Before a military coup and bloody crackdown on Monday flipped the narrative, U.S. officials believed Sudan had all the makings of a success story, a bright spot where Washington could encourage a post-revolution country’s march toward stable democracy.

The 2019 uprising that ended the rule of dictator Omar al-Bashir had led to a power-sharing deal between civilian protesters and the military, a three-year transition agreement brokered in part by the United States and the international community.

For Washington, the deal offered a clear road map without widespread bloodshed, instability, or repression.

Yet this week the U.S. issued a condemnation and suspended $700 million in aid to Sudan after the military dissolved the civilian government with which it had jointly ruled, arrested officials, and seized complete power. On Thursday President Joe Biden denounced the coup as a “grave setback,” urging the generals to restore civilian rule and put the country on a path back to democracy.

In fact, the military had acted only hours after a meeting Sunday between the U.S. special envoy to the Horn of Africa, Jeffrey Feltman, and Sudanese Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. Ambassador Feltman had warned against a power grab, the State Department said, and stressed that such a move would call into question U.S. assistance and support to Sudan, which is facing 400% inflation and rising unemployment.

Diplomats described the coup privately as a “slap in the face” that reverberated from the region to the halls of Washington.

If the U.S. response to Sudan so far rings any bells, it is no doubt because just eight months ago – when the Biden administration was not yet a month in office – a military coup against Myanmar’s fledgling democracy was also met with tough U.S. rhetoric but little action. Some sanctions were imposed, but nothing that dissuaded Myanmar’s military leaders from pursuing their anti-democratic course.

It’s true that the Sudan coup has been met with a flurry of diplomatic activity – led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken – aimed at demonstrating that the international community is united in demanding a return to Sudan’s democratic transition. But so far there are few signs the military is listening.

“Restraint theory”

What Sudan is confirming, say analysts, is that while Mr. Biden wants to be the world’s defender of democracy, that defense, when it confronts serious backsliding, is not likely to extend much beyond sharp condemnation and eventual financial measures targeting anti-democratic leaders.

Moreover, some foreign policy scholars say, the world is witnessing the rise in the U.S. of what has been called restraint theory, which holds that wielding American coercive power – military or even economic – rarely yields positive results.

Marwan Ali/AP

Sudanese security forces are deployed during a protest a day after the military seized power in Khartoum, Sudan, Oct. 26, 2021. The takeover came after weeks of mounting tensions between military and civilian leaders over the course and the pace of Sudan's transition to democracy.

Better, therefore, the theory continues, to refrain from wielding that power so as to keep America out of trouble – the kind recently experienced in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

“We are seeing this theory put to the test in a series of foreign policy crises of varying severity, from Myanmar to Sudan, from the Taiwan Straits to Turkey,” says Peter Feaver, director of Duke University’s Program in American Grand Strategy and a former official on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council.

Calling the Biden administration’s emerging preference for restraint the “don’t just do something, stand there” policy, Professor Feaver says a growing chorus is questioning whether what might be seen as a post-Afghanistan reaction is going too far.

“No one is arguing for a U.S. military response” in any of the bubbling foreign policy crises Mr. Biden is facing, he adds, “but some are wondering whether the reflexive restraint policy is adequately securing American interests.”

Coalition of voices

Others say they are heartened by how Mr. Biden has shifted the U.S. to an emphasis on diplomacy, and emphasize that the exercise of soft power should not be underestimated.

“The U.S. government is not without levers; we have some important levers in Sudan,” says Makila James, a former deputy assistant secretary for East Africa and The Sudans. “The first of those is that we are standing strong with the [Sudanese] who want to see this transition go forward – the young people and the women who delivered this transition in the first place.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Ambassador James adds, saying she would like to see “a stronger response” from the U.S. But she also recognizes that the diplomatic path the administration is taking is unlikely to yield results overnight.

“It takes time to assemble a coalition of voices, and the administration is right to recognize that a coalition of Western powers, regional powers, and neighbors is what this situation calls for.”

She finds particularly encouraging how the administration is tapping into the African Union, which she says has emerged in recent years as a strong advocate of Africa’s democracies.

