Inside the hillside church where she works part time as custodian, Ana Vanegas-Rivera rests on a wooden bench and pulls out her phone wallet. She holds up a blue debit card, similar to the others in her wallet, minus her name or any issuing bank. 

The card belongs to Chelsea, a blue-collar city outside Boston that is using it to give cash to around 2,000 low-income residents during a pandemic that has disproportionately hit its Latino-majority population. Every month the card is reloaded with between $200 and $400, depending on family size, allowing recipients to spend the money as they see fit. 

Ms. Vanegas-Rivera’s $400 goes toward buying food, household items, school supplies, and shoes for Dylan, her third grade son. For now, the family is getting by on her modest custodian salary and disability checks, along with what her husband earns from sporadic construction jobs, so every extra dollar counts. 

“It has been a big help. I’m very happy that we have this opportunity,” she says. 

The pilot income program, which began in November and runs until May, has been underwritten by federal and state COVID-19 relief dollars, as well as private donations, and is geared to feeding families, as its name, Chelsea Eats, suggests. “Our overriding goal is to get people through the spring,” says Tom Ambrosino, the city manager. “For some of our families that is the only money they have.” 

Chelsea is also a national testbed for a simple idea: to help people by giving them money. Not a housing voucher, not food stamps, but a cash-equivalent payment that ensures recipients have a basic income that they can spend any way they want. The rationale is that people know best what they need, and letting them make decisions on how to use the money, without restrictions, is direct and empowering, and doesn’t require a big bureaucracy to implement.

Chelsea is one of several U.S. cities experimenting with unconditional cash transfers to help some residents quickly – an idea that could become the basis for an alternative to traditional welfare and other safety net programs that have existed for decades. Indeed, advocates see these cash experiments as a building block toward a federal guarantee of a basic income for all, or at least all who manifestly need it. 

The idea of a universal basic income that would fill in some of the crevasses in capitalist economies isn’t new. Its supporters run the gamut from Silicon Valley millionaires to Pope Francis, who said last year it could “acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks.” But UBI has always been a provocative notion that seemed just a little too provocative, an unfathomable expense – free money for all – that nobody would want to pay.

That was before the pandemic. Once economies started closing down, governments around the world began to dig deep and spend freely, putting cash directly in people’s hands. 

“I think we’re at a watershed moment,” says Luke Shaefer, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “We used money to respond to an economic crisis and it wasn’t perfect, but we got money out quickly.”

Most U.S. social assistance is modest and conditioned on certain requirements, such as work and family size. Except for older adults or people with disabilities, it rarely arrives in the form of cash. This reflects an ethos of self-reliance, as well as decades of conservative criticism that welfare is wasteful and breeds dependence. Backers of basic income believe these traditional assistance programs no longer work. 

Yet the politics of governments handing out cash remains complicated. Many liberals like UBI but some don’t. Many conservatives don’t like UBI but some do. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

"We can trust people to spend money appropriately. Just because people are poor doesn't mean that people are irresponsible." – Tom Ambrosino, city manager in Chelsea, Massachusetts

For now, momentum is building for at least some form of basic income in the face of a lopsided economy that seems to generate more losers than winners, even before the pandemic. But the question is: How far will the idea go?

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned his attention to what he called the next phase of the civil rights struggle: an agenda for economic justice and structural reform. In his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,” he proposed a radical fix to the economic insecurity that many Black families faced. 

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

A year later, Dr. King was dead. The baton for basic income then passed to President Richard Nixon, a Republican. In 1969, he proposed what was essentially a negative income tax – a tax refund for people who made little or no money. Under his plan, a family of four with no earnings would receive up to $1,600 a year, roughly $11,000 in today’s dollars. The idea was backed by free market economist Milton Friedman, who had long favored an income guarantee based on the federal tax system. But the proposal failed to pass the Democratic-run Senate in 1971 and slipped into near-obscurity. 

