Unpublished Newswire

When Hitler swallowed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then divided Poland with Stalin in 1939, my parents’ generation decided, coming home from the war, to place the sovereignty of nation states at the heart of the United Nations Charter. With the operation in Venezuela, our generation has to ask, and not for the first time, whether anything now survives of a legal doctrine designed to protect the weak from the strong. Let’s not make the mistake of believing that it was United States president Donald Trump who dealt sovereignty its coup de grâce. We are not in a new and shocking narrative but...

LAST SUMMER, a friend was visiting from Australia. Our plan was to meet at my place at noon, and then he showed up thirty minutes ahead of schedule. “You’re early. I need to tidy up, it’s a mess,” I lamented like some kind of 1950s fridge-magnet lady come to life. It wasn’t. Messy, that is. I just hadn’t had time to do a pre-company spit polish. And now here was my dear pal, standing in my kitchen, and I was spinning out over coffee rings. As we hugged, I surveyed the dishes in the sink from over his shoulder, the high chair caked with egg-something, the bowl on the butcher’s block...