A dispiriting turn

In Sudan, once a source of regional instability, Ambassador Feltman was directly involved in assisting the transition and supporting the civilian government.

Sudan TV/AP

The head of Sudan's military, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, announces in a televised address that he was dissolving the country's ruling Sovereign Council as well as the government led by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, in Khartoum, Sudan, Oct. 25, 2021.

Washington was also quick to funnel economic aid so that the now-deposed civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, could hold up tangible benefits of democracy to the Sudanese people despite the austerity measures and hyperinflation.

“Within USAID, there was a real suggestion that Sudan could be the next success story of stabilization and development for the U.S.,” says Jonas Horner, senior Sudan analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Washington also was engaging regional actors with varied political and economic interests in Sudan and ties to its military, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, to prevent them from acting as potential spoilers.

For veteran diplomats working on the region, the coup landed as a “body blow.”

“I think if you are in the State Department right now, you have to be wondering: If we spend this much diplomatic time, obligate this many financial resources, and we still cannot get it right, what are the prospects of democratic transition in Chad, Guinea, and Mali – or elsewhere?” says Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center who served former U.S. envoys to Sudan.

“Washington is not the dominant actor it used to be. This has broader implications for our ability to shape events across this entire region.”

Some Sudanese voiced extreme frustration.

“If the U.S. is genuine about its calls for democracy and democratic reform, it should be much more assertive about what is happening in Sudan,” says Samahir Mubarak of the Sudan Professionals Association (SPA), a union that led the 2019 protests that toppled Mr. Bashir.

“Just the utter idea that it would cross the military leadership’s minds that they could safely carry out this coup right after they met with Mr. Feltman, this shows that not enough was done,” Ms. Mubarak says via rare access to a private internet line from Khartoum. “It doesn’t read well.”

Coup’s cost to Sudan

After the U.S. froze $700 million in aid, the World Bank followed suit and suspended $2 billion in grants.

Already this year, the U.S. had provided $377 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan, making it the largest humanitarian donor to the country.

The suspended aid included wheat for subsidized bread, cash assistance to the most vulnerable families, and funding for health, energy, and transitional justice projects.

Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters

People protest in front of the headquarters of the Committee to Dismantle the June 30, 1989 Regime, in Khartoum, Sudan, Oct. 6, 2021. The activities of the group, which seeks to undo vestiges of the corruption of the deposed Bashir dictatorship, were frozen by the coup leader this week.

None of the earmarked funds were destined for the military, and none of the funding had passed through the hands of the civilian government, raising concerns that the move will only hurt the Sudanese people without persuading the military to change course.  

“The military doesn’t care who receives humanitarian aid and who starves – they are literally shooting peaceful protesters in the head,” says one Sudanese protester via Facebook who prefers to remain anonymous and derides the funding freeze as a “PR move.”

Yet, despite the crackdown, and to even activists’ surprise, Sudanese are turning out en masse to protest the military power grab, suggesting that the fate of Sudan’s democracy lies more in the streets than in American influence.

Sudanese political factions, divided only a week ago, have united in opposition to the coup, calling for “total civil disobedience” and a nationwide work stoppage that entered its fifth day Friday.

Sharing power “unsustainable”

Sudanese protesters are preparing for a multimillion-person protest Saturday to send a message to the generals that their demand for civilian rule is undeterred.

Now protesters say they will remain in the streets until power is completely handed over to a civilian government, refusing any role for the military.

“The U.S. and the international community are talking as if they want us to return to the status quo of Oct. 24, but a status quo of sharing power with the military has proven unsustainable,” says Ms. Mubarak of the SPA.

“We are very concerned that the military has proven not to be a trustable partner,” she says. “And we have a good memory of who stood on our side and who did not.”

Yet if Sudan’s coup suggests a waning of America’s superpower status, even some experts who see American retrenchment in Mr. Biden’s foreign policy say that if anything is likely to move the U.S. to more robust action, it could be the president’s close association of democratic values with U.S. interests. 