Fifty years on, interest in UBI as an anti-poverty tool continues to attract odd bedfellows. On the left, basic income is framed as economic justice and a corrective to corporate exploitation. Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, considers it a sort of “national strike fund.” In a 2016 book, “Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream,” he argues a cash allotment would allow workers to walk off the job, or threaten to walk off the job, in protest, giving them leverage to demand better pay and working conditions from corporate overlords.

On the right, there is some appetite for a basic income because it could shrink the size of government – dispersing cash doesn’t take the bureaucracy that welfare does – and give more control to recipients. According to this argument, people couldn’t try to game the system to extend or get higher payments, as critics say they do now. They’d just get money.

Charles Murray, a conservative author, hails UBI as a slayer of a welfare system that “has severely degraded the traditions of work, thrift, and neighbourliness which enabled the system to work at the outset.”

One reason UBI is back in vogue is the seemingly inexorable march of automation, which heralds a dearth of jobs in the future for all but the most skilled workers. In this scenario, UBI is not so much a safety net for hard times as a futuristic way to re-imagine wage labor and human striving. Those who can’t find paid work would have a basic income to fall back on. Others could work in jobs they like, even though they don’t pay well, because they would have a supplemental income. 

While this tech future hasn’t arrived, many entrepreneurs seem convinced that it will. Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey and Y Combinator, a startup incubator, have separately poured millions of dollars into basic-income experiments and advocacy. So has Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who is a co-chair of the Economic Security Project, an advocacy group. 

It took another tech millionaire, Andrew Yang, to turn UBI from a policy abstraction into a national conversation about the future of work. He ran for the Democratic nomination for president on a proposal that all adults receive a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month, a plan based on dire predictions of robots and computers replacing humans in the workplace. 

By the time Mr. Yang ended his candidacy in February 2020, UBI was part of the political lexicon in imagining what governments should do if work does, in fact, go away. A month later, the U.S. and other major economies froze. Virtually overnight, work went away. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

People distribute boxes of food at La Colaborativa, a social services organization in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on Feb. 23, 2021. The organization has been distributing up to 1,500 food boxes a day since the beginning of the pandemic.

Back in Chelsea, Mr. Ambrosino, the town manager, had a problem. It was summer 2020 and he had his hands full distributing food to residents whose incomes had evaporated during lockdowns. The densely populated city of 40,000 on Boston’s North Shore, once studded with shoe and paper factories and now home to workers in the hospitality sector and at Boston’s airport, had become a pandemic hot spot during the first wave.

Mr. Ambrosino also felt for the men and women who stood in line for hours and lugged heavy boxes of food home. “That didn’t seem like a dignified way to feed them,” he says.  

So he turned to Jill Shah, an entrepreneur who, along with her husband, Niraj Shah, the founder and chief executive officer of Wayfair, has a family foundation in Boston that was supporting statewide food security initiatives. Ms. Shah looked at the logistics of trucking in food to Chelsea and wondered if there was a better way. What about just giving people cash? she asked. 

Ms. Shah had grown interested in basic income through her work on community resilience and saw that Chelsea was willing to experiment in an economic crisis, provided the money could be found. “This was a perfect opportunity for us to study it,” she says. 

By pooling COVID-19 relief dollars with $1 million from the Shah Family Foundation and donations from United Way and Massachusetts General Hospital, Chelsea had enough funding to support more than 2,000 households during winter months. Now it needed to select them. 

When Ms. Vanegas-Rivera heard about Chelsea Eats, she decided she would apply, not just for herself but also so she could guide other families in her WhatsApp support group who might not understand the application process. In the end, most filed to join the program, which was open to all residents on low incomes. 

Before the pandemic, Ms. Vanegas-Rivera, who was born in Guatemala and moved to the United States in 1997, had been making extra money by selling jewelry and cosmetics to her friends. But the family still struggled to pay bills, ran up debt, and had no savings. “We had nothing else to spare at the end of the month,” she says. “That’s how it was.” 

Then her husband’s construction work dried up. So when Chelsea held a lottery in September to pick the program recipients, she was elated when she found out her number had come up. But she didn’t let on that she had gotten picked because others in her group hadn’t been selected.

