientists. Yet humans remain fascinated by the idea of robots that would look, move, and respond like humans, similar to those recently depicted on popular sci-fi TV series such as “Westworld” and “Humans.”

Just how people think is still far too complex to be understood, let alone reproduced, says David Eagleman, a Stanford University neuroscientist and science adviser for “Westworld.” “[W]e are just in a situation where there are no good theories explaining what consciousness actually is and how you could ever build a machine to get there.”

But that doesn’t mean crucial ethical issues involving AI aren’t at hand. Less sophisticated AI is already embedded in everyday life, from the (sometimes) helpful voice assistants like Alexa to Facebook tagging photos for users.

Besides much-talked-about vehicles that will drive themselves, AI is crunching huge amounts of data to suggest whether a prisoner would likely return to crime if released; algorithms exist that can choose the best applicants for a job or the right classes for a student to take (not to mention defeat a human at chess or win a debate).

All these systems contain the possibility of misuse. One viral video shows an automatic soap dispenser in a public bathroom that only dispenses soap onto white hands. Apparently the design team forgot to calibrate the sensor so that it recognized hands with darker skin tones.

While that foul-up might seem frivolous, or even humorous (though perhaps not to those being denied soap), it illustrates a more serious problem: If an employer looks for new hires, for example, using an algorithm based on the characteristics of its presently all-white or all-male staff, might the algorithm recommend only people with those characteristics?

The coming use of autonomous vehicles poses gnarly ethical questions. Human drivers sometimes must make split-second decisions. Their reactions may be a complex combination of instant reflexes, input from past driving experiences, and what their eyes and ears tell them in that moment. 

AI "vision" today is not nearly as sophisticated as that of humans. And to anticipate every imaginable driving situation is a difficult programming problem. One possible technique may be to survey human drivers to ask what they would do in myriad driving situations. Another would be to analyze accidents involving AI after the fact, to understand how it proved deficient and fix the problem.

The hope is that AI-driven vehicles will become far better drivers than humans, saving thousands of human injuries and deaths.

But whenever decisions are based on masses of data, “you quickly get into a lot of ethical questions,” notes Tan Kiat How, chief executive of the Info-communications Media Development Authority, a Singapore-based agency that is helping the government develop a voluntary code for the ethical use of AI.

Along with Singapore, other governments and mega-corporations are beginning to establish their own guidelines. Britain is setting up a data ethics center. India released its AI ethics strategy this spring. Worldwide, high schools and colleges could seriously commit to teaching students in AI courses about the ethical issues this new technology raises.

On June 7 Google pledged to not “design or deploy AI” that would cause “overall harm,” or to develop AI-directed weapons or use AI for surveillance that would violate international norms. It also pledged to not deploy AI whose use would violate international laws or human rights.

While the statement is vague, it represents one starting point. So does the idea that decisions made by AI systems should be “explainable, transparent, and fair,” as S. Iswaran, Singapore’s minister for communications and information, put it recently.

To put it another way: How can we make sure that the thinking of intelligent machines reflects humanity’s highest values? Only then will they be useful servants and not Frankenstein’s unleashed monster.