“Biden is especially likely to feel the pressure to move off of a [restraint] posture because his rhetoric about promoting democracy as a counter to autocracy is so pronounced – as pronounced as any since George W. Bush,” Professor Feaver says. “Those are precisely the American interests that are implicated in Myanmar and Sudan.”

How do you get 197 countries to agree to a common plan of action that requires them to forsake the abundant energy sources that built the modern world? 

The inconvenient reality: You don’t, at least not quickly. Rather, for now victories come one national pledge at a time. 

A decentralized process is, in essence, both the genius and the bane of the world’s approach to humanity’s most pressing environmental issue. It keeps doors open to progress, as world leaders gather next week in Glasgow, Scotland. But modest gains, not momentous breakthroughs, are the norm. 

Those gains typically come slowly and deliberately, using persuasion, cajoling, bargaining, and flexibility. All the while knowing that it may or may not be enough to bridge the gaps between nations. 

Starting on Oct. 31, this messy system faces its most consequential test since 2015, when the Paris Agreement for the first time tasked each nation to do its part in decarbonizing human society. Every five years after that, nations were expected to set new and typically more ambitious emissions targets. The Glasgow summit, known as COP26 – the 26th “conference of parties” to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – will be the first such moment of truth, due to a one-year pandemic postponement. Yet there’s no global referee to enforce performance.

“We have a voluntary system because that’s what we can agree to,” says Alice Hill, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama who worked on climate resilience. “What’s the alternative?”

The imperfection of the system is all too visible. Six years after the world agreed in Paris on the ideal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, only Britain and Nigeria among the 50 largest economies are on a path close to meeting that target. 

Heading into the summit, most of the 192 Paris signatories have pledged to expand their national efforts to mitigate climate change. Still, greenhouse gas emissions are on track to be 16% higher in 2030 compared with 2010, a recent U.N. analysis finds. 

And already, global temperatures have warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius from the preindustrial era. 

To-do list from coal to carbon markets

The stage is set in Glasgow for two weeks of hard bargaining and complex negotiations. In reality, much heavy lifting has happened in advance of the conference, say experts on climate diplomacy, so that negotiators can close the gap on what remains to thrash out. 

“The groundwork has to be established before delegates even pack their suitcases to go to a conference,” says Radoslav Dimitrov, a former European Union climate negotiator.  

Top agenda items include:

• Countries will assess progress on emissions reductions, and the Paris treaty calls on them to boost their “nationally determined contributions.”
• They’ll try to settle rules for international carbon trading, as one mechanism for reducing emissions. 
• As host of COP26, the United Kingdom has been pushing other countries to join a pledge to stop investing in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. China said last month it would stop financing coal-fired power plants overseas, though it continues to add capacity at home.
•  The United States and EU recently unveiled an initiative to cut emissions of methane, primarily in the energy sector, that will also be discussed in Glasgow. 

For all the pressure of scientists’ dire warnings alongside youth-led climate activism, the risk of failure hangs over Glasgow, experts warn.  

Russell Cheyne/Reuters

Police officers patrol on a boat at the River Clyde, opposite the Scottish Event Campus, where the COP26 global climate summit will take place, in Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 27, 2021.

One reason for caution is geopolitics: Relations between the U.S. and China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, have unraveled since 2015, when bilateral summits between President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, paved the way for a deal in Paris. This time, the two countries are at loggerheads on trade and security, and climate diplomacy has stalled. 

Goal of fairness and inclusion

The other geopolitical fault line is a pandemic that has widened the divisions between rich and poor nations.

Developing countries argue that industrialized nations that have emitted the lion’s share of greenhouse gases must do more to help them adapt to a hotter planet. This question of climate justice – what rich polluting nations owe to the rest – is likely to prove contentious in Glasgow.

At the same time, countries in Europe and North America are facing their own domestic needs – a cascade of heat, flooding, wildfires, and storms that scientists say are harbingers for a future of severely impaired ecosystems. Making these communities more resilient will require more public investment.

Still, geopolitical tensions can be bridged, says Ms. Hill, who is a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

“It’s the art of diplomacy,” she says. “There are moments where we can overcome our differences and head towards the common good. That’s what happened in Paris.” 