“It’s a big help, definitely. We’re very grateful it happened to us,” she says. “But I’m very sad that other people don’t have access to the program.” 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Neighbors Ana Vanegas-Rivera (left) and Carina Meza shop for groceries in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Ms. Vanegas-Rivera, who gets $400 a month from the city, sometimes buys food for Ms. Meza, who wasn’t selected for the cash-assistance program.

Perhaps the worst was telling Carina Meza, her neighbor, who, like her, lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment with four children. Ms. Vanegas-Rivera’s son Dylan played with the younger kids. The two women cooked together. Now Ms. Vanegas-Rivera had a $400 debit card to pay for groceries and her neighbor didn’t. “It felt so, not good,” she says, removing her glasses to wipe her eyes. 

Of the roughly 3,600 residents who applied for Chelsea Eats, 2,074 were selected. Researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School are surveying around 1,100 of these recipients, along with 800 others who didn’t get the money, says Jeffrey Liebman, a professor of public policy who is leading the study and plans to release his findings this summer. 

Thanks to the debit card, Mr. Ambrosino can track where the money goes. He says most is spent at local food markets, which means a program designed to feed Chelsea, and get city hall out of the food pantry business, is working. He also sees some liquor-store purchases and other discretionary items, as well as Amazon orders. 

But he’s not worried about frivolous expenditures.

“We can trust people to spend money appropriately. Just because people are poor doesn’t mean that people are irresponsible,” he says.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP/File

"Economics has always been part of the conversation about racial equity." – Michael Tubbs, former mayor of Stockton, California, who started a basic-income experiment in the strapped city, inspired by the writings of Martin Luther King Jr.

While it’s too early to judge Chelsea’s experiment, a similar privately funded pilot program ended recently across the country in California’s Central Valley. For two years, 125 randomly selected residents in Stockton had received $500 a month; a control group received no money.  

The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) was the brainchild of former Mayor Michael Tubbs. Elected in 2016 at the age of 26, he alighted on basic income as an approach to tackle deprivation in Stockton. Residents suffered poor health and economic insecurity. Proximity to Silicon Valley’s booming tech sector hadn’t trickled down to its mostly nonwhite population of 310,000. Mr. Tubbs cites Dr. King’s writings on basic income and his own family’s struggles as inspiration for SEED. 

Independent researchers have analyzed data from the program’s first year, from February 2019 to February 2020. They found that the extra $500 had a significant positive impact on household incomes, physical and mental health, and debt management. SEED recipients were more likely to be in full-time employment and to have a cushion for financial emergencies. 

None of which would surprise Johannes Haushofer, an economist at Stockholm University, who has studied cash transfers in Kenya. When he analyzed the effects of cash transfers on 500 households, he found that recipients had higher incomes and more assets – in other words, they didn’t quit their jobs and just collect the assistance money. Most used it to supplement what they were already making. Levels of domestic violence among recipients fell sharply compared with a control group, too. The Kenya program, run by a U.S. nonprofit, GiveDirectly, has since expanded to around 20,000 households in 197 villages, making it the world's largest basic-income experiment. Some began receiving monthly transfers in 2018 that will run for 12 years, giving researchers an approximation of a UBI as an entitlement. Another group will receive two years upfront as a lump sum.

Researchers are curious how the different payouts will affect people’s lives and spending habits. “Will those bigger amounts allow you to do something more dramatic?” asks Jonathan Morduch, a professor of public policy and economics at New York University. 

Perhaps the ultimate UBI experiment is underway in Maricá, Brazil, a commuter city outside Rio de Janeiro. The government there is giving cash to 42,000 of its 162,000 residents, using a local digital currency. Experts say this could show the macroeconomic effects of cash transfers locally on inflation and other measures that don’t show up in smaller trials in cities like Stockton and Chelsea. 

Ann Hermes/Staff/File

A mural adorns the side of a business in Stockton, California, a city that gave 125 residents $500 a month for two years. Researchers found the money had a positive impact on household incomes, mental health, and debt management.

