Author: Sean Durns

In the opening pages of his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway recites the English writer John Donne’s famous poem from centuries past. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Both works warn about the dangers of hubris. On Friday the 13th, the bell began to…

The Palestinian movement is at a crossroads. Fatah and its foremost rival for power, Hamas, are both weakened, the former by internal divisions and unpopularity and the latter by the Israeli military. Palestinian politics are entering a transitional phase, and Palestinian political institutions are dead or decaying. The aftershocks will be felt in the Middle…

The late Elie Wiesel, the famed essayist and survivor of Adolf Hitler’s camps, once described the Holocaust as “an indictment of our present world.” Eight decades later, that verdict was renewed when another group of totalitarian antisemites put on a grotesque display. Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules Gaza, perpetrated the largest slaughter of…

China is preparing for war. The United States is distracted and distant. And Beijing seems to have a strategy — one that will exploit both Washington’s inability to focus and its depleted industrial base. America must reckon with both China’s ambitions and capabilities while having an honest accounting of its own. Chinese President Xi Jinping…

On the eve of the United Kingdom’s entry into World War I, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey told a friend: “The lamps are going out across Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Grey’s warning has become famous, presciently foretelling the near century of horrors that followed in the…