And the U.N. process, however cumbersome it may seem, offers a level of transparency and inclusion that can’t be easily replicated, says Nathan Cogswell, a research associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington. 

Smaller countries that are excluded from economic groupings like the G-7 or G-20 will have a seat at the table in Glasgow, which in turn builds trust that their concerns are being heard when it comes to collective climate action. “I think it’s important to have faith in a process that brings all of the different countries together,” he says. 

Yves Herman/Reuters

People take part in a climate march in Brussels ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 10, 2021.

The risk of a single-nation veto

In a consensus-based process, dissent can be obstruction. A single country can hold up an agreement by raising an objection, as Nicaragua did in Paris in 2015 when it argued for mandatory targets for major emitters and refused to sign the negotiated agreement. 

To win over Nicaragua’s delegation, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised to visit after the summit and explain in person why Nicaragua’s leaders should sign onto the agreement, says Janos Pasztor, a former senior aide to Mr. Ban. (Nicaragua dropped its objection and signed the Paris accord in 2017.)  

In 2010, Bolivia vetoed a joint agreement at COP talks in Mexico. Three years earlier, the U.S. threatened to do the same in Bali, Indonesia. However, such objections are usually overcome because countries, even the largest and most powerful, don’t want to be singled out as spoilers, says Professor Dimitrov, a political scientist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. 

“There are always delegations in the room who essentially swallow their displeasure because they can’t afford politically to stick out and take responsibility for the collapse of the negotiations,” he says, pointing to how the U.S. delegation relented in 2007 after consulting with Washington. “They knew they would be blamed for a failure.” 

Mr. Pasztor, who served as U.N. assistant secretary-general on climate change, says a skillful chair can avoid open dissent at meetings by persuading delegations to abstain. “It’s possible to have one or two countries that don’t agree. But they don’t make a formal objection,” he says. 

Keeping the faith

President Joe Biden is attending the COP26 opening in Glasgow, nine months after the U.S. rejoined the Paris Agreement that President Donald Trump had rejected as a bad deal. That shows that the Biden administration is committed to climate action, says Ms. Hill, though other countries are still skeptical of U.S. credibility on this and other global issues after the Trump presidency. The question she hears most from foreign counterparts, she says, is “How can we trust you?” 

Anxiety about trust is baked into the Paris Agreement. Unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which it effectively supersedes, it imposes no binding emissions targets on countries, only voluntary commitments that must be updated every five years.

And the scope of current climate negotiations is daunting, says Professor Dimitrov, since the emissions are everywhere, from agriculture to industry to transportation. By contrast, the 1987 Montreal Protocol that phased out the use of chemicals that depleted the ozone layer only affected a few industries. 

But the fact that the Montreal accord was negotiated at all should be a source of inspiration. “We need [a past] success in order to have faith that we can negotiate strong treaties,” Professor Dimitrov says.

Annabel Moeller/UK Parliament/AP

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gives evidence to the joint committee for the Draft Online Safety Bill, as part of government plans for social media regulation, in London, Oct. 25, 2021. Ms. Haugen says Facebook is making extremism worse and outlined how it could improve online safety.

Facebook, the social media behemoth with more than 2.8 billion users worldwide, has been weathering storms of criticism ever since its founder Mark Zuckerberg began it as an online project connecting college students in 2004. 

But the 17-year-old company newly rebranded as Meta – which also includes Instagram and WhatsApp, with their billions of global users – is now confronting an unprecedented level of scrutiny after a former Facebook employee secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of the company’s internal research. These appear to show the company has been well aware that its platforms contribute to a host of social ills, even as its profits reach new heights.

This trove of private information, which has been dubbed the Facebook Papers, reveals how the company’s own studies found its platforms damage the well-being of teenage girls, how its algorithms seize on human rage and foment the spread of misinformation and civic strife, and how it has enabled human trafficking and ethnic violence in countries in which it makes little effort to moderate content.