Still, the prospects for basic income becoming a reality in the U.S. seem more likely to turn on the success of domestic experiments. A Pew survey last August found that 45% of adults favored a $1,000-a-month federal guaranteed income; Democrats and younger voters were more likely to support the idea. 

Last summer Mr. Tubbs founded Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a national network of 40 city leaders exploring or developing basic-income pilots. Mr. Dorsey, the Twitter CEO, has donated $18 million to help seed these programs. The largest so far, in Compton, California, is giving $300-$600 a month to 800 people over the next two years. 

Mr. Tubbs says the goal is to see a national income floor for families living paycheck to paycheck, but concedes that a basic income for everyone may be a step too far. “While we work towards that great goal, we need to know those who absolutely need it, get it first,” he says. 

To advocates, basic income is a stabilizer that builds on federal expansions in social insurance passed during the Great Depression and to alleviate poverty in the 1960s. Natalie Foster of the Economic Security Project notes that many of the mayors drawn to basic income are millennials who see the effects of economic inequality on their communities.  

“This is our generation’s addition to the safety net,” she says. “It’s the way we need to expand it for the modern economy.”

Thanks to the pandemic, this expansion may be coming into focus sooner than expected. More than 10 pieces of Democrat-sponsored legislation currently in Congress would, if enacted, provide cash to hard-up families until the U.S. economy recovers – and possibly longer. 

Critics see the push as opportunism. “Policymakers are using the pandemic to advance an agenda that already existed,” says Matt Weidinger, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies poverty. Like other conservative scholars, he’s skeptical of the benefits of no-strings cash transfers and of the huge costs and unknown effects of a universal income.

A 2019 study found that giving $1,000 a month to every adult in the U.S. would cost roughly $3 trillion a year, or 75% of total federal spending. Eliminating Social Security, food stamps, and all other anti-poverty programs and tax benefits would only cover $1.2 trillion of that cost. 

The prospect of taking money from existing programs is one reason some liberals oppose UBI. They’re worried it would gut initiatives that largely target poor people, replacing them with a program that helps everyone, which would be less progressive. 

The immediate debate over the issue is less around the broad idea of giving everyone a basic income and more about using it to help families with children. In March, when Congress passed President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, it included a fully refundable child tax credit starting at $3,000 per child, of which a portion will be paid in advance. The temporary credit phases out for individuals earning more than $75,000 a year or $150,000 for couples. It’s essentially a cash dispersement by the IRS, similar to what President Nixon wanted to do. 

While Mr. Biden’s stimulus was passed on strictly partisan lines, the idea of a child allowance has Republican support in Congress as well. In February, Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, proposed a similar child benefit plan that would cut funding to other social programs to make it permanent. Both plans would lift millions of children out of poverty.

Taken together, the two plans show how far the political pendulum has swung toward social assistance that lets recipients spend money on what they need. 

“There is a shift towards a comfort [among lawmakers] in giving cash. This is a profound shift in thinking about safety nets,” says Professor Morduch. 

In Chelsea, Mr. Ambrosino doesn’t really focus much on whether the idea of a basic income is gaining ascendancy in Washington or not. His priority is simply to help families in a tough spot, and he’s happy with what he’s seeing so far with Chelsea Eats. “We’re getting money in the right hands,” he says. 

Roseann Bongiovanni, a former city councilor and now executive director of GreenRoots, a local nonprofit, agrees that the extra money is helping families. But Chelsea faces challenges of housing affordability and environmental justice, and overall demand at food pantries hasn’t gone away. “This is a short-term fix,” she says. “It’s not resolving a larger structural issue.” 

Ms. Vanegas-Rivera knows that her debit card is temporary. Though she owes less on her credit cards and is managing better, her money problems haven’t gone away. What has changed, she says, is that she and her husband are no longer lining up daily at food pantries. 

Every night, her son Dylan prays that the family moves into a house big enough for him to have a dog. “It breaks your heart when you hear that from a boy,” she says. 

