The sky over Paris this morning hangs at six degrees and partly cloudy, which is to say the heavens themselves cannot quite decide whether to weep or to smile, and so do both at intervals, in the prudent manner of modern diplomats. I confess I have grown fond of such weather. It is honest in its indecision, which is more than may be said of certain summits lately concluded in Beijing, where two great princes embraced one another with so many ceremonies that they had no time left for any agreement worth the paper their officials had so painstakingly drafted.
Two days the Emperor of the West and the Emperor of the East sat across from one another and exchanged what the gazettes are pleased to call "very successful" talks. Pangloss himself, were he still among us, would have declared that everything has happened for the best, and that the absence of trade concessions, the absence of breakthrough on Taiwan, the absence even of clarity concerning the silicon wafers upon which all of modern industry now apparently depends, was simply the most felicitous outcome conceivable. The newspapers report that the President of the United States returned home and immediately warned the island of Taiwan against declaring independence. To which one is moved to ask: from whom, precisely, is the island to seek protection now? From the gentleman who has just warned it? From the gentleman who covets it? Or from the gentleman in the looking-glass between them?
The stock-jobbers of New York, being men of more practical philosophy than I, gave their verdict in plain language: the Dow Jones index fell five hundred and thirty-seven points the moment the summit concluded. Five hundred and thirty-seven is, by my reckoning, a sum sufficient to inform any honest observer that what was hailed as triumph in the official communiqués was understood as confusion by those who must pay for it. The market, dear reader, is the one institution that cannot be flattered by ribbon-cuttings.
From Tehran, meanwhile, comes a perfectly Voltairean spectacle. The American President proposes that a twenty-year suspension of the Persian nuclear programme would be acceptable. The Persian foreign minister replies, with admirable candour, that his country does not trust the Americans. The Americans, in turn, are reported to require "real" commitment from Tehran. Each party, you observe, demands of the other precisely what it is itself unwilling to offer: faith. Faith without evidence is the special province of theologians, and I had long imagined that statesmen, being men of business, would have learned to negotiate without it. But I was mistaken. They have learned only to demand it.
And while the two governments exchange these courtesies, the rights groups inform us that executions in Iran have surged since the ceasefire. Many of the condemned were arrested during the protests of January last. Pangloss would say that this, too, is necessary: that the rope and the rifle are instruments of public tranquillity. I confess I am not so optimistic. When a state cannot rule its citizens save by terrifying them, it is no longer a state but a private fear, dressed in flags.
Lebanon and Israel, we are told, have extended their truce by forty-five days. Six Lebanese were killed yesterday by an Israeli strike. One supposes that, in the new arithmetic of peace, the dead do not count, because they have ceased to vote and to protest. In Gaza on Nakba Day, seven more were killed, three of them women and a child. The activists of the Extinction Rebellion climbed the Eiffel Tower – here, in my own city – and hung from it a Palestinian flag. The authorities removed it within the hour. I leave it to philosophers more zealous than I to determine which act was the more political: the hanging or the removal.
In Kyiv, a Russian missile struck a block of flats and killed twenty-four people. Among them was a girl of twelve, Lyubava Yakovleva, whose father had already been killed in this war. She had survived him by some months. Now she has joined him in that republic where no diplomat has yet succeeded in extending or violating any ceasefire whatever. I do not know what to say of such matters in the satirical vein. Let me only observe that the architects of this slaughter, on whichever side, will dine well tonight, and that the child's empty chair is a more eloquent indictment than any pamphlet I have written.
The Justice Department in Washington, I read, will henceforth pursue Mexican officials under terrorism statutes for their dealings with the Sinaloa cartel. This is a fine American invention: to convert every crime into terrorism, so that the laws of every nation may be reached by the courts of one. I do not know whether the cartels will be more frightened, or the Mexican statesmen, or the principle of national sovereignty, which seems daily to grow more pliable. Meanwhile in Cuba, the citizens lit fires in the streets of Havana because they had no electricity, which is to say they made light by burning, the oldest and most desperate of expedients.
From the Congo, the bulletins announce a new outbreak of the Ebola fever, sixty-five dead already, and the African public-health agency mildly observes that the matter ought to have been reported sooner. So it ought. But sooner is a luxury of well-administered states, and well-administered states are not where epidemics most often begin.
I had almost forgotten the small French item, which the Parisian editors have been at some pains to print. An influencer here, posing through artificial intelligence as a girl of fourteen, lured into open shame an old schoolmaster who is alleged to have hunted children. He has handed himself in. The machines, you see, have at last acquired a use I can applaud: they catch what the human conscience has failed to catch. Pangloss would say that this is precisely what artificial intelligence was created for, that all is for the best, that even our newest folly bends, in the end, towards justice. I am not Pangloss. But on this single point, looking through my window at six degrees and a partly cloudy Parisian sky, I am willing, for a moment, to be persuaded.
Reason takes a long route home. May she arrive before the next summit.