As a result, Congress, federal regulators, and a consortium of news organizations have been combing through these documents as lawmakers consider how to rein in the company’s outsized influence in the flow of global information. 

“The Facebook Papers are forcing a rare level of organizational transparency that has heretofore been missing from the public debate about the potential benefits and harms of these social media platforms,” says Matthew Taylor, professor at the School of Journalism and Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee State University. “We should be asking, why is there such a lack of transparency? Coca-Cola can keep its secret formula, but we still know enough about the product to study its effect on public health. We can’t say the same for Facebook.”

What are the Facebook Papers?

Earlier this year, the data scientist Frances Haugen, who worked for Facebook on its civic integrity team, felt alarmed at the way the company chose to optimize its profits instead of addressing the harms it knew it helped cause. 

“When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other,” Ms. Haugen told “60 Minutes.” “The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.”

So she started to copy thousands of pages of company documents before she left. She realized, she said, “I’m gonna have to do this in a systematic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.” 

At first an anonymous whistleblower, Ms. Haugen turned these papers over to the Federal Trade Commission. Her legal team also provided a redacted version to Congress and the news media.

“Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that we are seeing a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company,” Mr. Zuckerberg said this week. “The reality is that we have an open culture that encourages discussion and research on our work so we can make progress on many complex issues that are not specific to just us.”

What do the Facebook Papers reveal?

In one study first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook researchers found that its platforms “make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teen girls,” a company document said. On Instagram, company researchers found, 13.5% of teenage girls reported the platform makes thoughts of suicide and self-injury worse, and 17% said it makes eating disorders such as anorexia worse. 

Facebook officials stand by the findings of the study, but argue that it is out of context, “cherry picked” from a host of other company studies that have found positive effects of Instagram on the well-being of teenage girls. 

In other studies, Facebook found how its platforms spread misinformation. In a 2019 study, “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” researchers designed an account for a fictional 41-year-old mom who followed the Facebook pages of Fox News, former President Donald Trump, and other conservative figures. In just two days, the Facebook algorithm pushed a recommendation to join a page devoted to the conspiracy theory QAnon. 

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, one Facebook employee posted on an internal message board, “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.” 

While Facebook indeed invested a lot of time and effort to remove Stop the Steal groups and others rooted in conspiracy theories, its efforts in other countries have not measured up, company documents suggest.

When its platforms were being used to traffic maids in the Mideast two years ago, Apple threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from its app store. In company documents, Facebook acknowledged that it was “under-enforcing on confirmed abuse activity,” the Associated Press reported. 

How does Facebook’s business model make such problems worse?

In a deeper way, the Facebook Papers also raise questions about social media’s fundamental business model, which provides a “free” service in exchange for the kind of intimate self-revelations that become a gold mine for marketers.

By relentlessly analyzing user behavior online, the company, in effect, attempts to predict the kind of information users are most likely to engage with, and therefore make them spend more time on the site. This kind of behavioral analysis has revolutionized advertising, allowing those selling products to pinpoint users most likely to make a purchase.

But the means by which they do it often appeal to the darker sides of human nature. 

“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction,” Ms. Haugen told “60 Minutes.” “But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing – it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.”

“No one at Facebook is malevolent, but the incentives are misaligned, right?” she continued. “Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”

Scholars have used the term “affective engagement” to describe the algorithmic strategies that discover and then amplify the kinds of information that keeps users’ emotions aroused.

Five years ago, after Facebook introduced a suite of new emoji – anger, laughter, love, etc. – to buttress its famous Like button, it also programmed its algorithms to give these emotional reactions five times more weight than a simple like. 

Some employees wondered right away whether this new strategy would amplify conflict.  

“Quick question to play devil’s advocate: will weighting Reactions 5x stronger than Likes lead to News Feed having a higher ratio of controversial than agreeable content?” one employee posted on an internal message board. “I.e. if I post a story that I bought a coffee (pretty boring example I know) I might invite a few Likes from friends. However, if I post ‘Steve Bannon Punches Hillary’ I’ll probably get more polarized reactions with Angry emojis and thus (5x?) more distribution.”