But she believes that her family can forge its own way once the pandemic is over. “I don’t want to get stuck, and we’re not going to get stuck. That’s not who we are,” she says. 

Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify the details of the cash transfer program in Kenya. 

Agustin Marcarian/Reuters

People wearing protective face masks wait in line outside the Luna Park stadium to receive a COVID-19 vaccine in Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 9, 2021.

Latin American governments – hard hit by the coronavirus – have been doling out their thanks for international help in recent weeks. But one nation has been notably missing from their thank-you’s: the United States.

“Who would have guessed that … the only vaccines we’d receive are Russian and Chinese?” mused Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner last week.

Some 2.7 million doses arrived in Mexico City from the U.S. this week. For the most part, however, Russia and China have delivered more quickly than the U.S. and Europe. This could have lasting geopolitical effects in a region long seen as relying on its behemoth northern neighbor for international leadership.

Russia and China have spent decades trying to make economic and diplomatic inroads in Latin America – through Spanish-language media broadcasting, arms sales, and trade – with varying success. But observers say their prioritizing Latin America now could have long-term payoff, from support in bodies like the United Nations to trade deals and stronger economic relations.

“It’s really clear that this is not just vaccine diplomacy, but the geopolitics of vaccines,” says Andrés Serbin, president of CRIES, a regional think tank dedicated to social and economic issues that is based in Argentina. “In Latin America we’re often seen as peripheral [in global affairs] but we have suddenly become an objective for countries to strengthen their own interests through a stronger presence – whether economic or strategic.”

What do Russia and China want?

The U.S. decision to focus on supplying its own population first has amplified a leadership void in the region that arguably began after 9/11, when U.S. interests shifted firmly toward the Middle East and fighting terrorism. Russia and China saw an opportunity to step in.

Today, shipments are a way to demonstrate that “if you’re in trouble, [Russia] is here to help you,” says Victor Jeifets, a professor at St. Petersburg State University who focuses on Russian relations with Latin America. “We have the ability, we have the technology. The same goes for China.”

That’s a message some countries, like Paraguay, heard loud and clear. The country of 7 million is one of the last in Latin America that still recognizes Taiwan as the “true China.” Senators attempted to change allegiance to Beijing last April, arguing China would better aid Paraguay amid the pandemic, though the bill failed to pass.

This week, Foreign Minister Euclides Acevedo said on television that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had encouraged Paraguay’s president to stick with Taiwan. But Paraguay has to ask its allies for “proof of their love,” Mr. Acevedo said.

After COVID-19 arrived in the region, China made timely, strategic contributions, Cynthia Sanborn, a professor at Peru’s University of the Pacific, writes in a Wilson Center report. Beijing donated medical supplies and provided quick sales of ventilators, ambulances, masks, and oxygen plants, in addition to $1 billion in loans to pay for COVID-19 vaccines. 

“While the United States abandoned a global leadership role in fighting this pandemic, many governments in Latin America turned to China for assistance,” Dr. Sanborn notes.

China was already the primary trade partner for many South American nations, and those commercial ties could strengthen. There’s also the benefit of soft power, which Russia is seeking as well, particularly as both countries face strong criticism for clamping down on citizen rights at home.

“No one [receiving doses] is worried about human rights violations or democracy in these countries right now,” says Mr. Serbin, referring to China and Russia. “What is clear and will be remembered is that they came to help before the U.S. or the EU. That’s the perception of the people.”

But unlike the Soviet Union, Russia today is interested in more than just geopolitics, Mr. Jeifets says – it’s looking for new or deeper commercial opportunities. “It doesn’t have only an ideological stance with Latin America. Russia considers [the region] as one of the pillars of a future multi-polar world. Latin America is important for its many new voices in the United Nations. It’s important for Russia as a place to sell and possibly buy goods” and commodities, he says.

It’s also an opportunity to stick out its tongue at the United States. Mr. Jeifets says it had to irk the U.S. that Sputnik V – the Russian vaccine, whose name harks back to Soviet leadership in science – landed and was lauded in Mexico before the U.S. sent support of its own.

Warning for Washington

That’s a fact some in Mexico think their government should leverage more, given how deeply intertwined it is with the U.S. through labor, the economy, and migration.

“The U.S. should see this as an alert signal that it’s losing influence,” says José María Ramos, a professor at Mexico’s College of the Northern Border who studies U.S.-Mexico relations. “It needs to rethink its approach.”

It’s long been in Washington’s interest to maintain close working relations with its neighbors – most clearly demonstrated during the Cold War, when tensions between the former Soviet Union and the U.S. played out in many Latin American countries. But the need for support and investment in Latin America has been on display more recently, as well, with the uptick of migrants and asylum-seekers arriving at the southern border.

Mexico shouldn’t shy away from pointing out who’s shown up to help, and who hasn’t, Dr. Ramos adds. Latin America has struggled through the pandemic, tallying some of the highest death tolls in the world, and faces a dismal economic outlook. Getting support to reopen economies ­and sending children back to school is top of mind.

“I think there’s a justification for moving closer with [Russia and China]. The pandemic is a critical situation and these countries can be a counterweight to the U.S.,” he says. Dr. Ramos stresses that lending a bigger hand to the region would be an easy diplomatic win for the U.S.

Doses are just beginning to roll in, and some critics of the deals doubt Moscow and Beijing can deliver all they’ve promised. But if they can, pandemic assistance will “certainly improve Russia-Latin America relations, China-Latin America relations,” says Mr. Jeifets. “I wouldn’t say it will worsen relations with the U.S., but it will make it more difficult for the U.S. to recover influence in the region.”

Mark Blinch/The Canadian Press/AP/File

Canadian Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Carolyn Bennett (front) speaks at the North American Indigenous Games in Toronto on July 16, 2017. From left, President Clement Chartier of the Metis Nation, President Natan Obed of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, and National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Perry Bellegarde look on.

As awareness of the rights and historical mistreatment of Indigenous and minority peoples has grown in the United States, the popularity of land acknowledgments has been increasing as well. A land acknowledgment is a statement, which typically precedes a public event, recognizing the traditional Indigenous land upon which the event is occurring.

Americans at large were introduced to the concept at last year’s Academy Awards, when director-screenwriter Taika Waititi acknowledged that “tonight we have gathered on the ancestral lands of the Tongva, the Tataviam, and the Chumash.”

Territorial acknowledgments are already widely in use in parts of Canada – typically read before political events, school days, and sporting events. The acknowledgment symbolizes an important step toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. And yet as they grow more familiar, they’ve come under fire as hollow politics.

Why do land acknowledgments matter?

The land acknowledgment is intended for use by non-Indigenous members of society as a corrective measure, to recognize history. The atrocities committed against Indigenous populations – from genocide to forced assimilation – are only now coming into public consciousness, after being taught in school through a settler lens, if at all.

In Canada, a turning point came with a landmark report from the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission on forced residential schooling of Indigenous children, which was summarized as “cultural genocide.” Since then, land acknowledgments have flourished.

In the U.S., the Reclaiming Native Truth project, a two-year, $3.3 million public opinion survey, concluded that the vast majority of Americans have little or no knowledge about Native Americans. For many Indigenous people, a land acknowledgment is a starting point.

“When we kicked off the work around land acknowledgment, it was just to get people to stop and think, think about the truth that is their place,” says Wayne Ducheneaux II, executive director of the nonprofit Native Governance Center in Minneapolis, “and to understand that Indigenous folks here are part of the past, but we’re also here at present, and we’re going to be here well into the future.”

Why has this become a global movement?

The Native Governance Center launched an event in 2019 on how to pen a land acknowledgment. It was inspired by Indigenous people around the world.

“We were looking at what our relatives up north were doing,” Mr. Ducheneaux says. “I think about Aboriginal Australians and how they’ve had to basically build sovereignty out of nothing. I’m thinking about our Maori relatives in New Zealand and how, through getting folks to acknowledge their place in the world, [they] have really become a powerhouse in New Zealand.” 