In a 2018 internal document entitled “Does Facebook reward outrage?” researchers found that more negative comments on a Facebook post meant more clicks for the post’s particular link. “The mechanics of our platform are not neutral,” one staffer wrote, according to CNN. 

Some critics say Facebook’s focus on affective engagement has hurt itself in the long run.

“I guess what surprises me most is sort of the short-sightedness that you see here,” says David Richard, of the communications department at Emerson College in Boston. “Enabling circumstances for conflict – maybe in the short term it sells ads, but in the long term, it hurts the country, it hurts the general business climate and the economy, and in turn, that will hurt Facebook. That’s the surprise to me, that the ‘smartest people in the room’ didn’t see that.”

There are few phrases more prosaic or uninspiring than “underground car park.”

But it was the construction of just such a facility that led to the discovery in Rome of an archaeological treasure trove.

Engineers who burrowed beneath a 19th century office block to make space for the parking lot stumbled across the remains of gardens, villas, pavilions, and water features that once made up a vast estate built for the emperors of ancient Rome 2,000 years ago.

After eight years of excavating the site and five years of cataloging the tens of thousands of artifacts that were found, the collection has now been turned into Italy’s newest museum and will open to the public on Nov. 6.

Inviting visitors to an enclosed underground space would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, during the tougher days of the coronavirus pandemic.

But as life in Italy cautiously returns to normalcy, what was once an ancient retreat of rulers now beckons as a modern-day refuge for everyday Italians.

And as optimism returns, the museum serves as a poignant reminder of what the country has endured, and overcome, since facing the first lockdowns in the West in the spring of 2020. The office block above the Roman remains happens to be the headquarters of an association that provides insurance to Italy’s doctors and dentists. The new museum has been dedicated to the many who lost their lives to COVID-19.

“This place of beauty symbolically honors all the medics who were victims of the pandemic. Our thoughts are with them,” says Dario Franceschini, Italy’s minister for culture.

Doctors had put themselves at grave risk “by being close to their patients with an extraordinary level of commitment” during the pandemic, says Alberto Oliveti, the president of ENPAM, the health insurance association.

Fabio Caricchia/Courtesy of Rome's Superintendency of Archeology

This space in Rome was meant to be a parking lot, but when engineers stumbled upon a treasure trove of artifacts from ancient Italy they decided to create a museum. It opens to the public on Nov. 6.

Among the more striking discoveries that archeologists made are a bear’s tooth and the bones of lions and ostriches. They are animals that the emperors imported from the farthest reaches of Roman territory and shed light on ancient entertainment.

“It would have been like a small zoo. Creatures like bears and lions would have been kept in cages but other animals, like deer, would have been free to wander the grounds,” says Giorgia Leoni, one of the principal architects involved in the project.

“The bigger, fierce animals would probably have been used in gladiatorial fights – similar to the games organized in the nearby Colosseum, but for the private viewing of the emperor.”

Archeologists also found animal remains that attest to the rich diet that the emperors and their acolytes would have enjoyed – oyster shells, sea urchins, and the bones of fish like tuna and bream, as well as mammals such as wild boar and cattle.

A panel in the museum explains that the favorite dishes of the Roman upper class included oyster pie, wild boar steaks, roasted warblers, and thrushes with asparagus.

“This was a very extensive site, full of gardens, statues, pavilions decorated with colored marble, mosaics and frescoes, as well as water features. The emperors even had windows made of transparent glass, which was very rare,” says Daniela Porro, a senior archeological official with the city of Rome.

The complex was built on the Esquiline Hill, the highest of the famous seven hills of Rome. It was originally constructed in the 1^st  century A.D. by a wealthy aristocrat, Lucius Aelius Lamia, who bequeathed it to Emperor Tiberius.

From there, it passed down to a succession of emperors, including Claudius and Caligula.

Fabio Caricchia/Courtesy of Rome's Superintendency of Archeology

A fresco is shown at the soon-to-open museum in Rome called Museo Ninfeo or Nymphaeum Museum, named after the extensive gardens that would have surrounded shaded pavilions known as nymphaeum.