In response, it received hundreds of inquiries from government officials, churches, entrepreneurs, and educators. It’s a sign of a larger awakening in society about the lingering legacies of racism and oppression against minority communities.

Why are acknowledgments criticized too?

They can be seen as virtue-signaling, empty rhetoric, and cheap politics.

They were the crux of a sketch on a popular Canadian comedy – a sign of how common they are, but also how controversial.

The skit portrays a theater director giving a land acknowledgment before a production. But as the lights dim, an audience member stands up to ask if they should leave because it’s “somebody else’s land.” The director says it’s the theater’s land now, prompting the patron to ask whether any of the proceeds from ticket sales go back to Indigenous communities. “They go back to the theater,” the director says.

Many Indigenous thinkers decry acknowledgments as an easy way to express allyship without doing the hard work, like fighting for the land or for clean water on reservations. The Native Governance Center recently expanded its work on land acknowledgments to address the issues of “optical allyship.”

“That is standing in solidarity on social media but not coming and standing shoulder to shoulder, or doing what is quick and easy and trendy ... instead of digging in to truly help,” says Mr. Ducheneaux. “The land acknowledgment needs to be more than lip service, and it has to result in a movement, a movement where invisibility is smashed.”

It has been only 32 years – not that long ago, really – since President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III were sworn in. Their short four years in office, 1989-92, were rich in tumultuous events and policy decisions that continue to resonate today.

Historian and public policy analyst Diana Villiers Negroponte describes the two longtime friends and tennis-buddy Texans as “imbued with the modesty of gentlemen who sought power not to aggrandize themselves but to serve a nation.” Her new history, “Master Negotiator: The Role of James A. Baker, III at the End of the Cold War,” has a deliberately narrow focus, per Mr. Baker’s directive.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I covered the beginning of the George H.W. Bush presidency when I was a CBS News White House correspondent. I first came to know Diana and her husband, John Negroponte, about 10 years later during his stint as United Nations ambassador during the George W. Bush presidency. The three of us remain good friends.)

Beginning with the foreword, written by the first President Bush in 2014, “Major Negotiator” highlights the men’s closeness. Mr. Bush writes of Mr. Baker, “Looking back, I was blessed to have him by my side during four years of historic change in our world.”  

The two men were determined to make a clean break from the Reagan years. They did not want to be viewed as Ronald Reagan’s third term, despite having filled senior positions in his administration. Both men wanted to assert fresh ideas and to bring in new people. Of Mr. Baker, Dr. Negroponte writes, “The guiding principle of his national security team was the stable management of the international system and the avoidance of risk.” The Bush-Baker team successfully put that strategy into practice in ending the Cold War, German reunification, Desert Storm, the Madrid peace conference, and the variety of political reforms they encouraged in Latin America.

The importance of allies

“Not a shot between Cold War enemies was fired.” That’s the author’s bottom-line measure of success for the Bush-Baker management of the end of the Soviet empire and the reunification of Germany. In great detail, she describes how the men supported Mikhail Gorbachev through a series of internal machinations that kept him in power until the Soviet Union was dismantled and the Russian flag had been raised. Allowing the Soviets to dissolve peacefully – reinforcing Mr. Gorbachev’s decisions not to repress dissidents within his country – led to the ascendancy of the United States as the sole superpower. “But how we have used that position is another question,” Dr. Negroponte says. 

With her own work coinciding with that of other historians and journalists writing about Mr. Baker, she suspects that interest in the Bush-Baker foreign policy is rooted in a need to stabilize the world order following four years of acrimony with traditional allies and an embrace of autocrats during Donald Trump’s presidency. Examining what worked in the last years of the Cold War reveals the importance of working with allies, she says. “Baker formed coalitions. He never considered that America should act alone.”