Extensive gardens would have surrounded shaded pavilions known as nymphaeum, which gives the museum its name – the Museo Ninfeo or Nymphaeum Museum.

Archeologists have also given it another name – Il Giardino degli Dei, or The Garden of the Gods.

Caligula was so enamored of the retreat that when a delegation of Jewish merchants from Alexandria in Egypt came to put their grievances to him, they could hardly get his attention. The emperor spent the whole time directing improvements and upgrades to the gardens and pavilions, classical sources record.

One of the most notorious of all emperors, Caligula is said to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister, to have fed prisoners to wild beasts, and to have made his horse a consul. But Claudio Borgognoni, another archeologist involved in the excavations, warned that classical sources claiming that some emperors were mad, bad, and dangerous to know are not always to be trusted –perhaps another lesson of this era.

 “That said,” he says, “the Romans did hate him for claiming that he was a god and trying to establish a personality cult.”

The archeological find may not give a definitive answer on the emperor’s true nature, but it does shed light on the general conduct of ancient Rome. There are decorative bronze pendants from a bridle used by a cavalry officer, and a delicate doll’s leg, made out of bone, that was once played with by a child. Ink pots and clasp knives have been found, as well as hundreds of coins and fragments of amphorae, jugs, and bowls. The bones of red deer, roe deer, and boar were made into wind instruments and decorative objects. Archeologists found pieces of brightly colored marble that came from all over the empire: the Peloponnese in Greece, Tunisia, Spain, and Liguria in northern Italy.

“The quality of the material offers a unique vision of classical Rome, from its monumental architecture to its sumptuous decorations, its precious as well as everyday objects, the food that was eaten and the animals that were kept,” says Mirella Serlorenzi, the scientific director of the project. “The museum tells us the story of a privileged retreat of the ancient world.”

AP

Sudanese soldiers are greeted by civilians in Khartoum in June, 2019, after the ouster of the autocrat Omar al-Bashir.

Second time’s a charm?

That’s the hope of pro-democracy activists in Sudan who are planning a “million-person march” Oct. 30, five days after the military ousted a civilian government. Their reason is that mass protests worked in 2019 when enough soldiers, facing off against crowds of peaceful demonstrators, refused to shoot their fellow citizens. The top brass, fearing widespread defections, abandoned a long-term dictator, Omar al-Bashir, and set up a transitional regime.

Now the military has again taken full power, touching off a new contest for the hearts and minds of the rank and file. As in many countries during a civil conflict, often the winners are those who make the best appeal to the conscience of frontline soldiers, rather than to their fears, then bullets lose out to basic principles.

A similar contest is now playing out in Myanmar. A military coup in February against the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi has led to protests as well as rebellion among the majority Burmese population. Two previous uprisings, in 1988 and 2007, had forced the military to create a partial democracy, in part because many soldiers were reluctant to kill civilians.

This time, pro-democracy activists claim their tactics of converting soldiers to their civic cause – or at least convincing the soldiers not to shoot – might force the large Myanmar army to collapse from within. That seems a stretch as the military has long bought the loyalty of soldiers with a narrative of superiority over civilian society or, if that fails, with money or a fear of retribution for defection.

Still, a group of defectors called the People’s Embrace claims about 1,500 military personnel and more than 1,000 police officers have defected since the coup. The group works quietly with the families of soldiers to persuade them of a safe exit from the army. With the country’s economy in a free fall, the military, known as Tatmadaw, may not be able to continue buying the loyalty of soldiers.

”The Tatmadaw is unlikely to disintegrate anytime soon, but threats to its strength and unity are growing and look likely to continue to intensify,” writes Nyi Nyi Kyaw, a scholar at Germany’s Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in the East Asian Forum.

Democratic revolutions often succeed when civilian activists imbue soldiers with the moral norms of democracy – such as civilian rule over armed forces – as well as the international norm of protecting innocent life in a conflict. To a large degree, the conflicts in Sudan and Myanmar are battles for the hearts of those with guns. Either by mass protest or quiet appeals, the battle can be won peacefully.