Dr. Negroponte also details the successful execution of the first U.S. war in Iraq, Desert Storm, weaving together competing strands of history and decision-making. Mr. Baker took a hands-off role in dealing with China, in part because of Mr. Bush’s own expertise in the region, where he served as U.S. envoy in the 1970s. The administration was criticized for not taking a stronger stand against Chinese repression of dissidents during the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing from April to June 1989. But Dr. Negroponte emphasizes that the U.S. decision to keep talking with the Chinese resulted, one year later, in their abstaining, rather than vetoing, U.N. Security Council Resolution 678, which provided the legal authorization for the first Gulf War. 

“You can’t destroy the Chinese,” she says. “You must assert your objections and punish the leaders who commit ruthless actions, but you don’t cut off relations.”

What if?

Asked what might have happened if the Bush-Baker team had had a second term, Dr. Negroponte points to two issues. “They would not have expanded NATO eastward into Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, which was seen as a deep threat by the Russians,” she says. And the U.S. might not have intervened in the civil war in the Balkans. The Europeans had assured the Americans that they could handle the conflict “in their backyard” among the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croatians as Yugoslavia came apart. Also, Mr. Baker questioned the U.S. security motive for intervening, she says.  

The Clinton administration changed course on both of those policies, Dr. Negroponte explains, in large part because Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s U.N. ambassador and, later, secretary of state, was an émigré from Czechoslovakia and felt a responsibility to “rescue her people.”  

There has been relatively muted criticism of Mr. Baker’s actions during and even after his stint as secretary of state. He and his team have been widely praised for their deliberate and effective media management. With a smile, Dr. Negroponte says that Mr. Baker needed the media to persuade the American public that his actions were rational. His standard operating principle was, “You feed the crocodiles, or you are on the menu.”

Jacqueline Adams is co-author of “A Blessing: Women of Color Teaming Up to Lead, Empower and Thrive.”

AP

Kimia Alizadeh of Iran celebrates her taekwondo bronze in the 2016 Olympics. In 2020, she defected, citing lies by the Iranian regime.

For nearly two decades, during up-and-down negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, the United States has made sure other countries were at the table. On Tuesday, when the U.S. and Iran again resume talks – this time indirectly in Vienna – Britain, China, France, Germany, and Russia will be there. While these partners will not be enforcers of a new deal, they all have a vested interest in seeing compliance with nuclear restrictions. From the U.S. perspective, they also serve as witnesses to any Iranian evasions and deceptions – the kind that long hid the country’s covert nuclear activities.

The U.S. is hardly alone in trying to turn the light of truth on the false claims that prop up the Iranian regime. Mass protests in Iran, such as those in 2019 that ended only after mass killings by security forces, have exposed the unpopularity of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They also revealed the fiction of prosperity. ““People beg for a living while the supreme leader lives like a god-king,” was one popular protest chant.

Iran’s credibility also suffers in nearby countries that it tries to control. The grand ayatollah in Iraq, Ali al-Sistani, repeatedly refutes the Islamic justification used by Iran for Muslim clerics to rule the country. In recent elections, Iraq voters preferred parties that oppose Iran’s covert influence. Protests in both Lebanon and Iraq have challenged the myth of Arab Shiite solidarity with Iran’s Persian Shiites. Lebanese Shiites have bravely protested against Hezbollah, Iran’s Shiite proxy in the country, exposing the group’s hypocrisy over its claim of supporting democracy.

Iran’s leaders may now feel cornered by so many players pointing out the illusions they perpetuate. But facts are stubborn things. One possible sign that Iran might be getting the message was its admission last year that it had shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet – after denying it for three days. Protesters in Iran had demanded the truth.

If enough people “live in truth,” as the late Czech dissident Václav Havel said, it can force dictators to see the emptiness of their lies.

Many people in Iran and the region have removed the mask that Iran has imposed on them. Some of the most prominent are defectors from Iran. The best example is Kimia Alizadeh, the country’s first female Olympic medalist. She won taekwondo bronze at the 2016 Olympics. She defected last year, saying she did not want to remain complicit with the regime’s hypocrisy and lies. “Every sentence they ordered, I repeated,” she admitted.

Her choice of country to live? Germany, one of the major powers that will be present at the talks in Vienna on Tuesday, helping to make sure truth prevails.